I don’t have a lot of time, but I wanted to say something today. Forty years ago, Dr. King was assasinated in Memphis, TN. The country lost perhaps its greatest citizen (even if John McCain couldn’t see that in 1983) and a sure moral compass at a time when it needed that compass desperately. We are a worse country than we would be because we lost Dr. King too soon.
Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee — the cry is always the same: “We want to be free.”
We don’t have to argue with anybody. We don’t have to curse and go around acting bad with our words. We don’t need any bricks and bottles. We don’t need any Molotov cocktails. We just need to go around to these stores, and to these massive industries in our country, and say, “God sent us by here, to say to you that you’re not treating his children right. And we’ve come by here to ask you to make the first item on your agenda fair treatment, where God’s children are concerned. Now, if you are not prepared to do that, we do have an agenda that we must follow. And our agenda calls for withdrawing economic support from you.”
And so, as a result of this, we are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy — what is the other bread? — Wonder Bread. And what is the other bread company, Jesse? Tell them not to buy Hart’s bread. As Jesse Jackson has said, up to now, only the garbage men have been feeling pain; now we must kind of redistribute the pain. We are choosing these companies because they haven’t been fair in their hiring policies; and we are choosing them because they can begin the process of saying they are going to support the needs and the rights of these men who are on strike. And then they can move on town — downtown and tell Mayor Loeb to do what is right.
And then I got into Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?
Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop.
And I don’t mind.
Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!
And so I’m happy, tonight.
I’m not worried about anything.
I’m not fearing any man!
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!!
April 4th, 2008
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General, Culture, Race |
2 comments
Black Americans were a founding population. Africans and Europeans came here and founded this country together — Europeans by choice and Africans in chains. That’s not a very pretty reality of our founding. . . .
Descendants of slaves did not get much of a head start, and I think you continue to see some of the effects of that. . . .
That particular birth defect makes it hard for us to confront it, hard for us to talk about it, and hard for us to realize that it has continuing relevance for who we are today.
Wow - pretty radical words. Must have been some sort of angry, hateful, anti-white, black nationalist, racist, fear-mongering, Malcolm X-wannabe who spewed that kind of anti-American garbage.
Oh, wait. It was Condi Rice, unindicted Iraqi Occupation co-conspirator, vestigial Secretary of State, and fever-dream GOP Vice-Presidential possible who claims that the United States suffers from a “birth defect” relating to its treatment of blacks and that that history still matters. So I guess we’re not going to be hearing anything about how “angry”, “hateful”, or “anti-American” she is, because . . . IOKIYA(B)R.
March 28th, 2008
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General, Politics, Culture, Media, News & Current Events, Race |
13 comments
With respect to the Rev. Wright flap, Josh Marshall wonders aloud:
Here’s one other point I want to raise about Wright. Having watched the full sermons that his sound bites were grabbed out of, it’s pretty clear to me that the snippets running on Youtube were taken out of context and heavily distorted. (But that’s life, to a degree — political hits don’t usually come packaged with extenuating context) I’m also not going to get into the business of full-scale defenses of someone who has apparently suggested that the US government had some role in “inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color.”
But in the debate about Wright, which Sen. Clinton has just reignited, it seems to be spoken of now as an unquestioned assumption that Wright traffics in racist rhetoric or hate speech. But is that really true? I’ve seen some stuff that strikes me as whacky. I’ve heard soundbites that critics would not have much trouble spinning as anti-American. But are there really quotes that justify the charge of racism? I’m not saying that purely as a rhetorical question. I have not made myself a full Wrightologist. But I do get the sense that a lot of people believe he’s so radioactive that it makes no sense to point out when others are treating as granted claims that appear demonstrably false.
I’ve wondered the same thing. I’m sure I at least commented to that effect, if I haven’t actually blogged it.
March 26th, 2008
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Politics, Race |
27 comments
Sean Braisted brings on the snark:
I don’t believe that [Wright deserved a “lifetime of service to Christ” award] for one second. After all, I’ve seen tons (or 3-4 minutes worth) of footage which shows him angry and abrasive and hate-filled. Yeah, some might say that taking 3 minutes from a seven year period might not be an accurate measure of what he or his church was about, but we know differently. Context is for American-hating liberals…I want simplicity, and to think that Wright could be more complex than the youtube clips show, well, that is just downright un-American.
Amen, brother. Amen.
