"The 'Racist' Card"

Here is an interesting take on Republicans and racism via an interview with Peter Beinart. 

The Field Negro education series continues.

“Is American conservatism inherently bigoted?” That’s the question asked by Peter Beinart in a new piece for the Atlantic. It’s also a question that a lot of Americans have been asking over the past several years, particularly with the rise of Donald Trump. Beinart has been a passionate critic of Trump’s racism and bigotry, but he argues that liberals have been too unsparing in their labeling of people and institutions as racist. With Americans becoming increasingly progressive in some ways, Beinart recognizes that the ground is constantly moving beneath people’s feet. (Six years ago, Barack Obama was not openly in favor of gay marriage; now such an opinion is often considered beyond the pale.)

To discuss his essay and the American dialogue a year after Trump’s election, I spoke by phone with Beinart recently. During the course of our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, we discussed Ed Gillespie’s Virginia campaign (before we knew his racial appeals didn’t end up working), the notion that political correctness causes racism, how to talk to people who embrace social change at a different rate than you do, and the costs and benefits of labeling people who vote for bigots as “racist.”

 

Isaac Chotiner: You don’t really mention this in the essay, but one thing that struck me while reading it is: However we want to define people, and whether “racist” is the right label for them, a lot of people—46 percent of voters—just undeniably voted for a racist. How do we talk about them?

Peter Beinart: One of the points that Ta-Nehisi Coates has made repeatedly that is very well taken is that journalists should not think like political consultants. So, it may be politically unwise to call those people “deplorable” and to call out their racism, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. But I do think that in applying the term racist or bigot, except in the really extreme cases, it makes sense to try to apply the term towards an act or a policy or a statement rather than to a person.

And I think if I were going to critique Hillary’s “deplorable” comment, I might critique it along those lines, which is to say that a lot of Trump supporters believe deplorable things—which they absolutely do; just look at how much support the Muslim ban had in all of the polls—rather than to call the people “deplorable.” Because I think there’s a way in which, again, except in really extreme cases, even people who hold bigoted views are more complicated than that. And it also, obviously, is going to get people’s backs up much more, and so we should try to focus these terms on policy and action rather than individuals.

To take an example in the news: Ed Gillespie in Virginia ran a campaign that I think you and I would say has racist elements to it.

Yes. 

In some ways, it’s a Trumpian campaign. But it’s also very similar to a lot of Republican campaigns from the pre-Trump era. And you see a lot of Democrats labeling the campaign racist, or labeling Ed Gillespie racist for running this campaign. How do you think we should talk about something like the Gillespie campaign, which really is mainstream Republican at this point?

My piece just came out, but I actually wrote it a couple months ago, and I actually think that the circumstances are worse now than they were back then, because I think it’s become more clear now that the Gillespie campaign and the New Jersey campaign are good examples of this—and the kind of exiting of Jeff Flake and Bob Corker—of how much Trumpism is the model for the Republican Party. I think it was a little bit less clear even this summer.

As much as possible I think we should try to be specific in the way we deploy these terms, so I think saying Ed Gillespie is racist—or even the Ed Gillespie campaign is racist—is less valuable both descriptively but also in terms of its impact than saying this particular ad of Ed Gillespie is racist in this particular way. I certainly am not suggesting that we should take these terms out of parlance, because goodness knows we are in the Trump era, where so much of this deserves that. But I also think that they have such power because there is this sense, rightly or wrongly, amongst conservatives, that conservatives genuinely seem to believe, a lot of them, that they are routinely and unfairly tagged with these terms. I think it makes it all the more important that when they are deployed, that they’re deployed as specifically as possibly, so I would want people to say, name me the specific thing that Ed Gillespie has said or done in this campaign that’s racist.

You mentioned in your piece what Marco Rubio said about Black Lives Matter a long time ago, where he kind of tried to show some empathy for people who are feeling like race relations in the country needed to change, and you pointed out that when Republicans do things like this that, Democrats can and should highlight them and applaud them. But when this is all happening under a paradigm of Republicans, especially Republican officeholders, supporting a bigoted president, it’s just very hard to have any sort of conversation.

I agree with you, but I think that this is so bad for the country. The country needs a less racist conservatism, or less bigoted conservatism, if not a nonbigoted—I mean, many people say our liberalism is bigoted too, so it depends on from what perspective you’re seeing this. I think that in some ways, we didn’t appreciate—you know, Mitt Romney and George W. Bush had lots of problems and all, but we are in so much worse shape now than we were then, that I think it’s kind of incumbent on liberals and conservatives to try to think together, those who oppose Trump, what it would take to try to breathe some life back into this, to have a Republican that actually wanted to compete for the black and Latino vote again, rather than purely running against them. I don’t claim to kind of have conclusive answers, but I think the project is one that liberals and conservatives of good will need to really both be engaged in.

There is this idea out there, which I see online if I ever write something about Trump and racism, that basically one reason white people are driven to Trump is because they get called racist all the time.

Right, right

“I’m so angry about being called racist that I’m going to vote for a racist president.”

Right! Doesn’t exactly disprove the thesis!

It’s a ridiculous thesis. But I also think it’s worth thinking about culturally what it means having a country where a lot of people are labeled racist.

