Campaign veers off track
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So here it is at last: As we all, deep down, knew they would, the McCain campaign has played the race card. “He’s not like us,” proclaimed Sarah Palin. “He doesn’t share our values.” Cheers and shouts of “Terrorist” and “Kill him!” erupted from the crowd.
Quite a few years ago, I had an administrative assistant who took a dim view of African Americans (and Muslims, and Asians, and so on). The O. J. Simpson trial and acquittal added fuel to her fire. “You see!” she said triumphantly. “They’re not like us. They don’t have the same feelings, the same values.”
This process, named by the philosopher Hegel “othering,” is a way of marginalizing and excluding a group, identifying social and/or psychological ways in which they are somehow “different” from the norm, from the rest of us. And by implication, the Not-Others (us) are comfortably superior to The Others (them).
It means asserting that humans and societies whose life and historical experiences vary from one’s own are ‘different.’ And different, for folks who are prone to think along these lines, easily morphs into “wrong” and from wrong into “dangerous.”
It’s a useful tool for uniting the faithful, used most effectively against German Jews by Hitler, playing on irrational fears and on the all-too-human instinct to band together into figurative, ideological lynch mobs (or actual ones).
Two weeks ago, Gen. Colin Powell beautifully spoke to this.
Addressing the assertion hinted at and encouraged by the McCain campaign, that Obama is a Muslim (and by extension a terrorist), Powell said, “I hear people say, ‘Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.’ Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he's a Christian. He's always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer's no, that's not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, ‘He's a Muslim and he might be associated with terrorists.’ This is not the way we should be doing it in America.”
It is true that John McCain at one of his own rallies defended Mr. Obama’s “normalcy” and patriotism. Unfortunately, he did not constrain his running mate from whipping up racial tensions and she continues to do so.
“Othering” is the timeless source of bigotry, division, hatred, and at its worst, genocide and racial cleansing.
It has no place in American values and beliefs, and it has no place in this political campaign.
Connie Lyons
Broad Run
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