Confederate "Heritage" Month 2014, April 30: Talking about white racism

It turned out that April provided a rich source of material for Confederate "Heritage" Month posts! The Chait-Coates controversy. Defense of voting rights. Massa Cliven Bundy and his militia buddies. The Roberts Court's Schuette decision. And, one that I haven't even discussed, NBA commissioner Donald Sterling. (Stanely May, NBA bans Donald Sterling for life, asks Board of Governors to force sale of Clippers SI Wire 04/29/2014; L.A. Clippers Owner to GF: Don't Bring Black People to My Games ... Including Magic Johnson TMZ Sports 04/25/2014)

There was some good news at the end of the month on the voting rights front: Alana Semuels, Federal judge strikes down Wisconsin voter ID law Federal judge strikes down Wisconsin voter ID law Los Angeles Times 04/29/2014.

Dahlia Lithwick in a column on Schuette discusses something on which I've focused this year, What We Talk About When We Talk About Talking About Race Slate:

The starting point for the most recent chapter of this knotty and crucial conversation is Chief Justice John Roberts’ famous getting-past-race language in a 2007 case about racial remedies and school busing, in which he wrote that "the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." Roberts used that turn of phrase to both highlight his own philosophy that the Constitution must be color blind, and also to flick at the proposition that the time for overtly racial remedies to historical problems must be put behind us.

Told, in effect, that race has no place in modern constitutional discourse despite the central role it has played in her own life, Justice Sotomayor pushes back on that formulation. Her dissent in Schuette starts from the implicit proposition that Roberts was wrong to close the door in 2007, and is wrong to do so today: "In my colleagues’ view,” she writes, "examining the racial impact of legislation only perpetuates racial discrimination. This refusal to accept the stark reality that race matters is regrettable." Then she goes on to poke at Roberts with a sharp stick: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination."

This language of white-racism-denial coming from the Supreme Court and embodied in Court decisions has a particularly strong influence on the way race and racism are discussed in public discourse. And therefore talking about the realities of institutional racism will require continually countering the redefinitions and denials that advocates of segregation use to avoid that recognition.

Jamelle Bouie talks about the importance of recognizing the institutional nature of white racism in It Doesn't Matter That Donald Sterling Is a Racist Slate 04/28/2014. His argument relating to Sterling could be stronger, but the headline is misleading; he isn't dismissing Sterling's attitudes, he's pointing out how it has been manifested for years in concrete and substantial ways, not just in his obnoxious words that brought his problems to a head the last few days:

Donald Sterling settled for an undisclosed sum in 2005 - paying $5 million in plaintiff legal fees — but faced renewed scrutiny in 2006, following federal civil rights charges. According to the Justice Department, Sterling, his wife, and his three companies engaged in housing discrimination by refusing to rent to blacks and "creating, maintaining, and perpetuating an environment that is hostile to non-Korean tenants" at their properties. Again, Sterling settled. He paid $2.65 million to a fund for people harmed by his discriminatory practices — a record sum in a federal housing suit—as well as $100,000 to the government.

These were huge offenses — entrenchments of disadvantage in a city segmented by past bias. After all, Los Angeles was heavily redlined throughout the 20th century, with blacks, Mexicans, Chinese, and other minorities blocked from mortgage loans and relegated to the least desirable parts of the city.

But, despite the magnitude of the offenses and the size of the settlements, there was no outrage. Sterling caused actual harm to dozens of families, and the response was near silence. And it's in that contrast that we can clearly see our public hypocrisy on racism.

Bouie's piece uses the plural pronouns rather vaguely in that piece. What he calls "our public hypocrisy on racism" is a necessary element of the kind of substantive hypocrisy that is integral to institutional white racism in America. The Rand Pauls of the country want racism defined down to only expressions of overt biological racial supremacy and to bad manners. Massive, systematic discrimination in housing and mortgage lending, they don't want to count. And that is the direction that the Roberts Court has gone a long way toward making authoritative Constitutional law.

And the blog's old friend, Bro. Wade "Sword-of-Vengeance" Burleson weighed in on the Sterling matter to do, well, what Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby does so much: criticize them mean libruls! (Donald Sterling, Hate, and the Hypocrisy of Liberals Istoria Ministries 04/29/2014)

The Young Turks discuss some of the issues on which Bouie's article focuses, Just HOW Racist is LA Clippers' Owner Donald Sterling? Uh, VERY. (Some profanity used) 04/28/2014:

And the blog's old friend Bro. Wade "Sword-of-Vengeance" Burleson has also weighed in on the Sterling affair to complain about, well, the same thing Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby gripes about all the time: how mean them thar libruls are! (Donald Sterling, Hate, and the Hypocrisy of Liberals Istoria Ministries 04/29/2014)

"Liberals have become the new racists," writes Bro. Sword-of-Vengeance. And that is pretty much the point of his post. In the Republican Bizarro-world, opposing racism is the real racism. Just like Southern segregationists in 1964 arguing that the Civil Right Act and later the Voting Rights Act were racist against white people. The old traditions are still alive!

It's worth noting that Bro. Sword-of-Vengeance even rewrites Sterling's notorious recent comments to have him criticizing Christianity instead of black people. And he invites his readers to consider that if Sterling had said that, he wouldn't have suffered any consequences because the real problem, you see, is persecution of Christians in America. It's kind of crazy, but Bro. Sword-of-Vengeance writes like a Bircher, so that's par for the course. It is a good example of redefining the problem of white racism into its opposite, particularly if you can expect your audience to understand Christians being persecuted as white people being persecuted.

The soul of Jefferson Davis goes marching on!

Tags: confederate heritage month 2014, donald sterling, white racism, segregation

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2014, April 29: the Roberts Court vs. voting rights

This is a PBS Newshour report on the Roberts Court ruling last year in favor of segregationist state voter-suppression laws. Oddly, it doesn't mention the name of the decision, Shelby County (June 2013).

Was the Supreme Court ruling a setback for voting rights? 04/21/2014:

The video is a reminder of what a throwback to pre-1965 days the Shelby County decision is. It features a smug, smarmy Southern white legislator reassuring us that voter-suppression laws are just reassuring little adjustments, certainly not meant to prevent The Negro from voting.

This is an issue for which the standard, this-side-says-the-other-side says reporting is ill-suited. For instance, this is the closing exchange, with Gwen Ifill posing a question to good-ole-boy North Carolina legislator David Lewis, whose homepage as of now opens up with a banner that says, "Help Stop NC Voter Fraud" - "voter fraud" being the segregationists current favorite slogan to justify voter-suppression laws:

GWEN IFILL: But let me ask you this.

Is it fixing a problem — that you have evidence that fixed a problem that existed?

DAVID LEWIS: Well, we definitely have evidence, as I said, that folks that — some folks that registered to vote on the same day were never able to be verified.

We don’t know if they were actually eligible to vote or not. We think it does make sense to present a photo I.D., that the photo matches the name to say who you say you are. The professor referenced student I.D.s Doesn't it not make sense that if are you going attest, as the constitution of North Carolina calls for, that you are a resident of the state, that you would have taken time to have gone to the DMV and to get your driver's license or to get your non-operator's license, if this is truly your home, if this is the home in which are you going to exercise that precious right to vote, certainly being able to obtain an I.D. at no direct cost to you can’t be considered an impediment to voting.

GWEN IFILL: Well, this sounds like this is an issue that the administration is certainly not going to give up on.

And we’re going to — the Supreme Court may have just started this argument.

Kareem Crayton from the University of North Carolina and David Lewis with the North Carolina House of Representatives, thank you very much.

In fact, in-person voter fraud is a virtually non-existent problem. But Ifill instead let Lewis get away with answering her question with hypotheticals. One would think that the leading Quality TV news program could do a little research on alleged voter fraud in North Carolina to challenge a clearly evasive answer like that.

Dana Liebelson describes some of the actual results of the Shelby County decision in The Supreme Court Gutted the Voting Rights Act. What Happened Next in These 8 States Will Not Shock You. Mother Jones 04/08/2014:

Before the Shelby County v. Holder decision came down on June 25, Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act required federal review of new voting rules in 15 states, most of them in the South. (In a few of these states, only specific counties or townships were covered.) Chief Justice John Roberts voted to gut the Voting Rights Act on the basis that "our country has changed," and that blanket federal protection wasn't needed to stop discrimination. But the country hasn't changed as much as he may think.