This was something that I was really wrestling with and struggling with a lot in writing the piece. As I think the question implies, it’s somewhat ridiculous to suggest that political correctness is creating racism when America was pretty darn racist for a long time before anyone had heard of the term political correctness, and before any of this kind of culture of “political correctness” existed, right? So, obviously American racism does not require political correctness to exist and flourish throughout our history.

So I think that’s kind of obvious. I do think that, though—and I tried to cite a couple of studies in the piece—there are more and less effective ways of talking to people who hold views, some of which we would consider bigoted. And there is an art of persuasion, and that art kind of matters politically, and it also matters civically, like it matters in the way we interact. And while it’s true while Ta-Nehisi Coates says, like, journalists should just say what’s true, that’s definitely true, but it’s also important that we try to think about how we nurture and strengthen nonbigoted points of view, nonbigoted attitudes among people who we still fundamentally disagree with, you know? And I think that’s what I was trying to get at in the first half of the piece.

One thing that’s come up in conversations I’ve had about Weinstein and sexual harassment with people who are, say, over the age of 50, is this real discomfort about how things are changing in the culture. I hate the Mark Lilla thesis that, you know, Democratic Party PC-ness is what’s costing them elections, but I also think that, just for the health of our civic culture, it’s important to be aware of how people are different. I guess I don’t have an answer, because things like sexism and racism need to change, and going easy on them because it makes people “uncomfortable” is its own form of PC-ness. 

Certain cultural norms emerge, and sometimes they emerge quite quickly, like let’s say around issues about trans people. I mean, that’s been pretty recent in terms of its evolution in the broad public consciousness. And certain language emerges, and certain norms emerge about how you talk. And that’s very good, those things, and that’s partly why I am a progressive. I believe in that progressive impulse. But I think where it can be a problem is where you basically don’t give people any time and space to evolve a little bit more slowly, and one of the things I tried to say in the piece is I think it’s important to look at whether people are moving in the right direction, rather than necessarily demand that they move at the same speed.

To say, “Well at least we’re moving in the right direction on these things” after this election is really hard, when you are scared the country is in the broad sense not progressing but entering a reactionary time.

Right. I think there have been several moments in American history where progressives bought into the kind of famous Martin Luther King Jr. line about the arc of the moral universe being long and bending toward justice, and then you get shocked into the realization that actually there’s no inevitability about that at all. And I think that happened to liberals during World War I, I think it happened in the 1960s and ’70s and now it’s happening again. You’re right, in that moment it becomes much harder and unfortunately these are the wages of Donald Trump’s presidency. [Source]

I disagree with Beinhart's take, and I call bullshit on people who say that they voted for the racist because they were called racists.

No, they voted for the racist because they are racists.

It's really that simple.  

The death of democracy.

Did the greatest democracy on earth die with the election of Donald trump?

The following article might help with some answers to that question.

The Field Negro education series continues.

 "It’s been one year since the election of Donald Trump as president and, despite his questionable commitment to the country’s political traditions, American democracy is still standing. Some of Trump’s most dangerous policies have been stopped by the judiciary. Others have not made it through Congress. Special counsel Robert Mueller is closing in on the dangerous liaisons between the Trump campaign and Russia (and perhaps much more). The president’s approval rating has hit a dismal 38 percent, and Democrats scored a landslide in Virginia’s elections last week.

Is it time to rejoice in the strength of American institutions? That would be underestimating the threat on the horizon and overestimating the strength of U.S. institutions. There are two complementary prongs to Trump’s onslaught on American democracy, and both are still clear and present threats.

The first is a systematic attack on democratic political norms.

Democracy is supported by a complex set of political norms that encourage restraint and compromise from the main political actors. These norms are the lifeblood of democratic institutions because no constitution can specify a complete recipe for resolving conflicts in the disparate situations in which politicians, political parties, and other powerful actors will find themselves. Even when certain rules are specified, they need to be interpreted and are often vulnerable to abuse. Democratic political norms fill in this vacuum. They encourage compromise and rule out actions that enable those who currently hold power from impairing rivals. Without these norms, those in office will find ways to abuse their power, undermining the workings of democratic institutions.

The recent history of Argentine democracy illustrates the disastrous consequences of the violation of such norms. Argentina’s famous strongman Juan Perón was elected as president in 1946, after his stint as minister of labor in the former military regime. One of his first acts was to replace three Supreme Court justices with his cronies. Thereafter, Argentina’s Supreme Court ceased to be viewed as a check on presidential power, and it became a new normal for every president, even those who came to power via democratic elections, to oust justices and replace them with loyalists.

Of course, the political norms of democratic compromise in the United States were seriously strained even before Trump’s presidency, as illustrated, for example, by systematic gerrymandering to lock in the domination of the party currently controlling a state’s legislature or by the unwillingness of Senate Republicans to even consider former President Barack Obama’s final nominee for the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland. But Trump’s demonization of opposition and media, blurring of lines between personal and presidential, removal of all types of auditing and other control mechanisms on the administration, and legitimization of uncompromising, or even hateful, views via his implicit support for far-right protesters in Charlottesville and his pardon of former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio have set new lows not just by U.S. but by any international standards.
Political norms that are the bulwark of our democracy cannot be easily repaired once damaged, even if Trump’s most dangerous policies are stopped. Nor can white supremacist, anti-immigrant, and nativist rhetoric be swiftly sidelined once condoned by the U.S. president.

