This Has Been Another Edition of What I Said

I wanted to comment on this:

A disinterested observer would conclude that Justice Sotomayor is race-obsessed. In her now much quoted 2001 UC Berkeley speech she invoked “Latina/Latino” no less than 38 times, in addition to a variety of other racial-identifying synonyms. When one reads the speech over, the obsession with race become almost overwhelming, and I think the public has legitimate worries (more than the Obama threshold of 5% of cases) over whether a judge so cognizant of race could be race-blind in her decision making.

But I think I already did.

Gingrich's Hypothetical

Newt Gingrich, on Judge Sotomayor:

Imagine a judicial nominee said 'my experience as a white man makes me better than a latina woman.'

Some guy on a message board I frequent, also on Judge Sotomayor:

I would expect nothing less from someone [who] see[s] the world in race, gender and class glasses. I view the statement as racist.

I would actually kind of like to see Gingrich's hypothetical made real. Not in the asinine, reductionist way he means it, of course.

What I would like to see is some white guy judge say something comparable to what Judge Sotomayor was saying. I'd love to see Judge Roberts, for example, write a thoughtful, introspective piece about what it means to be a white guy, about how his gender and ethnicity have shaped the way he sees the world, and how they affect his decisions.

Not going to happen, of course, and the reason why is the same as the reason it would be so interesting to see it happen, and the reason it's so easy to gin up faux outrage when someone who isn't a white guy does it: because white guys have the luxury of believing their views aren't shaped by their race and gender--of believing they don't "see the world in [sic] race, gender and class glasses". White guy is the default option--in politics, in the news media, in entertainment. White guy isn't a viewpoint limited by race and gender; it's the standard by which the limitations of all other viewpoints are judged.

And yes, that's changing, and has changed enormously (remember when an African-American president was a far-fetched movie premise). The value of the moronic "Sotomayor = Racist" talking point is that it illustrates how far we still have to go.

QOTD: Black Power Edition

Fresh off last week’s column in which he wished Social Security and Medicare would immediately blow up because then, by golly, we’d be forced to immediately deal with the possible threat of them possibly blowing up possibly many decades from now, Robert Samuelson turns his delicate attention to American race relations:

[T]hey don't want to see the first African American president fail.

"They" being "the media." If that notion reminds you of another bigot, that's because it is nearly identical to what GOP leader Rush Limbaugh had to say back in 2003 about Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb:

I think what we've had here is a little social concern in the NFL. The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well.

They get all the freakin' breaks, those people. Take this Maria Sotomayor...

The Big Tent Party

The Republicans show us what diversity really means: they're willing to elect an African-American chairman, but they're also home to people who aren't.

Cadillac Records

I heard an advertisement on the radio today for Cadillac Records. It was an NPR spot, very dry and announcey. They said it was about Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, and Etta James, starring Adrian Brody, Jeffrey Wright, and Beyoncé Knowles.

Yep. It's about 3 black people, starring a white guy and 2 black people. Can your ears do a double-take?

I thought about it. The story of Leonard Chess is certainly interesting, but is it a way of getting white people to see a movie about black musicians? Didn't white people see Dreamgirls?

More... I remember there was an article about Eva Mendes co-starring in Hitch. They didn't want to give Will Smith a black romantic interest, because they didn't want it to be ghettoized as a "black movie." On the other hand, a white romantic interest could be controversial. Enter the beautiful Latina.

So that's...unpleasant. And I have to ask myself, am I, a white person, less likely to see a "black movie"? And the truthful answer is, maybe. Not consciously, but I think when I'm looking at what's playing, I might definitely eliminate non-white movies when I decide what I'm going to see. Which shows me how far we have to go. How not post-racism we are. Because I look at black movies as movies I won't necessarily relate to, as if those are people too different from me for me to form a connection to them. (Which is why Cadillac Records or Dreamgirls are exceptions; I connect to the music.)

And it's true. I know fewer black people than white people (even though some of the black people I know are my relatives). I connect less to the culture. I feel like a stranger. It shouldn't be true, it's wrong that it's true, but it's true.

(Cadillac Cross-post)

Predictable and Disgusting

John McCain gets very confused in an interview, and rather than admit his confusion chooses to insult a NATO ally. Sarah Palin talks about bringing transparency to the federal government with an initiative that was originally Obama's (and it's already in effect). McCain's response to economic meltdown is a promise to fire someone he won't have the authority to fire.

When you have a news cycle this bad, and you're John McCain, what do you do? You remind the voters that Obama is a Scary Negro.

