While progressives and average Americans who think Barack Obama’s speech presented a difficult challenge wring their hands worrying about appearing to be racist if they broach the subject in any significant way, the depth of the problem at hand is clear when we have folks on the right like Pat Buchanan just laying it on the line with this mind-blower.
Thanks, Pat. We’ve gotten the old “lift up” message, all right. How could people like Buchanan listen to the same speech and walk away with this level of vitriol in their heart and purposeful ignorance of history? Our country suffers an incredible sickness when it comes to race relations. The point of Obama’s speech is that we all have work to do, and share responsibility in opening up an adult dialog. The above does nothing to advance understanding, and shows no desire to do so either.First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.
Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.
Second, no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the ’60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the African-American community into the mainstream.
…We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?
I love Dave Neiwert’s comment on Pat’s “A Brief for Whitey” essay. It’s below the fold.
***Damn, I’m sure most black people forgot to be grateful for segregation, the lynching era, sundown towns, and the continuing discrimination they face both in employment and in residence. Because the institutional conditions created by those decades of bigotry have in fact gone largely unchanged, though to white guys like Buchanan, that simply isn’t a factor:
Is white America really responsible for the fact that the crime and incarceration rates for African-Americans are seven times those of white America? Is it really white America’s fault that illegitimacy in the African-American community has hit 70 percent and the black dropout rate from high schools in some cities has reached 50 percent?
Is that the fault of white America or, first and foremost, a failure of the black community itself?
Well, I’m sure black voters are convinced by that argument. After all, it’s obvious that the matter of continuing discrimination is just an illusion in their heads.
UPDATE: Bear with me, it’s a long update but it will hopefully spur more discussion. I posted this piece over at my pad earlier and a reader brought up a personal encounter that they used to try to figure out their response to the situation.
I am a white guy. Raised in Virginia and South Carolina … old enough to remember “white only” water fountains and bathrooms and schools and churches. I now live in California after a sojourn in Alaska. So let’s talk about race, Pam. I get you that the righties just don’t get it and Sen Obama does. I think the Clintons “get it” too. But that is not really the discussion that needs to take place, is it.My response:It is one thing to describe the problem and another to describe the proposed solutions to date (as Buchanan attempted - really tacky that he termed “race” as a poverty issue in my book) But let’s narrow the discussion from “race” to white and blacks in the USA in 2008 and beyond. Let’s leave Asians and Latinos to another discussion.
How do we even talk about black and white in the USA in 2008?
I was on a bus in San Francisco a couple of years ago. The driver was a black man. He stopped the bus and three black women got on aged approximately 19 to 21 or so. They had boxes of chicken dinners in their hands. The first two women got on and immediately proceeded down the aisle to the very rear of the bus, where they took a seat. They were talking very loudly. Sitting in the front of the bus, I could hear every word they said. They were really loud.
The third woman stopped at the pay kiosk at the front of the bus. She proceeded to put change into the kiosk. She only put a few nickles into the kiosk. The driver informed her she had not put enough change into the kiosk for herself, much less the three of them. She said she did not have any more money and asked him to let it slide. He refused. He said they had money for chicken, they should have saved money for the bus. The woman called, yelled, to the back of the bus to her friends for money for the fare. They screamed back that they were broke and for her to just join them in the back of the bus. They proceeded to yell back and forth for a good minute or two.
The driver was getting angry. He insisted that the three women get off the bus. They refused unless they got their fifteen cents out of the kiosk. It is impossible to retrieve money from the kiosk, as everyone in San Francisco knows. They started yelling at the driver … the one woman from the front of the bus and the two women from the rear of the bus. It was getting nasty.
A black man came forward. He was irritated. Asked the driver how much the women owed. The driver answered and the man put that amount in the kiosk. the man and woman proceeded down the aisle; the man to his seat, the woman to her friends in the rear of the bus. The driver finally drove the bus. Howevr, the driver kept looking in his mirror at the three women and yelled at them that there was no eating allowed on the bus. They yelled back that they weren’t eating on his damn bus. Actually, they were.
The driver turned to the Asian woman seated next to me in the front of the bus and informed her that in the City there were Black people and there were niggers. Those three were nothing but niggers and gave all black people a bad name. His comments shocked and offended me. The three women’s ploy for a free bus ride shocked and offended me. But I said nothing. I am not sure I should have. Just not sure.
