Revisiting Sunday Morning Apartheid: The Politics of Color Blindness and Racial Formation in the Harry Reid Controversy

Governor Kaine, a new book on the 2008 campaign called Game Change says of Senate majority leader Harry Reid—let's put it up—he was wowed by Obama's rhetorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama, a, quote, "light-skinned African-American with no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one, as he said privately." Governor Kaine, does that kind of language have any place in the leadership of the Democratic Party? And should he step down?

—Chris Wallace, Fox News Sunday, 10 January 2010

I don't think there's a scintilla of racism in what Harry Reid said. At long last, Harry Reid has said something that no one can disagree with, and he gets in trouble for it.

—George Will, This Week, 10 January 2010

The year 2010 opened with revelations on the television screen about private comments made in 2008 by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to reporters John Heilemann and Mark Halperin about Barack Obama's electability as a black man in America. Late Friday night on 8 January 2010 this passage from Game Change was leaked to the press: "He [Harry Reid] was wowed by Obama's rhetorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama—a 'light-skinned' African-American 'with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one,' as he said privately. Reid was convinced, in fact, that Obama's race would help him more than hurt him in a bid for the Democratic nomination." Reid's use of "light-skinned" and "Negro dialect" in those comments opened what many envisioned as a political and social maelstrom that would play out in the multimedia of the twenty-first century. The maelstrom never developed. Reid's belief that Obama was electable because he was "light-skinned" and had "no Negro dialect" was never directly discussed. Instead, the discussion was limited to Reid's choice of the words "light-skinned" and "Negro," not the accuracy of his statement. The maelstrom turned into a minor storm and merely a question of Reid's language, not a dialogue on the way Americans see race.

Why the maelstrom never erupted owes less to the individual pundits that appeared on the Sunday morning talk show stage and more to the manufactured discourse of color blindness that continues to mark twenty-first-century America. The way Americans view race is through the ideology of color blindness that Michael Omi and Howard Winant refer to as a hegemonic racial politics that marks the racial formation of America in their seminal text Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. Leaning heavily on the work of Antonio Gramsci, Omi and Winant argue that the discourse on race in America is typically not about opposing categories, stereotypes, or oppression by engaging in a discussion about the formation of race or by refusing the ideology of color blindness. Instead, they delineate the historic, continuing movement of America from a state-constructed racial formation built upon coercion to one that is more often ideologically constructed upon a "common sense" of race or a formation built through the consent of the people. While common, this construction makes little sense outside of the hegemonic, color-blind ideology that pervades the American discourse on race. Similarly, what viewers witnessed in the Harry Reid controversy was an example of the way the discussions on Sunday morning talk shows contribute to a continued, manufactured consent of the American people to a discourse of color blindness.

The aim of this project is to provide a discourse analysis of the most influential Sunday morning talk shows (Meet the Press, Face the Nation, This Week, and Fox News Sunday) that makes plain the hegemonic, color-blind ideology of American discourse on race as understood through Omi and Winant's theoretical frame of racial formation. I argue that the Sunday morning talk shows powerfully contribute to America's understanding...