Her focus was on the last two congressional sessions, which certainly show a dramatic increase in the use of the fillibuster. And, indeed, there can be no doubt that the senate is broken. But America as a whole has been broken for a lot longer than that, and in fact this chart clearly shows it. Look at the first sharp uptick on the graph. That's the 92nd Congress, starting in 1971. It's just one election cycle after Nixon's election in 1968, which I've repeatedly referred to--following Walter Dean Burnham--as a "de-aligning" election. That's when the pattern of a dominant party controlling all three power centers--House, Senate and Presidency--most of the time over a 40-odd year period broke down. From then on, divided government became the rule in America. And the breakdown of traditional order in the Senate began just two years after that election, reinforcing the broader policy paralysis that divided government brings and serves to normalize.
It's worth reprising the chart of party systems that I've posted a few times before, so that the striking anomaly of the passing sixth party system can be seen, and recognized as the background for the Senate's paralysis:
Partisan Balance In US History
Through Six Party Systems
Control of Presidency, House & Senate
Dem-Reps: 12 / Feds: 2 / Split: 1
Dem-Reps: 9 / Whigs: 1 / Split: 7
Dems: 1 / Reps: 9 / Split: 8
Dems 3 / Reps: 12 / Split: 3
Dems: 13 / Reps: 1 / Split: 4
Dems: 3 / Reps 2.25 / Split: 13.75
But there are two more turning points in the chart of fillibusters. The one in 2007, which Maddow focused on, and the earlier one in the 103rd Congress--1993, Clinton's first term. This in turn corresponds with a tremendous collapse in Democratic Party strength--which I noted Monday in "The Clinton catastrophe vs. Versailles hallowed memory (Rewriting presidential history 1992-2000)", as shown by these two charts:
Over the weekend, I played catch-up with a couple of DVRd episodes of Bones, classic nerd show that it is. If you don't know the show, it's centered on a forensic anthropologist ("Bones") and her team at a Smithsonian Institute knock-off--the "Jeffersonian Institute", in crime-fighting partnership with an FBI agent. In one of the episodes I watched, a sunken slave ship has been recovered, and the remains are brought to the Jeffersonian to be analyzed. The lab's supervisor, Dr. Camille Saroyan ("Cam", played by Tamara Taylor) is black, and why I'm writing about this is the way her co-workers responded when they first learn about the ship.
Although dealt with quickly, it was a complex mixture of shared revulsion and horror over the past it represented and special solicitude for Cam, who, it turns out, had a family ancestor on board. On one level, they all respond as one at a common human level, reacting as horrified as if they themselves were black, while on another level, because Cam is black, they know it's much more intense for her, even before it's known that she has an actual personal connection. They are simultaneously drawn together as a group and aware that Cam is naturally feeling isolated as well. It struck me as a typically liberal group response, intensified by their pre-existing relationships.
They are, of course, a team of scientists (primarily) and the tensions between scientific observation and analysis on the one hand and life its own self on the other are a constant presence in the show. The slave ship instantly cuts through the customary scientific detachment for all of them, and yet that scientific perspective in a way is what makes them take it seriously in a way that others might not. They know that they are part of the same historical and cultural fabric as the slave ship, those who owned it and those who drowned in it. Their shared professional identities serve to reinforce their shared cultural identities as racially integrated contemporary urban Americans. Their sympathies naturally transcend race out of lived experience, yet remain conscious of it. Both tensions and unforced sympathy are part of the mix.
Now, I'm quite aware that many conservatives might respond the same way. But it would not be similarly typical and consonant with their political ideology. Thinking about it further, thinking about Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck and the Tea Partiers, I was struck by the thought that Limbaugh is just fundamentally uncomfortable with black people, at a level just as deep and uncontrollable as the level at which Cam's co-workers are comfortable with her specifically and blacks in general. Of course, Limbaugh is uncomfortable with blacks because he's uncomfortable with himself, they aggravate all his inner uncertainties, all the doubts he does not allow himself to consciously recognize, much less entertain, examine, and act to do something about. Liberalism--reinforced by science--is about critical reflection: on ourselves as well as our social surround (Kegan's level 4). Conservatism--traditional conservatism--is not. It is unreflective, defined by the social surround (Kegan's level 3).