March 20th, 2008
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Politics, News & Current Events, Race |
one comment
Katherine at Obsidian Wings says it well:
[I]f a white candidate is affiliated in some fashion with a white religious figure who preaches incendiary sermons, he’s a nutty preacher, and it’s a one day story or doesn’t make the TV news at all. The white candidate can say: “if he said insulting things about Catholics or Jews, I strongly disagree,” entirely ignore hatred of Muslims, and that’s that. If a black candidate is affiliated with a black religious figure who preaches incendiary sermons, he’s a nutty BLACK preacher, and it’s a weeklong story & a huge threat to his candidacy. Repeatedly denouncing the preacher’s excessive remarks–in specific terms–and giving the most thoughtful speech about race in America in decades & exhibiting no hatred of whites or anyone else, is not sufficient. A lot of people say there is nothing that Obama can do or say that can excuse his association with a black man who would say those things. Never mind whether Obama was there. Never mind when Obama found out about them. Never mind whether they’re typical of Wright’s sermons–the media cannot be bothered to explore that question at all. Never mind that Obama specifically denounced those remarks, repeatedly. Never mind that Obama obviously doesn’t share those views. Never mind that there is absolutely no evidence in his entire public record that he hates America or hates white people, or that he has ever pandered to those sentiments. He is guilty of fraternizing with an angry, scary black man; he is therefore unfit for the presidency.
That is, as far as I’m concerned a huge double standard which is quite obviously a function of Obama’s & Wright’s race–and the fact that Wright’s remarks were directed at the United States & against white people, instead of against a hated minority like Muslims or gay people.
Go read the whole thing.
March 20th, 2008
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Politics, News & Current Events, Race |
59 comments
I haven’t been paying a lot of attention to the “Obama’s Pastor” controversy, because it’s the product of three forms of conservative stupidity that I am glad to be immune to. The first is their deliberate, calculated, and organized distortion of political campaigns with red herring issues and machine-gun assaults of irrelevant attacks whipped up by their noise machine to drown out a substantive discussion of issues on which they cannot compete. The second is their inability to think for themselves and its corollary, their assumption that nobody else is capable of thinking for themselves - hence the bizarre “controversy” over whether Obama was present in the room when somebody else said something that makes white conservatives uncomfortable. (It’s true: a major portion of the noisemaking over individual sentences spoken by Jeremiah Wright and taken out of context by Obama’s critics is the question not whether Obama agrees with them, but whether he was present when they were spoken. Somebody should ask these clowns if they are so weak-minded that they are incapable of hearing anything and not believing it - and if not, why they assume that black people must be.) The third is the inherent inability even to acknowledge race and racial history as an issue in America - the drooling stupidity that allows conservative whites to imagine that the Confederate flag is not a symbol of race hatred, but that black anger over discrimination is. Like so much of conservative discourse, this nonsensical “controversy” simply fails to rise to the level that would deserve to be taken seriously; as with conservatism in general, giving it no credence is the safest and most efficient way to deal with the mess it presents.
But the speech that Obama planned on the subject was interesting to me - interesting as a phenomenon. It occurs to me that this election has now seen two “Kennedy moments” - defining speeches in which a candidate has been forced, by others’ bigotry, to confront their own outsider status and challenge America to expand its notion of community membership and our range of shared values. Kennedy did it with panache over the question of Catholicism, and this year Romney did a decent job in the same vein regarding Mormonism. Obama faces a larger challenge on the question of race. Race and sex are the fundamental lines of discrimination written into the Constitution itself; race especially was the ground of the most vicious and tenacious divisions of American society, the one that defined and shaped the country as no other, and laid the groundwork on which the lives of all Americans are lived today.
Americans have always been able to make themselves feel good about themselves by invoking both religiosity and religious freedom, but they have invested to an even greater degree in defining and maintaining racial divisions. In some ways, Kennedy and Romney were fighting a downhill battle; it required little more for either of them than to express teary-eyed religious fervor and promise not to go overboard with it. Obama is unquestionably struggling uphill; he cannot claim community with other groups by invoking his devotion to his own, as Kennedy and Romney could, and he cannot erase their bigotry by any degree of non-threatening rhetoric or promises not to challenge their complacency (which is just as well, because that’s not what he’s about). Even so, a speech on race is an opportunity to bring race to the forefront of the discussion in a serious way, and potentially to cut through the winking code-words and denials and evasions that invariably smothered any approach to the subject heretofore. It was an unique enough opportunity, also, that it just might have had a chance to make whites shut up and listen for a change, and maybe shift the grounds of discussion just a bit. I was interested to see what Obama would do with it.
(More after the break)
March 18th, 2008
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General, Politics, Church & State, Religion, Culture, Media, News & Current Events, Read Your Bible, Race |
23 comments
This is just lovely:
Inside the store, hooded Klan robes hang on the same rack as the racist T-shirts. Pictures of men, women and children in Klan clothing and pamphlets tell a partial history of the organization.
…snip…
“If anything turns people off, they shouldn’t come in here. It’s not a thing in here that’s against the law,” Howard said, adding that he was once the KKK’s grand dragon for South Carolina and North Carolina.
That a store like that can make enough money to stay in business belies the whole “post-racism society” crap. The market, apparently, likes racism, at least in that part of the country. Makes you proud to be an American, doesn’t it?
