Rush Limbaugh and Encrypted Racism

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Rush Limbaugh, the witty, right-wing propagandist who died this week of lung cancer, gave his millions of listeners formulas for expressing anti-black bigotry without seeming to do so. Here is a description of his methods as directed against President Obama, in an excerpt from my book Freedom of Speech: Mightier Than the Sword:

                Given that blatant racial slurs are broadly unacceptable in twenty-first-century America, you could say that freedom of speech has its limits, restrained here not by law but by culture. And the punishments are inconsistent. People may lose jobs, promotions, reputations, and their chances for political office—or they may not. They can’t predict with confidence. Therefore, either instinctively or deliberately, people inclined to indulge in racial stereotyping find ways to disguise their messages in raceless terminology.

That leaves much room for disagreement over what is really being said. Is it encrypted prejudice or honest commentary? Which criticisms of Obama should be taken at face value, and which reverberate with echoes of age-old racial contempt? How can hidden implications be identified? Bias is agile and from time to time shifts into keys that sound race neutral to some Americans but are “dog whistles” audible to those who hear the notes of bigotry.

So, in polite company you cannot say that Obama is an “uppity” black, but you can call him “arrogant.” You can’t say derisively that Obama’s got rhythm, but you can accuse him of empty eloquence. You can’t say that he’s dumb or lazy—his obvious brilliance can even seem threatening—but you can say again and again that he has to read speeches from a teleprompter, an accusation not made against previous presidents who used the tool routinely. You can say he’s incompetent, but you can’t say that his blackness makes him so. Instead, you can say that his blackness got him elected to a job that’s over his head—a kind of political affirmative action by voters who didn’t want to oppose him for fear of seeming racist. Rush Limbaugh has actually made this argument.

You can’t tell whites that Obama will mug them because he’s black, but you can stir fears of black danger by saying, as Limbaugh has, that he hates whites, that he “has disowned his white half, that he’s decided he’s got to go all in on the black side” of his father. You can’t conjure up the scary image of an angry black man, but you can imagine that he’s Muslim, which today is code for menacing.

You can’t say explicitly that he is not “us.” You can’t say that he is really “other” and doesn’t know his place. You can’t say that he “doesn’t belong” in mainstream America because he’s black, but you can say that he wasn’t born in this country, that he’s a closet socialist, that he doesn’t understand or value what is authentically American. You can’t say that his race makes him a dark, frightening mystery, but you can say (again, as Limbaugh has) that we know less about him than we’ve known about any president—although, in fact, we know much more, owing to his autobiographies, Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope. In other words, you can find ways to accentuate the sense of distance that many whites already feel from African-Americans.

                In any given case, however, it’s an open question whether the purveyors of prejudice themselves are fully aware of what they’re doing, especially if they’re not well versed in the long legacy of anti-black images. The calls to bigoted thoughts are often so encrypted that they require some key of knowledge to unlock the code. Even listeners who can’t do that—who can’t clearly identify a statement as racially biased—may be subliminally affected by the racial message.

The result is a curious paradox: that such commentary can seem both benign and pernicious, that it can appear racially neutral and yet stir inchoate racial aversion. It would be simplistic, therefore, to brand someone like Rush Limbaugh an avowed racist, even as he plays on the stereotypes. Is he cunning or just unknowing?

Intentionally or not, he and others on the right trade in charges against Obama that probably wouldn’t stick if he weren’t black. Many of their accusations just don’t compute for most Americans, because the images stand so far from what the general public sees in the president. He has been under close scrutiny since 2008, after all, and widened his margin of victory in his 2012 reelection. So the extremists have to reach for timeworn racial assumptions designed to generate contempt and fear. The hard rightists accuse him of laziness, for example, and of fostering violence—two of the most durable anti-black labels in American history.

