The race card: Requiescat in pace

James Fallows and Ta-Nehisi Coates have had a rather rude awakening the last couple of days as they have both been forced to confront that the race card has lost its power to make people stand up and salute. It began with Fallows saying that Newt Gingrich's calling Obama the food stamp president" was a dog whistle signal to racists. One of Fallows'  reader quite rightly called him on this.

Fallows is standing by his guns:

You could call him the "pink slip president," the "foreclosure president," the "Walmart president," the "Wall Street president," the "Citibank president," the "bailout president," or any of a dozen other images that convey distress. You decide to go with "the food stamp president," and you're doing it on purpose. 

Yes, Mr. Fallows, you're doing it on purpose but to imply, on no evidence, that that purpose is to accuse someone of racism on no evidence and that is a vile ad hominem argument from someone who ought to know better.

And it is clearly obvious what Gingrich's actual purpose is here. He isn't talking about economic distress in general. He is talking specifically about the distress faced by students ill-served by the education system and who consequently will have a hard time getting a job and therefore run a great likelihood of ending up collecting food stamps. None of Fallows' alternative expressions applies to this case.

But what really interests me here is the Jane Austen point. Coates has a second response in which he quotes Jane Austen but misses her meaning entirely. Here is the Austen quote he cites:

The power of disappointing them, it was true, must always be hers. But that was not enough: for when people are determined on a mode of conduct which they know to be wrong, they feel injured by the expectation of anything better from them.

"Her", in this case, is Mrs. John Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility. And it's important if you want to understand the significance of the passage, which Coates does not, that you know that Mrs. John Dashwood has been doing everything she can to exclude her two sisters in law from her society. And the bit Coates quotes comes immediatley after her efforts to do so have been undermined by an innocent action of one of her friends. Here is a bit more context:

I come now to the relation of a misfortune, which about this time befell Mrs. John Dashwood. It so happened that while her two sisters with Mrs. Jennings were first calling on her in Harley Street, another of her acquaintance had dropt in—a circumstance in itself not apparently likely to produce evil to her. But while the imaginations of other people will carry them away to form wrong judgments of our conduct, and to decide on it by slight appearances, one's happiness must in some measure be always at the mercy of chance. In the present instance, this last-arrived lady allowed her fancy so far to outrun truth and probability, that on merely hearing the name of the Miss Dashwoods, and understanding them to be Mr. Dashwood's sisters, she immediately concluded them to be staying in Harley Street; and this misconstruction produced within a day or two afterwards, cards of invitation for them as well as for their brother and sister, to a small musical party at her house. The consequence of which was, that Mrs. John Dashwood was obliged to submit not only to the exceedingly great inconvenience of sending her carriage for the Miss Dashwoods, but, what was still worse, must be subject to all the unpleasantness of appearing to treat them with attention: and who could tell that they might not expect to go out with her a second time? The power of disappointing them, it was true, must always be hers. But that was not enough; for when people are determined on a mode of conduct which they know to be wrong, they feel injured by the expectation of anything better from them. 

So, as you is clear here, Mrs. John Dashwood has been shown up because a friend of hers showed up and acted without prejudice towards the two girls.  Note the irony here:

In the present instance, this last-arrived lady allowed her fancy so far to outrun truth and probability, that on merely hearing the name of the Miss Dashwoods, and understanding them to be Mr. Dashwood's sisters, she immediately concluded them to be staying in Harley Street ...

That is the indirect free speech Austen is famous for and the point here is not that the friend really did allow her fancy to outrun "truth and probability" but rather that she interpreted the situation the way the sort of person who doesn't make evil assumptions about others would. She simply assumed that Mrs. John Dashwood was treating her sisters in law fairly. In fact, to say she assumed anything is to say too much. Only someone as twisted as Mrs. John Dashwood would see it that way. She imagines a mistake in this other woman's perception because she cannot admit even to herself that her own assessment of Elinor and Marianne as unworthy of her society is driven by evil purpose. Elinor and Marianne really are her sisters in law! They aren't impostors.

And you can test this for yourself by asking yourself a simple question: Who in the above passage expects better of Mrs. John Dashwood? No one. There is no specific person who has charged her with anything here. It's all the price of her own hypocrisy. And the same is true of Coates who is the one behaving like Mrs. John Dashwood.

Look at his explanation of how the Austen quote is supposed to apply and you can see the resentment of someone who has been injured at the expectation that something better might be required of them:

People who are regularly complicit in wrong, are not in the habit of admitting such things. The unwillingness to admit wrong, the greedy claim upon the powers of disappointment,  the deep sense of injury is not coincidental--it is a necessary fact of wrong-doing. The charge that the NAACP are the actual racist [sic] is the descendant of the notion that abolitionists wanted to reduce Southern whites to "slavery,"  that the goal of civil rights was the rape of white women. That Barack Obama would have a "deep-seated hatred of white people" is not a new concept.

Wow, how did we get from "food stamps" to "raping white women"? This a crude, unfair caricature, Unfair to the point of being hatred pure and simple. This racism is in the eye of the beholder.