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Here’s the cover image. That’s McCain’s entire brood. Two of his children were the biological children of his first wife; he adopted them. One is their biological daughter. He has four kids with his current wife. Three biological children and one daughter adopted from Bangladesh. That’s her sitting at Cindy McCain’s right in the lowest position.

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From the blog's comments: Bridget’s placement and the placement of all the McCain children seem to be quite strategic and telling. On the one side, you have John and Cindy with their “real” children. Fold the magazine in half and you’ve got the perfect family portrait - two White parents with their three White biological offspring with the caption “The Real McCains.” The fake McCains are on the other side of the spread. Of lesser significance are McCain’s other three White children - technically McCains, but not real McCains since they’re from a different marriage - placed on the other side of the sofa. Of least import, the most “fake” McCain, the obviously not White adopted one sitting on the floor.

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Ick.

resistracism's comments on the People cover

You will note that the cover photo (seen by more people than the inside photo) exhibits no such characteristics of the apartheid that you are so eager to believe was intended in the other picture. [ETA: Although if you fold it diagonally, you can actually get all the females on one side of the fold and all the males on the other. Coincidence? You decide.]

Subtlety is not one of the first 50 characteristics that spring to mind when considering the McCain campaign. There's plenty of stuff to hammer him on, without looking for transgressions that are plausibly deniable and just make his critics look desperate and petty.

[ 22 September 2008: Message edited by: M. Spector ]

There's no debate, btw: the photos are racist. Tell me why the adopted brown daughter is sitting at her mother's feet in one photo, and on THE FLOOR in the other.

And then in the second picture, the most obvious thing to me is that his racialized daughter is the only one of all of them who is sitting on the floor.

In fact, too much of babble is filled with people chortling and clucking their tongues over gaffes, candidate resignations, poll results, nudity, pot-smoking, strategic voting, speculation over strategic alliances after the election, and other topics that completely avoid an actual discussion of election issues. Just look at the list of current topics in the "Canadian Politics" forum.

Most babblers seem to be more interested in trivia and conspiracy theories than substance. I fully expect to see someone breathlessly open a thread about what colour of ties Stephane Dion has been wearing.

Any time someone actually does try to discuss substantive political issues, the thread is either ignored or it gets swarmed with NDP loyalists who insist that the Party and its Leader are correct in every detail, and anybody who disagrees is a shill for the Liberals. See in this regard the threads on Afghanistan and the Environment and the election.

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If this thread is irrelevant than I suggest you don't post here.

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The current campaign IS playing on race and their are numerous examples out there of these more subtle tactics. Most of which don't see the light of day, unless one digs deeper. The 'muslim' meme is being pushed again, through emails and through what appears to be a conscious effort to blanket comment and discussion boards with the question. It's noticbly picked up in the past weeks.

This is coupled with stations like Fox doing 'fear' reports on the Terrorist threats to America and a pick up in that type of talk on Right Wing Radio. Over the past week millions of voters in swing states have received an DVD with there newspapers on, Islam an it's threat to America, that's been put out by a pro-Israeli Clarion Foundation.

I have no idea whether there was a conscious effort to say, "Hey, let's put the only person of colour in the family way down in the bottom corner of the picture and everyone else in the top half - and let's get her to sit on the floor while everyone else is seated or standing."

I don't know. Maybe there was, maybe there wasn't. But even if there wasn't, just the fact that they unconsciously decided that this composition is pleasing to the eye, where the one person of colour is marginalized in both photographs, is something that is valuable to note.

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Originally posted by Michelle:
I have no idea whether there was a conscious effort to say, "Hey, let's put the only person of colour in the family way down in the bottom corner of the picture and everyone else in the top half - and let's get her to sit on the floor while everyone else is seated or standing."

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This is such a stupid game. That's why it reminds me so much of the "subconscious" nonsense that Wilson Brian Key and Vance Packard made a fortune out of back in the '70's.