But movement conservatism is reactionary, it is not just unreflective, but anti-reflective, and dominated by level 2 thinking, which sees the world in terms of durable categories (Kegan's term), or natural kinds, one of which is race. Now, not all conservatives are reactionaries. Not all are racists. But they recognize Limbaugh as one of their own--indeed as one of their cultural leaders. And they are as comfortable with him as Cam's co-workers are with her. And though not all Tea Partiers are racists, they are comfortable with racists in their midst. As comfortable as Cam's co-workers are with her. This is what it comes down to, I think: who, exactly are you comfortable with? Who do you look at and see as basically like you? Who is "us"?
You choose who you identify with. And in so choosing, you choose who you are.
A perfect counterpoint to these thoughts was provided by The Simpsons this Sunday, and noted by Chris Hayes, sitting in for Rachel Maddow last night:
It happens all the time, conservatives or Republicans say or do something that progressives see as racist, and then get all in a huff when somebody calls them on it. Heck, they even have their own narrative arsenal for the occasion. Such attacks are "politically correct" examples of "playing the race card," we are sure to be told from a thousand different directions.
The only problem is, it's demonstrably true that these yahoos wouldn't know a racist act if it came up and bit them in the ass. Which, of course, would never happen. At least not now, in 2010. Nothing they could do would ever come back and bite them in the ass, or so it seems. Take for example, a proposed Florida law, highlighted by Think Progress last week:
Proposed Florida Immigration Law Exempts Canadians, Western Europeans From Scrutiny
Florida is one of at least 20 states designing an immigration bill similar to Arizona's SB-1070, which requires police to check the immigration status of anyone they think might be in the country illegally. State Rep. William Snyder (R) introduced the legislation in August, and Rick Scott, the Tea Party-backed Republican candidate for governor, favors such a bill.
Snyder has denied criticisms that such legislation could be used to discriminate against Latinos, saying in a recent radio interview that "race, ethnicity, and national origin cannot be used in making arrests. It's immoral, illegal, and unconstitutional."
However, the bill he introduced does appear to do just that - it exempts all Canadian and Western Europeans from extensive scrutiny. The exception, first reported by the Miami New Times, says a person will be "presumed to be legally in the United States" if he or she provides "a Canadian passport" or a passport from any "visa waiver country." Four Asian nations and all 32 Western European countries make up the visa waiver list.
So, you see, it's not racist, since anyone of any race with a passport from a visa waiver country will be presumed to be legal! Any Hispanic carrying a Swedish passport will just be let off right away. (Unlike US citizens, I guess, since native-born or naturalized Hispanic-Americans have of course, been deported on numerous occasions in the past.)
In the same sense, it's not discriminatory to ban gay marriage, since gays can marry anyone they want of the opposite sex, just like every one else!
If the past is any guide, there's going to be a wave of protestations, followed by grudging, modest, but real actions to reduce the influence of overt, outspoken racists in the Tea Party movement. That's what happened after the NAACP passed a resolution last July condemning outspoken racist elements in the Tea Party and calling on Tea Party leaders to repudiate such elements. Now, the NAACP has gone further. It has just released a report--"Tea Party Nationalism: A Critical Examination of the Tea Party Movement and the Size, Scope, and Focus of Its National Factions"--documenting racist influences in the Tea Party movement from a variety of angles. The report was conducted for the NAACP by the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, and written by Devin Burghart and Leonard Zeskind, Vice President and President, respectively of IREHR. It focuses attention on six national Tea Party organizations--FreedomWorks Tea Party, 1776 Tea Party, ResistNet Tea Party, Tea Party Nation, Tea Party Patriots, and Tea Party Express-each of which is the subject of a separate chapter. And, as David Neiwert writes at Crooks and Liars:
-- James von Brunn, the white supremacist who killed a Holocaust Museum guard last year, posted on Tea Partner Express partner websites.
-- Mark Williams, former chairman of the Tea Party Express, not only wrote racist screeds, he made death threats against President Obama,
-- Billy Joe Roper, a member of the ResistNet Tea Party who also happens to be the founder of the overtly racist White Revolution organization, indulging in "Nazi glamorization" with his eulogy for William Pierce, author of The Turner Diaries, the notorious race-war blueprint.