The second prong of the Trump onslaught is an attempt to weaken institutions so as to elevate the personal power of a would-be autocrat. The recent history of democratic institutions succumbing to such attacks in Russia, Turkey, and Venezuela illustrate that the takeover of democratic institutions is often a slow, gradual process. First comes the silencing of internal opposition within the party or the political movement of the strongmen. Then, there is the slow process of neutralizing the judiciary, followed by a systematic, if uneven, sidelining of independent civil service. All throughout, the media and other civil society organizations are increasingly muzzled and silenced by threats, co-option, and smearing.

Of course, if democratic institutions are truly strong and alert against threats, these attacks can be resisted. But the performance of U.S. checks and balances so far gives no comfort.

The last several months have shown clearly that Congress, so long as it remains under the control of Republicans, will provide none of the checks on the president’s power that are often presumed. On the contrary, the fact that only senators not seeking re-election have been able to speak against Trump underscores the near-complete capitulation of the Republican Party. And it is set to get worse as Republican lawmakers are witnessing how the small but highly motivated and mobilized minority of Americans devoted to Trump will bombard them with tweets, messages, or even threats if they so much as disagree with the president.

Several judges stood firm against Trump’s travel ban for several Muslim-majority countries. But in the next three years, Trump, through appointment, can completely change the balance of the judiciary, especially for cases that make it up to the Supreme Court, where he may have an opportunity to appoint several more justices. Banking on the judiciary to defend democracy would be foolhardy indeed.

The growing chorus of Trump supporters demanding the termination of Mueller’s investigation, fully anticipating that Republicans in Congress would not stand in the way, should dispel any notion that the judiciary can single-handedly defend American institutions.

It is heartening to see how several states and cities have stood for the rights of immigrants and taken actions for protecting the environment, even as the Environmental Protection Agency has turned into an anti-environment agency under Administrator Scott Pruitt. But states can neither stop the buckling of federal institutions under the president’s onslaught nor counter the collapse of political norms undergirding American democracy.

America’s most effective safeguards against Donald J. Trump so far are not to be found in Congress, the judiciary, or the states, but in the media and in civil society.

Many media outlets, led by the Washington Post and the New York Times, have enthusiastically embraced their critical role in these turbulent times and have spearheaded the defense of our democracy, keeping the spotlight on the president’s campaign against U.S. institutions and his and his family’s questionable business deals. But can we be sure that Trump’s unremitting attacks on the New York Times, CNN, and other critical outlets won’t work? It is true that when another would-be autocrat, Argentina’s previous president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, tried to browbeat her country’s opposition media group Clarín, it did not succeed. But that’s small comfort. Independent newspapers did at first stand up to Hugo Chávez, Vladimir Putin, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan too, but they got worn down slowly by threats, financial pressure, and relentless smear campaigns by other media blindly loyal to these strongmen. Even if the tradition of fierce, investigative and sometime rambunctious journalism in the United States gives us some hope, we cannot bank on these media outlets to defend our democracy in this age of weaponized fake news.

The people who get their voice from democratic political institutions are — have to be — their last line of defense. The American people have risen up to this challenge. Their mobilization against the policies and the values of Trump’s administration are the true silver lining of the dark clouds of today. It is this mobilization that has paved the way to the defeat of the president’s ban on citizens of several majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States, that made it impossible for even Republican congressmen to repeal Obamacare, and that has egged on Democrats to stand firm against the president. But history is full of examples where such mobilization peters out, especially when faced with soft (and even worse, hard) repression, or when it runs out of steam or gives way to internal squabbles (witness the emergence of Democratic litmus tests, already starting to divide the opposition).

So the slow battle between America’s democratic institutions and its 45th president is set to continue. But even more worryingly, there are the wild cards.

Putin’s subversion of Russian institutions would have been much harder without the Chechen War and the alleged Chechen attack on four apartment blocks in Russia in 1999. The suspension of the remaining constitutional checks on Turkish President Erdogan would have been all but impossible without the intensification of the war between Turkish security forces and the Kurdish rebels. What would happen if we witnessed a series of foreign terrorist attacks on U.S. soil? Or if war broke out against North Korea?

It’s too soon to rejoice, and too dangerous to be complacent. We are still the last defense." [Source]

We all saw it coming.

 I now give you a terrific article from David Remnick.

The Field Negro education series continues.

"Early last November, just before Election Day, Barack Obama was driven through the crisp late-night gloom of the outskirts of Charlotte, as he barnstormed North Carolina on behalf of . He was in no measure serene or confident. The polls, the “analytics,” remained in Clinton’s favor, yet Obama, with the unique vantage point of being the first African-American President, had watched as, night after night, immense crowds cheered and hooted for a demagogue who had launched a business career with blacks-need-not-apply housing developments in Queens and a political career with a racist conspiracy theory known as birtherism. During his speech in Charlotte that night, Obama warned that no one really changes in the Presidency; rather, the office “magnifies” who you already are. So if you “accept the support of Klan sympathizers before you’re President, or you’re kind of slow in disowning it, saying, ‘Well, I don’t know,’ then that’s how you’ll be as President.”

