A White Hot Season

An ugly streak of racism stained the right wing's summer of hate. It is plain to see in the posters of Barack Obama dressed as an African witch doctor above the slogan Obamacare: Coming Soon to a Clinic Near You, and it is evident in conspiracy theories that question Obama's place of birth and presidential legitimacy. But did it prompt Congressman Joe Wilson to scream, "You lie!" when Obama said his healthcare plan would not cover illegal immigrants? Is it manifested in the paranoid rants against "death panels" and "Obama-style socialism"?

Of course it is. But how much so, and why, are harder questions to answer--as former President Carter discovered when he ignited a firestorm by saying that "an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man." Carter's heart was in the right place, but his formulation suggests that racism can be quantified and that it is largely a matter of individual prejudice--an accusation that can be plausibly denied by anyone not in the KKK. Hence, pundits like David Brooks stressed the populist roots of right-wing rage, and the White House and GOP chair Michael Steele now agree on one thing: opposition to Obama's reform agenda is based on policy differences, not racism. But racism also expresses itself as policy, from legal segregation to states' rights, and if racism does not constitute the totality of antigovernment populism, it is not incidental to it.

Who knows what lurks in the heart of Joe Wilson? In the end, what matters is that after the outburst, Senator Max Baucus, at the request of the White House, tightened existing bars on illegal immigrants' buying health coverage in his proposed insurance exchange and established an immigration-status verification requirement that could make it harder for legal immigrants to get healthcare. That policy result is racist, even if no one involved in crafting it harbors a hatred of Latinos; it is also xenophobic, financially inefficient and a public health nightmare.

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