We also get "profiles of troubling Tea Partiers," including Roan Garcia-Quintana, a South Carolina Tea Party member who the report says belongs to the largest white nationalist group in the country; Karen Pack, another Tea Party member the report says is linked to the Ku Klux Klan; and Clay Douglas, a Tea Party member from Arizona the report says has pushed "militia-style 'New World Order' conspiracies" and "hard core anti-Semitism."
The report also integrates some survey data about Tea Party supporters' attitudes. For example:
Tea Partiers are more likely than white people generally to believe that "too much" has been made of the problems facing black people: 52% to 39%,
Of those who strongly disapproved of the Tea Party, 55% agreed with the statement that black people were "VERY hard working." Of those who strongly approved of the Tea Party, only 18% agreed with the statement that black people were "VERY hard working."
68% of the Tea party "approvers" believed that if only they would try harder, then black people would be as well off as white people. That number fell by almost half, to 35%, when the "disapprovers" answered it.
One can get a very good feel for scope, content and seriousness of the report from the first few paragraphs of the introduction, which reads as follows:
Tea Party Nationalism is the first report of its kind. It examines the six national organizational networks at the core of the Tea Party movement: FreedomWorks Tea Party, 1776 Tea Party, Tea Party Nation, Tea Party Patriots, ResistNet, and Tea Party Express. This report documents the corporate structures and leaderships, their finances, and membership concentrations of each faction. It looks at the actual relationships of these factions to each other, including some of the very explicit differences they have with each other. And we begin an analysis of the larger politics that motivate each faction and the Tea Party movement generally.
The result of this study contravenes many of the Tea Parties' self-invented myths, particularly their supposedly sole concentration on budget deficits, taxes and the power of the federal government.
Instead, this report found Tea Party ranks to be permeated with concerns about race and national identity and other so-called social issues. In these ranks, an abiding obsession with Barack Obama's birth certificate is often a stand-in for the belief that the first black president of the United States is not a "real American." Rather than strict adherence to the Constitution, many Tea Partiers are challenging the provision for birthright citizenship found in the Fourteenth Amendment.
Summer is in full swing, which means that Hollywood has come out with the usual set of summer blockbusters. This year's summer movies - from Inception to Despicable Me - have generally been good quality, well-done things. Indeed, the film Inception may become one of the great classics of movie fame.
Then there was The Last Airbender, by M. Night Shyamalan - a movie which may earn the title as the worst movie this year. From its inception (pardon the pun) to its sorry release, Airbender has been dogged in the wake of controversial casting decisions. The graphic below neatly summarizes the controversy:
This is the second part of two posts analyzing Louisiana's 2003 gubernatorial election, in which Republican candidate Bobby Jindal narrowly lost to lieutenant governor Kathleen Blanco. It will focus on racial dynamics in the 2003 election. The previous part can be found here.
Race and Bobby Jindal's 2003 Run
In my previous post, I began analyzing the electoral coalition that voted for Mr. Jindal. As a map of the election below indicates, he drew support heavily from the New Orleans suburbs, while doing extremely poorly in the rural north:
This is the first part of two posts analyzing Louisiana's 2003 gubernatorial election, in which Republican candidate Bobby Jindal narrowly lost to lieutenant governor Kathleen Blanco. The second part can be found here.
Bobby Jindal's Strange Coalition
In 2003, an ambitious Bobby Jindal ran for Louisiana governor against Democratic candidate Kathleen Blanco. Despite holding a narrow polling lead throughout most of the campaign, Mr. Jindal ended up losing by a three-point margin.
The story of the coalition that voted for Mr. Jindal constitutes quite the interesting tale. It is much different from the Republican base as commonly envisioned in the Deep South.
To begin, let's take a look at a map of the election - which is substantially different from most modern electoral maps. Here it is:
We last got together about ten days ago, when I put up a story that hoped to explain to the Islamic world that, Qur'an burning aside, we don't really hate either them, or our own Constitution.