March 10th, 2008
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Culture, Race |
13 comments
SayUncle is a lot of things, but racist bastard isn’t one of them. He’s right. Racism, sexism, and religious bigotry aren’t by any means things of the past. Not by a long shot.
Uncle does still insist on calling Obama a socialist, however. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
[Side note: I almost made “racist bastard” the link, but then had visions of SayUncle becoming the top google for “racist bastard” and changed it.]
UPDATE: It would seem that the same cannot be said for a lot of his commenters, however…
February 22nd, 2008
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Politics, Religion, Race |
27 comments
No, seriously, that’s her argument:
But maybe it’s not so simple. Obama and I are roughly the same age. I grew up in liberal circles in New York City — a place to which people who wished to rebel against their upbringings had gravitated for generations. And yet, all of my mixed race, black/white classmates throughout my youth, some of whom I am still in contact with, were the product of very culturally specific unions. They were always the offspring of a white mother, (in my circles, she was usually Jewish, but elsewhere not necessarily) and usually a highly educated black father. And how had these two come together at a time when it was neither natural nor easy for such relationships to flourish? Always through politics. No, not the young Republicans. Usually the Communist Youth League. Or maybe a different arm of the CPUSA. But, for a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or 60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics. (During the Clinton Administration we were all introduced to then U. of Pennsylvania Professor Lani Guinier — also a half black/half Jewish, red diaper baby.)
… Political correctness was invented precisely to prevent the mainstream liberal media from persuing the questions which might arise about how Senator Obama’s mother, from Kansas, came to marry an African graduate student. Love? Sure, why not? But what else was going on around them that made it feasible? Before readers level cheap accusations of racism — let’s recall that the very question of interracial marriage only became a big issue later in the 1960s. The notion of a large group of mixed race Americans became an issue during and after the Vietnam War. Even the civil-rights movement kept this culturally explosive matter at arm’s distance.
It was, of course, an explicit tactic of the Communist party to stir up discontent among American blacks, with an eye toward using them as the leading edge of the revolution.
Like the little bit about how it was almost always a Jewish woman marrying the Black man? This rolls up all the dark demons of the far right wing id n one place: Jews, Blacks, race mixing and communists, oh my! And, of course, Obama is not to be trusted becasue his parents were obviously inter-racial at a time when interracial couples got together for not other reason to advance the communist plot for world-wide domination!
This smear has it all: hints of antisemitism, racism, the implication that Obama’s parents are huge phonies who only got together to advance Marxism, and, of course, that peculiar aristocratic/racist obsession with a person’s parentage. In one short blog posting, this moron has dumped every bit of insecurity and warped nonsense that festers in the minds of some on the far right all over the internet, like a baby who takes off his diaper and smears feces on the nursery wall.
God, what disgusting people.
Via Balloon Juice.
UPDATE [tgirsch]: TPM has a great take on this. Go read.
February 20th, 2008
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General, Politics, Religion, Race |
35 comments
The wingnut brigade is falling over itself today because Michelle Obama is proud of her country. They think it’s a bad thing. Specifically, Obama said:
[F]or the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country. And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. And I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction and just not feeling so alone in my frustration and disappointment. I’ve seen people who are hungry to be unified around some basic common issues, and it’s made me proud.
They can’t stand the implication that she hasn’t had much to feel proud of in the past. Naturally they think that’s her fault, and naturally they’re ginning up their slavering noise machine, complete with screaming Drudge headlines and oleaginous crap from repulsive loons like John Podhoretz and Michelle Malkin.
But, really, what is questionable, or even surprising, about such a sentiment? What decent American hasn’t been frustrated and disappointed by the country’s many inequities, its many failures to make good on its own promise, and the repeated disasters engendered by lack of decency among its leadership? Who hasn’t been hungry for the chance to claim the birthright of true equality, true freedom, and political and material largesse that America portends, without making excuses or sweeping historical travesties and abuses under the rug? And for black Americans especially, who but a fool would imagine that the American dream and promise has been anything but a mockery of partial fulfillment and cynical denial? If you have any decency or sympathy at all, how can you not feel unsatisfied with America’s halting and incomplete fulfillment of its promise?
[more after the jump]
February 19th, 2008
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General, Politics, Culture, Media, News & Current Events, Race |
23 comments
I have been very sick the last week, hence my absence from the site. But today is the celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday and Dr. King is the perhaps the greatest American to ever live. He was the most effective civil rights leader to this date, and the struggle for civil rights is the most important struggle in American history. Civil rights are the political embodiment of the promises of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights. Without the enforcement of civil rights, this country has no special claim to decency or liberty.
Despite the work of Dr. King and the thousands who organized and the millions who protested, we are not a post racism society. We have come a long way, there is no doubt; the fact that an African-American could be one of two front runners for the Democratic presidential nomination speaks to that. But the fact that an unrepentant minority vote suppressor was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court until recently, the fact that the most popular political commentator on the right is an unreconstructed racist, the fact that the current President owes his position, in part, to a blatantly racist whisper campaign in South Carolina prove that we still have very far to go.
