On Thursday's edition of MSNBC's The Cycle, co-host Touré accused Mitt Romney of "using the playbook Republicans have been using for decades now" by leveraging coded racial language and deep stereotypes in criticizing President Obama.
That assessment of GOP tactics in the age of the first black president is certainly nothing new, but a new and jarring vocabulary word that Touré used to describe the phenomenon has put it in the spotlight in a way no previous piece of commentary has. From Mediaite:
[T]he group discussed Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney's assertion that President Obama should "take [his] campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago." Co-host Touré saw what he believes to be explicit racial connotations beneath what Romney was saying, calling it the "niggerization" of the campaign.
"That really bothered me," he said. "You notice he said anger twice. He's really trying to use racial coding and access some really deep stereotypes about the angry black man. This is part of the playbook against Obama, the 'otherization,' he's not like us."
"I know it's a heavy thing, I don't say it lightly, but this is 'niggerization,' " Touré said to the apparent shock of his co-panelists. "You are not one of us, you are like the scary black man who we've been trained to fear."
Read more at Mediaite.