Perhaps Ferraro was pandering to those who resent affirmative action. Perhaps she wasn’t. In place of a perfunctory reference to the intentional fallacy, I’ll simply say that what she meant in making her comment ceased to matter in any real way once that comment was appropriated by the media. And let’s not forget that the pundits who declared themselves, in the last few days, Morally Affronted by Ferraro’s comments are often the same pundits who have been celebrating Obama’s “post-racial” identity in their commentary—conveniently forgetting, again, that it is precisely Obama’s race that allows him to embody the promise of a post-racial America. And they’re often the same pundits who, when the campaigns were just heating up last year, wondered aloud, “Is this country ready for a black president?” If you ask a question, guys, you have at least to be willing to hear its answers—whether they affirm your hopes or confound them.

There’s an element of pack journalism, certainly, in the furor over Ferrarogate. (Indeed, reading and watching and hearing some of the coverage, it was hard not to imagine a pack of wolves, salivating as they homed in on the warm carcass of Ferraro’s reputation.) Given a media culture so ready to pounce on its pundits with accusations of racism, it’s much safer for those pundits to stay, safely, in the center of the pack; the outliers, as Ferraro’s case makes clear, are the ones most at risk of being attacked.

There’s likely an element of passive aggression, as well, in those attacks—a strain of self-preservation that manifests itself in preemptive strikes against charges of racism. (If I’m vehemently decrying Ferraro for being racist, then obviously there’s no way I’m racist. “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone,” and whatnot.) And this sense of defensiveness when it comes to race, it’s worth noting, isn’t limited to the media. See, as just one example, Saturday Night Live, which, before making “in the tank” the buzzphrase for alleged media bias this primary season, made headlines for the apparently agonizing time it was having finding someone to play Barack Obama (“Fauxbama,” as it were) on the show, given the touchiness of casting either a black man or a white man to portray—and poke fun at—the senator. The only solution the SNLers found, until they finally tapped the olive-skinned Fred Armisen to play the part, was to have Obama come on the show to play himself.

In today’s Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer writes of Ferrarogate,

The optimist will say that when this is over, we will look back on the Clinton-Obama contest, and its looming ugly endgame, as the low point of identity politics and the beginning of a turning away. The pessimist will just vote Republican.

He has a point, sort of. This is getting ugly; one does hope it’s a “low point.” We’re certainly at a critical juncture right now—not just in the Democratic nominating contest, but in the way we approach identity politics. And, by extension, in the way we approach our identity as a country. For all the other opportunities this unprecedented political contest provides, perhaps chief among them is the chance to step back and consider how, precisely, we in the media talk about that identity—and how, most importantly, we filter that conversation to our audiences. Obama won 91 percent—91 percent—of the black vote in Mississippi this Tuesday, according to exit polls. And on Wednesday morning, we got all the expected analyses of “Obama and the Black Vote,” parsing polling data, comparing Mississippi to other states, etc.—considering, you know, what such a striking discrepancy between Obama and Clinton means.

But: what does it mean? And not just in terms of glib, “Race Was a Big Factor in Mississippi” headlines, but in terms of the actual, on-the-ground intersection between race and politics in this country? And what does it mean that 72 percent of whites, according to those same exit polls, voted for Clinton? If we’re going to throw around the term “post-racial,” it’s worth stepping back and considering what, exactly, we mean by that. And if we’re going to celebrate Obama as a “transcendent” figure, it’s worth examining what, exactly, he’s transcending.

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