learning something ugly about yourself

Over the last several days, I've been processing an event from earlier in the week. I should preface by saying that I've always thought myself fairly enlightened on matters of race compared with many white people (of course, I suppose all white people probably believe that). Unlike a great many whites I know, I don't live in denial of my own latent racist tendencies, or of the benefits I have personally derived from white privilege. I live in a mixed neighborhood, and by choice. I'm politically left on matters of race, from affirmative action to prison reform and the War on Drugs. For a white person, I think I'm pretty well read in terms of African American literature.

So to the matter at hand: on Tuesday I was surfing the intarwebs, and I came across a series of Harvard tests on implicit associations and preferences. Just for kicks, I decided to take the race one. After about 5 minutes, the results were in.

According to the test, I have a "strong" preference for white faces over black, stronger than most white respondents.

What does that mean? Does it mean I'm more racist than most people? At first I thought, "well, I went to pretty segregated schools for the most part, and there aren't a ton of black people in my profession, so maybe it's just that I don't have as much experience with black people as others." That isn't true, though, nor is it relevant. It means exactly what it looks like: I associate white faces with good qualities and black faces with bad more than most white respondents. Are my southern upbringing and, shall we say, "racially insensitive" parents to blame? Maybe, but does it matter?

What do I do with that? People on all sides of the political and racial spectrum deride "white guilt," but shouldn't I feel guilty about this? Shouldn't I feel convicted, to borrow a less ambiguous term from theology? I suppose "should" doesn't really matter. I do.

Perhaps I could counteract this subconscious malady of mine by interacting with more African Americans. How would I do that, though? I know hardly any black people these days aside from a few of my neighbors, with whom I have little or nothing in common and who all have busy family lives. I don't work closely with any, and I could probably count on one hand the number of black people who even work in my giant academic library. There are none in my wider circle of friends or in their circles. I don't share the religious tastes of most African Americans, so church is out of the question. The only obvious place I can go to socialize with black people is the bar down the street, which I've made a point to avoid because a) drinking at bars is expensive, and b) it allows smoking inside, which makes me smell like an ashtray and entices me to smoke.

It appears I've run aground against a persistent spatial segregation in America. Even when I want to hang out with black people, there are few places where our lives intersect. We have constructed separate societies for ourselves that inhibit not only necessity for interaction, but opportunity for it.

Some months ago I asked a friend of mine what it was like growing up in the segregated South (he was a kid in Tenessee in the late 50's-early 60's). What he said was that in the Tennessee he grew up in he hardly knew black people existed. Segregation wasn't about making black people use crappy water fountains or giving white people the good bus seats; it was about moving black people away so whites didn't have to interact with them. It was about not living near them, or being in the same stores and restaurants as them, or standing in line with them or sitting next to them or going to school with them.

Here I am, 50 years removed from Jim Crow in a part of the country that was never officially segregated, and suddenly I'm finding that description of 1950's Tennessee alarmingly familiar. I'm also feeling like I just saw those test results all over again.

"raghead"

This article from the Charleston, SC NBC affiliate is amazing in so many ways, for the offensiveness of the story itself, the inaccuracy of the guy's comments, for the choice of title, for the apology. South Carolina is a crazy place.

No, wait, this may be better. The money quote:

“She’s a f#!king raghead,” Knotts said.

He later clarified his statement. He did not mean to use the F-word.

optics

But while we're on the subject of the "optics" of the health care reform vote, I would like to point out that what people saw on their TVs this weekend was a black president and an Italian-American female Speaker passing this bill over the protests of mobs of white teabaggers shouting "ni66er" and "fa66ot."

On a simpler level, though, it's also worth remembering John Madden's dictum about unpopular players and coaches: winning is a great deodorant. I suspect we're going to see some movement in approval ratings over the next week or two.

Also, so much for the GOP's charge that Obama isn't doing anything. Are we going to the "too busy" or "too much change" arguments now?

fear of reciprocity

Crazy Michelle Bachmann, in the full flower of craziness while discussing her super-crazy refusal to fill out her census form:

"Take this into consideration. If we look at American history, between 1942 and 1947, the data that was collected by the Census Bureau was handed over to the FBI and other organizations at the request of President Roosevelt, and that's how the Japanese were rounded up and put into the internment camps," said Bachmann. "I'm not saying that that's what the Administration is planning to do, but I am saying that private personal information that was given to the Census Bureau in the 1940s was used against Americans to round them up, in a violation of their constitutional rights, and put the Japanese in internment camps."