The fact that a racial discussion brings this story to mind shocks me too. But it does.
I must balance it somewhat with the incredible black man about 18 years old who organized the bus stop of about a dozen folks of various races to allow a disabled white woman to board a bus first even though she was the last to arrive at the bus stop … a thing just not done! He spoke up and moved us all until we all just stood aside, allowing this woman free space and all the time in the world to board the bus. He was quite the speaker and organizer. I tried to enroll him in labor organizer school, he was so good.
You’re sitting there wondering WTF is going on in that situation. There’s a lot going on there. Not to make light of this, but the minute I read your comment a Chris Rock stand up routine (”Black People vs. Niggaz”) came to mind — it’s exactly what this bus driver was talking about.Downthread a different question was posed that is also worthy of discussion (I love that people are opening up and allowing themselves to “think aloud” on this difficult topic in an open forum). The question is in bold italics. The rest is my response.Now honestly, what do people think of what Chris Rock said in that clip? Did it make you uncomfortable? Was he being racist?
What the driver (and Chris Rock) are conveying are class distinctions. Not all black folks are poor, under-educated criminals. Now the above comments by Rock and the bus driver conveniently skirt the issue of the underclass and the cycle of poverty that foments the pathologies of gang culture, disdain for educational achievement and other negative stereotypes that are a reality in those segments of the minority community. But Chris Rock speaks for a number of blacks who shake their heads every time they see a thug perp walk that inevitably will be seen by whites as representative of all black people.
So what do you think you were seeing — is it self-loathing, classism, or something else?
Has anyone else encountered folks who felt owed a livelihood and the “best” of everything as recompense for the history of slavery and Jim Crow
Yes. And that isn’t productive - most people like that tend to complain rather than do anything to rise to the challenge to affect the system in any meaningful way - run for local office, join school boards, etc. On the other hand, if you’re under-educated and under-employed because of the system in place, the pathology can develop that every instance of obstacles in life’s way is someone else’s fault — THE MAN. That’s a hard cycle of thinking to break. It doesn’t mean, however, that every black person living in a lower socio-economic strata thinks this way — that’s the common mistake many whites make. For instance, my mother grew up in poverty in Brooklyn back during the Depression — everyone in her neighborhood was poor, regardless of color. But her family believed in hard work, and the power of education and that has played itself out in rising out of poverty.
***
Now shave off part of your statement:
Has anyone else encountered folks who felt owed a livelihood and the “best” of everything…
Yes. A lot of young people new to the job market seem to have the same problem. Their parents have always told them how special they are, they can do no wrong. Their parents have complained to teachers if their child doesn’t get the A, or that it’s never their fault when the kid misbehaves, or daddy bails junior out after that wild keg party where he commits property damage.
When these kids get out into their first jobs, they seem to think the are entitled to a quick rise in the ranks with little output, are appalled at getting their first less-than-stellar evaluation, and have a poor work ethic. An interesting study confirmed this).
The key is that we’re not talking about all young people, or all black people in discussing these issues. The mistake is that too often human nature and implicit bias makes us lump all of one group together for easy assessment.* Nearly three-quarters (72 percent) of incoming high school graduates are viewed as deficient in basic English writing skills, including grammar and spelling. And, when asked about readiness with regard to applied skills related to the workplace, the greatest deficiency was reported in written communications (memos, letters, complex technical reports), and in professionalism and work ethic.
…”We have experienced horrendous turnover rates among high school graduates we hire,” says Chyrel Fortner of Pan Pacific Products. “We hire these young people, and then they don’t come to work. And they don’t see a problem with being absent. And when they do come, what they seem to care about is when they can leave work.” Within one month, half of those hired and terminated were recent high school graduates for whom this was their first full-time job. Yet, at the same time, a sense of entitlement prevails. “Kids want to get that top job right away, the nice air-conditioned office with the computer-never mind that the way managers achieved those jobs was by starting at the bottom and working their way up.”
Jim Kammerer, Director of Human Resources at Great River Health Systems, agrees. “Young people come to apply for a job in cut-off jeans. They have no understanding of how to act in an interview, no presentation skills, and a total lack of understanding of the impression they’re making on the employer. Instead, the attitude is ‘Hey, take me for what I am. I am an individual,’ and that’s what matters most.”
Chris Rock’s frank illustration of classism in the black community probably shocks a lot of white folks, but why should it? I assume most people cringe when you see images of “white trash” on Jerry Springer — and that is an image of Americans that gets broadcast around the world.