January 21st, 2008
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General, Race |
6 comments
Given recent discussions here about racism, code language, etc., I thought this response to Bruce Bartlett’s crap OpEd was a good read and worth linking:
First, to the extent that Bartlett is attempting to make a logical argument (personally, I don’t think logic is the goal) Yglesias pretty much rips the argument to shreds here and here. As Bartlett surely knows, the American political parties – while keeping the same labels – have shifted dramatically over the past 200 years. As every seventh-grade American history student knows, the white supremacist coalition (largely but by no means exclusively Southern) voted Democratic until the civil rights era when it moved to the GOP with helpful nudges from Goldwater, Nixon and Reagan.
It would be great of course if Bartlett were sincerely concerned about America’s historical racial legacy. But he’s not. That’s not the point of his book. The point is to win modern political points for the GOP and smear the Democrats. If he can get the question aired, he largely wins. (Chris Matthews: Tonight’s panel will discuss if the Democrats are racist. Joining us are …”)
…snip…
In a perverse way, Bull Connor is almost reassuring. That’s because his very existence at least validates the historical reality. We know the history is real because Bull Connor exists – because he unleashes the dogs. And as long as he is the enemy, he will lose in the end.
But the second wave – the post-Connors (Nixon, Atwater, Rehnquist, etc.) – are far more clever and insidious. That’s because they do something worse than unleashing dogs – they deny the historical reality. Their preferred tactic is to convince people to ignore it, or to pretend like it’s been magically fixed. To them, the consequences of racism aren’t the problem anymore. The problem is that you, white person, are being discriminated against. It’s this latter argument that has been so ingeniously effective. It allows people (non-racist people) to ignore historical reality – “The Reality” – and to oppose civil rights legislation not for racist reasons, but for reasons of perceived self-interest.
Our friend Bartlett – while well short of people like Nixon and the vile Rehnquist – falls squarely into Camp #2. I’m not accusing him of racism. It’s far more banal than that. He just thinks he’s found a rhetorically clever way to bash the hated Democrats. His sin here is not racism, but indifference. The problem is not so much the dishonestly itself, but that this particular dishonesty shows a callous indifference to “The Reality.” Bartlett pretends to care, but isn’t really acknowledging the problem. Otherwise, he wouldn’t strain logic to (1) score points for the party with the wretched racial record and (2) wound the party who’s actually been trying to make these things better.
I still think Publius is too eager to give people like Bartlett a pass on racism — he usually is — but the larger point holds. The effects of past institutionalized racism continue to linger on today, and people like Bartlett intentionally work to help people ignore that reality. That may not rise to the level of burning crosses, but that’s still an active form of racism, in my book.
UPDATE: Be sure to read the comments over there, too. A lot of good discussion.
January 2nd, 2008
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Politics, Race |
one comment
We don’t choose our holidays as well as we should:
Americans love to celebrate. We commemorate historic events (Thanksgiving, Independence Day) and people (Presidents Day, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day). But few are aware of the significance of January 1, 2008: the 200th Anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in the United States. We tend to remember the end of the institution of slavery as one result of the Civil War. African Americans have commemorated Juneteenth, a celebration of the day, on June 19, 1865, when slaves in Texas were finally told about the Emancipation Proclamation two and a half years after it was implemented. But America has all but ignored the date that marks the end of the slave trade.
This past year, Great Britain spent the equivalent of $40 million to remember their 200-year old abolition law from 1807. They educated students, invested in museums and commemorative services, and considered the legacy of slavery and the impact it still has today. They taught anew the heroic actions of historic figures like Wilberforce, Newton, Equiano, and Clarkson, who led England’s fight to end their evil commerce in human flesh.
Here in the United States we are doing precious little to mark the occasion of our equivalent historical watershed event. To my knowledge, the only official action toward commemorating the date, a bill to establish a commission to “ensure a suitable national observance of the bicentennial anniversary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade” (H.R. 3432), was introduced in August 2007, passed in the House (October) and the Senate (December 19 ), but with all funding eliminated. It remains to be seen whether this remains an ineffectual symbolic gesture or if funding will be forthcoming in 2008, obviously after the January 1 anniversary. Beyond that, the only government-sponsored event planned, of which I’m aware, is a public symposium hosted by the National Archives on January 10.
