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By Gregory S. Parks & Matthew W. Hughey

On Tuesday, January 25, 2010, Arab television network Alhurra interviewed Congressman Jim Moran (D-VA).  During the interview, Congressman Moran stated that Republicans made big gains this past November because “a lot of people in this country . . . don’t want to be governed by an African American.”  To some, these statements were not only controversial, but false.  This is because we live in a supposedly post-racial America since the election of our first black President.  For example, the 2008 voting booths had barely cooled before the Wall Street Journal proclaimed that Obama’s victory meant that we could “put to rest the myth of racism as a barrier to achievement in this splendid country.”

There have been sweeping changes in legal equality between blacks and whites since, say, the 1950s.  Moreover, white’s racial attitudes have also shifted during that same period. For example, in 1958 most whites indicated that they would not vote for a well-qualified, black presidential candidate; by 2007, almost ninety-five percent said they would.  Measuring racial progress and determining the degree to which race actually matters in America, however, is not simply—or even best—reflected in people’s expressed racial attitudes as measured through surveys.  Rather, a better measure might be the examination of people’s automatic, if not unconscious, racial attitudes.  This includes how Americans decided whether to vote for, weigh the policies of, and even re-elect the first black President.

For over the past quarter century, psychologists have found that people make automatic associations between black and white racial categories, and negative and positive words, respectively.  Even where individuals appear to harbor explicit, racially egalitarian attitudes, their unconscious racial attitudes may be wholly inconsistent.  Numerous studies find that anywhere from 75-90% of whites, roughly 65% of Asian and Latino/a Americans, and from 35-65% of blacks harbor these automatic, unconscious, pro-white/anti-black biases.  Not only do college first-year students—the typical participants of university-based psychological studies—harbor these biases; studies show that judges, lawyers, physicians, black professionals, and a broad swath of the American public hold these biases as well.  These biases are important because the influence judgment, decision-making, and behavior.

More specifically, the rhetoric against and opposition to candidate Obama can be traced, at least in part, to these unconscious anti-black biases. Undoubtedly, many conservatives probably would not have voted for candidate Obama simply because of his political leanings, party affiliation, and policy positions.  However, this point does not provide an end to the analysis of whether race matters in how Americans are influenced by Obama’s race. With regard to the run-up to the 2008 election, there are some important things to contemplate:

First, liberals and conservatives do not differ much with respect to their unconscious racial biases.  But while there is little difference between conservatives’ explicit and unconscious racial biases (both being relatively high), liberals have relatively high unconscious—but low explicit—anti-black biases.  Comparatively, conservatives’ greater consistency in their unconscious and explicit social evaluations suggests that they may be more inclined than liberals to use their unconscious biases for explicit judgment, including voting.  Second, the rhetoric around whether or not Obama is a “legitimate” American citizen appears to have substantial roots in

Ammon Shea recently spent a year of his life reading the OED from start to finish. Over the next few months he will be posting weekly blogs about the insights, gems, and thoughts on language that came from this experience. His book, Reading the OED, has been published by Perigee, so go check it out in your local bookstore. In the post below Ammon looks at the word “uppity”.

Last week a member of the House of Representatives, Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia, created a stir when he used the word uppity in conjunction with Michelle and Barack Obama. As reported in The Hill, a Capitol Hill newspaper, Westmoreland said “Just from what little I’ve seen of her and Mr. Obama, Sen. Obama, they’re a member of an elitist-class individual that thinks they’re uppity.”

The remark has drawn wide-spread coverage, and no small amount of condemnation from people who are of the opinion that uppity is what has been delicately termed ‘a racially-tinged’ word. Westmoreland himself has staked out the rather bold position that it is possible to have lived in the South for some five decades and not be aware of the potentially offensive meaning of this word, and offers his own ostensible ignorance as proof of this.

The question of whether the Representative from Georgia is or is not lying has been written about in many other places, as has the question of what would be the appropriate response from the Senator from Illinois or his wife; so have all the other questions of propriety of social discourse, and I’ll not mention them further. What I find interesting is just how difficult it is to really capture the nuance and breadth of a word such as uppity in the dictionary.

It appears to be widely acknowledged that the word has connotations of racism, at least as it was applied to the Obamas. Indeed, much of the commentary has focused on the fact that it would be surprising (or hard to believe) that Westmoreland did not know that he was using a racist turn of phrase. And yet a brief check of several contemporary general dictionaries (the OED, Merriam-Webster, the Encarta) and we find that none of them include this information in their definitions, or in a usage note.

So how should a dictionary address such an issue? It seems like an unwieldy solution to suggest that it could specify that such a word should be used with caution under some narrowly defined set of circumstances (such as ‘may be perceived as insensitive or racist when used in a disparaging sense by a Caucasian speaker referring to a non-Caucasian person or group’). And yet it also seems undeniable that it is in fact used this way, if not by Westmoreland than definitely by others.

One way to address this would be to show the connotations of the word through its use in citations, as the OED does with so much of our vocabulary. But although the OED provides nine examples of uppity being used, from 1880 through 1982, only one of them shows the word being used in an obviously racist sense. And some other dictionaries do not provide such examples at all (such as the American Heritage online dictionary, which has a citation taken from a New York Times article from 1981, which says that some members of Ronald Reagan’s cabinet thought that Alexander Haig “was getting a little uppity and needed to be slapped down” – no one will read that as being racially tinged).

I wonder if there is a limit on how well a dictionary can really capture the nuance of a language in such circumstances. Especially when one bears in mind that Senator Obama’s running mate, Senator Biden, was similarly taken to task for his use of the words clean and articulate some months ago. I don’t know whether they were intended as implicit slights (what reason is there to think that a well-respected senator would be anything but clean or articulate?), but I can see how it would be possible – and yet I’ve not found a dictionary that documents that these specific words are sometimes used thusly.

It is interesting to me that, Westmoreland’s protestations aside, uppity falls into the category of words of which we can say that we “just know” what they mean, without their being defined in a reference work. It exists with an unwritten social definition, and I cannot help but imagine what other words have come and gone through the last few hundred years, unremarked upon by dictionaries past, yet implicitly understood by the speakers of the language.

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