Race is a social construction. There is only one race, the human race. But, race has historically been something negotiated by the courts, has legal standing, and has impacted people's life chances across the color line.

As Cheryl Harris and Ian Haney Lopez have detailed, to be "white" is to have a type of property in America. Because "Whiteness" is property it can be inherited, passed down from one person to another as an inheritance, and has value--both symbolic and monetary--under the law, and in the broader society.

European immigrants understood (and continue to understand in the present) the value of Whiteness. In the most stark example, they knew to distance themselves from black folks as a way of become fully "white" and  a "real American."

In addition, the United States government helped to create race and reinforce the value of Whiteness when it passed immigration laws that privileged "desirable" races from Europe over those "less desirable" from Africa, Asia, and other parts of the world.

And of course, the racist implementation of the G.I. Bill and FHA Housing Programs after World War 2 helped to create Whiteness again by creating a segregated place called "suburbia," and creating a stark divide in the racial wealth and income gap that is still with us today.

Race works through a type of "common sense" that is based on individual experiences, cultural norms, (misunderstandings of) history, the law, politics, as well as psychological motivations and decision-making that operate on both a conscious and subconscious level. In total, the race business is a type of magic and pseudo-science. This makes it no less real or important.

Whiteness is synonymous with "American" for those who have socialized into what sociologists such as Joe Feagin have termed "the white racial frame." Here, common sense dictates that "those people" look "American" and those "other people" do not.

The United States Supreme Court summed up this logic in the Thind case (1932) where a South Asian man, a former U.S. Army soldier, was denied citizenship because he was not judged to be "white" by the "common sense" standards of the average white person.

Recent experiments in social psychology have demonstrated how test takers identified an image of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who is white, as being "American," and an image of Barack Obama, the President of the United States, and a black man, as being a "foreigner."

For the white racial frame Whiteness and "white" people are understood be "normal"; those "other people" are "raced" and are somehow "different."

Because citizenship is about the creation of an "imagined community" some groups and types of people are considered "outsiders."

The color line has racialized this process in the United States: to be white is to be considered de facto part of the country's political community.

History is inconvenient on these matters.

The first great waves of immigrants to the United States were from Africa and not Europe. First Nations peoples were already present in what would later become the United States, when the first white settlers arrived from Europe. The Southwest was already populated when it was claimed under Manifest Destiny after the Mexican American war.

Yet, European immigrants, the majority of who came long after those first arrivals can somehow claim to be more "American?" For race, Whiteness, and white supremacy to cohere with one another necessarily involves those great leaps of faith.

The two suspects in the Boston Bombing (and then manhunt) are white Chechens. While many in the mass public--white conservatives and racial reactionaries especially--will try to suggest they are not really "white" because they are Muslim, Chechens are considered white under the law in the United States, and through the pseudo scientific common sense norms of race.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokar Tsarnaev are also proof that racial profiling does not work as an effective law enforcement measure.

I was not alone in my long-held belief that the next "terrorist" attack on the United States would be conducted by White Europeans. I was also not alone in suggesting that it would be a group of white Chechen women such as the suicide bombers known as "The Black Widows"who would conduct a spectacular attack on the United States or her allies.

Why not? If the State and the public have telegraphed their hand by obsessing over "dark-skinned" Arabs that are a caricature out of a bad 1980's action movie, and the media and conservatives are willfully blind to white domestic terrorists in the United States, the preferred tactical choice is a clear one.

As the legendary comedian Paul Mooney has observed, "Whiteness is the complexion for the protection" in the United States. Whiteness will keep white folks safe. Whiteness, as it has long been for people of color, is also a source of terror and fear. However, Whiteness and white skin privilege are not benign. The Boston Marathon Bombing, and the subsequent manhunt and violence, demonstrates this long-standing history reality once again.

On CNN, a man was interviewed about the Boston Marathon Bombing and manhunt. He told the reporter about one of the suspects that, "I thought he was white you know a regular American."

Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokar Tsarnaev are "regular" Americans.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokar Tsarnaev are also white.

And Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokar Tsarnaev decided to kill other "regular Americans" who also happened to be white.

It is a given that Kermit Gosnell should be stripped of his medical license and incarcerated.

Those who support abortion rights see Gosnell as proof of the types of horrible things that will occur if a woman’s right to be the final arbiter over her reproductive choices is curtailed by the state: Kermit Gosnell will be just one of many such tales in a post-Roe versus Wade world. Conservatives (and those others) who would deny women their reproductive rights view him as an example of why abortion should be outlawed in the United States.