 

Donald Trump’s ascent was hardly the first sign that Americans had not uniformly regarded Obama’s election as an inspiring chapter in the country’s fitful progress toward equality. Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House, had branded him the “food-stamp President.” In the right-wing and white-nationalist media, Obama was, variously, a socialist, a Muslim, the Antichrist, a “liberal fascist,” who was assembling his own Hitler Youth. A high-speed train from Las Vegas to Anaheim that was part of the economic-stimulus package was a secret effort to connect the brothels of Nevada to the innocents at Disneyland. He was, by nature, suspect. “You just look at the body language, and there’s something going on,” Trump said, last summer. In the meantime, beginning on the day of Obama’s first inaugural, the Secret Service fielded an unprecedented number of threats against the President’s person.

 

 

And so, speeding toward yet another airport last November, Obama seemed like a weary man who harbored a burning seed of apprehension. “We’ve seen this coming,” he said. “Donald Trump is not an outlier; he is a culmination, a logical conclusion of the rhetoric and tactics of the Republican Party for the past ten, fifteen, twenty years. What surprised me was the degree to which those tactics and rhetoric completely jumped the rails.”

 

 

For half a century, in fact, the leaders of the G.O.P. have fanned the lingering embers of racial resentment in the United States. Through shrewd political calculation and rhetoric, from Richard Nixon’s Republican Party” to the latest charges of voter fraud in majority-African-American districts, doing so has paid off at the ballot box. “There were no governing principles,” Obama said. “There was no one to say, ‘No, this is going too far, this isn’t what we stand for.’ ”

 

Last week, the world witnessed Obama’s successor in the White House, unbound and unhinged, acting more or less as Obama had predicted. In 2015, a week after Trump had declared his candidacy, he spoke in favor of removing the Confederate flag from South Carolina’s capitol: “Put it in the museum and let it go.” But, last week, abandoning the customary dog whistle of previous Republican culture warriors, President Trump made plain his indulgent sympathy for neo-Nazis, Klan members, and unaffiliated white supremacists, who marched with torches, assault rifles, clubs, and racist and anti-Semitic slogans through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia. One participant even adopted an isis terror tactic, driving straight into a crowd of people peaceably demonstrating against the racists. Trump had declared an “America First” culture war in his Inaugural Address, and now—as his poll numbers dropped, as he lost again and again in the courts and in Congress, as the Mueller investigation delved into his miserable business history, as more and more aides leaked their dismay—he had cast his lot with the basest of his base. There were some “very fine people” among the white nationalists, he said, and their “culture” should not be threatened.

 

 

Who could have predicted it? Anyone, really. Two years ago, the Daily Stormer, the foremost neo-Nazi news site in the country, called on white men to “vote for the first time in our lives for the one man who actually represents our interests.” Trump never spurned this current of his support. He invited it, exploited it. With Stephen Bannon, white nationalism won prime real estate in the West Wing. Bannon wrote much of the inaugural speech, and was branded “The Great Manipulator” in a Time cover story that bruised the Presidential ego. But Bannon has been marginalized for months. Last Friday, in the wake of , Trump finally pushed him out. He is headed back to Breitbart News. But he was staff; his departure is hardly decisive. The culture of this White House was, and remains, Trump’s.

 

When Trump was elected, there were those who considered his history and insisted that this was a kind of national emergency, and that to normalize this Presidency was a dangerous illusion. At the same time, there were those who, in the spirit of patience and national comity, held that Trump was “our President,” and that “he must be given a chance.” Has he had enough of a chance yet? After his press conference in the lobby of Trump Tower last Tuesday, when he ignored the scripted attempts to regulate his impulses and revealed his true allegiances, there can be no doubt about who he is. This is the inescapable fact: on November 9th, the United States elected a dishonest, inept, unbalanced, and immoral human being as its President and Commander-in-Chief. Trump has daily proven unyielding to appeals of decency, unity, moderation, or fact. He is willing to imperil the civil peace and the social fabric of his country simply to satisfy his narcissism and to excite the worst inclinations of his core followers.

 

 

This latest outrage has disheartened Trump’s circle somewhat; business executives, generals and security officials, advisers, and even family members have semaphored their private despair. One of the more lasting images from Trump’s squalid appearance on Tuesday was that of his chief of staff, John Kelly, who stood listening to him with a hangdog look of shame. But Trump still retains the support of roughly a third of the country, and of the majority of the Republican electorate. The political figure Obama saw as a “logical conclusion of the rhetoric and tactics of the Republican Party” has not yet come unmoored from the Party’s base.

 

 

The most important resistance to Trump has to come from civil society, from institutions, and from individuals who, despite their differences, believe in constitutional norms and have a fundamental respect for the values of honesty, equality, and justice. The imperative is to find ways to counteract and diminish his malignant influence not only in the overtly political realm but also in the social and cultural one. To fail in that would allow the death rattle of an old racist order to take hold as a deafening revival." [Source]

 

*Pic from atlantablackstar.com

Fear and loathing after a tragedy.

      In lieu of president Obama's microphone drop moment today, the following essay is apropos.

"The grim coincidence of a major terrorist attack occurring just as the 2016 general election lurches to life has provided Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee, the opportunity he needed to define the campaign he intends to run: a campaign that casts the Muslim faith and its practitioners – both inside and outside the U.S. – as antagonistic to American interests. The speech he gave on Monday in response to the Orlando terrorist shooting was a relentlessly ugly diatribe that unambiguously embraced the pernicious and anti-American idea that a person’s religious faith makes them a threat to national security.