We looked at how many of these 15 states passed or implemented voting restrictions after Section 5 was invalidated, compared to the states that were not covered by the law. (We defined "voting restriction" as passing or implementing a voter ID law, cutting voting hours, purging voter rolls, or ending same-day registration. Advocates criticize these kinds of laws for discriminating against low-income voters, young people, and minorities, who tend to vote for Democrats.) We found that 8 of the 15 states, or 53 percent, passed or implemented voting restrictions since June 25, compared to 3 of 35 states that were not covered under Section 5—or less than 9 percent. Additionally, a number of states not covered by the Voting Rights Act actually expanded voting rights in the same time period.

She also manages to tell us more about what North Carolina has done since Shelby County that Gwen Ifill and her guests did: "About one month after the Shelby decision, Republicans in North Carolina pushed through a package of extreme voting restrictions, including ending same-day registration, shortening early voting by a week, requiring photo ID, and ending a program that encourages high schoolers to sign up to vote when they turn 18."

Tags: confederate heritage month 2014, white racism, segregation

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2014, April 28: Bobo and Sleepy Mark Shields agree segregation in higher education is the American Way

The supposedly respectable PBS Newshour weekly presents a Political Wrap, featuring David "Bobo" Brooks presented the supposedly respectable conservative view, with Mark Shields, normally in a semi-conscious state, presenting the supposedly respectable liberal view.

On Friday, both joined in their approval of the Roberts Court's segregationist decisions in the Schuette decision. They both happily agree that racial discrimination in public college admissions is just dandy. Bipartisanship!

Shields and Brooks on Georgia gun rights, Southern Senate races PBS Newshour 04/25/2014:

Yeah, black people have to take one for the greater good, but not to worry. Soon enough there'll be another whack against women's rights that Both Sides can applaud, too.

One thing Bobo is useful for is to follow poisonous trends in Respectability. The fact that he's praising affirmative action in public college admissions by class - to which Sleepy Mark agrees, of course - is almost certainly a sign that the segregationists will start going after that soon, too.

This may require a bit of explanation. Affirmative action as a primary means of enforcing anti-discrimination laws in hiring was started by the Nixon Administration as a conservative approach. Instead of getting fined, losing government contracts or executives going to jail (if you can imagine that!) for violating anti-discrimination laws, a company could instead implement an Affirmative Action Plan to eliminate discrimination in hiring.

And if it's diligently enforced, it's an effective way to enforce the law.

Of course, if you looked at footage of the 1972 Republican Convention, you'd see lots of bitching and moaning about "quotas." Because the Republicans were already trying to paint Nixon's conservative approach to anti-discrimination enforcement the same way segregationists portrayed all civil rights legislation, as discrimination against us pore persecuted white folks.

Class-based recruitment in college admissions is a way of achieving diversity goals de facto without explicitly practicing affirmative action against racial discrimination. In states like California and now Michigan, explicit race-based affirmative action in admissions is illegal under state law.

Bobo prominently announces his support of class-based recruitment in the segment above as an alternative to affirmative action. But when that starts coming under attack from Rush and FOX and and Massa Cliven Bundy as yet another evil plot of The Negro, Bobo will then take on his "tell" tone of careful reason he uses when he's about to tell a whopper, and then say with concern that some of these class-based programs have gone too far, and the abuses need to be addressed and blah,blah, we've all heard the rest.

Yes, recruitment by class can effectively serve as a proxy for affirmative action recruitment on race because, gee, groups that are racially discriminated against are also less affluent!

But Bobo even gives the game away the second time he mentions it, saying that only the larger colleges can do it effectively. And to make class-based affirmative action effective against adverse selection against racial minorities requires the college administration to be committed to real diversity as a goal, even if as an understated one. A class-based system of preferential recruitment could also be used to actively discriminate against minorities.

And Roberts Court decisions like Schuette this past week go farther and farther toward the Scalia-Thomas goal of blocking any anti-racial-discrimination legislation at all unless it expressly states its purpose is to discriminate based on race.

The Roberts Court really is well on the way to turning the 14th Amendment upside down.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2014, white racism, segregation

Confederate Heritage Month 2014, April 27: Definitions, definitions - and banning affirmative action

After yesterday's post that examined a case of neo-Confederate white racism but was very reserved about what could be called racism, I came across this post from Samantha Field, who describes herself as "overcoming a fundamentalist indoctrination," Christian women: feminism IS your friend, actually Defeating the Dragon 04/24/2014. She's debunking a fundamentalist's man's attack on feminism, the man in question being Matt Walsh.

And one of the things she focuses on is how narrowly Walsh defines feminism, and (of course!) does so in a propagandist way: "'feminist" is re-defined to mean – an[d] only mean– a woman who thinks there’s nothing wrong with murdering babies and 'equal' means sameness, both of which are preposterous definitions."

This particular re-definition of feminism is hardly new. Back in 1992, Pat Robertson sent out a fundraising letter opposing a push in Iowa to have women declared equal to men in the state's constitution, with a somewhat more expansive but hardly friendly definition of feminism (Robertson Letter Attacks Feminism New York Times 08/26/2014):

But Mr. Robertson's letter, distributed late last month to supporters of the evangelical organization Christian Coalition, described the proposal as part of a "feminist agenda" that "is not about equal rights for women." Claims of 'Anti-Family'

Instead, the letter said, "it is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians."

Defining the other side's position in unflattering terms is obviously central to almost any kind of argument. So if we look at it in those 30,000-feet-in-the-air terms, then Everybody Does It.

But the reactionary project of denying equal rights to anyone not a rich white male Christian runs counter to the democratic foundations of American government and values. So taking anti-democratic positions puts particular importance on redefining concepts like democratic equality before the law. And with law in particular, definitions matter. A lot.

Last week the Roberts Court took yet another step in removing equal protection of the law from African-Americans and other racial minorities with its decision in since Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action by Any Means Necessary (BAMN). The significance of the ruling is that it takes yet another step in blocking laws that are meant to enforced the 14th Amendment to the Constitution by preventing de facto racial discrimination. Or, put it more immediate terms, it gives the Republican Party and state legislatures it controls more latitude to promote racial discrimination.

An important part of this reasoning, which conservative Republicans have promoted for many years now, is to redefine "racial discrimination" to mean its opposite: actions taken to prevent and remedy racial discrimination. The idea is that for a federal, state or local government to take action against racial discrimination, the government would have to look at the race of the people affected by racial discrimination and looking at their race would itself be racial discrimination by the government so that is not allowed.

For anyone not worshiping at the Church of Rush Limbaugh, the goal of such a crazy definition is to prevent the government from doing anything to eliminate, mitigate or remedy overt and demonstrable racial discrimination. It makes racial discrimination in all aspects of official and social life legal, in other words.

The Roberts Court has gone a long way toward establishing that standard as their interpretation of the law of the land. The Schuette decision was yet another step in that direction.

Shanikka discusses this mind-bending redefinition of racial discrimination into its opposite in the Daily Kos post In case it wasn't clear: the Schuette decision and coming full circle on antidiscrimination law 04/27/2014. He explains how:

... decisions such as Schuette are merely the end-game of a restructuring of the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment from a law protecting the rights of black people in America (and later, others) against efforts to keep them subjugated to a law protecting the rights of white people against black people (and other people of color) seeking to obtain the actual benefits of equality.

Definitions do matter.

Shanikka also points to the FOX News version of this redefinition of racial discrimination for ordinary political discussion: "It is very similar to the currently in-vogue contention that there is no such thing as anti-black racism and American white supremacy unless it is wearing a sheet and calling black folks 'niggers' every day."

This is what struck me as odd about the analysis I discussed yesterday. The writer did a very good job of analyzing how white racism and neo-Confederacy worked in a particular Christian fundamentalist group - but seemed very reluctant to call it white racism, apparently because they weren't explicit about advocating an explicit biological or Scriptural basis for white supremacy. If you define white racism so narrowly as to exclude most actual manifestations of it, you've effectively defined it out of existence. In words, anyway.

Schuette is one of a series of Roberts Court segregationist decisions that the struggle for civil rights will have to contend with for years to come.

