Absent By Design

THIS ELECTION campaign reminds me of Day of Abscence, a play produced some years ago by the Negro Ensemble Company. This drama depicted the chaos that occurred in a Southern town on the day that black folks just didn't show up. The situation this election cycle is a little different. We're around all right. It's just that the way the white folks are running the campaigns, you'd think we were absent from America.

For example, Bill Clinton took almost an hour to deliver his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention and somehow did not manage to utter the words black, civil rights, or racial justice. A month later George Bush took almost an hour to deliver his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention and somehow did not manage to utter the words black, civil rights, or racial justice.

What a coincidence!

But don't get the idea that black people are not on the minds of politicians this year. The parties do manage to get their racial messages out. Pat Buchanan snarled his determination to take the country back "block by block." Guess from whom. And at the Democrats' convention a story came spinning out from deep in the bowels of the Clinton machine about how the ascendance of Ron Brown is a marker of the decline of Jesse Jackson. It was code for the preference that the reigning prince of the Democratic Party has for an organizational black, easily harnessed, as opposed to a black with a base of his own and an independent voice. Stories to this effect ran in both The New York Times and The Washington Post.

What a coincidence!

All election years are weird for blacks. In 1968, Richard Nixon showed up at only one significant black event. In 1976, Jimmy Carter thought it was swell for people to maintain the "ethnic purity" of their neighborhoods. In 1980, Ronald Reagan opened his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi--a town famous only for the murders of three civil rights workers in 1964--proclaiming that he believed in states' rights.

Then, in 1988, we had Willie Horton. Horton, as I recall, was first introduced into the campaign during the New York primary by Sen. Al Gore. He was later made famous, of course, by the campaign orchestrated on behalf of George Bush by the late Lee Atwater. The campaign became so crazy for blacks that, near election day, I called my good friend Jesse Jackson.

"How come you're only the second most famous black man in America?" I asked.

"Who's the first?" Jackson asked.

"Willie Horton," I said.

Jackson was not amused. And, deep down, neither was I. So, a lot of us made a lot of noise about Willie Horton and now we're into a post-Horton campaign. Everybody knows that race looms large in the consciousness of the American electorate, but nobody knows quite how to detonate it in his own favor without blowing his own face off.

"We're here to promote the white vote, the Bush vote," a heckler yelled at a Clinton rally within the hearing of Lloyd Grove of The Washington Post.

Those powerful emotions are good for lots of votes, and for a long time the Republicans owned them. But now Clinton is doing whatever it takes to contest for them. Each party is struggling to tap the nation's broad, rich vein of racism while maintaining deniability in order to avoid being stuck with the charge that they have been "Hortoning" the electorate.

Most Americans don't want to be confronted by their own racism. They want to be given alternative reasons for venting their racist spleen (Willie Horton, you remember, was really about good prison management) while continuing to profess their basic belief in equality.

AS THE HECKLER'S WORDS indicate, Bush has the easier task because he has inherited from Ronald Reagan and his own past campaign the deserved reputation for being the white people's candidate. His deniability is in his appointments. His Joint Chiefs chairman is black, as is his secretary of Health arid Human Services and his last appointment to the Supreme Court.

But he kept his anti-black credentials in good order by howling about quotas before finally signing the Civil Rights Act of 1991, and he is doing nothing to tarnish them in this campaign. He has not been seen in a black precinct, and he has not been heard to utter a civil rights word. When the need becomes apparent, however, I guarantee that he will seek some mild Hortonisms to spread across the landscape.

Bill Clinton's attempts to shake the Democratic Party's proud civil rights legacy from his own shoulders is grotesque and far too long to detail here. Let me give two examples.

Right after the Los Angeles riot, Peter Jennings of ABC asked Clinton what he would have done had he been president when the riot broke out. Clinton responded, "First I would have signed the crime bill."

Then Clinton talked out of boh sides of his mouth. The New York Times reported that on a recent bus trip was telling his white audiences that they would have to have "the courage to change." But the story never noted that he never told his white audeinces what risks would require that courage.

"Indeed!," The Times reported, "except for his appearance in East St. Louis, Illinois, where he told an all-black audience that the poor would have to shoulder a measure of responsibility for alleviating their own plight, Mr. Clinton did little but promise a golden future achieved without pain."

Clinton's calls for poor black people to be more responsible go over well with white people. He achieves deniability by saying that everyone in this country needs to be more responsible (a proposition with which I heartily agree), but he is only specific when it comes to talking about blacks. He never talks, for example, about the responsibility of the suburbanites he is courting to do something about inner-city poverty or for capitalists to do something about the deindustrialization flowing from globalization of capital, which is savaging poor black communities.

As a matter of fact, he turns the responsibility exactly around. He told his black audience in East St. Louis: "Your job is to come up with the responsibility to sieze...opportunity and make it work and to find out exactly how to win in this global economy."

In a country where people are worried about losing their jobs and are terrified at the sight of a shaky General Motors and a government that appears to have lost any ability to manage its money, these candidates are providing us with a disgusting display of their own irrelevance to our needs. Bush and his people spew on and on about family values and their disdain for homosexuals, while Clinton mouths vague pieties with few credible specifics about how he would solve our problems.

But when it comes to race, both candidates descend to even more disgusting levels. It is as if we blacks exist only in their fantasies. They don't seek exchanges with us, and they surely are contemptuous of our counsel. We are an image to be manipulated on the huge chessboard of American politics for whatever advantage can be gained from imagery and racist fantasies.

Still, in November the Democrats expect the campaign of absence to end and for us suddenly to become present again so that we can show up and vote.

Roger Wilkins was professor of history and American culture at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, and a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., when this article appeared.