The Civil War and the Abolition movement are the first great flowering of the spirit of the Declaration of Independence. For perhaps the first time in the nation’s history since the original, flawed Revolution, a mass movement arose that was dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. That movement lead directly to the Civil War, the outcome of which was the ending of slavery in this country. It is one of the greatest moments in American history; the nation as a whole took an enormous step down the path of justice and equality. It is one moment in time that we should, as a nation, be unreservedly proud of. Those moments in history are few and far between; each of them should be remembered and celebrated. The date of the Emancipation Proclamation, Juneteenth, the dates the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts took effect, and the anniversary of the end of the cross-Atlantic slave trade should be celebrated with the same fervor and grandeur as the Fourth of July. Any one of those events was as large a step towards the realization of the American ideal as the founding of the country.
But we don’t, and that matters more than most people think. It has been said that no one is born a fully paid up member of the human race, that we only become truly human through the constant Brownian motion that is human society. And a large part of that society are the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves. Holidays and history books are markers of what we want to believe about ourselves and what we choose to think of as important. They shape our national character and our national character shapes how we approach problems, opportunities, and the rest of the world. A country that celebrates, that revels in, the end of the slave trade, the end of slavery, and the end of Jim Crow is vastly different –and vastly better — than one that does not.
December 26th, 2007
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Politics, Culture, Race |
4 comments
Mitt Romney is on record defending his membership in an (until recently) officially racist religion by citing his family’s personal experience in combatting racism:
These American values, this great moral heritage, is shared and lived in my religion as it is in yours. I was taught in my home to honor God and love my neighbor. I saw my father march with Martin Luther King.
Except that David Bernstein, in The Boston Phoenix, documents the impossibility of that claim.
December 20th, 2007
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General, Politics, Church & State, Religion, Culture, Media, News & Current Events, Race |
2 comments
Publius:
And there’s a substantive, non-petty reason why I try to persuade people to see Reagan rather than Saint Reagan – namely, the lionization of Reagan has modern political and policy implications.
Whatever you think of him, it’s pretty undeniable that Reagan’s record has some rather repulsive elements (much like other Presidents). Race particularly stands out, given the systematic hostility that Reagan and his agencies had for civil rights efforts. But there’s also Iran-Contra, and Negroponte’s death squads in Central America, to name a few. That said, Reagan got some things right too. Marginal tax rates, for instance, were too high for some income brackets in 1979.
The point is not that Reagan is irredeemably evil, but that he doesn’t deserve the deification he receives not only from Republicans, but from the public as well. His race record doesn’t discredit his entire administration, but it does mean that we shouldn’t name airports after him.
…snip…
Modern race policy arguably turns on whether federal interventions remain necessary in light of the state-sponsored interventions of the past (which had been around, oh, 350 years or so). To me, the fact that the President of the United States from 1980 to 1988 successfully exploited race – and so actively opposed civil rights initiatives – is itself evidence that we’re not there yet. Indeed, the problem is not solely Reagan, but that Reagan reflected public opinion. If the public thought “welfare queens” and Philadelphia campaigns were ok, then that’s further evidence that we’re not there yet.
The upshot is that a honest appraisal of Reagan’s racial record would inform modern policy debates. But if we lionize him – and whitewash his record by repressing the negative in favor of a “Morning in America” narrative – then we lose sight of that record.
And those that forget the past… continue to employ David Addington and John Negroponte.
[Emphasis in original]
As they say, read the whole thing.
November 30th, 2007
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Politics, Weekend Flame Bait, Race |
3 comments
Tout le Monde has been fixated by hapless David Brooks’s stupid and tone-deaf attempt to resurrect Ronald Reagan’s tarnished image with a defense of his 1980 race-baiting so false and oblivious that it became a kind of scoring contest among liberal pundits to see who could put him in his place first and best. (Paul Krugman is ahead on points; Bob Herbert making a strong showing for MVP.) If you haven’t had your head stuck under a rock for the past 18 days, you’re laughing at David Brooks right now.
So this is a perfect time to tout Republican candidates as being “just like Ronald Reagan in 1980″, right? Well, it is if you’re Mike Huckabee’s director for “Research and Rapid Response Communications”.
I have a simple standard in deciding what type of candidate to support. I call it my ReaganTest: “Are they as conservative as Ronald Reagan was when he first ran for the Presidency?” Huckabee passes that test.
Yep . . . after, presumably, exhaustive “research” conducted just days after an extensive public scouring of Regan’s overtly racist campaign for his first term as President, Huckabee’s newest staffer “communicated” today - as his semi-official announcement of his appointment to the job - that Mike Huckabee “passes the ReaganTest” and is a “a solid fiscal, social, and security conservative” who is every bit “as conservative as Ronald Reagan was when he first ran for the Presidency”.
Now, under other circumstances, we’d call that “code”. It would be essentially impossible to imagine that that doesn’t mean what it looks like it means, and would mean coming from any other Republican. Any other prominent spokesperson for a conservative Southern Republican candidate whose very first public pronouncement evoked Ronald Reagan in 1980 - in the midst of an ongoing discussion of Reagan’s own racist first speech of that campaign - would be heard loud and clear, and called on it.