The Balkinization blog has just started a series of posts commenting on Bruce Ackerman's latest book on the civil rights movement. Gerard Magliocca's post Herbert Wechsler's Shadow 04/27/2014, while not specifically about the Schuette decision, addresses the previous approach the Court used and of which Schuette and other Roberts Court segregationist decisions represent a reversal of direction:

Ackerman's response [to a famous argument by Herbert Wechsler] is that the way in which Congress and the Supreme Court dismantled Jim Crow really did turn upon the facts. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act, and the Fair Housing Act are at the core of this claim. They "self-consciously divide the world into different spheres of life: public accommodations, education, employment, housing, [and] voting. They impose different [regulatory] regimes on different on different spheres . . . [and] insist on a far more contextual understanding of the constitutional meaning of equality in different spheres of social and political life." Granted, Wechsler was not talking about legislative action in his defense of neutral principles, but Ackerman contends that these landmark statutes were an extension of the pragmatic approach taken in Brown [v. Board of Education]. "[I]n limiting its decision to education, the Court wasn't engaged in a timid evasion of some grand legal theory attacking society-wide subordination or racial classification. It was proceeding sphere by sphere in a sociological spirit, challenging constitutionalists to make the principle of equality meaningful to ordinary Americans as they engaged in critical spheres of social life." [my emphasis in bold]

Tags: confederate heritage month 2014, christian right, radical right, white racism, segregation

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2014, April 26: A Quiverfull variant of neo-Confederacy

I got the idea of doing daily posts during April as a counter-observance to Confederate Heritage Month from the website of Edward Sebesta, who blogs now at Anti-Neo-Confederate and who follows this political trend in depth. In 2004, he had on his website at the time a document from a local NAACP chapter that had had a short item for each day of April describing some aspect of segregationist/neo-Confederate activity and propaganda.

Obviously, I haven't been sticking with the "short" aspect of the daily posts!

Ed in a recent post, Neo-Confederate married religious leader Doug Phillips sued for sexually abusing another woman 04/16/2014, calls attention to the neo-Confederate side of the fundamentalist Quiverfull movement, of which the Duggar family of many offspring are the most famous members. Vyckie Garrison has a blog devoted to a critique of that movement, No Longer Quivering. She says she started it "to tell the story of her 'escape' from the Quiverfull movement." The title of her blog is a clever play on the word "quiver" in English. In the "quiverfull" concept, it is a metaphor for a sack used to carry arrows; it also means trembling, as in trembling in fear, which is the state that many fundamentalists think is the proper role for women throughout their lives.

Ed points to this post on Doug Phillips organization, Vision Forum, which became a casualty of Phillips' own romantic conduct, apparently: Jonathan Wilson, Godly Heritage and Plantation Chic: The Case of Vision Forum The Junto 11/20/2014:

Vision Forum and Doug Phillips are not well-known outside of evangelical homeschooling circles. But as religion scholar Julie Ingersoll wrote at the Huffington Post and Abby Olheiser noted at The [Atlantic] Wire, they have enjoyed significant influence within a controversial subculture of that movement. They are leaders of the “Quiverfull” movement, which encourages Christians to have large families as a way of exercising influence in the world, and are champions of “biblical patriarchy,” or in other words, the principle that family life (and ultimately society at large) should be organized under the divinely instituted authority of fathers and husbands. According to a statement prepared by Vision Forum, “the erosion of biblical manhood and leadership," caused by modern ideologies that undermine God’s authority, "leads to the perversion of the role of women, the destruction of our children, and the collapse of our society."

At Vision Forum, this view stems from a particular interpretation of Calvinist covenant theology that holds that God deals with the world at large through his relationships with Christian family units. Hence, apparently, the closing of Vision Forum, which could not easily survive such a violation of family integrity by its patriarch.

Wilson notes that the American Exceptionalist pseudohistory so widely popular in the Christian Right also "that the Confederacy — and antebellum southern culture, if not slavery itself — are also part of 'America’s Godly heritage.' In these circles, in other words, the Founding is sometimes wrapped up with the Old South."

Wilson argues that while critics of Quiverfull type groups understandably focus on the male authoritarianism so prominent in such groups, "they often overlook the nationalism lurking in the background of this form of covenant theology, with its implication that an authoritarian biblical family structure will regenerate God's covenant with America."

But that nationalism shows distinct signs of white nationalism which promotes the Lost Cause image of the Old South as an ideal:

... Vision Forum sells various books and audio albums that discuss the Civil War directly as a matter of history. Although the online descriptions are vague, these materials have the usual earmarks of soft Lost Cause history. They sometimes refer to the war as "the War between the States," they fixate on southern "Christian warriors" like (of course) Jackson and Robert E. Lee, and they seem to imply that slavery's role in the conflict is not what you’ve been told. (One blurb in the print catalog warns that "most of what we 'know' about it is actually revisionist history.")

Wilson makes this useful observation about how the Lost Cause defense of slavery and the Old South fits into the psychological imperatives of present-day rightwing authoritarians:

What does seem useful to say, however, is that Vision Forum’s evident nostalgia for a slaveowning society is directly related to a general desire to rebuild an authoritarian social structure. The right to own slaves may not be the point, but the unquestioned authority of the male householder (exercised in a clear chain of command involving all other members of the family as subordinates) certainly is. No amount of talk about “complementary” roles for men and women can conceal what Vision Forum is actually eager to announce: that its key concern is patriarchy—a system of governance, not just a distribution of social responsibilities. From that perspective, the Old South represents a convenient image of white manhood and womanhood, and its fate serves as perhaps a hint of why authoritarian manhood seems endangered today.

As the quotes I've give so far probably indicate, Wilson is taking a careful academic's approach to the subject.

I was struck by how this comes out in his dicucssion of white racism:

Even more important, however, is that Vision Forum promotes a vision not just of male leadership in the family and the nation, but more specifically a vision rooted in an ideology of white male mastery. Vision Forum is not a racist organization; it does not directly or consciously advocate white supremacy. But it does deliberately promote nostalgia for the Old South. ...

What can this tell us about the reasons so many Americans imbibe a toxic nostalgia for the prewar South, its culture, and its (supposed) views about government?

To me, it seems fairly clear that racism isn't the place to start. Don’t get me wrong — I'm perfectly happy to question a slavery apologist’s claim that he isn't a racist slavery apologist. And it’s obvious that Lost-Cause, Neo-Confederate, and other ideologies of attachment to the antebellum South often do result from either conscious or unconscious racism. Even so, in this case, I don’t think it’s helpful to identify racism as the main source of the trouble. There’s little direct evidence of conscious racism, and quite a bit of evidence that the people involved don't want to be racists. If nothing else, blaming racism is the least interesting thing we could say about what’s going on. [my emphasis in bold]

This is downright confusing. Especially those first two sentences, which say that Vision Forum promotes "specifically a vision rooted in an ideology of white male mastery." But then in the directly following sentence, he says, "Vision Forum is not a racist organization."

This is splitting hairs too finely for me to follow. If your organization is promoting a worldview "specifically ... rooted in an ideology of white male mastery," the only way to say that it's not a white racist view is to define racism so narrowly as to be meaningless in practice. In the real world, if we confine "racist" to meaning only an explicit avowal of biological superiority of one race to another, it means that we can understand, analyze or even talk about white racism as it manifests itself in the real lives of real people.

In John Kenneth Galbraith's last book published during his lifetime, The Economics of Innocent Fraud: Truth for Our Time (2004), he devotes a chapter to "The Renaming of the System." In it, he sketches the history of ways the advocates of the wealthy have tried to deflect attention from any systematic faults of capitalism. The system had shown enough problematic features by the time of the Great Depression that new names for it were sought, like "free enterprise" and "social democracy":

In the next years reference was to the New Deal; this, however, was too clearly identified with Franklin D. Roosevelt and his cohorts. So in reasonably learned expression there came "the market system." There was no adverse history here, in fact no history at all. It would have been hard indeed, to find a more meaningless designation - this a reason for the choice.

The conservative effort to avoid talking about the extent to which conservatism of all kinds became intimately connected with white racial demagoguery and with what has now become an open advocacy of clearly segregationist voter-suppression laws in the Republican Party took an opposite tack. Rather than find a new name to describe the institutions and practices of white racism, it instead sought to define racism so narrowly that it couldn't be discussed at all.

Jonathan Wilson's discussion of the Christian Right and neo-Confederacy in that post is certainly not one that would be pleasing to today's "movement conservatives," since neo-Confederate pseudohistory is so closely integrated with so much of Republican Party politics today. And he correctly notes in a footnote on David Barton's popular brand of Christian Right pseudohistory, "David Barton has come under strong and sustained criticism in, e.g., World Magazine, a leading evangelical conservative newsweekly."