I pointed out that, just like everywhere else, about 20% of our population are idiots, that this means about 60,000,000 of us might, at any time, be inclined to burst into fits of random stupidity, such as the desire to burn Qur'ans to make some sort of statement, and that the same First Amendment that protects the freedom of stupid speech also protects the rights of Islamic folks to freely build mosques...and finally, that this apparent "paradox of freedom" is exactly why the US is the kind of country that many Islamic folks the world over wish they lived in as well.
I then went off to enjoy my Godson's wedding, and I ignored the posting until the next Monday.
On the two dozen sites where it could be found, this was apparently considered to be a fairly innocuous message...with one giant exception, which is what we'll be talking about today.
Long story short, some portion of this country's population has some bizarre ideas about Islamic folks...but maybe if they knew my friend Wa'el, they might see things a bit differently.
The Washington Post Outlook section this weekend had as its leading feature article on the front page a column by Gerard Alexander, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, on how conservatism has gotten a bad rap for being racist. While familiar in its defense of conservatism, the arguments raised deserve a response, as they go to the core of American conservatism's nature.
I am certainly not a person who believes that being a conservative automatically makes you a racist, but the protests of conservatives about the "race card" also have to be seen as cynical given the history of political tactics on this issue. The use of racism as a tool for conservatives goes way back, and it has not been limited to low brow politicians in the South. The intellectual godfather of American conservatism, Russell Kirk, in his cornerstone book The Conservative Mind, granted that his hero Edmund Burke "was not ashamed to acknowledge the allegiance of humble men whose sureties are prejudice and prescription". This acknowledgement of Burke's reliance on bigotry is critically important to note, because Burke's great cause in the late 1700s was the defense of monarchy against those in America and elsewhere who were rebelling against it. Conservatives who have appealed to bigotry have generally done so in alliance with the defense of tradition and the powerful.
A couple of generations after Burke was defending French and English kings against Tom Paine's rabble and welcoming the allegiance of the bigoted, another giant of the conservative movement revered by Kirk and modern conservatives, John C. Calhoun, arose. Before Calhoun, the states' rights debate had been used by a variety of politicians on a range of issues, but Calhoun forged the link between the states' rights doctrine and the politics of race and slavery. Like Burke, he argued that equality was a myth, that tradition was a virtue above all other things, and that the powerful - in his world, wealthy slave owners like himself - in society should remain powerful.
Throughout American history, conservatives have used issues of race to argue against change and for the existing order. Stephen Douglas wielded racial language like a cudgel against Lincoln in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Conservatives argued against the 14th Amendment by attacking the idea of establishing citizenship for both the freed slaves and Chinese immigrants working on the railroads out west. Segregationists used racist rhetoric to keep Jim Crow in place for almost 90 years.
So in the modern era, when the back of Jim Crow was finally broken and operatives were looking for tools to win over working class whites in defense of polices that would benefit mostly the wealthy, they knew where to turn. They saw an opportunity, and they went for it: William Buckley strongly defended Southern segregationists in a column; Barry Goldwater had voted for other civil rights bills, but saw an opportunity and started pounding the table about states' rights; Ronald Reagan started his general election campaign by giving a speech extolling states' rights, in a small Mississippi town famous for being the place where three civil rights movement youth were killed. Republican ad makers put up a picture of the scariest black criminal they could find (Willie Horton) to talk about crime policy. Jan Brewer talked about (non-existent) beheadings in the dessert by Mexican drug cartels. Fox News suggestively links Muslims and terrorists as if they are the same thing.
It is in no way racist to have a thoughtful debate about immigration policy, crime, affirmative action, and terrorism. But the language and tactics and symbolism being used by conservatives on these issues strays way too often into that territory occupied by the racists of the past like Calhoun and Wallace and Jessie Helms. Today, big business conglomerates like Koch Industries fund the Tea Party movement, whose leaders seem very reluctant to denounce the people coming to their rallies with racist signs. The conservative movement, big business special interests, and the Republican Party made a deal with the devil many years ago to welcome, as Burke put it, "the allegiance of humble men who sureties are prejudice and prescription". That deal with the devil makes the complaints of conservatives about being perceived as bigots sound pretty hollow. You reap what you sow, friends, and to complain about it now doesn't wash.
That post "Newt Gingrich Is A Bigot--and the face of conservatism & the GOP", was motivated by the jarring juxtaposition of Taranto denialism with Newtie's acting out. But it's probably even more jarring to consider the entirety of the racist rightwing attack on Obama over the past couple of years and the sudden anti-Islamic eruption of the past couple of weeks.
You see, the racist attack on Obama not only involved denialism, but projection: It was, Glenn Beck assured us, Obama who was the racist--a theme that Beck has taken so seriously that he's organizing his very own white conservatives' march on Washington this weekend to mug Martin Luther King's memory and steal his dream. It's a very carefully crafted argument that's been worked on for decades, though in Beck's incarnation it's rather slipshod. Still, projecting conservatives' racism onto blacks and liberals is a central aspect of this sort of racist crusade.
In contrast, the anti-Muslim furor raised over the Park51 Cultural Center has none of that careful craftmanship behind it. It's raw, unfiltered racial bigotry, complete with threats and even acts of violence. It totally gives the game away.
Still, this does raise the question of what it would like if there were a conservatism free from racism. In one sense, theoretically at least, it's quite possible. Different researchers have repeatedly found that political conservatism correlates with racist attitudes or with attitudes--such as Social Dominance Orienation and Rightwing Authoritarianism--that in turn correlate with a broad range of group prejudice: racism, sexism, homophobia, religious bigotry, etc. But even as these correlations show that actually existing conservatism is inextricably bound up with prejudicial attitudes, they also indicate that there is an identifiable set of beliefs separate from prejudicial attitudes that at least in theory could constitute a non-racist, non-sexist, totally non-bigoted form of conservatism.
So what would it take to bring such a form of conservatism into being? To be honest, I'm extremely doubtful that it could be done, but I'm willing to give it a shot. And to do so, I want to go back to two of the terms I've already referred to: denialism and projection.
Digby calls attention to a particularly high-fallutin', disingenuous excuse for conservative mendacity and racism. Don't let its title fool you--"How web journalism can make people seem hateful"--the main focus is selectively reported cognitive science--particularly what's known as "motivated cognition"--that has relatively little to do with the Internet per se. It's written for CNN by Gregory Ferenstein, who, we are informed, is "an author and educator who writes about the intersections of technology, business and politics. He teaches at the University of California, Irvine, and is a fellow at the University of California Center for the Study of Democracy." But a search of the UCI website reveals that he is a "political science graduate student", rather than a faculty member. Nothing wrong with that in itself, but it may help explain the undigested feel of his work--and provide some hope that he can still grow out of it.
I could take a cheap shot and call attention to his cheap shot article attacking Capitalism, A Love Story ("Michael Moore ignores capitalism's blessings") in which he cites the existence of open-source software and the occasional democratic work group as proof that Moore has it all wrong. (More fundamentally, Ferenstein uses "capitalism" and "free market" interchangeably, indicating a rather severe case of not getting it.) But more illuminating than this is his earlier CNN piece, "Why the web benefits liberals more than conservatives" In this earlier article, he notices that liberals and conservatives are different:
From the micro-donation platform first popularized by Howard Dean in 2003 to the million-strong Barack Obama Facebook page to the huge audience of the Huffington Post, liberals have been the dominant political force on the internet since the digital revolution began.
Now, research out of Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society suggests that the reason behind this imbalance may be the liberal belief system itself.
Liberals, the research finds, are oriented toward community activism, employing technology to encourage debate and feature user-generated content. Conservatives, on the other hand, are more comfortable with a commanding leadership and use restrictive policies to combat disorderly speech in online forums.
But Ferenstein seems to have forgotten all about liberals and conservatives having any differences in his most recent piece, in which he adopts the "balance narrative" and writes of "a powerful psychological tendency for ideologues unwittingly to distort facts to fit their preconceived biases," going on to say:
Glenn Beck is a type. Most folks have trouble recognizing it, because the type is not well-defined for them in their experience. He's the type that calls blacks racists in public. Lots of folks think that sort of thing. Racism has--fortunately for the most part--become a kind of taboo in (most of) our society, and so most whites who still harbor significant racial resentment find it far more comfortable to convince themselves that it's blacks (and other minorities) who are the real racists. But the difference between someone who may comfort themselves with such thoughts and someone who openly proclaims them to the world is what sets apart the type I'm talking about. And it is a type that's fortunately not well known to most of us. But it's starting to become much, much clearer if folks are paying attention.