It's all they've got...and with their former fans in the press bailing from the tire swing, I don't think it'll be nearly enough.

McCain, the Clintons, and the 'Race Card' Card

The most poisonous legacy of the Clinton campaign is this: a lot of Democrats now embrace the Republican frame in which any accusation of appealing to racism, made against any white politician, is presumptively bogus (is, in fact, far worse than racism itself). (Conversely, in this frame, any accusation of 'playing the race card' made against any African-American politician is presumptively true.) People like Lambert, Jeralyn Merritt, Taylor Marsh, Riverdaughter¹--all of them laid the groundwork for the campaign McCain is running today.

That's not to say that McCain wouldn't be running on the same coded appeals to racism without them; this was always the plan. More... What they did was broaden the potentially receptive audience for the McCain campaign's pre-emptive attacks on Obama for 'playing the race card', meant to neutralize any potential complaint about racist campaigning by the Republicans.

And they did it the same way Republicans spread their own memes: dishonestly. The fundamental dishonesty in this case was to elide the distinction clarified in this video (hat tip: Hogan), between what one does and what one is. They took accusations that the Clinton campaign was making coded appeals to racism (accusations that were sometimes clearly correct, sometimes murkier, but never crazy) and transformed them into claims that the Clintons were 'racists'--a charge that, as Jay Smooth observes, is much more inflammatory and much easier to swat away.

It's a dishonest line that Bill Clinton himself continues to flog--even though he was never called a 'racist' in the first place (he was, rightly, called out for racially coded remarks, which is altogether different). And it leads directly to the John McCain is not a racist meme that aimai slammed this morning.

I don't consider Lambert, Jeralyn, Taylor Marsh, or most of the anti-Obama club 'racists' (Riverdaughter is another matter entirely; her blog is saturated with the vilest kind of coded racism). They have, however, done a hell of a lot to advance a fundamentally racist meme that the Republicans have picked up and are running with.


¹Sorry, no links.

Whitewash

Unrepentant racist Jesse Helms is dead.

I hadn't planned to write anything about this...until I saw John Miller's complaint about the New York Times obit:

He "opposed civil rights"? Uh, no. He opposed a particular vision of them.

Yes, Helms opposed the 'particular vision' of civil rights that rejected white supremacy. White supremacist civil rights he was okay with. More...

Digging around some more, I found a whole lot of extravagant praise for the guy. At The Corner, there wasn't a single disparaging word about him. The Heritage Foundation called him "a truly great American and champion of freedom". Ben Domenech hailed him as "a warrior and a patriot". To Robert Bluey, he was a "great man and true conservative champion".

Helms had one or two things to say himself, of course. Back in the '60s, for example, he said this:

No intelligent Negro citizen should be insulted by a reference to this very plain fact of life. It is time to face honestly and sincerely the purely scientific statistical evidence of natural racial distinction in group intellect. ... There is no bigotry either implicit or intended in such a realistic confrontation with the facts of life. ... Those who would undertake to solve the problem by merely spending more money, and by massive forced integration, may be doing the greatest injustice of all to the Negro.

And then of course there's our own Flightsuit Boy, pre-eulogizing Helms back in 2005:

Throughout his long public career, Senator Helms has been a tireless advocate for the people of North Carolina; a stalwart defender of conservative values of limited government and individual liberty; an unwavering champion of those struggling for freedom; and a fearless defender of a culture of life.

Or, in the corrected version:

Throughout his long public career, Senator Helms has been a tireless advocate for the white people of North Carolina; a stalwart defender of conservative values of limited government regulation of business and individual liberty for white people; an unwavering champion opponent of those struggling for freedom; and a fearless defender of a culture of life female subjugation.

What else can they say? Helms helped to make the Republican party what it is today. To anathematize him would be to reject everything they stand for.

The Republicans are now running against a popular and charismatic candidate who stands a better than even chance of becoming the first African-American president. You think they wish they had someone just like Jesse Helms on their side today?

You bet your ass they do.

All in the Family

Good riddance to these Hillary supporters.

I love this: Real frickin progress

Via Ampersand, who got it from Ezra Klein:

Towards the end of the 1967 movie "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," Dr. John Wane Prentice, played by Sydney Poitier, sits down with his fiance's white father, played by Spencer Tracy. "Have you given any thought to the problems your children will have?" Tracy asks. "Yes, and they'll have some...[But] Joey feels that all of our children will be President of the United States," replies Poitier. "How do you feel about that?" asks Tracy, looking skeptically at the black man in front of him. "I'd settle for Secretary of State," Poitier laughs. More...