Still, the "ideology of white male mastery" that he otherwise describes so well in this particular neo-Confederate manifestation is an important part of what white racism in American politics and religion looks like. Warren Throckmorton and Michael Coulter showed integrity as scholars by challenging David Barton's ludicrously distorted presentation of Thomas Jefferson's ideas, which is what Wilson links there. But among prominent Christian Right figures like Mike Huckabee, Barton's pseudohistory is a comfortable part of their ideology. The Republican Party now embraces a wide variety of anti-science dogma, from creationism to climate denial to bizarre pseudobiology about women's bodies. Some of that is driven by industry lobbying (climate denial) and some by religious obsessions (the antiabortion movement, whose adherents are generally willing to lie about anything in the name of "saving innocent babies"). Barton-type pseudohistory is part of that victory of raw political-religious ideology over considerations of scientific, scholarly or journalistic accuracy.

No, the "ideology of white male mastery" i s white racism, in theory and in practice. And, yes, if we're going to talk about white racism and it's real-world manifestations, white racism is a perfectly good "place to start."

More on Vision Forum:

If the woman who publicly charged Doug Phillips with coercive sexual conduct is correct, the Vision Forum group itself may have been a cult: Morgan Lee, Vision Forum Founder Doug Phillips Accused By Woman of Treating Her Like 'Personal Sex Object' in Lawsuit Christian Post 04/16/2014.

Also, another article by Lee highlights the connection of Quiverfull stars Jimbob and Michelle Duggar to Vision Forum in Duggar Family's Close Relationship With Vision Forum Founder Doug Phillips and Wife Highlighted After Scandal Christian Post 04/13/2014

Libby Anne, Is Vision Forum Gone? Love, Joy, Feminism 01/07/2014

Tags: confederate heritage month 2014, christian right, neo-confederate, radical right, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2014, April 25: Howling at the anti-racists: I should have checked!

In my previous post on the seditious white racist Cliven Bundy - who no one associated with the Republican Party ever, ever, ever praised or supported, of course! - I quoted part of what Joan Walsh said about Massa Cliven Bundy's comments on The Negro. And I said:

I'm eagerly awaiting Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby's scolding of Walsh's wicked wickedness for daring to suggest there was anything the slightest bit racist about what this fine Christian patriot white man said. How do you know he wasn't trying to give helpful advice to The Negro, huh, huh, answer that! What, can you read minds or something? Bad, bad libruls!!

I should have checked the Howler website again before I posted. Because Somerby had apparently already obliged: The way we liberal rubes get played! 04/24/2014.

Try to imagine I failed to check! Playing my blog readers for rubes, just like they do at Stormfront!

Somerby christens Joan's article "an instant, appalling classic." Why she's practically like Joe McCarthy, Somerby tells us! No, wait, he didn't actually say "Joe McCarthy." And I didn't produce a single quote saying that he said "Joe McCarthy." What he says is, "In the last quoted paragraph, Joan's Wisconsin background really came shining through. We get the famous, and very familiar, guilt by association." I was just mind-reading when I assumed that's what Somberby meant! I'm one of those bad, bad libruls, I guess, worse than FOX! Worse than Breitbart.com! I'm so ashamed of myself.

Somerby grumps, if you read the comments to Walsh’s post, including the long string of Mormon-hating remarks .." - now he doesn't try to suggest or imply or guilt-by-association insinuate that Joan Walsh agrees with those comments, no, no, she just points out that "you will see that Salon is creating an impressive tribe of low-IQ, pseudo-liberal cretins."

And let's give Somerby credit: he does know something about pseudo-liberals.

In today's We’re off on a mission of national import!, he writes:

The New Black Panthers were a thoroughly insignificant group. But they were repeatedly hosted by Hannity and Colmes as a way to stoke fear and excitement, and of course to build tribal identity.

Watching MSNBC last night, we thought of the many years of thrills provided by the New Black Panthers.

... To what extent is the pitiful Cliven Bundy our equal-but-opposite tribal thrill-and-fear child?

Understand, he's not saying that Both Sides Do It. He's asking the question if pseudo-liberals are just as back as they accuse FOX News of being. Reading his mind, what he means there by pseudo-liberals that is anyone left of center who actually express a left-of-center opinion out loud or in print.

Yes, I read his mind! Wisconsin-style! I'm worse than Sean Hannity!

Never heard of the New Black Panthers? They were a favorite item for a while in one of FOX News' standard entertainment features: let's shore our elderly white viewers some black guy no one's ever heard of before saying how much he hates white people.

Here is part of the description of the New Black Panther Party from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in their Intelligence Files article on the group:

The New Black Panther Party is a virulently racist and anti-Semitic organization whose leaders have encouraged violence against whites, Jews and law enforcement officers. Founded in Dallas, the group today is especially active on the East Coast, from Boston to Jacksonville, Fla. The group portrays itself as a militant, modern-day expression of the black power movement (it frequently engages in armed protests of alleged police brutality and the like), but principals of the original Black Panther Party of the 1960s and 1970s— a militant, but non-racist, left-wing organization — have rejected the new Panthers as a "black racist hate group" and contested their hijacking of the Panther name and symbol.

In Its Own Words

"Our lessons talk about the bloodsuckers of the poor… . It's that old no-good Jew, that old imposter Jew, that old hooked-nose, bagel-eating, lox-eating, Johnny-come-lately, perpetrating-a-fraud, just-crawled-out-of-the-caves-and-hills-of-Europe, so-called damn Jew … and I feel everything I'm saying up here is kosher."
— Khalid Abdul Muhammad, one of the party's future leaders, Baltimore, Md., Feb. 19, 1994

"Kill every goddamn Zionist in Israel! Goddamn little babies, goddamn old ladies! Blow up Zionist supermarkets!"
—Malik Zulu Shabazz, the party's national chairman, protesting at B'nai B'rith International headquarters in Washington, D.C., April 20, 2002

"I hate white people. All of them. Every last iota of a cracker, I hate it. We didn't come out here to play today. There's too much serious business going on in the black community to be out here sliding through South Street with white, dirty, cracker whore bitches on our arms, and we call ourselves black men. … What the hell is wrong with you black man? You at a doomsday with a white girl on your damn arm. We keep begging white people for freedom! No wonder we not free! Your enemy cannot make you free, fool! You want freedom? You going to have to kill some crackers! You going to have to kill some of their babies!"
— King Samir Shabazz, head of the party's Philadelphia chapter, in a National Geographic documentary, January 2009

Now, maybe there was someone sometime somewhere who could be identified as left of center that praised this group. I just completely missed every one of them.

Maybe there were laudatory articles in The Nation on it. Maybe Mark Shields warmly defended the group on the PBS Newshour. Maybe Paul Krugman praised their perceptive analysis. Maybe Elizabeth Warren is promoting their virtues on the floor of the Senate at this very moment. And maybe Dick Cheney is planning to devote his remaining years to becoming the new Mother Teresa.

In other words, the New Black Panther Party was a tiny sect that FOX News hyped as the image of Evil. But there was no Both Sides Do It counterpart of praise and support on the left side of the spectrum. The liberals who were most likely to have heard of it were ones that paid attention to SPLC and their lists of hate groups, and therefore recognized it immediately as a weird variety of a far-right crackpot nationalist group.

FOX News, on the other hand, has been hyping Cliven Bundy's noble stand in favor of mooching off public lands to graze his cows without paying the fees other ranchers pay for the same thing. And now characters like Sean Hannity are having to tap-dance around their admiring reporting on the brave American patriots who have been gathering to gun down federal agents trying to enforce the law against shameless freeloader Cliven Bundy. See Media Matters:

Fox Finally Breaks Silence On Rancher's Racist Remarks 04/24/2014

Fox's Krauthammer Blasts Conservatives For Their Support Of Cliven Bundy (includes transcript) 04/24/2014:

When even a hardline conservative and incorrigible warmonger like Charles Krauthammer can say this ...

It's not the statement, you have to disassociate yourself entirely from the man. It's not like the words exist here and the man exists here. And why conservatives, or some conservatives end up in bed with people who, you know, he makes an anti-government statement, he takes an anti-government stand, he wears a nice big hat and he rides a horse, and all of a sudden he is a champion of democracy. This is a man who said that he doesn't recognize the authority of the United States of America. That makes him a patriot?

... defending Massa Cliven and his observations on The Negro could be embarrassing.

To paraphrase a famous statement by Walter Cronkite - that was the old guy who for years narrated the PBS coverage of the Vienna Philharmonic's New Year's Concert: If Massa Cliven Bundy has lost a hardline conservative like Charles Krauthammer, he's lost America! Which I guess would be okay by him since he hates America. Although his supporters who want to shoot federal agents say they love America. It's so confusing ...