That's pretty crazy. So crazy, in fact, that my first instinct is to laugh at Congress' own crazy cat lady and move on. Weird as it sounds, though, I don't think such a dismissal would do as much good as trying to unpack this nonsense and see what she's trying to say.

So, what is she trying to say? What's the lesson of "American history between 1942 and 1947?" It's hard because she's dancing around it, hiding her real meaning so that only people prone to thinking like her are going to catch it, and even then it's probably less purely "dog whistle" than tickling an inchoate fear. It sounds to me like she's saying that the federal government is going to be tempted to start throwing people back in internment camps or otherwise severely hampering their freedom of action. I don't think there's any other direction she could go with this argument.

But who are the ones that will be targeted? Who are Michelle Bachmann's Japanese? It isn't Americans in general, or women, or politicians, or Minnesotans; it's white conservatives. She's saying she thinks there's a not insignificant chance that President Obama is going to start cracking down on white conservatives by tapping their phones, infiltrating their groups and clubs, building dossiers on them, and perhaps eventually moving to more overt forms of oppression like ghettoizing and interning.

Her choice to bring up the internment of a particular disadvantaged, powerless ethnic group is meant to be analogous to the oldest bogeyman of white America: the reversal of power to black people and retributive oppression of white people. In Bachmann's crazy, crazy world, white people are like the World War II Japanese Americans: an innocent, put upon, utterly powerless minority being ruthlessly harassed by a tyrannical Democratic president, except this one's been waiting for a long time to put those white people in their place. In her mind, black people live their lives just aching for the chance to finally get back at white people for all those things that happened in the past. All black people are just Panthers, gangsters, and Nation of Islam brothers in disguise, and they've finally set the perfect trap: a smiling, well-spoken, articulate black man who'll con all the bleeding-heart, guilt-ridden, weak-minded liberals to vote for him, allowing him to slowly implement Operation: Kill Whitey.

After all, it's what white people have looking for in Obama since he first started running for president. What were the early scandals and bad press episodes for Barack Obama? He's a Muslim. Jeremiah Wright saying "God damn America." Michelle supposedly saying "whitey let Katrina happen" (in a meeting with Louis Farrakhan, no less!). Manchurian candidate. William Ayers. Tim Russert spontaneously asking Obama to answer for comments made by Louis Farrakhan and Harry Belafonte in the debates. Obama in traditional Kenyan garb. The birth certificate. The Anti-Christ.

Crazy Michelle's point is much uglier than it first appears.

open mic night at the RNC

From NY Daily News:

Commenting on a report posted to Facebook about a gorilla escape at a zoo in Columbia, S.C., Friday, longtime GOP activist Rusty DePass wrote, "I'm sure it's just one of Michelle's ancestors - probably harmless."

Busted by South Carolina political blogger Will Folks on his FITNEWS blog, DePass told WIS-TV in Columbia, "I am as sorry as I can be if I offended anyone. The comment was clearly in jest."

Then he added, "The comment was hers, not mine," claiming Michelle Obama made a recent remark about humans descending from apes. The Daily News could find no such comment.

Yeah, I know, that's really ugly even for southern fried Republicans. And yeah, that's a pretty terrible apology.

Here's what I want to talk about, though: who was it that thought it was a good idea to get every GOP politician and stooge their own Twitter account? Seriously, am I wrong or is this perhaps the worst idea in electoral politics since McCain put Sarah Palin on his ticket?

Racism is a problem for the Republican party. A big problem. Racism is what gives them their stranglehold on the South, but it kills them everywhere else. Because of this, Republican speechwriters and campaign strategists have cooked up all manner of ingenious ways to give dog-whistle signals to the former segregationists and Dixiecrats that make up the party's southern base: "affirmative action," "welfare queens," sexual innuendo, speeches in Philadelphia, Mississippi on states' rights, etc. It's a subtle art, though; if people outside the privileged group catch your underlying meanings, you're in deep doodoo, so you don't want every Confederate cracker with a chip on his shoulder and a hood in his closet taking a turn at the GOP's microphone to do his best Jesse Helms impersonation, and you sure as s**t don't want to give them the opportunity to send unerasable, impromptu, unsupervised messages accessible to anyone with an internet connection!

Unless, apparently, you're the dumbass who thought Twitter would be the secret weapon in the great Republican electoral juggernaut of 2010. Macacas for everyone!

UPDATE: Already another one here.

UPDATE 2: And now an email. Maybe low-level southern Republicans should just stay away from writing.

