As the cliche goes, hindsight is 20-20. 

It’s true that it can be easier to see some things in retrospect that would have escaped most people at the time.  For instance, in deciding the Plessy v. Ferguson case in 1896, the Supreme Court rejected Plessy’s argument that race segregation enforced by law "stamp[ed] the colored race with a badge of inferiority", concluding that "If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act [that segregated railway cars in Louisiana], but solely because the colored race chooses to put the construction on it."  In 1896, it was not that surprising that an all-white Supreme Court would uphold racial segregation, even though the 14th Amendment, passed in the aftermath of the Civil War, required states to provide all persons in their jurisdiction "the equal protection of the laws".  Even Justice Harlan, the lone dissenter from the now infamous opinion, agreed that the white race was "the dominant race" in the United States.

More than 100 years after Plessy, we all agree the decision was a terrible mistake that put the force of the law behind a legal system of racism, a system that divided the country for decades to follow. But, like Americans who lived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the majority of whom continued to support segregation for decades, it is hard for us to see our own flaws.

Joe Wilson provides an example of what I mean.  The Congressman grew up in Charleston in the 1950s and 1960s,  at a time when legal segregation stll remained.  For instance, South Carolina’s constitution prohibited any white person from marrying a "Negro or mulatto or a person who shall have one-eighth or more of Negro blood." (South Carolina didn’t formally remove the bar on interracial mariage from its state constitution until 1998, although the Supreme Court’s 1967 decision in the aptly titled Loving v. Virginia case rendered that provision a violation of the United States Constitution.  Even in 1998, 38% of South Carolinians voted to keep the unconstitutional, illegal, racist ban on the books.)   Schools in South Carolina remained segregated for years after the landmark Brown v. Board decision, as Wilson grew up.  There was official resistance to desegregation in the state.  In 1963, when Wilson was in high school, South Carolina remained the only state that still refused to integrate any of its public colleges and universities.

My point is not that Joe Wilson is responsible for this dismal history.  My point is that Wilson, like all of us, is a product of his environment.  That’s why it’s so difficult to digest his son’s declaration that "there is not a racist bone in my dad’s body".  The evidence?  Wilson refuses to laugh at racist jokes.  (His son fails to tell us if the elder Wilson admonishes those who tell the distasteful jokes he refuses to laugh at).

Race in 2009 is a lot more complicated than this. 

I’m not a religious person, but on a rare occasion when I found myself attending a formal religious event, I heard an African-American minister  place an interesting gloss on the subject of racism.  "I’m a recovering racist," he declared.  I think that’s the best any of us can do.  We didn’t all grow up in the segregated South, but growing up or living in the United States means being exposed to prejudices of all sort.  They seep into your bones, permeate your consciousness.  We all know the steretypes about African-Americans, Hispanics, Jews.  We may denounce them, but they are part of us.  I don’t see how anyone in the United States today can truly claim to be "color blind" (the aspiration Justice Harlan had in mind for the Constitution way back in 1896).

What most people understand, however, is that explicit racism is off-limits.  That doesn’t mean it never happens.  A Republican congressman referred to the middle-aged Obama as "boy".  A Republican from Wilson’s home state compared Michele Obama to a gorilla.  A Republican women’s group depicted Obama on foodstamps, amid a backdrop of watermelon and fried chicken. The signs waved at the recent Wacko-Palooza in Washington, D.C. offer additional vivid examples.

These are just a few examples of the overt racism that remains, even in 21st century America.  What’s more common, especially in politics, is veiled references to race.  Lee Atwater explained that, when it became impossible to use blatant racim in politics, the Republican party switched to code words, using references to forced busing, states’ rights, even tax cuts, to more subtly play the race card in politics.  With Obama, we have seen this approach as well, in Sarah Palin’s accusation that he "palled around with terrorists", in the offensive birther movement, that challenges Obama’s citizenship, and includes elected Republican members of Congress in its ranks. It is a way to mark Obama as "other"to subtly (sort of–it’s really not all that "subtle") make the point that he’s "not like us" white people.

Joe Wilson lives in 21st century America, and grew up in the segregated South.  Surely he understands the "optics" of a white South Carolinian publicly interrupting the nation’s first black president to denounce him as a liar.  Certainly Wilson’s understands how the "substance" of his attack reads to many white Americans, how using illegal immigration as a scare tactic is another way to play on racial biases on fears.

Joe Wilson’s son can tell us his father doesn’t have a racist bone in his body.  Right wingers can make Jimmy Carter the bad guy for pointing out the obvious, that some of the attacks against President Obama carry overt or subtle racial overtones.  But each of these arguments requires us to ignore context, to ignore the way race functions in 21st century American, just as the Plessy Court ignored the now obvious ways in which legal segregation just 31 years after the Civil War ended could reasonably make African-Americans feel inferior, not as a matter of "choice".  We can all acknowledge that we are immersed in racial ideas and distinctions, that they affect us all, that the best we can do is make ourselves "recovering racists."  It’s hard to fit this type of discusion into what passes for the national discourse today, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.