Sarah Gray reports Hannity quick-stepping on Bundy in Fox News flip flop: Sean Hannity backs away from Cliven Bundy the racist rancher Salon 04/25/2014:

And then in an effort to explain away his previous unbridled support for the man, Hannity claims he wasn't stoking the fire of a violent blowout, he was helping diffuse the armed situation between Bundy and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Right. He believes — and still does — that the BLM was “overreaching” in trying to get the million dollars Bundy owes the government, and wanted to prevent a bloody outcome.

“In this case, you’ve got a couple of hundred armed agents, snipers, sharpshooters, dogs, stun guns. And then you’ve got another group coming out because they think it’s government overreach,” Hannity said of the standoff. “It was a prescription for a disaster. Remember Waco, Ruby Ridge, all these other cases.”

Hannity also said that the comments angered him, not just because they were disturbingly racist, but because they make all conservatives look racist.

“[Democrats] want to say that conservatives are racists, conservatives hate women, conservatives want old people to die — granny over the cliff,” Hannity explained. “They don’t want the young people — they want young people to fend for themselves. They want to poison the air, poison the water. So people that, for the right reasons, saw this case as government overreach now are branded because of the ignorant, racist, repugnant, despicable comments of Cliven Bundy.”

In other words, Hannity thinks Massa Cliven is guilty of bad PR.

Speaking of Joan Walsh, she has another article up on the Massa Cliven story for which Somerby will likely scold her for being mean to pore Massa Cliven, Fox News’ new laughingstock: Cliven Bundy — and Stephen Colbert — will destroy Sean Hannity Salon 04/25/2014. She notes that FOX News "dumped Glenn Beck when he became a laughingstock and a liability for the network, and for conservatism. Hannity has done the same" by his promotion of Massa Cliven, she writes. "Beck’s sin wasn't his increasingly extreme conservatism; it was damaging extreme conservatism by making one of its leading faces an unstable lunatic."

And, re neo-Confederacy, she observes:

But even before Bundy's ongoing self-exposure as a racist, he should have been too toxic even for Hannity and Fox. How does a guy who declared early on “I don’t recognize the United States government as even existing” become a folk hero in the first place? The extremism of that statement should have been warning enough that Bundy was not only crazy but dangerous (and probably racist to boot, since not believing in the federal government tends to go along with not believing in the Emancipation Proclamation or the 13th Amendment, as [Stephen] Colbert noted.)" [my emphasis]

She also cites this article from the conservative Weekly Standard, which had the foresight even before Massa Cliven offered us his views on The Negro to be cautious about the freeloader's seditious talk, Uncivil Disobedience. (The article is actually dated 04/28/2014, but Joan mentions that it appeared earlier, and the Weekly Standard's Michael Warren references it in Is Bundy's Protest Tarnishing the Tea Party? of 04/22/2014.) " Far from acting in an arbitrary or capricious manner, the federal government has shown patience and forbearance in the face of lawlessness that customarily lands people in jail. It is worth noting that Bundy’s rancher-neighbors and the Nevada Cattlemen’s Association, who contend with the same federal policies, offer him little support," the "Uncivil Disobedience" article says.

For actual news and analysis of Massa Cliven and other aspects of the militia movement, you can't do better than David Neiwert, who has been writing for it on the SPLC Hatewatch blog. Dave's latest piece on it there as of this writing is Mainstream Supporters Scatter after Cliven Bundy Muses on ‘the Negro’ in the New York Times 04/24/2014. As he reports, CNN conservative Dana Loesch is still defending Massa Cliven, saying: "I hope no one is surprised that an old man rancher isn't media trained to express himself perfectly. He seems to be decrying what big government has done to the black family — which big government has negatively affected not just the black family, but all families regardless of ethnicity — so perhaps he included that in his remarks against big government?"

This should give Bob Somerby weeks of material with which to scold the mean, mean libruls for their mean meanness to pore ole Massa Cliven!

Tags: cliven bundy, confederate heritage month 2014, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2014, April 24: Calhounite militia rancher holds forth on the problems of "the Negro"

The rightwing/FOX News poster boy for the last week or so has been Cliven Bundy, the pore Christian white feller who's bein' threatened by the nasty fedrul gubment just because he's been mooching off public land for the last 20 years or so and refuses to pay a dime of the fees he owes us.

Things got a tad more complicated when Adam Nagourney did some actual reporting from the scene where militia-nut Patriot Militia white guys want to gun them down some federal agents to prove whut gud Amercans they are (A Defiant Rancher Savors the Audience That Rallied to His Side New York Times 04/23/2014):

Most of all, Mr. Bundy, 67, who was wearing a broad-brimmed white cowboy hat against the hot afternoon sun, recounted the success of “we the people” — gesturing to the 50 supporters, some armed with handguns and rifles, standing in a semicircle before him — at chasing away Bureau of Land Management rangers who, acting on a court order, tried to confiscate 500 cattle owned by Mr. Bundy, who has been illegally grazing his herd on public land since 1993. ...

He said he would continue holding a daily news conference; on Saturday, it drew one reporter and one photographer, so Mr. Bundy used the time to officiate at what was in effect a town meeting with supporters, discussing, in a long, loping discourse, the prevalence of abortion, the abuses of welfare and his views on race.

“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.

“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”

Joan Walsh discusses this development in Roger Ailes owns Cliven Bundy now: How dumb opportunism became a right-wing nightmare Salon 04/24/2014:

Where to begin? "They never learned how to pick cotton?" Or "are they better off as slaves?" Or … take your pick.

Surprise! Sean Hannity’s hero, whose cause has been embraced by Sens. Dean Heller of Nevada and Rand Paul of Kentucky along with Texas Gov. Rick Perry, turns out to be an old-time Republican racist, the kind that even Jonathan Chait recognizes, and Fox News and the GOP have a problem.

Until now I’ve ignored Bundy because he’s an extremist and a freak, and even Glenn Beck has denounced him. I was reluctant to use him against the GOP. But as he’s gotten support from the likes of Paul and Perry, two respected 2016 candidates, plus regular backing from Hannity and Nevada Sen. Heller, he’s become a huge problem for the right.

The welfare rancher has grazed his cattle for free and owes the government more than a million dollars, but to his admirers he’s leading an American insurrection. “This is the beginning of taking America back,” Shawna Cox of Kanab, Utah, told the New York Times. From whom? Shawna doesn’t have to say.

I'm eagerly awaiting Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby's scolding of Walsh's wicked wickedness for daring to suggest there was anything the slightest bit racist about what this fine Christian patriot white man said. How do you know he wasn't trying to give helpful advice to The Negro, huh, huh, answer that! What, can you read minds or something? Bad, bad libruls!!

I don't believe I've yet quoted the estimable Chauncey DeVega in this years Confederate "Heritage" Month posts. So let me remedy that glaring omission now. He is speculating on the following: Updated: Who Will Be the First Black Conservative to Defend Cliven Bundy's Racism? Answer. Kira Davis, Handkerchief Head, Butt Kissing, Boot Licking, Black Conservative WARN 04/24/2014. As the title suggests, he isn't really fond of African-American conservatives who give cover to white racism.

This is nothing that the Republican Party invented in the last few decades, putting black conservatives like Ben Carson or Herb Herman Cain out in the public eye to recite justifications and excuses for white racism. [Update: My heartfelt, abject apologies to the late great columnist Herb Cain for that unforgivable typo!] It's actually a stock part in the world of bigotry and has been for a long time.

The ur-crackpot political group in the US, the Anti-Masonic Party, relied on testimony from people who were or claimed to be former Masons to describe the horrors perpetrated by the Masonic orders. Anti-Catholic groups relied on Catholics or ex-nuns or whatever. And, of course, "anti-Communist" far-right groups like the John Birch Society as well as more respectable Republican Party types of earlier decades loved to have former Communists testify to the threat of Communism. Former left radical David Horowitz has been working that same schtick for decades on the wingnut welfare circuit. Even the anti-Semitic fabrication from the Russian czarist secret policeThe Protocols of the Elders of Zion purported to be a secret document written by Jewish conspirators.

DeVega writes, "Allen West is a leading contender here. There is no claim, however miserable, racist, and inaccurate that he will not support. West is an African-American mercenary for the White Right." He doesn't expect Clarence Thomas to weigh in right away, but thinks he "may one day cite Bundy in a Supreme Court decision that further overturns voting rights for people of color."

