Mandela? Is that a Muslim name?

by David Benjamin

“They framed an ad that is chilling and kind of classic in its way. It features a portrait of this very scary looking, disheveled, wild-eyed black man. As [Lee] Atwater once said, by the end of this campaign, you’re going to think that Willie Horton is Michael Dukakis’ running mate.” 

— Bill Keller, editor-in-chief, The Marshall Project

 

PARIS — Just before I left Wisconsin, I noticed a blitzkrieg of TV ads that depict lieutenant governor and senatorial candidate Mandela Barnes as the second coming of Willie Horton.

I don’t pay much heed to political ads, but these were hard to ignore. In a swirl of grainy glimpses and jump cuts, I saw America’s Dairyland overrun by roving bands of “urban thugs”  looting and pillaging, raping, killing randomly and eating their salad with the wrong fork.

A basso-profundo voice-over shouted aghast—and inaccurately—that Mandela Barnes has plans to eliminate bail willy-nilly for (Black) felons and to zero out every police budget in Wisconsin, unleashing a tsunami of dusky lawlessness that will threaten the lives, livelihoods and prepubescent virgin daughters of every white household from Superior to Big Foot.

Ah, perhaps you don’t recall the Willie Horton campaign, engineered by George H.W. Bush’s dirty-tricks impresario Lee Atwater in the 1988 presidential campaign. The Bush ads exploited the tragic case of a Massachusetts prison furlough program gone wretchedly wrong. In 1986, Horton, who was serving a life sentence for murder, was given a weekend out of jail. He never returned to his cell and eventually committed, in Maryland, an assault, armed robbery and a rape. The Bush campaign hung Horton’s crimes around the neck of Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis, not mentioning that the furlough system, modeled on similar programs in all fifty states, was signed into law in Massachusetts by a previous—Republican—governor, Frank Sargent.

Two furloughed prisoners in California, during Ronald Reagan’s term as governor, had committed murders. But never mind. 

The point was not, of course, prison privileges—although letting Willie Horton out of jail was a travesty. Lee Atwater’s abominations were about fear, the fear that has been nurtured by racists in America since time immemorial. It’s a fear conveyed to me regularly by acquaintances who have left the state, but daily scour Wisconsin news sites, monitoring headlines and dispatches that report crimes committed by Black folks. Every tearsheet validates their fear and justifies their escape. The Black crime wave of the Apocalypse was nipping at their heels as they hightailed it to the gated realms and double-wides of Arizona, Florida, Idaho. How can people go on living in skid-row hellholes like Sun Prairie and Lake Geneva?

When, to me, these bleats of paranoia seem not to compute, I remind myself that Black mayhem is a sort of insecurity blanket for the bored and bourgeois. One of the last straws of white privilege is a deep, abiding faith in rampant Black crime, seeping from the big cities, lurking on the cornflower outskirts of even the tiniest towns and unincorporated hamlets. Just you wait. They’re coming!

In this light, Mandela Barnes is a godsend to the nervous whites of his native state, where the worst offense he ever committed was lying on his resumé. They will vote against him just because he’s Black. But it’s nicely comforting for them to see actual video evidence (provided helpfully by Republican political action committees) that thousands of muscular Nubian giants are poised to roam the streets of Wausau, Waukesha and Ashwaubenon, terrorizing white children, ravishing their moms, looting the Walmart and setting fire to the Piggly Wiggly. White-flighters need reassurance—beyond pure prejudice—that you just can’t civilize these people, proof that Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Sidney Poitier, Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey and Lester Holt are anomalies, oddities, benign mutants in a gene pool swimming with slobbering orangutans and baboons in heat. 

The GOP’s attack ads against Mandela Barnes are saying to Wisconsin voters, let’s go back to simpler days when decent people all knew that every Black male who ventured across the Realty Association’s red line was looking for trouble. 

Of course, as I ponder this hackneyed barrage of 1950s racist clichés, I want to ask a Republican, Is this all you got? Black crime in a state with hardly any Black people? Black crime in a state where, every day, a dozen kids, invariably white, OD on oxy, meth, horse and fentanyl provided by other white people?

But the GOP, working from focus-group interviews, would probably answer, “What else do we need?”

Indeed and alas, fear of Black crime might be an oldie, but it remains a biennial goodie. As threadbare and ugly as their propaganda seems, I have no reason to doubt that the Republican Party’s reprise of its jigaboo bugaboo will succeed, even at this late date in America’s slow cultural evolution. 

Yes, there are lots of white kids in Oshkosh and Oconomowoc with Giannis Antetokounmpo posters above their beds and Beyoncé bobbleheads on their bureaus. But these kids don’t vote, and their parents fear for them, fear that The Other will slip into the neighborhood and unleash an army of homies and ho’s. Nothing has been more frightful throughout our history than the imminence of a healthy Stagger Lee with his shirt off and his fangs luminescent, appearing on the street corner where America’s everydaughter walks home from ballet class.

Win or lose in November, Mandela Barnes—buttoned-down, soft-spoken and middle class—has revived and shouldered that pernicious, magnificent stereotype. In a cascade of action-packed thirty-second spots, he has been enshrined by the Republican Party as dairy state’s Once and Future Gangsta.

With that ominous African name, Mandela has been saddled with the mantle of otherness. Summoning the mythic heritage of Bigger Thomas and Willie Horton, he is Black crime’s latest poster buck, cast as the sum of our most jealous, historic and visceral fears. We’ve been warned against his like by paragons of bigotry—from Wilson, Thurmond and Nixon to Wallace, Buchanan, Trump and even Poppy Bush—and by the greatest minds of the ad biz. Mandela’s dilemma, the slanders cast against his skin, body and mind, is tiresomely familiar. It’s a dead end to which we will keep circling back—to slave quarters and chain gangs, to the ghetto and to cell blocks overcrowded with the brothers of Willie Horton—until some day, the campaign hacks and admen realize that voters have changed. Grown up?

Or, decided, at long last, that four centuries of ignorance and hate is enough already.