How much does anyone want to bet, though, that Huckabee’s oppo-attack mouthpiece will get away Scott-free of any consequences of what he said today? In particular, how vast is the difference going to be between the blogospheric reaction to the clunky and faintly offensive comparision he made today, in his official capacity, regarding his own candidate, and the howling berserker assault on Amanda Marcotte in the early days of the Edwards campaign, in response to nothing involving the campain in any way? Huckabee’s spokesperson explicitly, but evasively, compared his own candidate to a racist throwback who - just this month - was the subject of extensive and searching condemnation for using coded racist insinuations in the very campaign he lauds as a model for his own candidate; Amanda previously, privately, in a completely different context, used harsh language about Catholic misogyny: if the treatment of Amanda and the Edwards campaign was anything other than insane, vicious, and misogynist in itself, what response is appropriate to statements made in an official context in Huckabee’s campaign? And more to the point: is there any likelihood we’ll see such a response? (Hint: IOKIYAR)
Finally: is this a racial code-phrase? Hard as it would be otherwise, in this case I’m willing to believe this wasn’t a secret signal of covert racial animosity. I’m willing to believe it’s exactly what it appears to be: an overt signal of simple, oblivious indifference. I don’t think Huckabee’s new “Research and Rapid Response Communications Director” is given to secret signalling or is an overt racist. I’m willing to believe he just didn’t bother to think about what it means to be “as conservative as Ronald Reagan in 1980″, and I suspect that if it were pointed out to him what that entails he wouldn’t care. A party that doesn’t seem to consider Confederate flags to carry any kind of baggage with them certainly doesn’t think celebrating the murders of civil rights workers would either - or that that part of Reagan’s past in any way illuminates his peculiar brand of conservatism. And Huckabee’s campaign is surely not going to be the first to buck that trend.
So who is the new voice of the Huckabee campaign? Why, it’s our own Joe Carter, sometime Lean Left antagonist and all-around evangelical nemesis. Joe is a sincere and well-intentioned guy, and I doubt he meant what what he said means when he said it, if you follow me. But that doesn’t mean he - and Huckabee - aren’t tellingly tone-deaf on certain particular points.
November 27th, 2007
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General, Politics, Culture, Race |
45 comments
Publius has some good thoughts on the whole Reagan editorial thing that Kevin addressed earlier. Publius is a little too eager to think that racism is strictly a thing of the past, rather than still being quite prevalent today (well that, or he’s operating from a quite different definition of racism than I am), but apart from that he makes some excellent points. Go read it.
UPDATE: There’s some excellent discussion in the comments there, too. Especially this comment by freelunch:
While I agree that it is possible to be a Republican or anti-immigrant or want to fill the prisons without being a racist, the problem is that you will end up with many allies who are racist and you will be furthering their agenda. The Republican Southern Strategy was effective for the Republican Party, even for those who were not remotely racist, but they traded their heritage for it, just as the Democrats were finally cleaning up their act.
If the Republicans hadn’t made a place for the Confederate Battle Flag Wavers, they would have been marginalized in a George Wallace third party, vile and vicious, but essentially harmless because Democrats were breaking away from their racism and the Republicans had never been.
That pact with the devil is still in place. Republicans who have never been racist, who have Blacks, Latinos, and Asians in their foursomes at the country club and don’t even mention it, are still relying on the deal and are still making decisions that keep the racists who still exist voting for the Republican candidates. As others have mentioned, life in the US has been fraught with racism in the past and ‘color-blindness’ does nothing but reinforce the sins of the past.
UPDATE II: This comment (below the fold), by Gary Farber, is a great rejoinder to the Morrises/Freds/Truths of the world who like to pull the “but the Democrats were racists in the fifties” canard:
November 14th, 2007
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Politics, Culture, Race |
27 comments
David Brooks seems to think that Reagan is being unfairly portrayed as a racist and he seems to think that he has that reputation because of his infamous campaign kick-off in 1980:
The distortion concerns a speech Ronald Reagan gave during the 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., which is where three civil rights workers had been murdered 16 years earlier. An increasing number of left-wing commentators assert that Reagan kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign with a states’ rights speech in Philadelphia to send a signal to white racists that he was on their side. The speech is taken as proof that the Republican majority was built on racism.
… Reagan’s speech at the fair was short and cheerful, and can be heard at: www.onlinemadison.com/ftp/reagan/reaganneshoba.mp3. He told several jokes, and remarked: “I know speaking to this crowd, I’m speaking to a crowd that’s 90 percent Democrat.”
He spoke mostly about inflation and the economy, but in the middle of a section on schools, he said this: “Programs like education and others should be turned back to the states and local communities with the tax sources to fund them. I believe in states’ rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can at the community level and the private level.”
… But still the slur spreads. It’s spread by people who, before making one of the most heinous charges imaginable, couldn’t even take 10 minutes to look at the evidence. It posits that there was a master conspiracy to play on the alleged Klan-like prejudices of American voters, when there is no evidence of that conspiracy. And, of course, in a partisan age there are always people eager to believe this stuff.