Of course there's Beck, as mentioned above. More recently, attention has focused on Andrew Breitbart, who pushed the hoax that Shirley Sherrod is a racist--and that the NAACP crowd she spoke to applauded her racism. But now Media Matters has exposed a writer for Breitbart, Dr. Kevin Pezzi, who is so far gone that even Breitbart has gotten rid of him. And yet, the similarities are far more striking than the differences:
What the Pezzi saga tells us about Breitbart
August 05, 2010 6:05 pm ET by Ben Dimiero
Earlier today, we pointed out that Andrew Breitbart's Big Government published posts from Dr. Kevin Pezzi smearing Shirley Sherrod as a racist.
Pezzi is rather overtly racist, and has repeatedly used racial epithets like "Japs" and "Chinks," and claimed Native and African Americans should have been grateful for their subjugation by whites. Additionally, Pezzi is a doctor/"sex expert"/author/inventor/huckster, who, among other things, says he has "beaten Bill Gates" on a math aptitude test, is "bigger than some porno stars," and stumbled upon a cure for cancer. Pezzi has also apparently created a series of at least six fake MySpace profiles of women claiming to be big fans of his sex books.
In response to our posts, Big Government has now disappeared Pezzi's articles. If you attempt to visit the pages for his posts and bio, you are greeted with an error. While Big Government has disappeared Pezzi from their website, they posted the following "Editorial Note" from "Publius," which doesn't mention Pezzi by name:
Earlier this week, we read an on-line column which provided one of the most thorough and well-researched examinations of the many controversies surrounding former USDA employee Shirley Sherrod. We asked the author of the column for permission to reprint his article. Since publishing the articles, we have been made aware of other writings from this author which do not reflect the principles and values of this site. Because of this, we have removed the articles from Big Government. While we stand by the information contained in the articles we published, we do not wish to see the underlying issue confused or diminished by other work the author has done. We regret the error.
So, let me get this straight: After Breitbart and his "Big" websites became the focus of well-deserved criticism and national ridicule for posting a misleadingly edited video and smearing Shirley Sherrod as a racist, their defense was that Breitbart merely posted the video he was given, and he didn't bother doing any extra research. (Breitbart later conceded that the video was out of context and that he "should have waited for the full video.")
Yet in the wake of this embarrassment, Big Government sought out posts from a guy smearing Sherrod as a racist without doing any research into his background. Notice a pattern here? Breitbart and co. are so eager to cover their tracks and somehow "prove" that Sherrod is a racist that they have long-since abandoned any pretense of responsible behavior.
Once upon a time, the GOP used to have a couple of reckless, wild-eyed backbenchers in Congress who would spout off just about anything that popped into their heads. Then they made Newt Gingrich their leader. One upon a time, rightwing media had a good deal more such figures, but most of them were relatively discrete when the spotlight was on them. Then the Reagan Administration destroyed the Fairness Doctrine, and Rush Limabaugh was turned into the first post-fairness media star of the right. Glenn Beck, Andrew Breitbart, and Kevin Pezzi as the logical extensions of this "progression".
It's not just that Pezzi is a racist. It's of a piece that he's also:
a doctor/"sex expert"/author/inventor/huckster, who, among other things, says he has "beaten Bill Gates" on a math aptitude test, is "bigger than some porno stars," and stumbled upon a cure for cancer.
This sort of megalomania on the individual level is not aberational. It's the logical expression of the underlying attitude that denigrates blacks and puffs up whites in the first place. It's the "Drum Major Instinct" that Dr. Martin Luther King so thoroushly described in his famouse speech of that name so long ago. This is what white supremacry looks like. It's what folks who call blacks "racist" look like. It's not a pretty picture at all. But ultimately, it's more foolish, sad and pathetic than it is anything else.
When I was a kid in the late 50s--and even moreso in the early 60s--one of the most frequent things you heard racists say was "Some of my best friends are negroes." (Yes, that was the common term back then, used by pretty much everyone until black power showed up on the scene. Somehow, you almost never heard anyone say, "Some of my best friends are negroes, which is why I support immediate integration," or "Some of my best friends are negroes, which is why I support the Civil Rights Act," "Some of my best friends are negroes, which is why I support the Rumsford Fair Housing Act."