I suppose I should get into the parts of Trump’s proposed policies that either don’t make logical sense or are at war with each other. Referring to the man who murdered 49 people in Orlando, Trump said that he “was born to Afghan parents who immigrated to the United States” and “the only reason the killer was in America in the first place was because we allowed his family to come here.” That led Trump to segue into a denunciation of the “dysfunctional immigration system which does not permit us to know who we let into our country.” Those two thing aren’t actually related, unless you believe (as Trump seems to) that the immigration screening process should weed out those people who are likely to give birth to people who will one day become terrorists.

Of course, the way Trump squares this circle is by arguing that literally every single person emigrating from a Muslim country has to be treated as a potential terrorist, which is why he expanded his proposed ban on Muslim immigration. “When I am elected,” Trump said in his speech, “I will suspend immigration from areas of the world when there is a proven history of terrorism against the United States, Europe or our allies, until we understand how to end these threats.” That would obviously include certain Middle Eastern countries, but given how general his proposed immigration ban is, for the sake of consistency it would also have to include Spain, the United Kingdom, Colombia, Peru, India, Canada, Greece, and countless other non-Muslim countries where Donald Trump would quite happily build one of his tacky golf resorts.

But Trump’s focus is on Muslims exclusively – not radicalized Muslims, but every Muslim person outside the U.S. He referred to the expanded admittance of refugees from Syria as potentially “a better, bigger version of the legendary Trojan Horse.” Per Trump, Hillary Clinton, as president, would “be admitting hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Middle East with no system to vet them, or to prevent the radicalization of their children.” It’s all fearmongering based on lies and prejudice. “We have to stop the tremendous flow of Syrian refugees into the United States,” he warned, even though the actual number of admitted Syrian refugees is shamefully low compared to European countries and far behind the administration’s already modest proposed goal. The vetting process for Syrian refugees is rigorous and lengthy, consisting of background checks, multiple interviews, and hundreds of questions, to say nothing of the separate United Nations screening process they have to go through before the U.S. will even consider their cases." [Source]

Constitution? What Constitution? We don't need no stinkin Constitution.

*Pic from thegrio.com

America's hopeless "color line".

Take it away Chauncey DeVega:

"2015 was a whirlwind year, full of miserable happenings and scant hope for those of us who write about and study the color line in America.

 

The Republican Party finally surrendered to the nativism, racism and xenophobia that it nurtured among its base for decades. This toxic mix birthed the ascendance of the proto-fascist Know Nothing Donald Trump.

Freddie Gray, Laquan McDonald and so many other black and brown people had their lives stolen from them by America’s out of control, hyper-violent, militarized, racist police.
The right-wing news/entertainment complex continued to weaponize its followers. Dylann Roof followed through on his programming and killed nine black Americans after they welcomed him into the fellowship of their church community. Robert Dear also heard the drumbeat of hatred and lies turned into truths by Fox News and Republican presidential candidates such as Carly Fiorina when he killed three people at a Planned Parenthood center in Colorado.

The old combination of guns, racism and toxic white masculinity was lethal in 2015. There is no reason to believe that it will be sated in the years to come.

Bill Cosby, once “America’s Dad” and exemplar of “black respectability politics,” was revealed to be a likely sex predator/serial rapist.

President Barack Obama continued to face strident opposition from Republicans. America’s first black president is entering the twilight year of his two terms in office with the lesson now fully reinforced that “hope and change” was beaten back by old fashioned racial bigotry and white racial resentment. For too large a swath of white America, a black man who is president of the United States is illegitimate: his policies, however reasonable, are to be rejected as dead on arrival.
There is an ugly irony in how America’s first black president, the most powerful person in the world, is in many ways a 21^st century Dred Scott, the latter a man deemed by the United States Supreme Court in 1857 as having “no rights which the white man is bound to respect.”

For those of us who study race and politics during a time when white supremacy is resurgent, American empire is in decline, and the inhumanity of neoliberalism is accepted as the natural order of things, it is easy to surrender to racial battle fatigue. To resist this impulse, a person must develop mental and emotional armor. Ultimately, if the worst of human behavior is your object of study, it is easy to become cynical, to no longer be surprised.

Even by those low standards and expectations, the de facto street execution of a 12-year-old black child named Tamir Rice by an incompetent and emotionally unstable white Cleveland police officer, and his subsequent exoneration for such a foul and wicked act, shocked me.

However, the response by conservatives–in the news media, online forums and by at least one of the 2016 Republican presidential candidates–to the killing of Tamir Rice is potentially even more disturbing.

What should be a source of collective outrage and sadness has instead been transformed into an opportunity to lecture black people about “personal responsibility,” a lightning rod for virulent anti-black racism, a showcase for how white racial paranoic thinking always blames the black victim for his or her unjust killing by the State, as well as one more chances to make excuses for a broken American criminal justice system that enables police murder, abuse and violence against people of color, the poor, the mentally ill and other groups marked as the “disposable” Other.