Written in the late-1960s, the exchange was, indeed, laughable. The Civil Rights Act had been passed three years prior. Two years before, the Watts riots had broken out, killing 35. Martin Luther King Jr. would be assassinated a year later. But here we are, almost exactly 40 years after theatergoers heard that exchange. The last two Secretaries of State were African-American and, as of tonight, the next president may well be a black man. John Prentice's children would probably still be in their late-30s. They could still grow up to be cabinet officials or even presidents, but they would not necessarily be trailblazers.

Tying movies to politics? Deborah Lipp: This is Your Life!

You know what? It's easy to look at the current climate of racism; the hatred of brown people as expressed by hostility towards immigration, religious prejudice disguised as fear of terrorism, comedians who say "n****r" and then say they aren't racist, Confederate flags flown with pride, comparisons of Barack Obama to a chimp or Curious George, conflation of all of it in the rank malificence that is the "Barack Hussein Obama" meme, to see all of that, and feel that pit in your stomach like, we've made no progress at all.

But by fucking golly, we have.

(Guess who's coming to cross-post?)

Gay Marriage, Massachusetts, and Harry Truman

This was one of the first things I posted when I started here, about a year after the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling; I'm re-posting it today in honor of the California Supreme Court decision. I don't know if our experience will be like that of Massachusetts, but I sure hope so...and I think we have reason to be optimistic.

My father, who was a civil rights activist in Mississippi in the mid-'60s, is was fond of citing Truman desegregating the military through Executive Order 9981 as a paradigm for civil rights action. Racism and bureaucratic inertia had always defeated efforts to integrate the armed forces, and even after Truman signed the order it took 5 years before they were fully integrated. Once it happened, though, the strife many had predicted never materialized; black and white served together in relative, if not perfect, harmony--more harmony, certainly, than there was in American society as a whole.
More...


My father's point was that in matters of basic human rights, sometimes the action has to precede public support; that when fundamental change is presented as a fait accompli, opinion swings around to embrace it; and that if we wait to change things until everyone agrees it'll never happen.

I have always been a little skeptical of this view--not least because it is at the root of a liberal reliance on top-down solutions that, while never as pervasive as caricature would have it, gave the right a populist fig leaf for their anti-equality agenda. The ultimate fiasco for this kind of approach was court-ordered busing, which crystallized the white rage that was eventually manifest in the phenomenon of Reagan Democrats. This is not to say that it was the wrong thing to do; only that it didn't play out the way supporters had hoped.

But now we have another example to vindicate my father's view of things: the Massachusetts experience with gay marriage.

Last month, a year or so after the Massachusetts Supreme Court invalidated the state's marriage laws (effectively establishing same-sex marriage in the state), the Massachusetts legislature voted 157 - 39 against a constitutional amendment prohibiting gay marriage. This is a bill that passed 102 - 92 just last year. Meanwhile, polls show that something like 56% of Massachusetts residents approve of gay marriage--a huge turnaround in public opinion from a year ago. So what's changed since then? One thing: people in Massachusetts are now responding to the reality of gay marriage, instead of their preconceptions about it. Apparently, the reality isn't so bad, more Ozzie and Harriet and less Folsom Street than they envisioned.

The same thing has happened in California, to a lesser degree. Mayor Newsom's great experiment in equality may have been legally invalidated, but not before Californians were exposed (ever so briefly) to the reality of the thing. We saw thousands of loving, committed couples pledging to share their lives--including the ultimate couple, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, who had been in a committed relationship for 50 years--and apparently a lot of us didn't find this horrifying: polls in California went from 60% opposed to a roughly even split as of August, 2005.

All of which serves to undermine the position of people who, like Debra Saunders, argue that gay marriage should be established by referendum rather than by the courts or the legislature. Saunders, a libertarian-leaning Republican who is sympathetic on gay rights, misses the point when she argues that

Supporters of same-sex marriage should ask themselves if they want to win their cause without public support or -- even if it takes a little longer -- with public support.

Because the Massachusetts experience, like Executive Order 9981, shows that it doesn't always happen that way. Because prejudice is fear, and people naturally fear the unknown, and so to defeat prejudice sometimes you have to make them know the thing they feared instead of waiting for them to stop fearing it.

I'm still wary of Truman's example, for the reasons I described above; but I am enormously happy to see it apply in this case.

Mississippi 1966

Posted to commemorate Confederate Memorial Day. The past isn't over; it isn't even past.

