| The Frameworks Involved: A Quick Review
From the first diary in this series, here are three frameworks to keep in mind. First is this functional overview of Social Dominance Theory (SDT):
Colorblind racism is an ideology, meaning it functions primarily in the realm of "Legitimating Myths" in the chart above. It's four central frames are:
(1) Abstract liberalism.
The frame of abstract liberalism involves using ideas associated with political liberalism (e.g. "equal opportunity," the idea that force should not be used to achieve social policy) and economic liberalism (e.g., choice, individualism) in an abstract manner to explain racial matters.
(2) Naturalization.
Naturalization is a frame that allows whites to explain away racial phenomena by suggesting they are natural occurrences.
(3) Cultural Racism.
Cultural racism is a frame that relies on culturally based arguments such as "Mexicans do not put much emphasis on education" or "blacks have too many babies" to explain the standing of minorities in society.
(4) Minimization of Racism
Minimization of racism is a frame that suggests discrimination is no longer a central factor affecting minorities' life chances ("It's better now than in the past" or "There is discrimination, but there are plenty of jobs out there).
And, finally, Todd Rudd, Senior Researcher at the Kirwan Institute at Ohio State University speaks of "Identifying conditions, processes, practices, policies, ideologies, and interactions that lead to racial inequality" and identifies five of them:
- Individual racial animus
- Implicit Bias ("symbolic racism")
- Colorblind racism
- Institutional racism
- Structural Racialization
The first two primarily impact attitudes on the left side of the SDT chart, colorblind racism, as already mentioned, impacts the realm of legitimating myths, and the last two impact the institutional elements on the right side of the SDT chart.
With all that in mind, we now turn to consider Rush Limbaugh, who not only plays on the implicit biases of his audience, but who also exhibits the individual racial animus of a classical racist.
Limbaugh's Racism
Lest anyone doubt that Limbaugh is a racist, here's John Amato on Rush referring to LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa as a "shoeshine boy". And here's a column listing Limbaugh's "Top 10" racist quotes. A couple of them are disputed, as they derive from a book that fails to give an air date for them (see WikiQuote), but Limbaugh's routine racist stereotyping is far more substantial than one or two disputed high-profile quotes. Indeed, it's the non-sensational everyday drip-drip-drip of his racist contempt that's by far the most corrosively evil thing about his racist attitude.
Indeed, it's the non-sensational everyday drip-drip-drip of his racist contempt that's by far the most corrosively evil thing about his racist attitude. That, and the fact that his prominence encourages millions of listeners to think that their own racism is perfectly fine and normal, and not even racism at all--it's the Barack Obamas and Sonya Sotomayors who are racists!
There are others who are far more over and obsessive about race, and Limbaugh's hatred and contempt is dispensed against anyone who dares contradict him-calling anti-war Iraq Veterans "fake soldiers", for example-but none of this detracts from the fact that Limbaugh is, without questions, one of the most prominent racists in America, and has been for nearly two decades. It's the normalization of his racism that I want to focus on here, because it's reflective of a larger normalization of racism that eerily co-exists with the mythology of America as a "post-racial" society... if not now, then very, very soon.
Interlude: The Numbers Case Against The "Post-Racial" Myth
As I've noted before, the numbers say, not so much. For example, in my diary, "(Black America)--Invisible Nation", from March 2008, I cited an April, 2005, Princeton University press release about a study that found that "Black applicants without criminal records are no more likely to get a job than white applicants just out of prison, according to a Princeton University study of nearly 1,500 private employers in New York City."
Now that's discrimination. And it lines up with the fact also cited in the same diary that black unemployment routinely runs at about twice the rate of white unemployment:
Also from that diary, I presented public opinion data from the General Social Survey about recent attitudes (2000-2006) towards Black's lower economic status:
Attributed Causes For Blacks'
Lower Economic Status | | Cause | View | EXT
LIB | LIB | Mod
Lib | Mod | Mod
Con | Con | Ext
Con | TOT | | Discrimination | YES | 51.0 | 48.7 | 43.2 | 36.2 | 27.9 | 24.9 | 24.4 | 35.4 | | NO | 48.4 | 51.3 | 56.8 | 63.8 | 72.1 | 75.1 | 75.6 | 64.6 | |
Precise wording: 266. On the average (negroes/blacks/African-Americans) have worse jobs, income, and housing than white people. Do you think
these differences are: a. Mainly due to discrimination?