Brooks, unsurprsingly, is not correct:
Similarly, when Reagan declared in 1980 that the Voting Rights Act had been “humiliating to the South,” he didn’t mean to signal sympathy with segregationists. It was all an innocent mistake.
In 1982, when Reagan intervened on the side of Bob Jones University, which was on the verge of losing its tax-exempt status because of its ban on interracial dating, he had no idea that the issue was so racially charged. It was all an innocent mistake.
And the next year, when Reagan fired three members of the Civil Rights Commission, it wasn’t intended as a gesture of support to Southern whites. It was all an innocent mistake.
Poor Reagan. He just kept on making those innocent mistakes, again and again and again.
PS: It has been pointed out to me that Reagan opposed making Martin Luther King Day a national holiday, giving in only when Congress passed a law creating the holiday by a veto-proof majority. But he really didn’t mean to disrespect the civil rights movement - it was just an innocent mistake.
He also leaves out a few details about Reagan’s trip to Neshoba:
A full account of the incident has to consider how the national GOP was trying to strengthen its southern state parties and win support from southern white Democrats. Consider a letter that Michael Retzer, the Mississippi national committeeman, wrote in December 1979 to the Republican national committee. Well before the Republicans had nominated Reagan, the national committee was polling state leaders to line up venues where the Republican nominee might speak. Retzer pointed to the Neshoba County Fair as ideal for winning what he called the “George Wallace inclined voters.”
… It was clear from other episodes in that campaign that Reagan was content to let southern Republicans link him to segregationist politics in the South’s recent past. Reagan’s states rights line was prepared beforehand and reporters covering the event could not recall him using the term before the Neshoba County appearance. John Bell Williams, an arch-segregationist former governor who had crossed party lines in 1964 to endorse Barry Goldwater, joined Reagan on stage at another campaign stop in Mississippi. Reagan’s campaign chair in the state, Trent Lott, praised Strom Thurmond, the former segregationist Dixiecrat candidate in 1948, at a Reagan rally, saying that if Thurmond had been elected president “we wouldn’t be in the mess we are today.”
And Herbert, perhaps the most under-appreciated columnist in America, reminds Brooks that, yes, that speech was precisely as bad as people claim it was:
After a brief stopover in Ohio, Andrew traveled to the town of Philadelphia in Neshoba County, Mississippi, a vicious white-supremacist stronghold. Just days earlier, members of the Ku Klux Klan had firebombed a black church in the county and had beaten terrified worshipers.
Andrew would not survive very long. On June 21, one day after his arrival, he and fellow activists Michael Schwerner and James Chaney disappeared. Their bodies wouldn’t be found until August. All had been murdered, shot to death by whites enraged at the very idea of people trying to secure the rights of African-Americans.
The murders were among the most notorious in American history. They constituted Neshoba County’s primary claim to fame when Reagan won the Republican Party’s nomination for president in 1980. The case was still a festering sore at that time. Some of the conspirators were still being protected by the local community. And white supremacy was still the order of the day.
That was the atmosphere and that was the place that Reagan chose as the first stop in his general election campaign. The campaign debuted at the Neshoba County Fair in front of a white and, at times, raucous crowd of perhaps 10,000, chanting: “We want Reagan! We want Reagan!”
Reagan was the first presidential candidate ever to appear at the fair, and he knew exactly what he was doing when he told that crowd, “I believe in states’ rights.”
Racist is as racist does, to plagerize the worst movie of my lifetime. I don’t care, really, how Reagan treated African American in his personal life. I don;t care that prominent people seem to think that he wasn’t really a racist. What I care about is that Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of the Conservative Movement, made a career out of deliberately appealing to the racist vote. it brought him to power and, as the above shows, it was a constant tool throughout his career. Ronald Reagan acted in public as a racist acts. He deliberately set out to appeal to racists and continue the odious Southern Strategy. In doing so, he helped to mainstream racism in the GOP and thus the country.
Racist is as racist does, and Reagan did quite a bit of racism. He got elected in part by chanting the genteel version of “n*gger, n*gger, n*gger” and no amount of wishful thinking or historical revisionism is going to change that. One wonders why, exactly, people like David Brooks are trying to excuse such racism.
November 13th, 2007
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Politics, Race |
18 comments
Joe, over at Evangelical Outpost, cites “Another example of the economic ignorance of Americans“:
close to 46 percent of those surveyed in a new CNN-Opinion Research Corporation Poll out Thursday morning say the country’s economy is in a recession . . .
69 percent of black Americans questioned in the survey say the country’s in a recession while only 42 percent of white Americans feel the same way.
First of all, this isn’t evidence of economic ignorance - just of the difference between a technical definition and people’s common-sense understanding of the situation.
