From the very beginning, there were consistencies and inconsistencies in Ashley Todd's narrative about the alleged attack she suffered. The inconsistencies were within the story itself (the reverse "B" most obviously). The consistencies were with a long, long history of lies about blacks that are inescapably linked with racism in all its forms, from slavery, through segregation, through the "colorblind" racism of the present day. Both leaped out at me as the story exploded. Among the consistencies were the 4,742 identified lynchings from 1882 to 1964, for which the breakdown of "causes" reads:
"Cause"
Number
Percent
Homicides
1,937
40.84
Felonious Assault
205
4.32
Rape
912
19.22
Attempted Rape
288
6.07
Robbery and Theft
232
4.89
Insult to White Person
85
1.79
All Other Causes
1,084
22.85
Total
4,743
100.00
Speaking of "Insult to White Person," although not strictly a "lynching" per se, I thought as well about Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy murdered for whistling at a white woman. You see, the history of lynching is a history of terrorism, a history of collective punishment and mass intimidation. One black does something, however trivial-or is alleged to-and some black, any black, must pay, without all that "due process" stuff that's reserved for white people.
This, quite naturally, puts the entire black community at risk. Which is, of course, the underlying point. A point that's very much alive today, as revealed in a blog post from Fox Executive Vice President Joe Moody, titled, with unintended irony, "Moment of Truth":
If Ms. Todd's allegations are proven accurate, some voters may revisit their support for Senator Obama, not because they are racists (with due respect to Rep. John Murtha), but because they suddenly feel they do not know enough about the Democratic nominee.
Revisit their support for Obama not because they are racists? Why then? What exactly is it, Joe, that connects a blackety-black man who attacks a white female McCain volunteer with support or lack of it for the Senator?
It's not just racism is a generic sense, but the specific tradition of racial terrorism that's being invoked here. Any black at any time can be singled out for any reason, even if he's on the verge of being elected President of the United States.
The latest newsletter by an Inland Republican women's group depicts Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama surrounded by a watermelon, ribs and a bucket of fried chicken, prompting outrage in political circles.
The October newsletter by the Chaffey Community Republican Women, Federated says if Obama is elected his image will appear on food stamps -- instead of dollar bills like other presidents. The statement is followed by an illustration of "Obama Bucks" -- a phony $10 bill featuring Obama's face on a donkey's body, labeled "United States Food Stamps."
....
The woman "responsible" (they're never responsible) tried to explain that it was Obama who was the racist here:
The group's president, Diane Fedele, said she plans to send an apology letter to her members and to apologize at the club's meeting next week. She said she simply wanted to deride a comment Obama made over the summer about how as an African-American he "doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills."
"It was strictly an attempt to point out the outrageousness of his statement. I really don't want to go into it any further," Fedele said in a telephone interview Tuesday. "I absolutely apologize to anyone who was offended. That clearly wasn't my attempt."
Fedele said she got the illustration in a number of chain e-mails and decided to reprint it for her members in the Trumpeter newsletter because she was offended that Obama would draw attention to his own race. She declined to say who sent her the e-mails with the illustration.
It was "outrageous" that Obama would call attention to his race. It offended her!
She said she doesn't think in racist terms, pointing out she once supported Republican Alan Keyes, an African-American who previously ran for president.
Or, "some of my best friends are negroes" as the segregationists used to say.
And as for that other stuff? It didn't mean anything at all. She doesn't see things that way:
"I didn't see it the way that it's being taken. I never connected," she said. "It was just food to me. It didn't mean anything else."
Watermelon? Fried chicken? "Just food"!
Food stamps?
She said she also wasn't trying to make a statement linking Obama and food stamps, although her introductory text to the illustration connects the two: "Obama talks about all those presidents that got their names on bills. If elected, what bill would he be on????? Food Stamps, what else!"
Of course! What else? Nothing racist in that! Only a racist would think otherwise! This is a core belief of the colorblind ideology-anyone who's the least bit conscious that racism still exists is themselves a racist. Only those who ignore racism are free from its stain!
Susan Smith-And Newt Gingrich
At the same time I thought of Emmett Till, I also thought of Susan Smith--and Newt Gingrich. Smith was a white woman who blamed a black man for a carjacking-with her two young children in the car. It created an national hysteria. And then, after several weeks, she confessed it was a hoax. She had killed her children herself.
