Play the Race Card At Your Own Peril

But as the public consensus in favor of civil rights grew, racial provocations became more subtle, focusing on controversial policies with racial associations such as immigration, affirmative action and criminal sentencing. In perhaps the most notorious racial insinuation in recent memory, the late GOP political strategist Lee Atwater helped George H.W. Bush win the presidency in 1988 by playing to the racial fears of white voters with a campaign ad that dramatically recounted the sexual crimes of Willie Horton, a felon furloughed from prison under a program supported by Bush's opponent, former Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. The ad featured Horton's menacing mug shot, complete with shaggy Black Panther beard and Afro.

In 1990, incumbent Republican Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina won a close race against his black Democratic challenger, Harvey Gantt, by exploiting white resentment of affirmative action: A Helms television spot featured a pair of pale hands crumpling a job rejection letter and a voiceover intoning, "You needed that job, but they had to give it to a minority." Affirmative action has been a reliable "wedge issue" ever since, a way to drive white voters away from liberal politicians and toward conservatives.

In 1994, Republican Gov. Pete Wilson of California made support for Proposition 187 -- a ballot initiative to deny undocumented immigrants access to social services -- a central theme of his reelection campaign. Soon after he won, Wilson, once a supporter of affirmative action, attacked it as a "racial spoils system" and threw his support behind the anti-affirmative action Proposition 209. A 1996 Los Angeles Times article revealed that behind the scenes, Wilson and then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich had candidly told GOP insiders that Proposition 209 had the potential to help Republicans in the upcoming congressional election. Affirmative action supporters weren't above playing the race card, either: They ran ads comparing Proposition 209's supporters to the Ku Klux Klan and, in a stunt worthy of Atwater or Karl Rove, invited former Klansman David Duke to a debate to argue in favor of the initiative.

A lot of contemporary racial antagonism isn't based on hatred and animus, but rather on mutual suspicion and mistrust. Overt racism is rare, but racial inequalities remain widespread and subtle. As a result, we often have to guess whether or not our neighbors are secretly prejudiced. People of color wonder whether their white neighbors and co-workers secretly hold them in contempt because of their race; whites worry that people of color secretly resent them for the color of their skin. And the increasingly complex relationships among black, Latino and Asian groups present similar anxieties, as well as their own unique vexations. An insidious suggestion from an influential person can trigger these suspicions and set off a dismal spiral of mistrust, reaction and recrimination.

It's ironic that, as politicians play the race card for personal advantage, pervasive racial injustices go unaddressed. None of the presidential candidates has proposed a policy response to the real racial problems facing our society: Many of our nation's cities are as racially segregated as they were in the era of Jim Crow, many minority neighborhoods are crime-plagued and bereft of opportunities for gainful employment, and one in three black men between 20 and 29 is in prison, on parole or on probation.

So far, the Clinton campaign's attempt to scare Hispanic voters away from Obama has met with significant success, and we'll probably see more in the future. Perhaps Clinton believes that the ends justify the means because she'll be more effective in advancing racial justice if she's elected. But whoever wins this election, it will take a lot of extra work come next January to reverse the damage caused by playing the race card now.

Richard Thompson Ford is a professor at Stanford Law School and the author of the recently published "The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse."