Over the last few days, an unofficial portrait hanging in the office of Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has generated a flurry of interest on social media sites and at mainstream media outlets, from People Magazine to the congressional daily The Hill .

At issue in the portrait, donated by a constituent, is the depiction of Jindal’s skin color, which renders him phenotypically white. A photo of the portrait was tweeted on February 3 by liberal Louisiana blogger Lamar White. A few hours later, the governor’s chief of staff, Kyle Plotkin, responded with a tweet that read in part: “Thx 4 ur race-baiting tweet.”

In a follow-up email Plotkin continued, “Liberals want to race-bait and they think the governor looks insufficiently brown in the picture. No other reason to tweet that picture.” Since then liberals have shared the portrait widely on social media, presumably to demonstrate the difficulty a largely white Republican Party has with a brown party leader, particularly in a southern state.

It’s true that Jindal, who may run for the GOP presidential nomination, has to navigate complicated issues of race and representation. Indeed, the Louisiana Republican Party is notorious for its historic commitments to white supremacy.

One of the state Republican Party’s modern founders, Leander Perez, was a racist Democratic Party boss who led Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond’s 1948 presidential campaign in Louisiana before offering pioneering support for Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and, after leading the massive resistance movement as a White Citizens’ Council leader, supported Barry Goldwater in 1964.

As in other Deep South states, the issue of segregation prompted an exodus of disgruntled whites from the Democratic Party over the latter half of the twentieth century. But Louisiana was even more extreme, with the party retaining strong vestiges of open white supremacy even as other states of the old Confederacy settled for “colorblind” conservatism.

Klansman and neo-Nazi David Duke ran in — and nearly won — the 1991 gubernatorial race on the GOP ticket. And most recently, Republican US Representative Steve Scalise was exposed for having spoken at a white supremacist conference in 2002 when he was a state representative.

But the phenomenon of the whitened Jindal is also interesting for the way liberals have seized on, and taken clear delight in, the story. A Buzzfeed post entitled “This Is An Actual Portrait Of Bobby Jindal That Hangs In His Office” is typical.

Part of this pleasure, obviously, rests in the presumption that Democrats are the party of multiculturalism, that the party better serves the interests of people of color. However, the relationship of conservatives to political figures of color is not so simple. While the GOP in the main opposes policies that a majority of people of color support, it has been actively promoting conservative leaders of color for the last decade and a half.

George W. Bush placed more people of color in leading cabinet positions than any president before him. In addition to Jindal, prominent Republican officials of color include Sen. Tim Scott and Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, Rep. Will Hurd from Texas, and Rep. Mia Love from Utah. And figures like Ben Carson, Herman Cain, and Allen West have consistently headlined CPAC in recent years.

So why does race come to signify so powerfully through elected officials? Political representatives act as signifiers, and not just through their policies, philosophies, or partisan alignments, but in their physical appearance. Embodied notions of political representation have animated US political culture since the founding, when debates about what representation meant centered on who was included in the polity.

As John Adams put it in his Thoughts on Government , representatives “should be in miniature an exact portrait of the people at large.” Struggles over civic inclusion have repeatedly marked US political history — whether race, class, gender, or nationality — and have shaped partisan development. Given this history it is not surprising that phenotype has become one of the shorthand ways in which political symbolism is expressed.

The rise of modern conservatism in the US is inseparable from its opposition to antiracist movements from the 1960s to the 1980s. The ideological commitment to the conservative version of both state’s rights and individual rights was generated via anti-black racial affect, which produced new political subjects defined through a discursive relationship to what Daniel Martinez HoSang has called political whiteness.

The contemporary era, on the one hand, is saturated with liberal civil rights as a form of American universalism. On the other hand, the black freedom movement against which conservatives formerly defined themselves is almost entirely absent within contemporary politics. This leaves the discursive field unstable, open for conservatives to remake the themes of antiracism in their own image, drawing on the moral power of civil rights to advance quite different agendas.

The debate over skin color in Bobby Jindal’s unofficial portrait — like endless discussions over Obama’s blackness in his first presidential campaign — also speaks to questions about race and representation in an increasingly multiracial society. In this context, the political meanings of race are both less stable and greater objects of fixation.

To be a successful nonwhite candidate, in the post-civil rights era, is to express a vision of the achievement of American ideals. Elevating people of color to high-profile positions (a tendency even more pronounced in the Tea Party, which claims Scott, Carson, Cain, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz as leaders) decouples race from class. This is meant to inoculate them from claims of racism, but perhaps more importantly it offers the chance to affirm the Horatio Alger myth through heroic stories of individuals overcoming,

Even as Republicans strip voting rights from African Americans and Latinos in state after state, even as they seek to roll back anti-discrimination law and policy, and even as they pursue an economic agenda that statistically hurts people of color more than whites, black and brown faces in party leadership demonstrate an affective attachment to the idea of black and brown success.

The 2014 CPAC provides a good snapshot of this dynamic today. Throughout the conference there were exhortations of antiracist principle along with invocations of historical moments in the black freedom struggle.

Oliver North, referring to the fight against same-sex marriage said, “In the 1850s a political party was born on the idea of a great moral issue, human bondage, the abolition of slavery in America. If we as conservatives cease to be a place where people of faith and those who believe in strong moral values can come, we will cease to be a political force in America.” Both Jindal and Christian Coalition founder Ralph Reed went a step further, comparing Barack Obama’s opposition to school vouchers to Alabama Gov. George Wallace’s “stand in the schoolhouse door.”

But is the story is so different for Democrats? In 1988, after two presidential electoral victories by Ronald Reagan and a subsequent victory by Reagan vice president George Bush where, through his campaign director Lee Atwater, racial demonization played a decisive role, a group of conservative, mostly Southern Democrats formed a new group: the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which would push the party to temper its commitments to racial equality, to labor issues, and to Keynesian economics. The DLC’s first decisive victory came with the presidential election of one of its founders, former Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton.

Clinton is a curious figure in regard to race politics, having built his national career on the DLC strategy of appealing to white reaction. Beginning with a theatrical moment of foundational violence, he flew to Little Rock on the eve of the 1992 New Hampshire primary to personally oversee the death row execution of the mentally disabled black man, Ricky Ray Rector.

That same election year he scolded rapper Sister Souljah and snubbed Jesse Jackson at the Rainbow Coalition annual convention. Clinton signed national anticrime legislation, contributing greatly to the rise of the modern carceral state in the US, and largely dismantled the US welfare system. These legislative acts, like his campaign actions, were meant to stanch the hemorrhaging of white voters to the GOP.

Yet Clinton evinced another, seemingly opposite political strategy throughout, which was to demonstrate an ease and facility with black America. This Clinton was often seen on the golf course with his friend and Revlon executive, Vernon Jordan. He spoke frankly about racism. On a historic trip to Africa, he apologized for slavery. And famously, during his impeachment for lying about an extra-marital affair with a White House intern, Toni Morrison called him “our first black president.”

The Obama campaign self-consciously claimed the mantle of the Civil Rights Movement in 2008 — from his victory speech after the Iowa caucuses (“They said this day would never come. . .”) to declaring an “I Have a Dream Day” at the National Democratic Convention — even as he has regularly scolded black audiences with culture-of-poverty rhetoric, and pursued policies that reward the wealthiest Americans while abandoning efforts to create a racially egalitarian society.

The celebration of the idea of people of color evokes a redemptive dream even as the actual politics drop out. An affective attachment to the idea of multiculturalism symbolically is not a fig leaf but a tool of mobilization for both conservative Republicans and Democratic centrists.

Bobby Jindal may expose a contradictory fetishism of color among Republicans in both Louisiana and nationally. But it would seem liberal delight over the portrait exposes the investment many Democrats have in the superficialities of their own antiracism.