Race has been a huge and ugly issue in American life ever since the first European immigrants arrived. Although the immigrants accepted help from Indians, few if any regarded natives as equals and fellow human beings. The long process of taking land from the peoples who had lived on it for thousands of years was rationalized by assumptions that these were not civilized people because they did not have a European-style civilization. African slaves began arriving very soon, and "civilized" people justified their enslavement by clinging to beliefs about the inherent inferiority of dark-skinned people.
Almost everybody finds it comforting to have somebody to look down on, and darker skin has been an accepted stigma through much of the world for millenia. After using this standard for centuries, it's little wonder that a historically-very-new revolution in thinking remains fraught with uneasiness, especially when it's complicated by uncomfortable questions about whether, or how, those harmed by past and present bias should be "made whole."
Most of us with "white" skin wish that we could just pretend none of it ever happened. Seems like a simple solution --- we'll just evaluate everybody on the basis of their behavior and abilities today, and not get into awkwardness about what went before. Unfortunately that approach falls far short of fairness, because it doesn't consider the real situation. It ignores the fact that for a large proportion of African-Americans, slavery did not end with the Civil War; the sharecropper system perpetuated it beyond the 19th century. A huge proportion of Black farmers, however hard-working and competent, were little more able to control their own fortune as share-croppers than if they had still been considered property. Jim Crow laws extended severe restrictions past the mid-20th century, de facto segregation in bad housing and bad schools keep the negative effects operant right up to the current day. Only the most extraordinary individuals emerge from circumstances like that ready to compete with the more privileged; the average person will carry a heavy handicap for life.
This is the setting in which the phrase "playing the race card" has arisen. It's a phrase that offers some comfort to those who want to pretend discrimination never happened or is long gone. As commonly used, the phrase means it is inappropriate to notice race at all.
Perhaps we'll reach a time when that's valid. We simply aren't there yet.
In a culture that had moved beyond racial bias, there could be a real use for the phrase "playing the race card." It would apply to all the subtle invitations to bias --- the use of words and phrases that encourage resurrection of ugly old beliefs. When news stories about a candidate with African-American heritage use words like "pimp" in their headlines (as I saw yesterday about Obama) --- that is playing the race card, however the story below the headline tries to disguise it as hip phrasing. More subtle accusations that he is "presumptuous," "brash," "slick" also stimulate racist thinking.
In a bias-free culture, the phrase also could fit those occasions --- and they do sometimes arise --- when a person who lost a fair competition claims unjustifiably that he was the victim of racial bias, or when he implies that legitimate criticism or critique is motivated by bias.
Today, we see the phrase used far more often against those seriously trying to address and resolve racial issues, and seldom against those trying to exacerbate them. For that reason, I'm going to avoid using it --- and to examine my own attitudes with great care when I find myself tempted to use it.
For now, I think we should hold a rebuttable assumption that anyone using the phrase "playing the race card" is trying to evoke racial bias, or trying to discourage honest examination and resolution of America's terrible legacy.
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