Video From Angle Event Reopens Subject of Race

Video From Angle Event Reopens Subject of Race
By SUSAN SAULNY
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: October 19, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/20/us/politics/20race.html?th&emc=th


Louie Gong, a 36-year-old Seattle resident who is a mix of American Indian, white and Chinese, is often mistaken for Latino.

“Most people don’t look at me and say ‘Chinese,’ ” he said. “Then I tell them what my heritage is, and they argue with me, saying, ‘No, you look Hispanic.’ That’s offensive on a whole other level — it’s like their sensibility of racial aesthetics trumps my 36 years of life experience, and the fact that my last name is Gong.”

Mr. Gong, like many other racial and ethnic minorities, was taken back to some of his own uncomfortable encounters with being assigned a heritage that was not his own when a video circulated widely on the Internet this week showing Sharron Angle, the Republican candidate for the Senate in Nevada, telling a group of Latino students that she did not know if they were all Latino because “some of you look a little more Asian to me.”

Ms. Angle, who is running with Tea Party support against the Democratic majority leader, Harry Reid, made the comments at Rancho High School in Las Vegas, to the Hispanic Students Union. Her sentiments, not the first unorthodox statements she has made, have thrust activists, experts and bloggers into a conversation about race in a campaign season that has been far more about mortgages than minorities.

“Race has not played much of a role,” and is beginning to only now, said Andrew J. Cherlin, a professor of sociology and public policy at Johns Hopkins University. “In past economic downturns, it was common for economically troubled whites to blame minority groups for their problems. In this great recession, everyone is blaming the government and Wall Street.”

This election season is also different from the past in another way: the racial themes that have run through the campaigns have focused on Latino issues rather than the black-white dichotomy that has been the defining racial axis of American politics. “We’re hearing more about Hispanics than African-Americans, which may reflect the growing status of Hispanics in the United States,” Professor Cherlin said.

Further complicating the role of race is that a growing number of Americans are identifying themselves as racial mixtures that can be difficult to categorize based on looks alone. Beyond that, some members of minorities are pushing back against anyone who wants to tell them what race they are, then stereotype them, whether Asian or Latino or black or some combination.

“We are more complex than our phenotype,” said Mr. Gong, the past president of Mavin, an advocacy group for mixed-race families, and the co-founder of the Mixed Race Heritage Center, an information clearinghouse. “People have the right to self-identify in this country, on the census or in personal actions.”

He said Ms. Angle’s comments to the students were “a strong reflection of her sense of entitlement to identify them as she wants, not as they want.”

The comments, captured on video apparently taken by a student and posted by a Nevada journalist, Jon Ralston, were in response to students’ questions about one of her television advertisements, in which several dark-complexioned people are shown to be crossing a fence.

The ad’s message was clearly a statement on illegal immigration. But did it involve Latinos? It did not explicitly say. Ms. Angle sought to distance herself from making that association, hence the comment that the Latino students could as well be Asian.

“I’m not sure that those are Latinos in that commercial,” she told the students.

But experts said otherwise.

“It is difficult for anyone who studies political advertisements to say that those images weren’t chosen specifically to activate thoughts about Latinos,” said Nicholas A. Valentino, associate professor of political science and communication studies at the University of Michigan. “The visual reference is clearly sending information that is very potent.”

He also said that his research showed that people tended to react negatively on immigration issues when images of Latinos were involved. There is hardly any negative connotation for Asians, his research showed.

A spokesman for the Angle campaign did not return a call for comment.

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, a professor of sociology at Duke, said the ad and Ms. Angle’s comments about it reflected the country’s new “racial terrain.”

“I think the new boogeyman is Latino,” Professor Bonilla-Silva said.

Still, Ms. Angle “managed to offend two communities at once: Asians and Latinos,” he said. “Her statements come across as patronizing, and hark back to an old racist tradition where we all look the same.”

Mr. Valentino said the statements could motivate Latinos to turn out and vote against Ms. Angle, who is in a tight, hard-fought race with Mr. Reid.

Mary Beltrán, associate professor of communication arts and Latina and Chicana studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, said: “It seems like she’s trying to say, ‘I don’t see race, so how could I be racist?’ It’s an interesting thing that’s happening in politics today.”