As I wrote at the time, "Three out of four conservatives say 'no.' Even almost half of 'extreme liberals' say 'no.' They are not just mistaken. As the information above shows, they are downright delusional." And, of course, this fits right into the framework of colorblind racism, in the "Minimization of Racism" frame. And in the "Cultural Racism" frame, we have the following:
Attributed Causes For Blacks'
Lower Economic Status | | Cause | View | EXT
LIB | LIB | Mod
Lib | Mod | Mod
Con | Con | Ext
Con | TOT | | Lack of Will | YES | 36.6 | 37.0 | 41.1 | 51.1 | 50.3 | 57.0 | 65.4 | 49.2 | | NO | 63.4 | 63.0 | 58.9 | 48.9 | 49.5 | 42.9 | 34.6 | 50.8 | |
Precise wording: 266. On the average (negroes/blacks/African-Americans) have worse jobs, income, and housing than white people. Do you think these differences are: d. Because most (negroes/blacks/African-Americans) just don't have the motivation or willpower to pull themselves up out of poverty?
"Lack of will!' That's a classic cultural explanation. Those lazy slaves! They almost destroyed the South! As I wrote in that diary:
That's what almost two out of three extreme conservatives say the problem is, and more than half of all moderates agree! Lack of will is why those employeers choose white convicts over blacks with a clean record. Yesirree!
A related economic indicator is homeownership-which blacks have long been disproportionately excluded from, only to be particularly targeted during the recent housing bubble:
But economic numbers are actually rather positive compared to the numbers around policing and incarceration. Given the history of slavery in our country---followed by decades of near-slavelike sharecropping, and the widespread use of convict labor, surreptitiously secured-we should be deeply troubled by the fact that racial inequities are by far the most stark when it comes to incarceration and punishment generally. Consider the following, from a recent paper, "Post-Racial Racism: Crime Control and Racial Stratification in the Age of Obama":
The public security system in the United States produces shocking racial disparities at every level, from stops to arrests to prosecutions to sentencing to rates of incarceration and execution.6 The United States today places almost one in every thirty of its residents under correctional control in a racial pattern that produces state prison populations two-thirds black and Latino.7 Racial differences in the penal context dramatically exceed those in every other social domain: "Whereas racial disparities in unemployment and infant mortality stand at roughly two to one, and the disparity in unwed childbearing is three to one, the differential with respect to imprisonment is eight to one."8 Even so, however, for the last two decades and more, the Supreme Court has assured us that these dramatic, persistent racial inequalities do not denote the presence of racial discrimination. McCleskey v. Kemp famously shrugged off the most sophisticated and exhaustive survey of criminal sentencing thus far undertaken when it rejected the claim that racism tainted Georgia's death penalty machinery. 9 Though it accepted that Georgia imposed the ultimate penalty on blacks who murdered whites at twenty-two times the rate for blacks who killed blacks, the Court nonetheless opined that these statistics proved "at most . . . a discrepancy that appears to correlate with race."10 McCleskey's dismissal of the evidence rested on a particular conception of racism as rooted in the episodic expression of individual malice.11 Even crediting the Court's conclusion that intentional racism is largely absent from contemporary crime control, though, the dismal numbers in McCleskey and beyond cry out for explanation.
The conservative Supreme Court majority's refusal to see racism despite overwhelming statistical evidence is about as pure a demonstration of colorblind racism as one could hope to find. So long as there is no evidence of overt racial bias in a particular case, that's all that matters to them.