It's Hard Out There for a Woman-Hating Racist

Now that the Democratic nominee is definitely going to be either female or African-American, the party that whose stock-in-trade has been racism and misogyny is afraid they're going to get called on their shit:

Top Republican strategists are working on plans to protect the GOP from charges of racism or sexism in the general election, as they prepare for a presidential campaign against the first ever African-American or female Democratic nominee.

The Republican National Committee has commissioned polling and focus groups to determine the boundaries of attacking a minority or female candidate, according to people involved. The secretive effort underscores the enormous risk senior GOP operatives see for a party often criticized for its insensitivity to minorities in campaigns dating back to the 1960s. [emphasis added]

Translation: they're going to run coded racist/misogynist messages past focus groups to see which ones do the job without being identified as racist or misogynist.

Oh, and "criticized for their insensitivity...dating back to the 1960s"? That would be because the 1960s is when the Republican party made the conscious decision to openly embrace racism as a means of winning the South from the Democrats--a strategy they have employed mostly successfully ever since.

Gee, it's just awful that now they're afraid it might backfire on them. My heart fucking bleeds for the poor motherfuckers.

(Hat tip: John Cole)

Jonah Has Correspondents Even Dumber Than He Is

Exhibit A: an e-mail he posts without comment. Choice quote:

The Democratic Party has been identity-driven for most of its existence. Ask a Democrat about his and he will tell you who it stands for—women, minorities, the poor—in old times, it was "the common man" or "the working man" or "the little guy."

Thing one: in old times? The 'common man'? The 'working man'? The 'little guy'? Was actuaally the common white man, the working white man, and the little white guy. Women, African-Americans, Hispanics--not in the picture. Not part of what the party (either party) stood for. The thing Goldbergians deride as 'identity politics' exists because it has to--because the identify politics of white guys was used to disenfranchise people who weren't (and apparently still aren't) supposed to have an identity.

Thing two: no identity politics in the GOP? Riiiight.

(Hat tip; Sadly, No!)

Racist Comedy Gaze

So I watched some standup comedy special on Comedy Central. It was a couple of weeks old, but I have a DVR, so there you go. It was a single live performance featuring Dave Attell, D.L. Hughley, and Lewis Black. They performed their routines in that order, and then came out and did a thing together.

At some point, I became aware of the way the camera moved through the audience. You know what I mean; the audience members laughing in response to something the comedian has said.

Everyone shown in the audience for the white comedians was white. Everyone shown in response to Hughley was black.

I don't get it. I mean, what's the purpose of that? Is it scary to show white people enjoying Hughely? Does that provoke white anxiety in some way that eludes me? Are Black and Attell so unfunny to blacks that it would be implausible to show black audience members laughing at them? Are the camera operators, incredible as it seems, unaware that they are making racial choices?

There's certainly a quantity of racial content in any comedian's routine. Hughley does humor that is more black, Black does humor that is specifically Jewish (and Attell just isn't fucking funny). And none of that feels racist or problematic. But the audience stuff; I had a real problem with that, and I just. Don't. Get it.

(comedy cross-post)

One Klan Group to Protest Another in Cullman AL

Um, what? Geez, just how many Klan members are there in Cullman?

Members of one Ku Klux Klan organization say they will assemble at the courthouse Nov. 10 to show their opposition to another Klan group that plans an anti-immigration rally there that day.

Ken Mier, who described himself as an investigator for the Alabama Ku Klux Klan and the national office of the Ku Klux Klan LLC, said in an e-mail to The Cullman Times that his group is against the tactics of the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which held an anti-immigration protest last month in Athens.

"We are opposed to the ignorance and stupidity as displayed by the individuals that thumbed their nose at the area churches by continuing to use racial slurs, threats and avoided Christian deportment," he said.

Okay, I'm speculating here -- there's not much information in the linked news flash -- but somehow I doubt the Alabama Klan loves them some immigrants. Sounds like the local folks are just a mite pissed that the damnyankees came down here and stole their thunder.

Race, Revisionism, and the GOP

Bob Herbert calls out the GOP for 40 years of using racism as an electoral strategy.

Gateway Pundit, in what he must have thought was a devastating takedown, posts a timeline (originally from National Review) of all the good and beneficent things Republicans have done for The Negro...and it pretty much ends in 1964.

I say 'pretty much' ends, because there are a handful of post-1964 events--just not many of them. The two substantive entries:

June 29, 1982: President Ronald Reagan signed a 25-year extension of the Voting Rights Act of 1965....