For example, the comment sections at the website Cleveland.com (which is a news aggregator that also features content from the newspaper The Plain Dealer) were so infested with racism and hate speech against Tamir Rice that the site administrators deactivated them at the end of November.
Cleveland.com explained its decision as follows:

So why, a lot of you have asked, have we chosen to turn off all comments on stories about Tamir Rice?  

The simple answer is that we don’t fancy our website as a place of hate, and the Tamir Rice story has been a magnet for haters.  

We tried to maintain the conversation. The Tamir Rice case offers lessons for Greater Cleveland, and hashing out those lessons in an online community forum could be a healthy exercise. A lot of people firmly believe the police broke the law when they shot Tamir, but others feel just as strongly that the shooting was justified. Passions are strong, and because our comments section could provide a place for venting, we allowed comments on Tamir stories for months. We enlisted a small army on our staff to monitor the comments and delete any that violated our standards.  

The trouble was that we couldn’t keep up. Just about every piece we published about Tamir immediately became a cesspool of hateful, inflammatory or hostile comments. Rather than discuss the facts of the case, many commenters debased the conversation with racist invective. Or they made absurd statements about the clothing and appearance of people involved in the story. Or they attacked each other for having contrasting viewpoints. In many cases, well over half of the comments on Tamir stories broke our rules and had to be deleted.  

We ultimately decided that the comments sections of Tamir stories, overrun as they were by wickedness, were not contributing to the needed conversation. In early October, we reluctantly and finally decided to close down the comments on any news story about Tamir..." [More]

DeVega  goes on to talk about the rise of racism in America and the resurgence of white supremacy while the American empire continues to decline.

The state killing of Tamir Rice is just one example of many. Sadly, these types of incidents that continue to divide along racial lines have been the norm and not the exception since the election of Barack Obama.

I suppose we could blame the conservative media and their huge echo chamber, but I suspect that things would be this way if there was no FOX VIEWS and Drudge Reports. What is driving the America's racial divide is the fear in some quarters of the new America that is emerging and the thought that a person of color could actually lead it, again.

Like DeVega, I don't see the color lines in America getting any closer, and I certainly don't see anyone trying to bridge it.

Folks in the majority hate to hear about racism and racial issues because they believe in their hearts that racism no longer exists. And if they didn't, they would have the right-wing media to tell them that it really doesn't.

On the other hand, folks in the minority population see race relations getting worse,  and they believe in their hearts that white resentment and angst is only going to increase as the country becomes more diverse.

Of course we both can't be right.  Fortunately, though,  I think events in the coming years will show us all who is.

*Pic from huffingtonpost.com

 



  

 

How "toxic white masculinity" hurts America.

     The Field Negro education series continues.

Tonight we will read the words of my friend Chauncey Devega. Chauncey has his own blog  (love the name), but I first caught this piece that he wrote over at Salon online magazine.

"Dear White America,

 

I am your friend. I have written several letters of this type to you before. It pains me to have to do so again. What I am going to share in this letter may be commonsense for many white brothers and sisters. Other White Americans may be surprised. Because our society is so segregated, people of color often do not have many opportunities to talk with white people in a direct way regarding our sincere worries about the problems in your community. I hope that this open letter can be part of a broader conversation in that regard.

When a person suffers from chronic pain they often find ways to compensate for it. Some people self-medicate with drugs or alcohol. Others develop the mental discipline necessary to compartmentalize their physical suffering. Others cocoon themselves in a bubble of denial. Because I am your friend, I am going to be honest with you. White America is suffering from a type of cancer. It is hurting you; it is killing your children; it is damaging families; it hurls shrapnel in many directions, maiming and otherwise bringing an end to the lives of those people who are unfortunate enough to be in its blast radius. If you want the truth, this is it: toxic white masculinity, and the backward right-wing politics which nurture and protect it, are hurting millions of you every year.

I know that is hard to digest. But, because I care about you White America, I am obligated to tell you the truth, even at the risk of your discomfort.

For many of you, the very idea that there is such a thing as toxic white masculinity is both surprising and enraging. Denial and anger are a very normal reaction when an uncomfortable truth is called to account. But it is the truth. Toxic white masculinity is a fear of the world changing to the disadvantage of white men, and where what too many white men take as natural rights are actually going to be exposed as unfair advantages, advantages which were gifted by a lottery of genetics and fortune of birth, as opposed to earned merit.

Toxic white masculinity defaults to violence as a means of maintaining social and political control. It clings to guns as a symbol of “real” male identity. It fears women as equals; it lashes out at non-whites who are somehow “stealing” white men’s jobs and power. Toxic white masculinity sees “liberals,” “progressives,” “social justice,” and “feminism” as enemies — out of a fear that “white masculinity” will somehow be made obsolete or extinct. The dream worlds and paranoid fantasies of angry white men are distractions that look to some type of Other as the preeminent threat to America’s safety and security. The reality is of course, very different.

In reality, right-wing domestic terrorists and mass shooters are the number one threat to America’s safety and security since September 11, 2001.

White men are approximately 31 percent of the United States population. And yet, white men are nearly 63 percent of those people who commit mass shootings. Such behavior, among any other group, would be considered pathological and a public health crisis.

Dylann Roof turned his toxic white racist masculinity on a black church in Charleston. And John Houser — a white, right-wing, conservative, Christian fundamentalist, an anti-feminist, woman-hating Nazi sympathizer — directed his rage towards a movie theater in Lafayette last month, where he killed three people and wounded eight others.