He explains further:

As I wrote here, there is nothing new or surprising about Bundy's racist remarks about how African-Americans were better off under slavery. Such specious claims are standard Right-wing talking points.

The nobility of black servitude, and how freedom ruined African-Americans, is not a lie that is advanced only by white conservatives. Black conservatives are the tip of that spear: they are human chaff whose sole purpose is to advance the agenda of the White Right by systematically denying the reality of white racism.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, who now has his name attached to a recent prominent discussion over white racism, also discusses Moocher Bundy in Cliven Bundy Wants to Tell You All About 'the Negro' The Atlantic 04/24/2014:

Enslaved black people were, with some regularity, beat with cowhide whips, tongs, pokers, chairs, and wooden boards. Nails were driven through their palms, pins through their tongues. Eyes were gouged out for the smallest offense.

When people like Cliven Bundy assert the primacy of the past it is important that we do not recount it selectively. American enslavement is the destruction of the black body for profit. That is the past that Cliven Bundy believes "the Negro" to have been better off in. He is, regrettably, not alone.

White racism is alive and well. And it's riding a straight-up segregationist movement right now known as the Republican Party.

And since I'm making up for my recent lack of Chauncey DeVega quotes, his first blog reaction to Bundy's now-famous pronouncement on The Negro (Barack Obama's S.H.I.E.L.D. Agents Must Have Tricked and Manipulated Him: Cliven Bundy, White Racist Right-wing Darling, Theorizes About the Mysterious Ways of 'the Negro' WARN 04/24/2014) observes:

The seditious, treasonous, "patriot" Cliven Bundy, he who is fighting against federal "tyranny", all the while sucking on the government tit and threatening violence against the United States government, has shown us his true face. ...

Bundy's statements are not novel or outliers: they are standard, mainstream, Republican, Southern Strategy infused, post civil rights era, talking points.

I would not be surprised if there is a segment on Fox News arguing that Barack Obama is somehow responsible for Cliven Bundy's racism. ...

White conservatives believe that they are victims of a "liberal" conspiracy. They preach a mantra of "personal responsibility" while working very hard to avoid any responsibility for their own racist deeds, words, behavior, or policies.

Sean Hannity and other members of the Right-wing propaganda machine have made Cliven Bundy into a hero.

And I cannot not quote this gem: "Once more, white supremacy has profoundly damaged the thinking processes of white people--especially those of conservatives in the Age of Obama."

Tags: cliven bundy, confederate heritage month 2014, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2014, April 23: Silent Cal and the Confederacy

Erik Loomis (Coolidge and the Confederates LGM 04/22/2014) just yesterday posted this YouTube video that's a reminder that the Republican Party's romance with neo-Confederacy didn't start with Barry Goldwater in 1964, Nation's Head Pays Tribute To Confederate Dead AKA President Coolidge Pays Tribute (1930-1939) British Pathé:

This is a video of Calvin "Silent Cal" Coolidge who served without notable distinction as President from 1923 to 1929. He is probably most remembered for his characteristic declaration, "The chief business of the American people is business." And for his plutocrat Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon.

The newsreel footage shows him celebrating on a platform hung with Confederate flags.

The time of the event isn't given at the YouTube site or at the British Pathé site. The title is a bit confusing because it shows a date of 1930-1939 but it calls him the "nation's head" so it's presumably from when he was President.

The Republicans still had a lot of loyalty from black voters in the North from the tradition going back to the Civil War. But the Republicans certainly weren't trying to roll by the segregation system in the 1920s, the high period for the Ku Klux Klan's political influence.

The Republicans even today try to make historical arguments that range from the merely odd to the bizarre to claim a lasting civil rights heritage for the present-day incarnation of the one-time Party of Lincoln.

Don Arel discusses one of them in the somewhat inappropriately titled, Top Figures in Conservative Movement Spreading Crazy Lie That Faith in God Ended Slavery Alternet 04/16/2014. He doesn't mention it in the article, but the kind of statement he's analyzing from the Heritage Foundation's Jim DeMint is phrased to indicate an identification between the pre-Civil War anti-slavery Abolitionists and today's hard right anti-abortion militants. That identification is a tribal slogan for the Christian Right which also serves to morph the history of Abolitionism into something that has nothing to do with contemporary civil rights issues for African-Americans.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2014, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2014, April 22: Howling at the anti-racists

Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby mostly dropped his criticism of the mainstream media years ago, criticism that I often found helpful and informative as well as entertaining.

But now he mostly trashes liberal-leaning reporters and commentators, pretty much like any other conservative. He takes a liberal troll posture, claiming to lament how His Side is committing various journalistic sins. But the troll posture has long since lost his credibility in my mind.

It was his liberal-troll embrace of Tea Party extremists - in the form of tut-tutting at Digby Parton for not realizing what nice reglar folks some of those hardline rightwingers were - that convinced me that he wasn't no friend of progressive politics. Or even conventionally liberal politics.

Having said that, his close reading of news reports is still sometimes informative. He did catch some sloppy reporting by MSNBC on the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case, even if one suspected he was happy to be able to criticize the same position that FOX News was constantly attacking.

Somerby's response to the Chait-Coates discussion on white racism in the US isn't encouraging to me about where he's coming from.

The title of his April 14 post on the topic is titled, Stalinist-leaners reject Chait speech! 04/14/2014. That gives you an idea on where he's coming from, Commie-baiting the critics of Chait's shaky position on the role of white racism in US politics.

In Twenty-six minutes yields 600 words! 04/15/2014 Somerby discussed "Chait in Salem Village," in which the African-American librul Melissa Harris-Perry criticized pore Jonathan Chait to his face. The pore guy just couldn't defend himself before such a ferocious opponent. And the next night, "Harris-Perry had assembled a panel designed for an old-fashioned dunking." What's a pore ole white guy to do with a mean Negro liberal like Harris-Perry attacking him!

But Somerby rushes to the pore guy's defense again in Our basic reactions to Chait’s famous piece! 04/16/2014.

The next day he returns to the Stalin symbolism with The eternal shortcomings of show trials! 04/17/2014

In Progressives should learn to question authority! 04/21/2014, he frets about whether Harris-Perry has split some hairs precisely enough. In this one, he professes to be mystified by what Harris-Perry, Chait and a couple of political scientists he quotes actually mean.

So, critics of Chait's perspective, at least the mean libruls Somerby discusses, are Stalinists who need to learn to question authority. Including that Negro Stalinist witch Melissa Harris-Perry. And, golly, us reglar folks don't understand what these here fancy perfessers are trying to say. Although he does make a mildly disparaging reference to her, which I've been known to do myself. (I'm no big fan of the general MSNBC style of liberal reporting.)

But Somerby's a liberal, you understand. He wants the Democrats and progressives to do well. But since 2004 or so, Somerby has been telling us how them nasty libruls are as bad if not worst than the Rushes of the world and FOX News.

In the "show trials" post, Somerby cites Gene Lyons' column How We Devalued The ‘R-Word’ National Memo 04/16/2014 saying "Gene Lyons wrote his column this week about the Jonathan Chait show trial." If we apply Somerby's approach, we would have to note that Gene didn't use the phrase "show trial." Nor did he accuse anti-racists as being Stalinists. Or portray Melissa Harris-Perry as a sorceress. Although he does criticize, which I've been known to do myself. (I'm no big fan of the general MSNBC style of liberal reporting.)

Although I wouldn't have phrased things quite the way Gene Lyons did, his column - in contrast to basically everything I see Somerby writing on the subject - recognizes that white racism is real:

Here in America, ethnic boundaries can be as fluid as you make them. As long as you’re white. My people [Irish] didn't arrive in the U.S. until 20 years after the Civil War, but the only "ghetto" they were ever confined to was of their own choosing. ...

For blacks, it’s not so easy to leave the “old country” behind. Because you’re living there. For the descendants of slaves, America’s where your ancestors were bought and sold like cattle: less the land of opportunity than the land of white supremacy.

Even President Obama, while careful not to say that the Trayvon Martin jury decided wrongly, emphasized that "it's important to recognize that the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn't go away."

Actually, I’m often amazed that black people love this country as much as they do. What's more, ethnic groupthink definitely comes in technicolor. You don't have to be Justice Clarence Thomas to see that.

And we're exceptionally unlikely to see Somerby writing something like Lyons' Ryan's Rhetoric Has Consequences National Memo 03/19/2014.