By comparison, those of us who have a standing prior that abortions should be safe, legal, and widely available to all who seek them necessarily understand that a post abortion-rights world will create more Kermit Gosnells, not fewer of them.

Those who oppose a woman’s right to control her own reproductive health choices consider Kermit Gosnell as a bogeyman that embodies everything they hate about a country where abortion is legal.

Politics involves the mobilization of emotions to win over supporters in the pursuit of specific policy goals. Story-telling is one way to accomplish this goal.

For the anti-Roe vs. Wade Republican or “pro-life” advocate (“pro-life” being a type of odd newspeak that falls apart in the face of any critical inquiry) Kermit Gosnell is a ready made tale that can be easily exploited for political ends.

In the Right-wing echo chamber, the lurid details about how Kermit Gosnell performed late term abortions are the stuff of a moral panic, where the descriptions fit neatly into pre-existing beliefs about the twin fictions that are “the liberal media” and a “conspiracy” to suppress any discussion of abortion that does not serve the “left-wing” agenda.

The more graphically Kermit Gosnell’s crimes are discussed and detailed, the more powerful the narrative becomes, as it resonates throughout the Right-wing media machine.

The framing of the Kermit Gosnell case by the Right-wing media is pornographic: it is the rough equivalent of a snuff film. There is a prurient fascination with the details of the body, how it can be destroyed, and the various ways that the flesh can be dismembered or hurt. The details are revolting; they are also titillating and exhilarating for those who want to take away women’s reproductive rights, and see such an effort as a moral crusade.

For example, Andrew McCarthy’s recent piece at the National Review is an example of “habeas corpus” in the Right-wing political imagination— “show me the body” is made into a literal type of visual political vocabulary:

A decade later in Philadelphia, “it would rain fetuses. Fetuses and blood all over the place.” So said Stephen Massof, one of Kermit Gosnell’s fellow butchers, as he described for the jury the chamber of horrors that was the “Women’s Medical Society” on Lancaster Avenue. There, scores of babies — perhaps hundreds of them — were willfully mutilated after being born alive.

Standard fare was the “snip.”

“Snip” is a terse, antiseptic word. Like “choice,” it is tailored to those rare, discomfiting occasions when the intentional killing of a “however way you want to describe it” must be spoken of rather than silently done. It is an effort, as much mentally as verbally, to evade the monstrousness we abide in the United States, where nearly 60 million children — a population roughly equal to that of France or the United Kingdom — have been aborted since the Supreme Court’s 1973 fatwa in Roe v. Wade.

In a “snip,” the abortionist, sharp scissors in hand, grasps the squirming and sometimes squealing baby he has just delivered. He stabs the child in the back and then, snapping the blades, severs the spinal cord from the brain. Massof described the snip as “literally a beheading. It is separating the brain from the body.”

There is a deep and socially problematic inconsistency here: the destroyed human bodies of American soldiers are removed from sight by the mass media; the broken bodies of American veterans are shunned, hidden away in veteran’s hospitals, others made homeless and thus rendered “invisible” to the public; the victims of American firepower abroad are nameless and faceless in the United States, as their bodies are shattered and immolated by drones, bombs, and bullets. To discuss such realities openly and plainly is considered by some to be “impolitic” or “anti-American.”

Conservatives are especially vulnerable to such norms and habits because of their extreme addiction to the socio-political narcotic known as American Exceptionalism. Many Republicans are obsessed with dead fetuses. But, they are also rather immune to the suffering of adults, teens, children, and babies whose bodies and lives are shattered by American foreign and domestic policy.

In total, the obsession with the specifics of Kermit Gosnell’s deeds by the Right-wing media constitutes a type of “torture porn” best exemplified by Hollywood films like Saw or Hostel.

Kermit Gosnell is cast as the character “Jigsaw” in the Saw movies (or perhaps even the Nazi Doctor Joseph Mengele) where he sits around devising new ways to destroy the human body. He is perverse, monstrous, possessed of a gross indifference to suffering.

How can a reasonable person not hate such a person? Moreover, how can a reasonable—and “moral” person—not want to put an end to such practices?

Liberals and progressives understand that legal and safe access to abortion services are a way of preventing the excesses and dangerous behavior of doctors such as Kermit Gosnell. Conservatives who want to overturn Roe versus Wade have confused outcome with process. Outlawing abortion will create more Gosnell’s and not fewer of them.

The “pro-life” movement has developed a sophisticated vocabulary to mobilize their supporters and potential allies. They make good use of “dog whistles” such as a recurring mention of the infamous Dred Scott case when discussing Roe versus Wade.

