After spending about a decade as a Democratic Congresswoman in the 1990s and early 2000s (one of the U.S. Representatives who spearheaded the defeated bid to impeach President Bush), Cynthia McKinney recently announced that she has decided to accept the Green Party nomination for President of the United States.

For those who don’t remember, McKinney found herself at the center of a public firestorm in 2006 after allegedly hitting a Capitol Hill police officer for grabbing her in a Congressional office building. When that story first broke, McKinney maintained that the building’s guard had singled her out because of her race. As the details unfolded in the media, however, she was soundly thrashed by both right-wing critics and her usual Democratic allies, many people publicly reprimanding her for crying (racial) wolf.

McKinney was criticized for playing a version of that proverbial “race card,” the same one that we’ve been talking about on this blog for the past week or so. She was chastised for unjustifiably claiming that that D.C. guard had misrecognized and accosted her because of a semi-closeted/cloaked racism. It wasn’t the first time that McKinney was stopped on her way to work, but on that particular day in March, she had had enough.

After first calling herself a victim of “racial profiling,” she eventually had to apologize for the entire incident, especially given the fact that she couldn’t get much public support for her characterization of the exchange. The officer, Paul McKenna, contended that he needed her to show ID simply because she wasn’t wearing the requisite congressional pin, something that would have made it clear to him that she belonged in the building. He insisted that it had nothing to do with her race.

What is interesting and telling about their altercation is the fact that much of the “story” pivoted exclusively on the accusation itself, an accusation that was met with everything from disgust to angry defensiveness — but little of the “white guilt” that theorist Shelby Steele uses to explain the “code of decency that defines [explicitly racist] views as shameful,” a white guilt, he says, which is “quite literally the same thing as black power” (in the way that it relatively positions blacks and whites in contemporary American society). But instead of white guilt fueling public reactions to McKinney’s claims, there was a different kind of righteous indignation at play, a different guilt trip.

Bloggers had a field-day when the incident made the news. McKinney was scolded for invoking race at all, for trivializing real racism with such trite hypersensitivities. Critics dismissed her for playing dirty, for being disingenuous and insincere.

Part of what was going on during those days right after the incident was a clear demonstration of how the moral high ground around issues of racism has been reconfigured. Martin Luther King Jr. could once construct spitting, rage-filled white suburbanites (those protesting against integration) as America’s unequivocal racist villains, but now we live in a world where a person who accuses others of racism (especially a potential “racism” that is far less obvious and transparent than, say, placard-holding Klansmen represent) is the nation’s newest racial sinner. To detractors, such a person should be demonized (as McKinney was) for bearing false racial witness and for embodying a new kind of moral failure.

Most fascinating about the McKinney controversy, however, is that she never once claimed that the officer had said anything inappropriate or racist to her. He hadn’t systematically targeted her for ridicule over the years. He never subjected her to racial slurs. He simply failed to recognize her as she bypassed the building’s metal detectors, giving chase and finally stopping her when she didn’t respond to his calls. If this is an example of racism, it is a “kinder and gentler” form of racism than most of what African-Americans have had to negotiate in the past.

McKinney wasn’t categorically and explicitly barred entrance to the building. Instead of being victimized by legalized racial discrimination, McKinney was more like the casualty of racial invisibility, of racism’s plausible deniabilities. The problem wasn’t that she was being prohibited from the building tout court, but that she still felt somewhat unseen (and unaccepted) once she was already there.

Now McKinney is back on the scene — and Green.

But for some of the folks most excited about the very real prospect of this country electing its first black president, McKinney’s announcement comes as a bit of a blow, even a racial betrayal. Is that fair? And can her candidacy really impact the election in any substantial way? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.