NASHVILLE Tenn.
A White woman with blonde hair and bare shoulders looks into the camera and whispers, “Harold, call me,” and then winks.
This Republican National Committee television ad doesn’t mention that “Harold” Democratic Senate candidate Harold Ford Jr. is Black, but the NAACP and others have complained the commercial makes an implicit appeal to deep-seated racial fears about Black men and White women.
Race was always an element of the Tennessee contest as Ford seeks to become the first Black man elected to the Senate from the South since Reconstruction. The issue slammed into the public consciousness this week with the latest ad. “I’ve not met any observer who didn’t immediately say, ‘Oh my gosh!
’ It was a race card,” said Vanderbilt University professor John Geer, an expert on political attack ads.
Hilary Shelton, director of Washington bureau of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said the ad plays off fears some people still have about interracial couples.
“In a Southern state like Tennessee, some stereotypes still exist,” he said. “There’s very clearly some racial subtext in an ad like that.”