What Limbaugh and Obama Share In Common
Such is the stark reality that Limbaugh's hate-soaked shuck and jive is intended to distract us from. And Limbaugh is merely acting off the same underlying script that dominates racial discourse in our society today. On one level, Obama is the polar opposite of Limbaugh. Limbaugh is angry white man, accusing the almost-too-calm black President of being an angry racist, just like him. Such is the level of absurdity and polarity. (Glenn Beck is right there with Limbaugh, too.) But on a deeper level, Limbaugh and Obama are both reading off the same script to the extent that Obama largely accepts, and even reinforces the framework of colorblind racism. If we were to extend the analogy with America circa 1900, Obama is much like Booker T. Washington, seeking accommodation within a segregated system. It's not nearly so blatant, of course, and his position is far more elevated. But he is every bit as much concerned with fitting into an existing framework of understandings as Washington was, and every bit as much at odds with the sort of sweeping intellectual challenge that WEB DuBois mounted as an alternative.
Recall again are colorblind racism's four central frames:
(1) Abstract liberalism.
(2) Naturalization.
(3) Cultural Racism.
(4) Minimization of Racism
Obama famous race speech in Philadelphia turned on contrasting his own minimization of racism in sharp contrast to Reverend Jeremiah Wright, whom he criticized for failing to join him in his minimization. Of course, Obama doesn't always do this-which is a source of some consternation. His comments on the Gates Affair were an example of this. But so was his speech at the 100th Anniversary of the NAACP. He also strikes themes of naturalization and cultural racism from time to time (in Bill Cosby mode, for example.)
But what's clearly most important is the near religious ferocity that Obama exhibits toward the frame of abstract (classical) liberalism. This can be seen in his individualist, personal aspirational style. It can be seen in his casual self-identification as a "free trader" who looks back on his promise to renegotiate NAFTA as a bit of irrational campaign exuberance. It can be seen in his love affair with Wall Street, and his enthusiasm for continuing Bush's "free market" assault on public education. None of these things has been good for black people as a whole, much less America.
The shortcomings of 19th-Century liberalism were recognized by Dickens, and began to be addressed by the "New Liberals" back in the 1870s. The theory did not work as advertised, there needed to be a broader focus on material preconditions and group welfare, or else the promise of individual flowering would never be realized by the large mass of people. In America, there were three distinct waves of political reform that grappled with these shortcomings-the Progressives, the New Deal, and the Civil Rights/Feminist/Great Society reforms of the 1960s, and of those three, Obama seems most comfortable only with the earliest, most process-oriented and most minimal. It should be quite clear, as LBJ himself foretold, that the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act after it, meant that the Democrats would lose the South. Obama sees himself as a survivor in the aftermath of that, not as a figure to challenge it.
To underscore the meaning of this, here is further quote from "Post-Racial Racism":
Several scholars have persuasively argued that the rise of mass imprisonment reflects a backlash against the civil rights movement. They point to the triumph of Richard Nixon's "southern strategy," whereby the Republican Party gained ascendance by attracting previously Democratic voters from the South as well as the working and middle classes nationally through coded appeals to racial fears-with "crime" serving as a potents synonym for the threatening presence and demands of nonwhites.12 According to Vesla Weaver, "Nixon's strategy was based on the linkages between racial conflict and lawlessness; indeed, in viewing [one of his own campaign ads], he remarked triumphantly that it 'hits it right on the nose. It's all about law and order and the damn Negro-Puerto Rican groups out there.'"13 Weaver continues: "Conservatives pitted toughness on crime against vigorous advocacy of civil rights by building a durable connection between black activism and crime."14 Rather than breaking this connection, Democratic politicians almost immediately acceded to it, engaging with Republicans in a "punitive bidding war," as Naomi Murakawa put it, that over decades created the carceral state we face today.15
The conservative racial narrative has not only been constructed around crime and incarceration, but also around white victimhood, in the form of affirmative action-a palpable absurdity, as the above information about unemployment rates and job hiring discrimination indicate. But progressive push-back on affirmative action has never come close to the relentless conservative attack. And facts? Well, when have conservatives ever needed them?