The dread of rage and brutality derives from the time of slavery, when it seemed only logical that those who lived under the whip would, if they could, rise up in rebellion and revenge. Thomas Jefferson imagined ominously that if blacks were freed, as he believed they should be, racial coexistence would succumb to racial war. He proposed instead that a colony for freed blacks be established on the coast of Africa. “Deep-rooted prejudices entertained by the whites,” he wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia, “ten thousand recollections by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions, which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.”

Even at today’s distance from slavery, vestiges of the images and fears survive in some quarters of white America, and they are handy for rightist commentators. Limbaugh, America’s master propagandist, skillfully strikes those chords of anxiety. In a 2010 monologue nimbly touching on the indolent, the unpatriotic, the arrogant, and even the sexually uninhibited, Limbaugh said:

Let me focus mostly on the lazy . . . He’s on his sixth vacation, he really doesn’t appear to work very hard, gets to the Oval Orifice [yes, that’s what Limbaugh said] at 9:30 in the morning . . . Obama is late, he doesn’t spend a lot of time in there. I don’t think it’s laziness. I think it is arrogance. I think Obama thinks of himself as above the job . . . I don’t think he likes the White House. I think he looks at the White House as confining . . He and his wife do not like living there. To them the White House is not a great place of honor, it’s a prison, and a lot of presidents have felt that it’s a prison, but to them it’s like some African-Americans, “Fourth of July ain’t no big deal to me, yo.”

Limbaugh went on, in a rare violation of the unwritten cultural rule against the word “uppity”: “Obama is uppity, but not as a black. He is an elitist. He does think he’s smarter and better than everybody else. That’s what he was taught. He’s a Harvard man.” Later, Limbaugh also accused Michelle Obama of “uppity-ism” because she flew separately to a vacation in 2011.

Obama’s supposed anger, as one of Limbaugh’s favorite themes, surely strikes the nerve of those listeners who share many whites’ low threshold of tolerance for black men’s rage. “I think he’s motivated by anger,” Limbaugh said of Obama in 2012. “He’s got a chip on his shoulder, a number of them.” (The “chip” turns up regularly in Limbaugh’s comments.) “The days of them not having any power are over, and they are angry,” he said in June 2009, four and a half months after Obama’s inauguration. “And they want to use their power as a means of retribution. That’s what Obama’s about, gang. He’s angry; he’s going to cut this country down to size. He’s going to make it pay for all the multicultural mistakes that it has made—its mistreatment of minorities. I know exactly what’s going on here.” Two years later, Limbaugh predicted racial violence as “part of the program,” saying, “There are going to be race riots, I guarantee.”

To drive home the terror that whites should feel, Limbaugh pictures a vast policy conspiracy driven by black grievances. “Obama has a plan,” he said in January 2012. “Obama’s plan is based on his inherent belief that this country was immorally and illegitimately founded by a very small minority of white Europeans who screwed everybody else since the founding to get all the money and all the goodies, and it’s about time that the scales were made even. And that’s what’s going on here.” What’s more, he and Michelle Obama view the presidency “as an opportunity to live high on the hog without having it cost them a dime. And they justify it by thinking, Well, we deserve this, or we’re owed this because of what’s been done to us and our ancestors.”

Soon after his inauguration in 2009, Obama was branded by Limbaugh as “more African in his roots than he is American.” This implication of “otherness” has animated the right. It recalls the historical ethnocentrism of this land of immigrants, which has marginalized and disqualified one group after another, from one era to the next: Chinese, Italians, Eastern Europeans, Jews, Latinos, blacks, and on through the phases of decades.

On May 27, 2015, after I called Limbaugh “America’s master propagandist” on an NPR show, I had the honor of hearing him rail against me for many minutes, even playing sound bites of me citing a Soviet professor’s explanation of propaganda: a truth, a truth, a truth, and then a lie. Limbaugh seemed as pleased as I was to have this debate, going on and on—denying that he was a racist, of course, but relishing the term “propagandist” by attributing its origin to “propagate” in the Catholic Church’s lexicon.  His web site then put up a logo bragging: “America’s Master Propagandist” with a big footnote: “As declared by state-run NPR.” I just wish that footnote had given credit accurately.