“New Voices” is an election project from The Takeaway that showcases the issues and thoughts of students and young voters across the country.

“I don’t trust Obama… He’s an Arab,” a McCain supporter said at a rally in Lakeville, Minnesota, on October 10th.

McCain stood shaking his head as she spoke, then quickly took the microphone from her. “No, ma’am,” he said. “He’s a decent, family man, a citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with.”

Mudslinging has been a campaign tactic ever since presidential candidates waged campaigns, and those which include racial appeals are by no means an exception. But in an age where we believe we are finally moving beyond race, a notion corroborated by the success of an African-American front-running candidate, it’s becoming soberingly evident that race has not vanished from the implicit or explicit considerations of politicians, campaign strategists and voters, but rather has taken a different form in post-9/11 America.

Obama has been accused of being an Arab and/or Muslim since far before his presidential run was announced. Back in 2006, when Obama was only known among Washington insiders as a potential 2008 runner, right-wing pundit Debbie Schlussel wrote a blog post entitled “Once a Muslim, Always a Muslim,” in which she cites his middle name, his estranged Muslim father and his interest in Kenyan culture as ample reason to question Obama’s loyalties to America “when we are fighting the war of our lives against Islam.”

It is a rather unfortunate coincidence that Obama’s name rhymes with Osama, which among most Americans immediately conjures images of bin Laden, and that Obama’s middle name happens to be Hussein, the surname of the horrible tyrannical dictator whose reign and life ended with the U.S. led invasion of Iraq.

Pictures have surfaced of Obama in traditional Somali dress taken from a trip he made to Africa in 2006. The images, featuring him in a turban, were used repeatedly in the background of news reports discussing rumors of Obama’s Muslim heritage and potential terrorist leanings.

And now, as if the racial, cultural, and religious associations were not suggestive enough, the McCain camp has been attempting to link Obama with ’60s radical Bill Ayers to thereby forge a direct association between Obama and terrorism.

What is more troubling than these not-so-subtle racial appeals is the evidence that they are actually effective. Despite, for example, a twenty-year-long church attendance record and vehement denials that he’s a Muslim, 13 percent of Americans claim that Obama is Muslim, up from 10 percent in June, and another 25 percent don’t know, according to a Pew Research poll.

The racial appeals used in the McCain campaign strategy resonate with a sizeable portion of the American electorate because they play off of the widespread resentment and suspicion toward Arabs and Muslims that continue to linger in post-9/11 America. Many public opinion polls conducted in this election race indicate that about 40 percent of Americans still hold negative feelings toward blacks, and some determine that such hidden racist sentiments might account for as much as a 6 percentage point vote-switch in this election. This is also known as the “Bradley effect,” in which people simply lie about their vote choice out of shame from being racist.

Anti-black sentiment is a clear determining factor in this election, yet it is difficult to ascertain how much of a role it will play, seeing as we live in a time where the norms of racial egalitarianism make it so that people know better than to publicly divulge their anti-black racism.

Though while it is no longer socially acceptable to express prejudice toward blacks, anti-Arab sentiments flow freely in popular media and regular discourse, commonly justified by the terrorist attacks of 2001.

It is thus advantageous for conservatives in this election to capitalize on latent and long-standing racist sentiments that disfavor blacks by triggering more socially acceptable racist feelings (those that paint Arabs and Muslims as anti-patriotic terrorist sympathizers) and projecting them onto an African American using associations that are, euphemistically, rather tenuous.

Yet even worse than McCain’s Willie-Horton-ing of the presidential race is Obama’s refusal to acknowledge it, from fear of being criticized for doing such, and from fear of being perceived to sympathize too much with a group that many feel deserve more scrutiny and suspicion.
Rather than condemn these sorts of accusations and discourse, Obama tacitly legitimizes them by remaining on the defensive, by denying any Muslim identification and any Arab ancestry, rather than questioning the problematic suggestions underlying such allegations. In addition to his web page denying any Muslim affiliation, people in the Obama camp have removed Muslim women from camera frames in two separate public events because volunteers felt the “political climate” made it a risky move to keep them there.

Far beyond coincidence or indirect policy, Obama’s disassociation with Arabs and Muslims is also evident in deliberate campaign strategy. Obama has visited churches and synagogues throughout his campaign but has never visited one mosque. And perhaps most disconcerting are his extremely conservative foreign policy stances, where he continually asserts that catching Osama bin Laden is a top priority in the war on terrorism (while military strategists admit bin Laden is little more than a symbolic figure in a highly elusive and complicated international network), frames the Israel-Palestine conflict as a zero-sum game that must favor Israel’s victory, and generally supports hard-line conservative postures leaning toward military intervention in the Middle East when it comes to Iran and Pakistan, despite a lack of convincing evidence as to either of them representing any genuine or immediate threat.

Colin Powell on Sunday’s Meet the Press finally declared something that I was waiting for someone to say for a long time, though I’m thankful the message was delivered by someone of his stature. Not only are there supposedly implicit racial appeals carefully constructed to suggest that Obama is an Arab and/or Muslim when he is not, but, as Powell himself put it:
“What if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, ‘He’s a Muslim and he might be associated terrorists’…. This is not the way we should be doing it in America.” — Heidi Khaled, University of Pennsylvania

Heidi Khaled is a second-year doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.