Indeed, Democrats have utterly failed to build an overarching progressive narrative of any scope that goes significantly beyond Horatio Alger, as discussed in my diary "Misreading History While Trying To Make It--Achievement Narratives And Obama's Limitations ". They even fail to effectively challenge white supremacist attacks on affirmative action by explaining its role in enabling individual achievement when presented with a golden opportunity. In an op-ed for the newspaper I work for, Random Lengths News, Bobby Grace, an LA County deputy DA, noted the failure to do this as one of three significant failures of the Sotomayor hearings:
Second, it was also disappointing that the Senate did not discuss the role that affirmative action played in making Sotomayor the next Supreme Court Justice. Judge Sotomayor grew up poor, and lived in housing projects in the Bronx borough of New York. She attended Princeton University and Yale Law School on scholarships and she has attributed her admission to both those institutions through affirmative action programs. Sotomayor graduated summa cum laude from Princeton and was an editor of the Yale Law Journal while in law school. She is a great example of how affirmative action gives those blocked from opportunity due to race or poverty a chance to rise to whatever level their talent can take them. Affirmative action gave Sotomayor the opportunity to attend Ivy League schools; but her own abilities carried her from there. Discussing affirmative action would have been valuable to the country especially at a time when many feel that affirmative action is no longer necessary. Sotomayor's career drives home the point that unless schools and individuals take steps to promote the poor and the disadvantaged, advancement will not take place.
White supremacists like Pat Buchanan lambasted Sotomayor repeatedly for being an "affirmative action baby," and virtually nothing was done to counter them. This is typically par for the course, but Bobby Grace is absolutely right-this should have been a golden opportunity to set the record straight. Instead, it merely served to show once again the power of internalized colorblind racism. The most charitable explanation is simply that people thought it would be "too controversial" to go there, and since they didn't need to in order to get her confirmed, they simply chose to stay silent. But that assumption that telling the truth would be "too controversial" is itself a testament to the power of colorblind racism.
White Identity
The white victim identity has been continuously built up by conservative affirmative action narratives, so much so that it's instructive to point out that shortly after the highly publicized Ricci case, which overturned existing law in favor of the white firefighters of New Haven, another case went exactly the opposite way-finding that there indeed was a serious pattern of discrimination against minority firemen in the obscure local of New York City. From Black Agenda Report, here's some of what Glen Ford had to say:
Some right-wingers may have wishfully thought that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act was dead - that it was no longer a legal safeguard against tests that resulted in disproportionately bad outcomes for Blacks. They were wrong. Last week, a Federal District Court ruled that Blacks and Hispanics were discriminated against in two entrance exams for the New York City Fire Department. The judge ruled that the tests, administered in 1999 and 2002, not only disproportionately failed non-white applicants, but did so by asking questions that had little or nothing to do with fighting fires.
The tests were not quite as bad as the old Jim Crow voting test question, "How many bubbles in a bar of soap?" - but many of the questions were nearly as irrelevant. According to one constitutional law professor, the New York test was similar to others in big cities around the country, dealing with arcane firefighting details that only the children and grandchildren of firefighters would be familiar with - in other words, a kind of trivia for the families of firemen. Which is just the kind of test a bunch of white guys who want to put their relatives on the public payroll, would put together.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act is still in effect - at least until its next confrontation with the right-wingers at the U.S. Supreme Court. The legal reasoning goes like this: if a test results in a disproportionate number of failures among Blacks or Hispanics, then it must be shown that the skills and knowledge being tested are necessary for doing the job. If not, then the test amounts to illegal discrimination....
Police and fire departments have remained disproportionately white, not because whites are inherently better at fighting fires and crime, but because the hiring and promotion systems have been rigged in their favor. The Civil Rights Act was designed to un-rig the system. That's not reverse discrimination, that's justice.