Geronimo

Good, sue the pricks. We tell Native Americans and the world that we're not racist anymore, that we're a different people from those that continuously reneged on their promises to let the tribes live in peace, yet our past and future leaders spend the twilight years of their childhood playing with the skulls of great Apache warriors. Maybe it's finally time we forced our kids to find better things to do than desecrating the corpses of brown people.

Pope Benedict reinstates Holocaust-denying schismatic bishop

The new face of the Catholic Church, same as the old face of the Catholic Church. With every passing year, I become less impressed with the moral compass of Christ's vicar, the Pope.

the daughter of a slave votes for Barack Obama

Awesome. I'm sure there are perfectly legitimate reasons not to vote for Obama, but I'm glad I won't have to tell my grandkids that I tried to stand in the way of this (potentially) historic moment.

just a monkey in a suit

Fresh off FOX News' newest gaffe of referring to Michelle Obama, Barack's wife of 15 years, as a "baby momma," we have the newest and most brazen example yet of the kind of attack the darker corners of the Right have devised for Barack:

In case you were wondering, the banner at the top of the vendor website implies that the monkey's mouth is not open; that is its lips.

Sure, you could argue that it's only "the fringe" that has anything to do with this doll and other such filth (though is it really that much more offensive than the FOX News line? Is FOX News "fringe?"), but that doesn't matter because it proves a point about the common distinction people claim to make between dignified black people and "n****rs." To these people and everyone they represent, at the end of the day the Obamas will never be middle class enough or educated enough or intelligent enough or wealthy enough to become innocuous. They can never adopt the white manner of speaking completely enough, have enough white friends, or have enough white blood in their linage. Barack Obama may be precisely the kind of man that they could point to and say, "see, here's a black man that's rejected all that's depraved about black culture and made something of himself!," and Michelle may perfectly fit the bill for the poor black woman who "pulled herself up by her bootstraps," but when the chips are down and it's time to account, to these people they're just a couple of n****rs like everyone else on the South Side.

judgment

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. --Martin Luther King, Jr.

Crazy Train is one of relatively few politicians who have been in federal office so long that, in 1983, he had the opportunity to vote on the establishment of a holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

He voted nay.

In his defense, he was a maverick then, too: most other Republicans voted in favor.

why I liked "A More Perfect Union" so much

Obama has staked his entire candidacy on the belief that the voting public can be trusted to comprehend an issue that neither provides its own obvious answer nor strokes the American ego with dubious hyper-patriotic dualism, in spite of a press and opposing party that have treated Americans like self-centered morons for the last 30 years. It's a pretty radical act of trust in 300 million strangers.

presidential

I'm pretty blown away by this speech. It's by far the most intelligent, honest, and realistic speech on race in America that anyone's bothered to give Americans in, well, maybe ever. This is what I want the president to sound like and think like.

And by the way, Barack wrote it himself.

race-baiting Obama

Cafferty has it exactly right. Joe at AMERICAblog and Kos also note that what we're seeing now is pretty clear evidence that the Clinton campaign has adopted race-baiting as a conscious campaign strategy. There have just been too many too obvious comments to deny it anymore. Clinton has defended herself from these charges before by claiming that, if Obama can't learn to parry these strikes from her, then how can he handle the Republican slime machine? This also protects her from the charge that, in her stubborn insistence on continuing to joust this windmill, she endangers the party's chances in November by sandbagging Obama while McCain fires his slings and arrows unmolested. Josh Marshall, however, explains the problem with that argument:

It is insufficient to say that Republicans will do this in the fall so there's nothing to be lost in hearing it now from Democrats. Because by doing this now, as a Democratic campaign, they are mainstreaming the message. If Obama is the nominee, when this emerges again, no doubt in a harsher, more rancid incarnation, it will come pre-approved by dint of a Democratic campaign's imprimatur.

This race-baiting via refusal to "reject and denounce" Ferraro is damaging Clinton in a big way in the media and netroots. As you can see, I've noted exceedingly critical, even condemnatory posts from at least 3 major bloggers (2 of whom have taken no side in the race and one who runs the biggest blog on the web) plus Jack Cafferty. And here comes a big one: a scolding special comment from liberal darling Keith Olbermann:

"no other voting bloc"

Atrios:
I imagine if CNN's Randi Kaye thought a bit harder she could come up with at least one more.

Recent polls show black women are expected to make up more than a third of all Democratic voters in South Carolina's primary in five days.

For these women, a unique, and most unexpected dilemma, presents itself: Should they vote their race, or should they vote their gender?

No other voting bloc in the country faces this choice.