Because it covered up the horrendous crime of killing her own children, this hoax carried with it a sense of primordial evil-something that white America can rarely bring itself to associate with racist acts. And this case was no exception. Instead of racism remaining central to the story, it became bizarrely inverted, as Newt Gingrich pounced on the incident in the closing days of the 1994 campaign, and blamed the murder on Democrats and the welfare state. As progressive columnist Norman Solomon wrote several months later:
Back in early November, the motor-mouthed Gingrich had much to say about the case -- offering a treatise so wrong-headed that it's almost laughable. Except there's nothing funny about the Susan Smith tragedy...or Gingrich's attempt to exploit it for election-eve advantage.
Here's what Gingrich said three days before last November's election -- in response to an Associated Press reporter who asked him how the campaign was going: "Slightly more moving our way. I think that the mother killing the two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things."
Gingrich concluded, "The only way you get change is to vote Republican. That's the message for the last three days." Two days later, less than 24 hours before the polls opened, Gingrich defended his comments on the Smith case as no different than what he'd been saying for years -- that violence and related ills arise from a Democratic-controlled political system: "We need very deep change if we're going to turn this country around."
Asked if the change he was offering the country would stop killings like those in South Carolina, he replied, "Yes. In my judgment, there's no question."
As it turned out, of course, liberalism had nothing to do it. Quite the opposite. Smith had been molested by her stepfather, a local leader of the GOP and the Christian Coalition. Moreover, there was a profound contradiction in Gingrich's argument. As Ron Rosenbaum later wrote for the NYT Magazine, "Staring Into The Heart Of The Heart Of Darkness":
Newt Gingrich weighed in with his theory of Susan Smith's act. In Gingrich's view the real cause of Susan Smith's act was not Susan Smith; she was just the "efficient cause" in the Aristotelian sense. The formal cause was the 60's -- liberalism, the Great Society, the counterculture -- and the amoral social ethic they supposedly produced. It wasn't Susan Smith who pushed the Mazda into the lake; it was George McGovern.
Curiously, for an apostle of individual moral accountability, Gingrich was trying, however clumsily, to do what the Left, what Great Society liberals, have been accused of doing: he was blaming society for the evil deed of an individual.
This was not the only time Gingrich did this. There were a couple of other high-profile examples. James Ledbetter wrote about one of them in The Village Voice, on Dec 5, 1995 (available via Proquest at many public library websites):
Following the stabbing of an Illinois woman whose womb was ripped open, baby stolen, and children killed, Gingrich blamed welfare and the left: "Let's talk about what the welfare state is bringing. Let's talk about the moral decay of the world the left is defending. There's barbarity after barbarity. There's brutality after brutality. We shake our heads and say, 'What's gone wrong?'" The only confirmed welfare recipients in this story, by the way, were the victims.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, of course. There' much, much vaster history that this is only a tiny part of. But Gingrich was hardly a minor figure. Recalling the Susan Smith incident this week-but without the connection to the Ashley Todd hoax, Hilzoy wrote at Political Animal:
Some liberals were aghast. But Gingrich himself paid no price for what he said. (I imagine this is one reason he went on doing it.) He was reelected to Congress. Shortly thereafter, he was elected Speaker of the House. Just last year, David Broder wrote:
"If there is any politician of the current generation who has earned the label "visionary," it is probably the Georgia Republican and former speaker of the House."
As far as I'm concerned, anyone, of any political party, who blames the actions of someone like Susan Smith on his or her opponents shows that he or she is without shame. In a sane world, politicians who did this would be thrown out of office: their constituents might or might not agree with their political views, but they would be revolted by anyone who said such a thing.
But no, of course, he's a "visionary." The "Dean" has spoken. The bipartisan narrative is set. It is joined at the hip with the wingnut racist narrative. On close inspection, there is not a sliver of daylight between the two synergistic "opposing" narratives.
But, of course, close inspection is verbotten. Close inspection is "racist."
p.s. Of those 4,742 lynchings (or 4,743, tabulations vary), 1,297 victims were white. Two things were going on: One, it was very dangerous for whites to be too closely allied with blacks. Two, once you do away with the law for some people, it readily melts away for everyone.