Because I am your friend White America, I will share another truth with you: While the mainstream news media will run away from subjects that make you uncomfortable, it is no coincidence that “Trainwreck,” a movie written by a white Jewish feminist comedian, was the target of John Houser’s lethal actions. It was not “mental illness” which made John Houser shoot those people in Lafayette, although such a claim is a common deflection that prevents a serious discussion of white masculinity and mass shootings. One can be “mentally ill” separate and apart from their violent impulses. No, it was extreme right-wing politics and toxic white masculinity that drove Houser to kill.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. The killing and abuse of women by men in the United States — the vast majority of it committed within the same “racial” group — is so common that it is rarely deemed to be newsworthy by the mainstream news media. This is a disgusting national embarrassment.
Toxic white masculinity is a complex problem. And you cannot fix it unless you also confront how toxic white masculinity is nurtured and encouraged by your news media and political representatives. While I do not think that you are a victim of your news media and political parties, you have nonetheless been done a disservice by them.

Fox News is your mouthpiece: 92 percent of its prime time viewing audience is white. Fox is the most popular cable news network in the United States. Millions of people watch it on a daily basis. Fox News is part of a propaganda machine that consists of the Internet, radio, and social media. This has created an alternate reality for many White Americans where down is up and up is down, so to speak. Researchers have shown that the right-wing media actually makes its public less knowledgeable about empirical reality and current events than those people who do not watch or listen to it.

The white identity politics, grievance mongering, conspiracies, paranoid thinking, eliminationist rhetoric about liberals and progressives, hostility to women, rage against immigrants, anxiety about those who are not “Christian”, and mainstreaming of white supremacy and white racial resentment, are the fuel for toxic white masculinity. The right-wing media gins up and encourages such sentiments because it is dependent on them for viewers and ad revenue.

The Republican Party, meanwhile, is America’s most prominent white identity organization. Since the end of the civil rights movement, the modern GOP has fused together conservatism and racism as its name brand. In the Age of Obama, the Republican Party has found itself increasingly dysfunctional as its politics are seemingly unable to evolve beyond “hate the black guy in the White House and anything that he proposes,” however reasonable. In many ways — the fetishistic embrace of guns, hostility to women’s rights, Islamophobia, symbolic and overt racism against black people — the policies and talking points of the contemporary Republican Party are toxic white masculinity as a campaign platform. Together with the alternate reality created by the right-wing media, the Republican Party has become so radicalized, breaking many of the standing norms of consensus politics in modern American politics, that it no longer functions as a responsible political organization.

White America, you have been confused, misled, and lied to by your primary political party and media. This is hurting you in many ways.

The American economy is broken. Wealth and income inequality are severe. The psychological wages of being White in America may still exist, but they are not translating into the material wealth they once did in the not so recent past. For example, there are more White Americans on welfare and other types of public aid than any other group. White Americans also receive a disproportionate percentage of public assistance dollars. As Robert Putnam details in his new book ”Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis,” the life opportunities and upward mobility of White America are increasingly imperiled. The abuse of prescription drugs, as well as illegal narcotics such as heroine and methamphetamines, is a severe problem for White America. The sum total of these and other troubles have left white folks – white men especially – less hopeful and feeling more insecure and angry about their future." [More]

Chauncey wrote all that to tell you, my white male friends, that the days of John Wayne are long gone.

It's time that you all got in touch with your sensitive and cerebral side. This might be a bit tough for some of you, but I think you can do it.

*Pic from Salon.com


 

Mr. Boehner, Mr. McConnell, you should have been there.

It was nice to see all those folks going back to Selma to relive that bloody and horrible day in America's history some fifty years ago. 

I watched the activities on MSNBC today, and seeing all those people coming together to say never again was a beautiful thing.

I saw all those people, but there were some very important people who unfortunately I did not see.

"Another day, another political leader (or two) failing to grasp the very simple concept of optics and symbolism.

Today’s what-the-hell-were-you-thinking winners are Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) as it pertains to their respective no-shows to the 50th anniversary of the march on Selma. Did House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) attend? Yes. RNC Chairman Reince Priebus? Yes. Former President George W. Bush and Laura Bush? Yes. Do all of these GOPers being in attendance mean Boehner and McConnell are excused for not taking a day to show unity around a truly historic event in our nation’s tumultuous history on race relations?

Absolutely not. Nor does it excuse Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid for not attending, nor the second and third ranking Senate Democrats (Dick Durbin of Illinois and Chuck Schumer of New York) from blowing it off, either. But Boehner and McConnell are the focus here, and here’s why:

Optics is a topic that has been discussed before on this space, particularly as it pertains to President Obama and ill-advised tee times.

Note: As a fellow southpaw on the links and one who can appreciate the stress relief golf can provide regardless of score (I shot 62 this morning…on the front nine), nobody is begrudging someone with as stressful a job as Mr. Obama owns from getting away from it all for a few hours. It’s not exactly a new thing either: Democratic President Woodrow Wilson reportedly played 1200 rounds of golf.