Heh, wow.

race and the Obama candidacy

It's really, really long, but this is the most thought-provoking essay on Obamarama, inchoate racism (among conservatives and liberals) and "white guilt" that you will ever read. I guarantee it.

Boondocks nails Alan Keyes' ass

Ron Paul is not who you think he is

If I were Rudy Giuliani or John McCain (known in the jungle as the Pandersaurus) or Mitt Romney (whose followers are affectionately known as "mittheads"), right after the primary ends I'd take as hard of a left turn as I could on one or two issues. If they do so, they'll probably win in a landslide because progressives and liberals apparently have an acute, though latent, case of the Stupid that triggers upon hearing a conservative take a liberal stance on one issue that they care about. We saw this with way too many liberals in Texas with Kinky Friedman, and he didn't even need a liberal stance on any issues; he just needed a bunch of snappy one liners.

Now we're seeing it with far-right nutjob Ron Paul. David Neiwert dismantles him ably at Orcinus; I'd suggest checking it out, just to get a sense of how cuckoo Paul really is. For background, phenry @ dKos wrote a good series on him. Paul is what you might call "the far, far right's ambassador to reality." And I don't mean "far right" like Jerry Falwell or Grover Norquist. I mean far right like "heavily armed white guys staring out the windows waiting for the Mexican horde or the black helicopters" far right. Or the "the Jews caused 9/11 and are secretly seeking world domination by hijacking the UN" far right. Here's a taste:

Paul, a tireless foe of the United Nations for more than 30 years, is one of the higher-profile proponents of the familiar "New World Order" conspiracy theory, a paranoid fantasy in which a shadowy group of powerful players is perpetually plotting to conquer the world. Like many on the fringe, Paul takes his fear of other countries to ridiculous extremes; when asked by radio host Alex Jones in November 2005 about a report that Dutch and Mexican troops were helping out with Hurricane Katrina relief operations, Paul called it "a horrible precedent, and it's all part of the NAFTA scheme and globalization and world government."

Again, he's the ambassador, so a lot of what he says, looked at individually, can be rationalized away or may even sound reasonable, until you see who he's really speaking to and what he really means. Liberals, for instance, are also against aspects of globalization and NAFTA, but not for the same reasons Paul is against them, and the end result of President Paul abolishing NAFTA wouldn't be anything resembling what liberals would want or expect.

Check out the phenry posts and the Orcinus posts to see what I mean.

Here, by the way, are some choice nuggets ripped straight off his campaign website:

NAFTA”s superhighway is just one part of a plan to erase the borders between the U.S. and Mexico, called the North American Union. This spawn of powerful special interests, would create a single nation out of Canada, the U.S. and Mexico, with a new unelected bureaucracy and money system.

And there's this, one of his points to solving the immigration issue:

End birthright citizenship. As long as illegal immigrants know their children born here will be citizens, the incentive to enter the U.S. illegally will remain strong.

The incredible hypocrisy and the apostasy against a core American belief should be self-evident.

George Bush disenfranchised the troops: the definition of "caging"

I can't believe this, from Greg Pallast, detailing the practice of "caging" as practiced by the Bush/Cheney campaign and minimized by Monica Goodling this week as "a direct mail term." It's far worse than I personally was expecting. It begins with the campaign compiling a list of likely Democratic voters by focusing on those in African American neighborhoods, and then it takes a particularly sinister turn (h/t ThinkProgress):

Here’s how the scheme worked: The RNC mailed these voters letters in envelopes marked, “Do not forward”, to be returned to the sender. These letters were mailed to servicemen and women, some stationed overseas, to their US home addresses. The letters then returned to the Bush-Cheney campaign as “undeliverable.”

The lists of soldiers of “undeliverable” letters were transmitted from state headquarters, in this case Florida, to the RNC in Washington. The party could then challenge the voters’ registration and thereby prevent their absentee ballots being counted.

It was an attempt to use African Americans' service to their country to rob them of their right to vote. Tim Griffin, one of Rove's flying monkeys, allegedly led such a caging effort in '04. He's now the U.S. Attorney for the state of Arkansas.

Don Imus: wankeroo

Gwen Ifill, of whom I'm occasionally critical, has put it best so far:

...Every time a young black girl shyly approaches me for an autograph or writes or calls or stops me on the street to ask how she can become a journalist, I feel an enormous responsibility. It’s more than simply being a role model. I know I have to be a voice for them as well.

So here’s what this voice has to say for people who cannot grasp the notion of picking on people their own size: This country will only flourish once we consistently learn to applaud and encourage the young people who have to work harder just to achieve balance on the unequal playing field.