Dred Scott is considered by constitutional scholars to be one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in American history. The use of Dred Scott by conservatives who want to overturn Roe vs. Wade also allows them to make a moral claim, as they try to relate a Supreme Court decision that deemed all African-Americans subject to slavery as human property, to one that acknowledges women’s reproductive rights and freedoms.

The Dred Scott dog whistle works by dishonestly linking together two very dissimilar cases in the Right-wing imagination.

The obsession with Kermit Gosnell is the opposite of the subtle dog whistle politics deployed by conservative, anti-reproductive rights advocates: it is glaring, obvious, and clear.

Ultimately, the pro-life movement and the conservative establishment view the over-turning of Roe versus Wade as a just struggle of the first order. It is their civil rights movement, one that in a search for moral certainty reaches back to the Abolitionist Movement. The ahistorical nature of these claims and connections by conservatives is of no concern for those who want to strip away a woman’s right to choose.

Why?

Because they seek moral certainty, and a claim on one of the United States’ greatest struggles legitimates an effort to constrain the reproductive rights of women.

The classic book Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped to galvanize public support against the evils of chattel slavery. The fixation on Kermit Gosnell is a contemporary effort to find a story (or Internet meme) with similar power and emotion. The Right-wing echo chamber wants to make Kermit Gosnell their Simon Legree.

The Abolitionist Movement used political theater to win over the white American public in their fight against chattel slavery: in the performance, abolitionists would invite former slaves to speak about their experiences. Then, at a dramatic moment, the now free person of color would open up his or her shirt, revealing the scarred back, torn from the lash of the evil whip wielded by the dastardly slave owner or overseer. In that moment, the black body was made a site of the visual politics necessary to generate social change and revolution on the ground.

The Right-wing echo chamber’s torture porn obsession with dead fetuses and Kermit Gosnell is their effort to “find” Dred Scott and the visually provocative whipped body of former slaves.

History is not fair.

The Abolitionists were working for the expansion of human freedom; the “pro-life” movement is working in the opposite direction. Lurid images of dead fetuses in a narrative better suited for a Hollywood torture porn snuff movie do not disguise or mask that basic fact.

Tim Graham should be hired to hold up brown paper bags against the skin of African-Americans in order to determine, to his satisfaction, if they are sufficient "black." Tim Graham could also perhaps be hired to help coordinate the next census as he trains others in this most important of tasks.

Despite the howls of his critics, Graham is (ironically) in some ways more accurate than not in his description of the relative "blackness" of Karen Finney, the newest host on MSNBC.

Race is a true lie and a social construction. The meaning of race, and how different people are located within its shifting boundaries and categories, is a function of the politics of the moment, and the type of "social work" that race does in a given society.

While not as infamous or well-known as Supreme Court Chief Justice Robert Taney who ruled over the Dredd Scott case, Judge Sutherland was also instrumental in how race was made in the United States during the early 20th century.

In his decision about Bhagat Singh Thind, a Sikh who petitioned for citizenship on the grounds that his people were "scientifically white," what was the legal prerequisite for naturalized citizenship, Judge Richardson rejected his claims and argued that "whiteness" was a category wholly determined by the "common sense" judgement of white men.

He wrote:

What we now hold is that the words “free white persons” are words of common speech, to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man, synonymous with the word “Caucasian” only as that word is popularly understood. As so understood and used, whatever may be the speculations of the ethnologist, it does not include the body of people to whom the appellee belongs.

It is a matter of familiar observation and knowledge that the physical group characteristics of the Hindus render them readily distinguishable from the various groups of persons in this country commonly recognized as white. The children of English, French, German, Italian, Scandinavian, and other European parentage, quickly merge into the mass of our population and lose the distinctive hallmarks of their European origin.

On the other hand, it cannot be doubted that the children born in this country of Hindu parents would retain indefinitely the clear evidence of their ancestry. It is very far from our thought to suggest the slightest question of racial superiority or inferiority. What we suggest is merely racial difference, and it is of such character and extent that the great body of our people instinctively recognize it and reject the thought of assimilation.

It is not without significance in this connection that Congress, by the Act of February 5, 1917 . . . has now excluded from admission into this country all natives of Asia within designated limits of latitude and longitude, including the whole of India. This not only constitutes conclusive evidence of the congressional attitude of opposition to Asiatic immigration generally, but is persuasive of a similar attitude toward Asiatic naturalization as well, since it is not likely that Congress would be willing to accept as citizens a class of persons whom it rejects as immigrants.