It started out with an attempt to draw a line between the "real" McCains and the adopted ones. I guess that one is simply too indefensible, so people are now focusing on the one racialized person in the photograph in order to find the hidden meaning behind her placement.

It would be just as possible to draw inferences from the fact that she is one of the closest people to the mother in both photos. I'm sure that if the People Magazine photgrapher had stuck her in the back behind the couch or behind the parents that would be a cause for condemnation as well.

Maybe the Bangladeshi daughter is the shortest person: photographers always want to put the short people in front. Like I said, it's a stupid game.

Suggesting you post elsewhere with your negativity and condescension isn't shushing you, it's trying to make space for responses from people who actually want to talk about what the thread is about.

Your issues with babble and NDP politics and trying to get to more substantial levels have nothing to do with this thread, or me and don't belong in this thread.

Star Spang, the issues of interracial adoption are huge and vast. There have been threads about it on babble which offer lots of sides of this issue, with links.

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Originally posted by M. Spector:
It would be just as possible to draw inferences from the fact that she is one of the closest people to the mother in both photos.

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I mean, you can arrange family photos any number of ways whetehr it's oldest to youngest, shortest to tallest, etc. In my families albums, there are probably photos where one eprson is furthest away or anotehr is. I really don't read very much into thsoe or these.

Very cool blog on racism in the US election. I've not ever heard of the term "dog whistle racism" before. Learn something new everyday.

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StopDogWhistleRacism.com is a non-partisan research project of the Center for Social Inclusion that examines the way that race figures implicitly in many political discussions. For 50 years, political figures have introduced tacit appeals to racial hostility – references to “law and order,” “welfare queens” and other implicit evocations of racial stereotypes – into political discourse. But while there has been much commentary and analysis around specific instances, rarely is there an effort to educate the public about the pervasiveness of the problem
The aim of this site is to document the full scope of symbolic racism in our political discourse by bringing collecting and preserving news and commentary on Dog Whistle Racism, elections, and policy.

Dog Whistle racism – also known as symbolic racism – is political campaigning or policy-making that uses coded words and themes that appeal to conscious or subconscious racist concepts and frames.

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Dirty Tricks, South Carolina and John McCain

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Eight years ago this month, John McCain took the New Hampshire primary and was favored to win in South Carolina. Had he succeeded, he would likely have thwarted the presidential aspirations of George W. Bush and become the Republican nominee. But Bush strategist Karl Rove came to the rescue with a vicious smear tactic.

Rove invented a uniquely injurious fiction for his operatives to circulate via a phony poll. Voters were asked, "Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain...if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?" This was no random slur. McCain was at the time campaigning with his dark-skinned daughter, Bridget, adopted from Bangladesh.

It worked. Owing largely to the Rove-orchestrated whispering campaign, Bush prevailed in South Carolina and secured the Republican nomination. The rest is history--specifically the tragic and blighted history of our young century. It worked in another way as well. Too shaken to defend himself, McCain emerged from the bruising episode less maverick reformer and more Manchurian candidate.

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Originally posted by bigcitygal:
Stop Dog Whistle Racism

Very cool blog on racism in the US election. I've not ever heard of the term "dog whistle racism" before. Learn something new everyday.

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Originally posted by Star Spangled Canadian:
Brilliant term! It's a classic republican strategy down here in the South.

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Besides Winchester and Richmond, I've also been to (gorgeous) Alexandria and Fairfax in Virginia. Never Charlottesville. Is Charlottesville really nicer than Alexandria?

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Originally posted by Star Spangled Canadian:

If you ever get the chance to visit (Charlottesville), don't pass it up.

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Originally posted by al-Qa'bong:
Yeah, and while we're on the topic of that picture of McCain's lynch mob, we might ask why one of the most popular (I don't know if it's "widely read," since most people who pick it up just look at the pictures) magazines in the USA is doing a piece on what a swell family guy McCain is.

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Originally posted by Bookish Agrarian:
It doesn't even have to be conscious, but like it or not the placement of the children does say a lot about the real dynamic of that family and how they view the world. In that regards it is revealing.

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