Racial Code-Words, Part Deux

Disclaimer: I do not intend for this entry to be a bomb-throwing session towards President Bush. Instead, I want to focus on his words and why what he says is so embedded in our culture that the message is so much bigger than him and escapes our notice so easily.

Doing some research for a paper a month ago, I stumbled across this quote by President Bush. It wasn't until I read it a few times that I came across an interesting double message that was in his statement. Here's the quote:

"There's a lot of people in the world who don't believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self govern. I reject that. I reject that strongly. I believe that people who practice the Muslim faith can self-govern. I believe that people whose skins aren't necessarily.. are a different color than white can self-govern."

Now, in this 2004 press conference, what President Bush was attempting to do here was show that he is confident in the ability of people from what we know as The Middle East to self-govern in a democratic fashion, and somehow imply that anyone who thinks to the contrary believes themselves to be superior to "other skinned people". This was the primary and most obvious surface message of what he said.

What I didn't realize until later, however, is that he was in the process of further cementing the idea of American and White being synonymous. That is, by using "people whose skin color is white" as the symbol for American in his sentence, he says it as if the most legit, generic Americans are those who are White. He furthermore uses darker-skinned people as the symbol for Muslim, and further states that Muslims can self-govern (true), but then using them as being some sort of autonomous group apart from Americans. 

This is a large example of how code words in our society come to still racially divide us, even when we're not aware of the institutional way in which they're employed. By using White people are the paradigm for legitimacy in a conversation on being Americans, and Muslims as the opposite, foreign people who need to learn and embrace the "American" (read: white) way, we push forward more ideas of racial superiority and inferiority, even if the person is not overtly prejudiced or racist. These are conditioned, institutionalised behaviors. 

President Bush is not the lone offender in this regard. It happens everyday, with different words or even attitudes. It's all over our mainstream media (CNN, FOX, ABC, etc.) It happens when we speak of "tragedies" in the suburbs when two (white) kids shoot up Columbine and seldom devote a fraction of that time to the weekly tragedies of the (predominantly non-white) inner cities. 

How about this video? The guy even in his opening statements sort of places that "drug related, inner city" violence as "old news" and this "new, suburban attack" against a white kid as a special story. 

Now, I'm not saying  that I don't feel empathy, regret, and sorrow for this mentioned family. It's terrible that this should happen to any parent, and the kids who did that to this boy should be punished severely. However, my beef is also with the way the media handled the story. It's the way we paint and hand-pick stories that can be rose-tinted and tilted to keep a certain racially coded "norm" as a certain way in Americans' minds. 

So, the next time you watch the news or read a speech, think a little about how words we take for granted have been institutionally crafted to hold double meanings for us about people in society.