And puhleaz, let's stop pretending like: a) this is the first, or second, or third time Imus and his producers have polluted the airwaves with this filth, or b) Imus' age or distance from the black community or off-the-cuff style assuages his remarks. In what setting or in what time was it ever okay to call a Cinderella-story collegiate women's basketball team a bunch of "nappy-haired hos"? Or to call the upper management of a major TV network a bunch of money-grubbing Jews?

So tell me again, please, on what basis should this bigot keep his job?

There's a lesson here about humor. Molly Ivins once said:

There are two kinds of humor. One kind that makes us chuckle about our foibles and our shared humanity -- like what Garrison Keillor does. The other kind holds people up to public contempt and ridicule -- that's what I do. Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful. I only aim at the powerful. When satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel -- it's vulgar.

Imus first gave a half-hearted defense that it was just an idiot comment meant to be amusing, and I suspect that was the most truthful reaction we ever got out of him. I've never listened to his show, but this type of humor is ubiquitous on talk radio so it doesn't exactly surprise me to hear that Imus has a penchant for verbally beating up on women and black people. I don't quite understand the humor defense, either, the "can't you take a joke?!" retort when you say something out of line. What does that mean, that you don't actually believe what you said (or, in this case, the premises and stereotypes behind it) is true? If not, then why would it be funny? "Nappy-haired hos" wouldn't be funny in reference to the Smith College class of '95, or the Chinese women's volleyball team, let alone the Edmonton Oilers.

But in its proper context, it's funny 'cuz black women live in the ghetto and have ugly hair and are loose and say funny-sounding words like "nappy" and "ho"!

"especially immigration and illegal drugs"

For those of you who've been living under a rock (or perhaps abroad?), in January a dozen or so US Attorneys were quietly fired under questionable circumstances. One had issued indictments for several Republicans, including the guy who was, by all accounts, the big cahuna in the Duke Cunningham scandal, only a couple of weeks beforehand. The attorneys will be testifying to Congress this week about the (questionable) circumstances of their firing.

One case that has become the exemplum for the entire scandal is that of the US Attorney for the state of New Mexico. It appears that, at some point during the week before the November midterms, he was contacted by two lawmakers trying to get him to speed up an indictment of a state Democrat on corruption charges. It now appears that those two lawmakers were Rep. Heather Wilson (who, you may remember, just barely survived her re-election by 875 votes out of nearly 211,000), and Senator Pete Domenici. As if it even needs to be mentioned anymore, they're both Republicans.

This weekend, both the White House and Sen. Domenici have gone into full damage control mode, as this scandal could get pretty big. And here's where I'd like to put in my 2 cents that, so far, no one else seems to have noticed. The White House/Domenici tactic from here is to paint the attorney as someone who's performance necessitated his ouster, rather than his partisanship. It also has nothing to do with filling posts with cronies or deepening the rather drained and wanting GOP bench.

We've talked a lot about "dog whistle politics" and GOP racist code in this wee corner of the blogosphere, and I feel like I'm starting to get a feel for it, and am learning where to look for it and when to expect it. Domenici, suddenly mired in bad press and staring down the barrel of his own re-election in '08, needs someone, to give him a break and come to his aid: GOP voters, those who really understand him and what New Mexico's problems are and why this attorney needed to go.

Everyone feel primed and ready?

From Sen. Domenici's statement:

During the course of the last six years, that already heavy caseload in our state has been swamped by unresolved new federal cases, especially in the areas of immigration and illegal drugs. I have asked, and my staff has asked, on many occasions whether the federal prosecutors and federal judiciary within our state had enough resources. I have been repeatedly told that we needed more resources. As a result I have introduced a variety of legislative measures, including new courthouse construction monies, to help alleviate the situation.

My conversations with [the US Attorney] over the years have been almost exclusively about this resource problem and complaints by constituents. He consistently told me that he needed more help, as have many other New Mexicans within the legal community.

My frustration with the U.S. Attorney’s office mounted as we tried to get more resources for it, but public accounts indicated an inability within the office to move more quickly on cases.[emphasis mine]

Why was the highlighted snippet so important to add? What bearing does it have on his larger point? Ahh, more important to the question (remember your audience) is, what kind of US Attorney would be neglectful of immigration and drugs cases in New Mexico and would be constantly asking for more government aid and more American dollars to do a job that, one would assume, other US Attorneys have done without extra it?

Meet United States Attorney David Iglesias.