White victim identity is designed in part to deny that simply reality, but it is not limited to conservative affirmative action narratives, although that is a major contributing source. The mere fact that whites are not fully in charge in any situation can be enough to trigger outbreaks of white victim identity display. And this is precisely what happened with police officer Crowley once Obama criticized his actions.
Obama acted reasonably quickly, and very smoothly to defuse grievance on behalf of Crowley himself and the department that instantly backed him up, but conservative activists could not let such a narrative-building moment go. And this was not limited to conservative movement and media figures. Michigan Congressman Thaddeus McCotter got into the act, "Big time," as America's #2 war criminal would say.
McCotter's trajectory was particularly interesting, as he was caught on YouTube by Mike Stark in Birther hunting mode, telling Stark he didn't have time to say "yes or no" to whether Obama was a natural-born US citizen, because he was too busy working on health care.
The whole Birther fantasy is, of course, yet another symptom of white victimhood. A black man wins the presidency-thus damaging every white male ego in the land. How to turn injured pride into a claimable victimhood? Simple! Assert that Obama is not just black... he's a furriner! And no amount of proof to the contrary will be believed!
But McCotter had bigger fish to fry:
U.S. Rep. McCotter drafts resolution demanding Obama apologize for saying sergeant 'acted stupidly'
by Jonathan Oosting | MLive.com
Monday July 27, 2009, 11:22 AM
U.S. Rep. Thaddeus McCotter, a Republican who represents Michigan's 11th district west of Detroit, plans to introduce a House resolution today demanding President Barack Obama apologize for remarks he made last week about Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley.
"The problem that we have is that the president injected himself in a situation where he admitted bias, admitted a lack of knowledge of all the facts, and nevertheless made a pronunciation that officer Crowley had done something impoper," McCotter told Steve Courtney this morning on WJR AM-760.
McCotter said that President Obama, who nominates the nation's top law enforcement official (the Attorney General), sets a dangerous precedent by weighing in on matters best handled by local authorities.
It was a great ploy. It even got him on Hardball. But the resolution was a joke:
Whereas on July 16, 2009, Cambridge, Massachusetts Police Sergeant James M. Crowley responded to a 911 call from a neighbor of Harvard University Professor Henry Louis ("Skip") Gates, Jr. about a suspected break-in in progress at his residence, which had been broken into on a prior occasion;
Whereas on July 22, 2009, in responding to a question during a White House press conference President Barack Obama stated: "Skip Gates is a friend, so I may be a little biased here. I don't know all of the facts involved in this local police response incident";
Whereas President Obama proceeded to state Sergeant Crowley "acted stupidly" for arresting Professor Gates on charges of disorderly conduct;
Whereas, as a former Constitutional Law Professor, President Obama well understands that all Americans are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, and their actions should not be prejudged prior to being fully and fairly judged by an appropriate and objective authority after due process;
Whereas, President Obama's nationally televised remarks may likely detrimentally influence the full and fair judgment by an appropriate and objective authority after due process regarding this local police response incident and, thereby, impair Sergeant Crowley's legal and professional standing in relation to said incident; and
Whereas, President Obama appeared at a daily White House Press briefing on July 24, 2009 to address his denouncement of Sergeant Crowley and stated: "I could have calibrated those words differently" but "I continue to believe, based on what I have heard, that there was an overreaction in pulling Professor Gates out of his home to the station."
Whereas, President Obama's refusal to retract his initial public remarks and apologize to Sergeant Crowley and, instead, reiterate his accusation impugning Sergeant Crowley's professional conduct in the performance of his duties;
Now therefore be it
Resolved, That the House of Representatives-
Calls upon President Obama to retract his initial public remarks and apologize to Cambridge, Massachusetts Police Sergeant James M. Crowley for having unfairly impugned and prejudged his professional conduct in this local police response incident.
That bolded paragraph there? That's where McCotter tried to insinuate that President Obama couldn't say anything bad about a white man unless the white man had been convicted in a court of law.
Pretty fucking incredible! Even the President of the United States gets his own personalized Black Code!
I rest my case. |
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