It was always, "Some of my best friends are negroes, but I think all this emphasis on civil rights is hurting them, not helping," or ""Some of my best friends are negroes, but Martin Luther King is nothing but a Communist agitator," or "Some of my best friends are negroes, but most negroes are just shiftless bums, if not dangerous criminals."
It's been a long time since that rhetorical line has enjoyed a similar level of prominence. It was not the first time, of course. It was an intricate part of the South's recasting of slavery as a lost ideal to portray master-slave relationships along the lines of buddy movie. Indeed, even during slavery this was a common line of defense. So what I witnessed as a child was not anything new at all. But it was something that was on its way out.
Well, now it's back, "bigtime," as our nation's number two war criminal would say, thanks to our friends in the Tea Party, which Talking Ponts Memo has been all over this week. In "Diversity Is In The Eye Of The Beholder: A Day At Uni-Tea" they covered the totally awesome, "We're not racists, hones" Uni-Tea event, which featured 8 minority speakers and all 18 of their friends in the audience:
It was billed as the most diverse tea party rally ever. For three hours Saturday afternoon, we waited for the diversity to show up.
Was Saturday's Uni-Tea rally in Philadelphia a success? Well, it depends on your definition of "epic fail." If you're more on the defensive end of the tea party spectrum, you would have left the rally this afternoon even more convinced that the movement is not now about race and never has been. If you're the kind of tea partier who'd like to see that abounding not-racism result in some actual demographic diversity in the movement, the Uni-Tea rally appeared to be a borderline disaster.
For three hours, a small crowd drifted in and out of Independence Park as speakers and musicians regaled them with paranoia about Democratic politicians and policies and reassurances that no matter what anyone says, there's no racism in the tea party....
The total crowd was a measly 500 or so--far less than 1500 water bottles on hand. But almost all were white:
Among those who did make it, for most of the time the numbers of non-white faces could be counted on two hands, and maybe a foot.
Okay, so I exaggerated when I said that 18 of their friends show up. Heck, some of my best friends can count!
There were two major modes of viewing the issue raised in the comment that were worth taking note of. First, there was the discussion of racism in the Tea Party, typified by Filler's comment (directed :
You are the type of person for whom no evidence of racism would ever be good enough.
Ta-Nehisi Coates has spent the past few days talking about racism in the Tea Party and those, like Metamars, who enable it, if anyone's interested.
Second was the view of the Tea Party as an example of American white supremacy, which was typified by Oaktown Girl's comment:
Just like 1776
Here's a good Tim Wise link unpacking the take our country back rallying cry. Hard to get a louder dog whistle than that:
How fascinating. That it is factually impossible to separate out the "racism part" from the rest of it is something many white folks seem not to understand. They seem to think there was once a time of innocence when oppression wasn't happening, or that we can easily extract from our accounting of those crimes the great and noble things about our forefathers and view them in some patriotic vacuum.
Protest is only seen as fundamentally American when those who have long had the luxury of seeing themselves as prototypically American engage in it. When the dangerous and dark "other" does so, however, it isn't viewed as normal or natural, let alone patriotic.
The discussion of racism in the Tea Party took up most of the comment thread. It represented far and away the most common perspective. But the song/video was clearly articulated from the perspective that Oaktown Girl introduced, the perspective of the Tea Party as an example of American white supremacy.
There are, as I see it, two fault-lines here worth noting:
In South Africa, East Asians are both white and black at the same time. Here is how this happened:
For many years South Africa's white minority governed the country through a policy of apartheid - racial segregation and discrimination intended to favor whites and continue white rule. Under the 1950 Population Registration Act, South Africa's government classified individuals into three racial categories. These constituted Blacks, Whites and Coloureds. It was upon the basis of these classifications that apartheid functioned. It was also upon these classifications that parts of apartheid quickly began to approach the ludicrous.
The world, you see, is not just composed of black people and white people. South Africa's apartheid system, however, found it hard to deal with those outside its black-and-white classification scheme.
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