In the United States a person's status as "black" was determined by the "one-drop rule." This phrase signaled to how race is/was made by commonsense folk wisdom enforced and made real by pseudoscience, Power, and the State. One "drop" of "black blood" in the United States makes a person "black." Historically, this could mean the difference between slavery and freedom, life and death, or that one's children will be deemed the property of some other to be sold at auction.

These stakes were high. And however circumstantial and contingent, they had a great impact on life chances in the most basic ways possible. Even in the post civil rights era, a person's being "marked" or "raced" as white or non-white influences, all things being equal, if they will be socially stigmatized, more likely to be incarcerated, their lifespans and education, as well as wealth and income. Race remains real even in the Age of Obama.

Tim Graham's lazy and failed quip about the blackness of Karen Finney hints at other complications along the colorline.

What of how African-Americans can travel to other countries, Brazil for example, and be viewed as anything other than "black" because those countries use a reverse system where any amount of "white blood" makes a person "non-black?"

What do we do with dark-skinned Europeans such as Tom Jones? Is he black? What about Sicilians? Are they somehow "black?" Many South Asians are also darker than many African-Americans. Yet, the former are categorized "racially" as "Caucasian" or "Aryan." And how what does one do about the "race science" that deems "Arabs" such as Syrians and others to be "white?"

Race is a social construct that is an exercise in personal identity, as well as how society assigns meaning to certain types of bodies in relationship to one another. These are inherently political projects. Tim Graham's error is a reflection of a contemporary type of Right-wing politics that is deeply invested in racism denying and furthering a narrative of white victimology, while also having an almost prurient and sick fascination with the race-making business.

Contemporary conservatives profess a deep devotion to colorblindness. Despite their claims otherwise, they are almost pathological in their commitment to a version of old-school racism which has been updated to fit the contemporary sensibilities of the post civil rights era.

The Right's obsession over the politics of black authenticity has been a fixture of the Age of Obama. Determined to rob the American people of the symbolically triumphant moment of electing their first black president, many on the White Right, complained that Obama was not really "black" because he had a white mother. They have also wallowed in race based conspiranoid projects such as "Birtherism."

Others on the Right pivoted on their ideological brethren's fascination with black authenticity in order to gin up white racial resentment by suggesting that Barack Obama hates white people--and by extension his white relatives--in order to earn racial political capital from black folks.

Some among the American public mirrored this fantastical thinking by claiming that Barack Obama, despite how he self-identifies as a black American, is really multiracial, and that he is somehow "denying" his white ancestry. Thus, Obama is robbing white America of the opportunity to credit-claim for his election and subsequent successes. Here "reverse racism" can even be twisted into a cognitive schema that explains the electoral success of a black presidential candidate.

Tim Graham's ugly statement that Karen Finney is not sufficiently black is a reflection of a political moment in which conservatism as a movement and philosophy is increasingly and more clearly inseparable from white racism. The contemporary Right despises identity politics--except when it is useful for mobilizing white racial resentment. Consequently, conservatives like Tim Graham do not "see" race unless it can be used to marginalize and delegitimate people of color who occupy positions of authority, influence, or power.

Historically, race and race-making are not games in the United States. As joked by Tim Graham, John Boehner has died-red skin from a bad spray on tan. This color can fade or be removed. Boehner is still "white" and male: as such, he enjoys all of the privileges which come with such an identity in this society.

African-Americans who look like Karen Finney are still considered "black" in these United States. In a moment, not so long ago, a woman of her complexion would suffer under Jim and Jane Crow. Her mother's mother would likely have been deemed a slave because of the one-drop rule.

To riff on comedian Paul Mooney's great observation, the complexion was not necessarily any source of protection for black Americans and other people of color in the United States. By contrast, a man or woman could have John Boehner's ruddy red glow and still be considered "white" with all of the privileges that came with it--including the "right" under the law to own black people as human property.

Tim Graham likely does not know this history. I doubt that he cares. Tim Graham's play at being "he who referees the brown paper bag test" is no less ugly because of his cultivated ignorance.

Ben Carson, the Tea Party GOP Mandingo, has taken time away from his busy anointing tour as the newest Black Champion for the Right--and also issuing letters of marque, as well as absolution to his white conservative supporters--in order to address the accusation that he is an Uncle Tom.

On Fox News, in classic black conservative talking-point form, Ben Carson channeled the ugly allusion that "he is not on a plantation" and "can think for himself." This is the same internalized racism for the benefit, amusement, and psychological validation of racially chauvinistic Conservative Whiteness that Herman Cain, Jessie Patterson, and other black conservatives have been channeling for the amusement of their overlords and masters for at least a decade.