I’ll admit that I cringe every time there is a tornado down South and the MSM always manages to find the most backwoods person to interview that embodies every stereotype about the South imaginable because I know how bad regional bias exists (and the progressive world is just as polluted in its thinking on this front).
UPDATE 2: Dave Neiwert has new post up referencing mine (he’s got the Chris Rock video up as well), and he added this observation, which we’ve touched upon in the lively, productive comments thread today.
OK, just in the interest of honesty, here are some things usually associated over the years with white people that, well, I as a white person find kinda embarrassing:Bell-bottom pants.
Mullets.
“Country living” decor.
Bad country music.
Bad heavy metal.
Bad dancing.This is just a short sampling of a much longer list, but you kind of get the idea. There are a lot of dumb things associated with white folks that I, as a very melanin-challenged person myself, would hate being associated with. And for the most part, I’m fairly comfortable knowing that since I generally don’t indulge these vices myself (except that I am a truly awful dancer), I don’t need to worry much about being in fact associated with them.
…When white people insist on making every other black person bear some kind of responsibility for the behavior of a small segment of their community, people who only share with them their racial identity — the kind of responsibility that whites repudiate on their own behalf for white miscreants — that is nothing if not “identity politics” incarnate. And as long as it persists, there’s going to be a racial divide in America that will not be bridged.
83 Responses to “Exhibit A: Pat Buchanan - why we desperately need to discuss race”
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What’s intriguing about Buchanan is that unlike Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham he does not believe things to support the *business* of appealing to the baser instincts of the ignorant.
Irish Catholic, taught by the Jesuits, he leads a simple life and do does not apply himself to amassing power in any conventional political or economic way.
In this he is not an angry, disenfranchised, ignorant white guy. He a true bigot. An increasingly rare phenomenon. We desperately need him the same way we need to preserve any endangered species.
Just structurally odd about his argument here is his notion that welfare and government services was/is whites supporting blacks. It was/is most certainly the rich supporting the poor. Thinking of important economic and social issues as strictly racial issues is flawed, and I think, generational.
I would hope you wouldn’t think that just because a white person may be reluctant to engage in discussions with black people on race issues (for varying reasons) that it means they won’t confront blatant racism like this. I’ve pretty much given up on trying to discuss race issues with minorities (I’m not willing enough to personally blame myself for their misfortunes), but a few of the more uncomfortable situations in my life have involved calling out other whites engaging in racist behavior.
“In this he is not an angry, disenfranchised, ignorant white guy. He a true bigot. An increasingly rare phenomenon. We desperately need him the same way we need to preserve any endangered species.”
Pat Buchanan really should be preserved - in a museum, where he can be trotted out every time some dumb fuck like Tony Snow says racism was finished in the ’60’s.
Those of us who remember All in the Family from the first go around see Pat Buchanan as a more articulate but no less bigoted real life Archie Bunker…
There is absolutely no need to personally blame yourself for others misfortunes. In fact, there is even a word that includes white people who feel that personal blame is a bar they have to jump over before they can do anything useful about race: “white guilt”. There was actually a rather decent forum for thinking about race issues that was a safe place for whites to come out of their corners: the debunkingwhite community on LiveJournal.
After all, it’s obvious that the matter of continuing discrimination is just an illusion in their heads.
To people like Pat, they really do believe it. In fact, some of those people go so far as to claim that they are the victims, that all those lazy black people are really just stealing their money. They lack any kind of awareness of institutional racism, because they’re not oppressed, therefore oppression itself does not exist.
And the idea that slavery was a good thing for black people sounds similar to the paternalistic attitudes of imperialism - “Why aren’t you savages grateful that we’ve brought you to civilization?” Civilization, naturally, being white civilization, which of course, the slaves were a part of but not allowed to participate in. Which ties right into the thinking that it’s the black community’s fault for the plight that they’re in, because hey, obviously they still haven’t been “civilized” [/sarcasm].
I’ve never understood why this myth is still around. I mean, I can understand it due to the fact that racism is still around and they have to justify the oppression, but times have changed so much that really, there’s no “savages” anymore - they’re talking about American citizens as if they aren’t American, and I’m sure that a few people would take exception to that.
Here’s the problem with race in this country from my middle aged southern white guy point of view.
