Mitt Romney and the NAACP: A Classic Black on White Double Bind

It is July 2012.  In about four months you will contend for the United States presidency.   Time and financial resources must be conserved and apportioned properly if you are to have any chance to unseat the incumbent president. 

You are invited to speak to a group with the following characteristics: members never have supported your party; 95 percent, at minimum, voted your opponent into office; has a history of opposing virtually everything that differentiates you from your opponent; applaud uproariously whenever your opponent addresses them; readily admit that their allegiance to your opponent is identity-based; has within its ranks an army of campaign workers, donors, and officials with social, political, and financial ties to your opponent; seize every opportunity to praise your opponent and his party and to criticize you and your party.

Do you need to conduct a rigorous cost-benefit analysis to decide whether you are best served by meeting with this group?

If you are Mitt Romney, despite all of the above, you do speak at the NAACP convention. 

What happens?  Surprise, surprise, you are booed and the booing becomes a headline for all manner of news media around the country and the world.  Moreover, the booing has been delivered by a minority group that repeatedly has complained that “the Democrats take us for granted and don’t address our needs.”   

I must wonder why the Democrat take-them-for-granted attitude persists.  Could it be that Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, et al know that the NAACP does not decide political issues based on logic but identity.  As long as the Democrat establishment panders to the NAACP personalities, their allegiance is guaranteed regardless of the Democrat agendas.

So, why did Romney bother to speak at the NAACP convention?  For the same reason that George W. Bush did in 2000: He would have been accused of not wanting to be inclusive of the black community.

The implicit requirement to kowtow, at least initially, to the NAACP is a classic double bind, a situation that I described in my book.   Romney’s address mostly provided an opportunity for the NAACP to disrespect him and for their meeting to receive enhanced press coverage by doing so.  On the other hand, if Romney not made the attempt, he would have been explicitly or indirectly accused of being racist.  exclusivist, elitist, and unwilling to “reach out” to the African American community. 

Now, this entire explanation is well known to everyone, but rarely discussed.  And that is the most damning aspect of this double bind.  If Mitt Romney or anyone connected to him dares raise the dammed if you do and damned if you don’t anti-white explanation, he is shouted down as promulgating racist propaganda.  No white person in authority can even talk about the racial game playing, since merely talking about it is ipso facto proof of the anti-black racism of the speaker.  That is merely one boldfaced example why the black-white divide persists in America.  No genuine racial reconciliation ever will occur until white people repeatedly and stridently talk about the racial double bind that they find themselves in. 

Should Romney be chosen president in November, no one could blame him for doing what George W. Bush did after he was elected: He never again spoke at an NAACP convention.