Otherwise, this month Somerby has been making a number of posts defending pore Chris Christie against his mean librul critics like that ruthless Rachel Maddow. And he spent some energy venting at Joan Walsh and others for defending of equal pay for female workers. And bitched some about defenders of the Affordable Care Act.

Somerby also had some less than inspiring comments about new rightwing militia hero-of-the-month Cliven Bundy.

I notice that in a couple of posts from April, Somerby delved into philosophy, professing his admiration for the methodology of linguistic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (What the heck is an abstract object? 04/06/2014) and ridiculing existentialist Martin Heidegger (The New York Times and the nature of being! 04/01/2014), in which post he also invokes Wittgenstein. Both of them are pretty lame.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2014, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2014, April 21: How white racism disappeared from FOXWorld

Leonard Pitts, Jr. deals with a specific instance of the kind of whiney-white-guy posturing I posted about yesterday in his column, Hey, Fox Pundits! How Blatant Must The Anti-Obama Racism Be? National Memo 04/21/2014. (As of this writing, in the linked version the fourth paragraph before the end that begins, "Hume, by the way," seems to be mostly a quote from Brit Hume, though it's not so indicated by the expected punctuation or indentation of a quote.) He describes a recent FOX News panel where the participants discussed the question, "Has race played a role in the often-harsh treatment of President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder?"

Said Hume: "This strikes me as kind of crybaby stuff from Holder. My sense about this is that both Eric Holder and Barack Obama have benefited politically enormously from the fact that they are African-American and the first to hold the jobs that they hold."

"Look," added Will, "liberalism has a kind of Tourette's Syndrome these days. It's just constantly saying the word 'racism' and 'racist.' It's an old saying in the law: If you have the law on your side, argue the law, if you have the facts on your side, argue the facts. If you have neither, pound the table. This is pounding the table."

Being black is an advantage in America, in this view of the world. In FOXWorld, an accusation of "racism" - if it's directed against whites over hostility to blacks - should be treated as content-free. "This is pounding the table" when you don't have anything of substance to say.

It's dodges the issue, too, of course. It's also ironic because part of the standard schtick for prominent black conservatives from Clarence Thomas to Ben Carson is to argue as white conservatives do that the real racism comes from white libruls directed against black conservatives. When Thomas was challenged over sexual harassment allegations during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings, he famously called it a "high-tech lynching," though the allegations from Anita Hill and others was clearly a substantial one, even if someone may have found it unconvincing.

I've argued since Obama became President that while Obama's own race does appear to be a factor in the intensity of the Republican hostility against a man who in a somewhat saner world would be called a conservative Democratic President. But that the more important way that race factors in to criticism against Obama is the same way it factored into intense Republican criticism of Bill Clinton as President and of the Democratic Party as a whole, which is that the Republicans use anti-black racial demagoguery against Democrats generally, and have been doing so as a party with varying intensity over time since 1964 or, at the latest, 1968.

Barry Goldwater as Republican Presidential candidate in 1964 was running in an election dominated by two issues: segregation (Segregation 1.0) and the Vietnam War. In the segregated Deep South states, then still considered a part of the Democratic Party's "Solid South," Goldwater was able to attract votes from many Southern whites who more often voted Democratic because of his stand against civil rights, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which most of his party in Congress had voted to support.

But he didn't say "n****r" on the campaign trail. In fact, he declared himself opposed to segregation! But no half-sentient voter on either side of the segregation issue took that seriously, because he opposed the federal civil rights laws that were the only available remedy to segregation and voter suppression directed against African-American citizens. Whether he was personally rude to "the coloreds" made no difference in the substance of his policy or in how it was perceived by supporters of segregation. They knew he was on their side: for segregation and against democracy (for anyone but white people).

Pitts in his column poses a question for Brit Hume and George Will: "You say race has played no role in the treatment of President Obama? Fine. What would it look like if it did?"

This is why the approach taken by Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby in covered race issues makes it basically impossible to criticize white racism directly. His hyper-positivist approach, which he applies with special rigor when white racism is at issue, prevent him from recognizing any so-called "dog whistle" appeals to white voters based on racial prejudice. And that's the same game the Republicans play, that Hume and Will play in the quote above. Unless someone is explicitly describing themselves by using the words "racist" or "white racist" or "white supremacist," in that game you pretend there's no reason to think of race at all.

It's not exactly new for white people to fail to see white racism when it's right in front of their faces, nor for them to pretend they don't see it when they know very well they do. Pretending there's no racism involved in, say, supporting voter suppression laws like the Republicans push today can also be a sneer: we're not prejudiced against the "nigras," we just want to take away their ability to vote. (Hyuk, yuk, nudge-nudge, wink-wink)

Pitts lists a number of incidents of Republicans and Tea Party types using language and symbolism that have been and are still commonly used by white racists as negative against blacks:

I mean, we're talking about a president who was called "uppity" by one GOP lawmaker, "boy" by another and "subhuman" by a GOP activist; who was depicted as a bone-through-the-nose witch doctor by opponents of his health care reform bill; as a pair of cartoon spook eyes against a black backdrop by an aide to a GOP lawmaker, and as an ape by various opponents; who has been dogged by a "Tea Party" movement whose earliest and most enthusiastic supporters included the Council of Conservative Citizens, infamous for declaring the children of interracial unions "a slimy brown glop"; who was called a liar by an obscure GOP lawmaker during a speech before a joint session of Congress; who has had to contend with a years-long campaign of people pretending there is some mystery about where he was born.

But in the Somerby/Hume/Will approach, you shouldn't say or suggest that there was anything racist about any of those things, except maybe for one from the Council of Conservative Citizens, the directly organizational successor to the segregationist and overtly white supremacist Citizens Council. There may be some Republicans around still willing to criticize them, if only for messing up the marketing of policies and campaigns aimed against black Americans.

The bottom line on the FOXWorld approach: in the dawning Segregation 2.0, it's wicked for libruls to criticize any white people for racism against blacks. If they want to say how racist African-Americans are against white people, well that's obvious, ain't it? Just ask ole Rush or Glenn Beck.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2014, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2014, April 20: The white victimization whine

In what is currently known as the Chait-Coates controversy, Jonathan Chait's critics generally seem to think he jumped the shark with his article The Color of His Presidency New York 04/06/2014. He opens by talking about an on-air argument between Bill Mayer and neocon bigwig and incorrigible warmonger Bill Kristol, sparked when Mayer said that the rise of the Tea Party "was about a black president." Chait writes

"I totally believe that," Maher responded, which is no doubt true, because every Obama supporter believes deep down, or sometimes right on the surface, that the furious opposition marshaled against the first black president is a reaction to his race. Likewise, every Obama opponent believes with equal fervor that this is not only false but a smear concocted willfully to silence them. [my emphasis]

Chait adopts the perspective of the Republican white-victimization whiners, who have developed a ritual of making some explicit or heavily implied statement about race, then responding to criticism of their comment by some form of, "Those mean libruls are pickin' on me, bwaa-aaah!"

The silliness and shallowness of Chait's perspective here is that you have to concentrate to pretend that the Republican Party hasn't been working hard since Barry Goldwater's anti-civil-rights Presidential campaign of 1964 to establish itself as the anti-black party. And they've succeeded.

Mayer's comment as Chait reports it is too big a generalization. But not because race isn't a major issue that increases emotional intensity among Republicans. Anti-black racism is a major factor in Republican hostility toward Obama. It was also a major factor in Republican hostility toward Bill Clinton. And for that matter, in Republican hostility toward Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore and John Kerry.

A big problem of this article by Chait is that he lays out substantial reasons to believe that white racism is deeply embedded in Republican politics. He then proceeds to argue that its' really wicked for Democrats to point this out:

One of the greatest triumphs of liberal politics over the past 50 years has been to completely stigmatize open racial discrimination in public life, a lesson that has been driven home over decades by everybody from Jimmy the Greek to Paula Deen. This achievement has run headlong into an increasing liberal tendency to define conservatism as a form of covert racial discrimination. If conservatism is inextricably entangled with racism, and racism must be extinguished, then the scope for legitimate opposition to Obama shrinks to an uncomfortably small space. [my emphasis]

This is a airy construct that validates the Republicans' white-victimization framework. But it has all kinds of problems. For one, even during Segregation 1.0, white candidates generally claimed to not be motivated by racism, though some like Mississippi Sen. Theodore Bilbo were more comfortable being explicit about it than others.

This is almost John Birch Society time reasoning: libruls want racism to be extinguished, libruls make racism equal to conservatism, therefore libruls want to extinguish conservatism.