The suggestion that black people who choose to support the Democratic Party are "on a plantation" is ugly and indefensible. No other group has its political decision-making maligned in such a way, where a political choice is linked to the charnel and death houses that were plantation life during the slaveocracy in the United States and across the Black Atlantic.

Our Jewish brothers and sisters who have made the political choice to support the Democratic Party are not greeted with the accusation that "they are stuck in a Death Camp" and those who "escape" to the Republican Party are by comparison "liberated." Poor white people who support the Republican Party against their own material self-interest also do not have their capacity for common sense and independent thought maligned as a matter of routine by media and political elites on a national stage.

Such ill-treatment is uniquely reserved for African-Americans. Our citizenship and national belonging are always viewed as contingent and suspect. History's ironies are great: in America there is no more an "American" people than black folks (and our First Nations Brothers and Sisters). We are America. But the "real America" white blood and soil herrenvolk types have a very hard time accepting that fact, as for them, to be "truly" American means to be "free, white, and twenty-one." No other groups need apply. Such attitudes are at the core of symbolic and conservative colorblind racism in the Age of Obama

Ben Carson's tired suggestion that black people who are Democrats are "slaves" on a plantation is part of a racist political imaginary wherein free blacks and others were imagined as child-like, not fit for freedom, and whose race made them incompatible with democracy. African-Americans fought for and took their liberty in a freedom struggle which lasted for centuries. This monumental freedom struggle has served as an inspiration for people around the world.

Ben Carson's success and opportunities stand on the shoulders of those honored ancestors: he smites them, spitting in the face of their legacy, every time he regurgitates the Right-wing talking point that African-Americans are on a "plantation" called the Democratic Party.

Black Conservatives move from holding positions of principled political difference, and crossing over to being human props and mascots for the White Right, when they disparage the political decision-making of other black folks. To the degree that Black Conservatives have any sense of linked fate with other African-Americans--I would suggest that from the post Reagan era forward, such a sense of connection is very much in doubt--they could give a reasonable answer that does not mock other black people's wisdom, common sense, or political values.

For example, Ben Carson and other black conservatives, when prompted for the obligatory "demean other black people and show us how you are 'special'" moment by the Right-wing media could offer the following answer: "The majority of African-Americans, for their own reasons, have made a different choice regarding what political party to support. For my own reasons, I have chosen to be a Republican."

In a political moment when the Tea Party GOP has embraced a range of racially hostile policies and beliefs from Birtherism, to the open racial resentment of Romney's campaign, the naked discussion of Secession and a revitalization of the Neo-Confederacy, and efforts to suppress the votes of African-Americans in a return to Jim and Jane Crow, how any person of color--or sensible conservative--could support such a dying on the death bed demographically and ideologically obsolescent political organization defies explanation or logic to me.

Perhaps Ben Carson and his black conservative brethren are proverbial political kamikazes or dead enders? Regardless, his decision-making process and agency should be respected...even as the policies which he advocates for should be critically interrogated and challenged.

Ultimately, there are many ways to call a black person a "nigger." Some folks are direct, they avoid the silly-talk that is "the n-word." In your face they mutter or aim the slur.

Others using the political correct language of post-civil rights America talk about how black folks have "bad culture" and "could succeed if they only really wanted to and tried hard."

And there are black conservatives, along with their white sponsors and circus masters, who say that black people are "stuck on a plantation." Moreover, these special and anointed black conservatives are apparently uniquely positioned to interpret the drums and what the natives are really saying.

All of these examples are just myriad ways of calling black people "niggers." One can tell black people "to get the bones out their noses" like Rush Limbaugh did some years ago. Or you can have a black conservative say that other African-Americans are stupid children who are political zombies, unfit for democracy. Both proceed from the same fetid waters: to call a black person a "nigger" is to suggest that they are a second class citizen, not an equal, and somehow racially defective as compared to some ideal-type as defined by the White Gaze.

The racial chauvinism of the White Right and the Tea Party GOP makes sense as a function of crude realpolitik: the Republican Party is the party of the Southern Strategy and has embraced white racial resentment as part of its brand-name in the post civil rights era. Anti-black and brown affect is part of a political calculus that has until recently paid Republicans great political dividends.

When black conservatives echo this same logic it is contemptible and tragic. Self-hatred is pathetic. Self-hatred in the service of political attention, fame, or fortune from being the star attraction in a Right-wing human zoo by black and brown conservatives even more so.