The racist card is textbook strawmanship. As opposed to having to address whether her comments were, as Obama said, "wrongheaded" and "absurd," Ferraro gets to debate something that only she can truly judge—the contents of her heart.
It's a clever and unassailable move: How would you actually prove that Ferraro is definitively a racist?
By being clear on what racism is.
Why do U-People always think everyone is a racist?
Well, everything in America is looked at through, measured in terms of, categorized and stored by race. So we know you have thoughts and opinions about us. Then we look at everything the society produces that depicts us. We consider that to be tangible evidence of the collective attitude. So now we know that the collective opinion of our race is negative.
This is a competitive disadvantage, and when our abilities are immediately discounted to the degree that we can be made to fit people's preconceptions as a tactic, we feel the tactitician and the one who executes the tactic is racist. When the tactic succeeds, we feel those who hold the preconceptions that were played on are racist.
I didn't make this up for Gerry. And that last paragraph precisely describes what she did...and what Robert Johnson did...and what Bill Shaheen did...and what "Pig" Penn did...in fact, it's what Mrs. Bill ("To the best of my knowledge") Clinton did.
I feel totally free to refer to them as racists. They passed my preexisting test with flying colors.
Playing the Racist Card
Ferraro's comments about Obama were racist. Why can't we say that?
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
Posted Friday, March 14, 2008, at 12:11 PM ET
There is peculiar bit of jujitsu that white public figures have employed recently whenever they're called to account for saying something stupid about black people. When the hard questions start flying, said figure deflects them by claiming that any critical interrogation is tantamount to calling them a racist, which they most assuredly are not.