Republican President Dwight Eisenhower racked up around 800. Nixon loved it. So did Clinton. Party is irrelevant. With Mr. Obama (who has played over 200 rounds, which suddenly looks relatively small), the issue around optics is not around playing golf, but the timing of certain outings…particularly last summer when he was on the first tee less than 20 minutes after a statement on American Jim Foley’s beheading by ISIS, and especially for not going to Paris following terror attacks there when many other world leaders found the time.

In Boehner’s and McConnell’s case, each appears to at least be wise enough to leave the clubs in the garage this weekend (especially Boehner–a scratch golfer). But that doesn’t make the optic of two-thirds of government leadership not being in Selma yesterday any less embarrassing for the Grand Old Party..." [Source]

I disagree with the writer. This is much more than just "optics". This is personal to us black folks.

The two leaders of the republican party not being in Selma is a personal affront to every person of color in this country.

Republicans say that they want to reach out to minorities, but this is not how you do it. Talk is cheap.
Show us that you are sincere by showing up in places like Selma.  

I have a lot of issues with George W. Bush, but I give him credit for showing up in Selma.

Unfortunately, the current leaders in his party are causing folks like Colin Powell to say the following:

“I still see it in the Republican Party,” Powell said. “And I still see it in other parts of our country. You don’t have to be Republican to be touched by this dark vein.”

“America is still going through this transformation from where we were 50, 60 years ago,” Powell said.

“You have to remember it was just 60 or 70 years ago that we still had poll taxes, that we still had literacy tests in order to vote, that voting places were only open two days a week for African Americans. So we’ve come a long way, but we still have a long way to go.”

I don't think that people like John Boehner and  Mitch McConnell share the sentiments of Colin Powell.

To them, we have already arrived.

The Civil War spirit.

This is a bad time for race relations in America.


To be sure, it has been worse, but folks expected so much after the election of the second first black president.


Sadly, though, that has not been the case.


Here is a post from Andy Schmookler which explains one of the reasons why things are the way they are.


"It's like facial recognition technology: if the features match up, you conclude, "It's the same guy."


So it is with the match between the force that drove us to Civil War more than a century and a half ago, and the force that has taken over the Republican Party in our times.


In both cases, we see an elite insisting on their "liberty," by which they mean the freedom to dominate.


With Citizens United, in our times, the corporatists have declared that their "freedom of speech" gives them the right to buy our elections, unfettered by any concerns about the rights of the average citizen to have an equal say in their government.


Back in the 1850s, the slaveholders insisted that their "liberty" meant that they had the right to take their human "property" anywhere in American territory, an insistence that swept aside the previously respected concerns of millions of their countrymen that there be regions of the country free of slavery.


In both cases, the use of the structures of American democracy was combined with a contempt for the democratic values that inspired our founders.
Nowadays, the Republicans have made a national effort to pass voter ID laws to address a non-existent problem of voter fraud-- a campaign that is itself a fraud whose transparent intent is to disenfranchise the vulnerable whose champions are the Republicans' opponents.


Back in the years leading up to the Civil War, the slaveholders banned the distribution of anti-slavery writings, and sometimes suppressed anti-slavery talk by violence.


In both cases, the elites driving the polarization of the country justified their dominance by distorting, in belittling ways, the humanity of those they sought to exploit.


Today's Republicans talk about the 47 percent, the half of the country they characterize as "takers," even though many of those 47 percent work multiple jobs just to make ends meet; and these Republicans vote to strip them of unemployment benefits, at a time of massive joblessness, in the mistaken belief that only desperation will get these lazy people to work.


Back in the time of the Slave Power, the slaveholding class declared they were doing their black slaves a favor to discipline them into an ethic of work; freeing them would be cruel, the masters claimed, because those blacks were inherently too lazy and incompetent to survive on their own.


In both cases, the idea of compromise became a dirty word, as the inflamed insistence on getting everything one's own way took hold of the inflamed side.
Today's Republicans do not seek compromise, and the dynamics of the party are such that anyone who works toward compromise is demonized and run out of office by challenge from the more extreme, uncompromising wing of the party.
Back in the years leading up to the Civil War, the South's insistence on the unfettered expansion of their domain led to the overturning of the great Missouri Compromise, which had held the nation together for more than thirty yearsv--va fracturing of the peace that instigated the return to the political arena of Abraham Lincoln, and set the nation on course to a bloody civil war.


In both cases, the powerful elite in the grip of that destructive force refused to accept that in a democracy sometimes you win and sometimes you lose, and sometimes you have to accept being governed by a duly-elected president you don't like.


Today's Republicans have done everything they could to nullify the presidency of Barack Obama, whom the American people duly elected twice. Like no other opposition party in American history, they have refused to accept the temporary minority status to which American voters have consigned them. Blocking the president from performing the function for which the people hired him has been their top priority.


Back on the eve of the Civil War, the Southerners -- who had disproportionately dominated the upper echelons of the national government from the time of its founding -- considered the election of Abraham Lincoln an intolerable insult, and promptly made a unilateral decision to break apart the Union; they then raised an army to defend that decision, rather than accept the outcome of the democratic process and regroup for the next election.


As with facial recognition, the configuration of the features tells us, "This is the same ugly thing, come back again." [Source]


One little quibble with the author's premise: It's not only republicans; there are democrats among those "corporatist" as well. And even though they are in his party, their wimpy weak- kneed posture towards the president while trying to protect their own political necks has been glaring.