Joe quotes the technical definition of recession:
[T]he National Bureau of Economic Research defines a recession as “a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales. A recession begins just after the economy reaches a peak of activity and ends as the economy reaches its trough.
[emphasis added]
That is, by definition the recession is over when things literally get so bad they can’t get any worse. Most people would think the recession was still going on at that point.
Most people understand “recession” to mean “economic bad times”, but technically it just meanst anytime economic indicators turn negative. If you think of the strength of the economy following a kind of sine curve, the popular notion of recession would be the period when the curve is below the middle point, either rising or falling, while the technical definition would be whenever the curve is falling, even if it starts from a high point.
So, by the technical definition, we’re kind of weakly out of the Bush recession - that is, some of the things that got so bad they couldn’t get worse have now started to get better. But by any reasonable understanding of the situation, things are in fact still bad in absolute terms. Joe thinks it’s “ignorant” to believe that.
Among other features of Bush’s “recovery”:
- he remains the worst President since at least Eisenhower in terms of average monthly employment gains over his term
- he remains the only President since at least Eisenhower to average negative monthly job growth
- his best month ever in terms of job growth still puts him behind 5 other recent Presidents considered on average over their entire terms (top three finishers: Clinton, Carter, and Johnson)
- even periods of “expansion” and of positive net job growth under Bush have always lagged population growth - there has never been a period under Bush in which more jobs were becoming available to the working population overall
- he is the only President in recent history to sustain continual lagging job growth, with respect to population, throughout his term
- the Bush recession officially “ended” almost two years ago - Bush has averaged a net 33,000 jobs lost per month during the “expansion” period
- Unemployment rates for both blacks and whites declined steadily under Clinton, and rose dramatically under Bush
- the gap between black and white unemployment rates narrowed under Clinton and has widened under Bush
- the black unemployment rate is more than twice the white rate (and would be three times higher if you include the larger percentage of non-imprisoned working-age blacks who are categorized as “not in the labor force” because they’ve simply been unemployed too long)
- GDP growth under Bush has been below the 10-year moving average for most of his term (contrast Clinton: both Bush and Clinton sat through “official recessions” lasting about a year in the first year of their terms - Clinton then not only posted record job-growth for the rest of his Presidency, but GDP growth above the 10-year average almost every quarter therein; George Bush, as we note, has put people out of work by the trainload, while also posting below-average GDP growth most quarters; the “Economic Snapshots” Website notes: “Historically, we have seldom seen real GDP growth this weak except when a recession was near”)
Re: real income, the Economic Policy Institute reports:
despite low unemployment and strong productivity growth, these measures of living standards have yet to recover to their levels of the previous business cycle peak in 2000. . . . in 2006 [there was] an increase in the poverty rolls of 4.9 million persons, including 1.2 million children; median household income in 2006 was . . . about $1,000 dollars (-2.0 %) below its 2000 level (in 2006 dollars). In other words, economic growth over the last six years has totally bypassed the typical middle-class household. . . .
Since 2000, the share of the population without health coverage has increased 2.1 percentage points, an increase of 8.6 million uninsured Americans. . . .
Reflecting the narrow extent to which the growing economy has been showing up in the paychecks of many working-age households, median annual earnings by full-time, year-round workers fell in 2006, for the third year in a row, down about 1% for both men and women. . . .
The unequal distribution of growth between profits and compensation is playing a critical role in this result. . . . the earnings declines among male and female full-year workers last year can be accounted for by a profit squeeze on wages.
Note also that this very weak wage performance has occurred while productivity growth increased 3% per year (2000-06). While economists and policy makers typically stress the positive performance of such indicators as productivity, GDP, or low unemployment, these earnings results clearly reveal that positive macro-conditions have not led to wage growth for typical full-year workers, as customarily had been the case.
So, yes, we’re technically in an “economic expansion” - one that has seen consistently increasing gaps between available jobs and needy workers, declining real income, increasing lack of health insurance, a widening unemployment gap between blacks and whites, record levels of net job losses, and recession-level GDP growth, all during this supposed “expansion”, and all arising uniquely under the Bush administration.
But Joe thinkd it’s a sign of “economic ignorance” that so many workers think they’re worse off only because they’re losing wages, benefits, and employment opportunities, and that blacks are more likely to think they’re worse off only because their unemployment rate is two or three times that of whites and they’re more likely to be counted out of the workforce entirely.
Corporate net profits are up, largely on the basis of those declining wage expenses, so anyone who thinks the economy is bad is clearly wrong. It’s only bad for for the people who do the work - you know, the little people, the ones who don’t count, the ones whose actual personal economic status has no bearing on the real economy, the ones who are “ignorant” for believing that they matter.
October 23rd, 2007
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General, Politics, Economics, Culture, Media, News & Current Events, Race, How Capitalism Will Ruin You |
17 comments
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