How Racist Are We?

It may be enlightening to take a look at the language the Bush administration and its ideological compatriots use to describe terrorists in the Middle East. There have been a number of essays and studies that discuss the religious language the administration uses to make its arguments in support of policy and certainly that kind of language is quite discernible in the Bush rhetoric. The flag almost transforms into a religious symbol for many Americans. However, another look at the terms the administration couches its arguments in reveals a racist dimension to its rhetoric as well.

In a campaign event with John McCain, George Bush said that Middle Eastern terrorists wished to impose "a dark, dim vision of the world". Coupled with language that termed the war on terror to be a battle between good and evil, the rhetoric of light versus dark doesn't have rosy connotations exactly. The American Heritage Dictionary defines racism as "the belief that race accounts for differences in human character..." Now, it seems that the administration is using exactly the kind of imagery that implies malevolence on the part of Arab dissidents as a whole. With the "you're either with us or against us" mentality, and with scholars like Samuel huntington lending legitimacy to arguments that break the world up into civilizations that battle one another in some epic contest, there is a noticeable undercurrent of racism in many of the arguments in favor of the Bush administration's foreign policy.

The real question, though, is whether it's a surprise that many American embrace these types of arguments, often without even realizing it.