Here in the real world, Democratic Party liberals seem to find it a major effort to insist on getting liberal policies enacted. Which of course is a far cry from wanting to see conservative ideas or their advocates "extinguished." For that matter, I'm sure liberals would prefer to see racism go away. But their main focus has been keeping racial discrimination out of public policy and to take affirmative action (in the larger sense of the phrase) to prevent racial discrimination in public policy.

Chait's version is clearly a polemical, absurdly distorted version of that reality.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2014, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2014, April 19: How was death viewed during the Civil War?

Today I'm posting about the actual Civil War. Or rather, about something on how the Civil War is remembered.

Nicholas Marshall in The Civil War Death Toll, Reconsidered New York Times 04/15/2014 explains that Civil War historiography in recent years has focused on how the level of killing during the war affected public perceptions.

This topic interests me also because it puts into perspective the still-common assumption that the level of television coverage of the Vietnam War played a key role in undermining public support for it. In the Civil War, the battles themselves were taking place at home and people near the battlefields could see the battles and the many bodies left behind after the larger ones. Yet public support in the North and the South held firmly enough to keep the carnage going for four full years.

One part of the aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg

James McPherson in Dark Victories New York Review of Books 04/17/2008 issue reviewed two books dealing with this aspect of the Civil War, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008) by Drew Gilpin Faust and Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death (2008) by Mark Schantz. McPherson offers a contrast in the approach the two historians' books take to the understanding of and rituals around death in American culture at the time:

Drew Gilpin Faust ... in This Republic of Suffering ... contrasts the preoccupation of antebellum Americans with death to our discomfort with the subject today. But while Schantz believes that "antebellum Americans could face death with resignation and even joy because they carried in their hearts and heads a comforting and compelling vision of eternal life," Faust portrays death, however frequent, as a heart-wrenching experience for both the dying and their surviving loved ones. If there was a "culture of death," it consisted of rituals to cushion the numbing shock of loss. Faust labels the most important ritual "the concept of the Good Death." Such a death occurred at home in bed surrounded by family and friends who provided every comfort during the last hours of life. The dying person spoke last words assuring everyone that she or he was ready to depart in peace and to meet them again in the afterlife where the strife and hardships of earthly toil were unknown. "By the 1860s," Faust writes, "many elements of the Good Death" had been largely "separated from their explicitly theological roots." Assumptions about "the way to die" had "spread beyond formal religion to become a part of more general systems of belief held across the nation about life’s meaning and life’s appropriate end."

McPherson also reminds us that seeing dead bodies of soldiers scarcely leads exclusively in itself to lack of support for further war and killing:

Although few soldiers had read Saint Augustine or Hugo Grotius on the theory of "just war," they eventually developed their own version of this doctrine as applied to "Yankee vandals" or "Rebel traitors." A variety of beliefs and attitudes helped soldiers to overcome the sixth commandment, among them ideas of duty and self-defense (kill or be killed), a desire for revenge against a demonized enemy who had killed their comrades, the murderous hatred of Confederate soldiers toward black Union soldiers, and the latter's retaliation for the massacres of captured black soldiers by frenzied Confederates. Veteran soldiers became hardened to death. They were, in Faust's words, "never quite the same again after seeing fields of slaughtered bodies destroyed by men just like themselves." [my emphasis]

McPherson summarizes the significance of the two authors' interpretation this way:

For both Schantz and Faust, this loss of life and the cultural institutions Americans constructed to cope with it are the most enduring legacy of the Civil War. The "horribly luminous" reality of 620,000 war dead, writes Schantz, "worked profound transformations on American society." For Faust, "death created the modern American union" The dying and killing "transformed society, culture, and politics in what became a broader republic of shared suffering." The "meaning of the war had come to inhere in its cost .... The Civil War Dead became both powerful and immortal, no longer individual men but instead a force that would shape American public life for at least a century to come." [my emphasis]

McPherson doesn't buy the notion that this is "the most enduring legacy of the Civil War." For one thing, there's "its apparent morbidity." But there is also the fact that the war for all its death did produce important constructive and democratic results:

Faust makes a strong case that the creation of national cemeteries with their constituency of mourners and the slain changed “the very definition of the nation and its obligations.” But I think that the Thirteenth to Fifteenth Amendments, which defined freedom, citizenship, and equality, were even more nationalizing and transformative. Despite the war’s “harvest of death,” almost four times more soldiers survived than died. Their veterans’ reunions well into the twentieth century commemorated the sacrifices of comrades who had given their lives in the war, to be sure, but they also celebrated the achievements of the living.

Nicolas Marshall suggests that the level of the body count may also be exaggerated in terms of its affects on how the country viewed death:

Solid scholarly work exists on the central importance of death in antebellum America and the ordinary experience of death during the war, but Civil War historians have tended to sidestep this literature in order to claim the war years as exceptional. They have also underplayed the significance of the demographic realities that Americans faced before, during, and after the war. These reveal a society constantly coping with large-scale mortality. Americans throughout the period were lucky if they survived into middle age, and they recognized that life was more fragile than we do today. ...

Given these circumstances, it is important to remember that approximately two-thirds of the deaths of soldiers came as a result of disease, rather than on the battlefield. Looking back from today, these numbers are difficult to fathom, and the image conjured by them is of horrendously unsanitary conditions in military camps. After all, these deaths seem to be as much a product of war as those that resulted from wounds: soldiers in camp were there to fight the war and they died because the conditions were necessary to conduct field operations with a massive army.

He cites the variability of the death rate in different parts of the country that were differently affected by the war. Which, of course, also applies to my point about people seeing the bodies on the battlefied, something far more likely in some parts of the country than others.

Marshall also notes this:

The experience with epidemic sickness and death in other historical moments should also remind us that Americans have been much more blasé about death from sickness than they are today. During the global flu epidemic at the end of the World War I as many as 100 million worldwide, including 600,000 in the United States (roughly five times the number of American casualties in World War I and approaching the total number of deaths in the Civil War), perished over the course of just a few months. In addition, this was an unusual strain of influenza that killed mainly the healthiest cohort of the population (those in their 20s and 30s) through a violent immune response. If any event should have triggered re-evaluation of the nation’s approach to death (based solely on changes in incidence and scale, as Civil War historians often calculate), this would be it.

Yet one historian’s book on the subject is titled “America’s Forgotten Pandemic,” and he spends a significant portion of the book trying to explain why the epidemic seemed to disappear from public consciousness so soon after it waned. The answer, in part, is that well into the 20th century Americans viewed disease — and the death that came with it — as a constant, as something that had to be dealt with as part of everyday existence.

War is also one of the most long-standing practices of the human race, God help us. And there are a huge number of cultural rituals, assumptions and attitudes around war that heavily condition the larger social reaction to death in war.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2014, us civil war

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2014, April 17: Politics of race and voting rights today

Jamelle Bouie weighs in on the Chait-Coates discussion on white racism in Color Blind Slate 04/07/2014. He makes this observation about civil rights in the Obama era:

Of course, it’s not accusing conservatives of "racism" to note that particular policies — say, tax cuts to defund the social safety net, or blocking the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act—have a disparate impact. That's just reality. And it's not tarring your opponents to note that race plays a huge part in building popular support for those policies. But again, for as much as this is interesting as a matter of political combat, it's less important to telling the story of race in the Obama years than, for instance, the tremendous retrenchment of racial inequality during our five years of recession, recovery, and austerity. [my emphasis]

The structural problems of white racism won't go away without confronting them directly.

Bouie reacts to the perspective he understands Jonathan Chait to be articulating, one common to the superficial coverage of the mainstream media more generally, which focuses on race in terms of its function as a partisan topic of political fights. In the current context, Chait is giving support to the whiny-white-guy victim posture the Republicans are currently using in which they claim to be terribly wrong whenever they are challenged on white racism:

Still, if you're trying to tell the story of race in the Obama years, Chait's version strikes me as utterly ancillary. First and foremost in this history has to be the ways in which race kept its material salience despite the momentous political event of a black president. The partisan reactions to Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis are less important than the activism that emerged around them, in the same way that Republican complaints of language policing are less important than the party’s ongoing push for voter suppression. [my emphasis]

That last point is extremely important. It doesn't matter if the Republicans are pushing to enact segregationist voter suppression laws with their hearts full of Christian love as they do it. They're pushing anti-democracy segregation laws that are a a manifestation of white racism in action, white racism which such laws establish in the core of the American democratic system. The effects are what count.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2014, voting rights, white racism