November 2, 1983: President Reagan established Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday as a national holiday, the first such honor for a black American.

Reagan, of course, opposed the King holiday, and signed the bill only after it passed by veto-proof majorities. I can't find a vote count for the VRA extension, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't the Republicans pushing hardest for it...and there was definitely opposition within the Reagan administration. So apart from a few prominent minority hires (Powell and Rice, of course), there's really nothing after 1964.

That would be 43 years ago.

Boy, Gateway Pundit sure showed that Bob Herbert, didn't he?

Look, all the Reconstruction-era anecdotes and all the gibes at Senator Byrd's regrettable past are never going to change the perception that the GOP is hostile to African-Americans, for the simple reason that the GOP is hostile to African-Americans. (Maybe it's a racist thing, and maybe it's opportunism; I don't think it pays to make that distinction.) That's been their electoral strategy for 40 years, and (let's face it) it's mostly worked for them. Whining about being called on it is just fucking pathetic.

Congratulations, I Guess

I don't really feel one way or the other about Barry Bonds breaking the home run record. He seems like kind of a jerk, but then so do a lot of people in professional sports.

I will say this, though: if he deserves an asterisk for his alleged steroid use, then let's also give an asterisk to all those players who were the beneficiaries of performance-enhancing racism.

George Allen, Deerslayer

Tom Schaller highlights the most lurid detail in that Salon article on George Allen:

Shelton said he also remembers a disturbing deer hunting trip with Allen on land that was owned by the family of Billy Lanahan, a wide receiver on the team. After they had killed a deer, Shelton said he remembers Allen asking Lanahan where the local black residents lived. Shelton said Allen then drove the three of them to that neighborhood with the severed head of the deer. "He proceeded to take the doe's head and stuff it into a mailbox," Shelton said.

And I think Schaller is absolutely right about this:

This may be the episode on which Allen’s Senate career (I think his presidential career has gone the way of the deer’s head) may turn, for two reasons. First, because an incident like this, if true, is not only grotesque and craven, but reveals a general hatred rather than an anger directed at a specific individual....If Shelton’s account is true, for Allen any black suffices for intimidation and ridicule.

The second toxic element here is the verifiability of the event....If Scherer or Lizza are able to document this incident, or if a credible source comes forward to confirm, get your butter and jam out, folks, because Allen is toast.

I'll go further: if this is verified, then Allen is not only toast--he becomes a major liability for the Republicans as a whole. At that point, every Democratic candidate in every state or district should be asking his or her Republican opponent if they think someone like George Allen should be in the Senate. Get them on the record. If they toss him overboard, that's a scalp for the Democrats. If they don't--if they try to weasel out of answering, or are supportive of Allen--it becomes a club to beat them with. Implicit racism is (sadly) often a political positive, but explicit racism is taboo; forcing the GOP to deal explicitly with issues of racism can only hurt them.

[Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog]

[That's all, folks]

Voting Rights Act Renewed

Semi-good news: the House has overwhelmingly voted to renew the Voting Rights Act.

I say 'semi-good news' because a) the Senate hasn't voted on it yet, and b) the fact that this is news at all is bad. It should have passed unanimously, with no debate.

But it appears that some people from Southern states don't like the requirements the VRA imposes. It appears that some of them don't think those requirements are necessary:

Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, R-Ga., argued that his state has overcome its documented history of discrimination and asked the House to amend the act to ease requirements for states that must have all voting changes cleared in advance by the Department of Justice. He said Georgia still is being punished for racist practices that it has eliminated.

I see. And when, exactly, did that happen? Is it since last November?

The chief sponsor of Georgia's voter identification law told the Justice Department that if black people in her district "are not paid to vote, they don't go to the polls," and that if fewer blacks vote as a result of the new law, it is only because it would end such voting fraud....

The memo, leaked to The Washington Post, went on to state: "Rep. Burmeister said that if there are fewer black voters because of this bill, it will only be because there is less opportunity for fraud. She said that when black voters in her black precincts are not paid to vote, they do not go to the polls."

In other words, Westmoreland's home state (which is now totally without racism, we are told) passed a bill that would have prevented thousands of blacks from voting, by its sponsor's admission. Fortunately it was struck down in the courts. So, the other day, was its successor, a revised version that was less odious but still would likely have discouraged black voters.

Yep...all those racist practices have been eliminated, all right.

I'm going to make it really simple for Rep. Westmoreland: if you ever want to get out from under the burden of Voting Rights Act, stop trying to disenfranchise minority voters.

Is that really so hard to understand?

[That's all, folks]