The problem is that people my age and older have spent too many years letting cowards in white sheets, cowards with skin heads, and cowards hidding behind their darker skin tell us who to hate; we’ve let them tell us who can be a racist and who can’t. We continue to let them tell us which cloth with what pattern means this or that. We continue to let them tell us it’s ok to look down on people of color and to resent the white man. We let them dictate race relations in this country. We let them tell us it was the evil white slave traders who invented the slave trade, we’re not allowed to mention the Africans who sold their fellow Africans into slavery. Why does my generation continue to put up with this crap? Good damn question. Stupidity would be my guess. We’re comfortable with the way things are.
This is just a guess on my part but I think most of you here in Pandagon land are 20 somethings. My generation could learn alot from yours when it comes to race. The problem is, your generation is letting mine inject our insecurities into your beliefs about race in this country.
Sorry if this post didn’t make any sense but this racial crap pisses me off. Gorw up America!
Jason
Pat Robertson just cannot understand that the image of the happy dark folk strummin’ banjos and singin happy minstrel songs to show their appreciation for Massa’s largesse isn’t valid.
Of course, Dick Cheney believed that the Iraqis would recreate the liberation of Paris by waving flowers and dancing in the streets when the 4th Infantry arrived.
Both of these fantasies are indicitive of just how far this country still has to go…
The one big reason we need Obama is to finally have an occupant of the the White House who is not mired in anachronism.
It’;s the same rationale as the Inquisition–who care what torments we subjected them to, we saved their souls, damn it!
Buchanan’s views are strongly reminisence of those held by Robert E. Lee:
http://www.civilwarhome.com/leepierce.htm
I updated the post with an exchange from my pad on this piece that’s worth taking a look at. I’m curious about reactions.
Exhibit B: Bill Kristol
And his mindbogglingly offensive column in the NYTimes today.
Buchanan is an old Nixon hand, PR man and speechwriter, a lifelong Beltway inhabitant. He’s not naive, he’s not ignorant, he’s not a helpless victim of his time and place; he’s a studied, practiced propagandist for the plutocracy who was studying what buttons to push to make the American people give power to him and his cohorts before most of us bloggers were even born.
We ignore his racial dogwhistling at our peril - he’s saying nothing I haven’t heard said both by Ayn Rand followers AND “liberal” commenters the past four years, when it comes to the claimed respective superiority/inferiority of whites and blacks, and the incumbent gratiitude on the latter to the former.
I wasn’t really shocked by Chris Rock’s routine at all (I’ve heard similar comments from black friends in regards to class differences). I don’t think it’s something that a black person of any class would tolarate a white person saying, though. Reminds me of another stand-up routine I saw (I can’t think of the comedian’s name any more) where the premise was basically “White people: you can’t use the N-word. Ever.”. Which was understandable (it’s too loaded of a word to ever be used I think), but puzzling (in the same way that I’m puzzled by women who think calling each other a B-word or a C-word is empowering, I’ve never understood why a black person would want to use the N-word).
I’ve never understood why a black person would want to use the N-word
I haven’t either, but I obviously cannot speak for those who want to “reclaim” it. Then again, I sometimes take flack for calling out the misogyny and debasement of black women in the bitch/’ho/bling segment of hip hop/rap videos. That it plays into stereotypes (and is so popular, even with white youth these days) seems to be a message lost on the fans of that genre.
Sporkey
March 24, 2008 at 8:03 am
“people like Pat… lack any kind of awareness of institutional racism, because they’re not oppressed, therefore oppression itself does not exist.”
Bingo.
There have been some interesting studies over the last few years demonstrating some fundamental differences in the psychology of rightwingers vs leftwingers. The couple of points I remember most were that rightwingers tend to be less comfortable with change and to have a greater willingness and need to follow authority figures — neither of which comes as a huge surprise.
But it’s seemed to me for a long time that the single greatest symptom — or perhaps determinant — of the right-wing character is a complete failure of imagination. Specifically, an utter inability to imagine oneself in another’s position.
This results in rightwingers’ blind spots to all manner of inequity and injustice, unless it happens to them personally, or to someone very close. This is why it took Bob Dole’s support to get the Americans with Disabilities Act thru Congress. It’s why Dick Cheney isn’t as direct a supporter of his party’s institutionalized homophobia as he so clearly would be if his daughter weren’t gay. It’s why Nancy Reagan supports stem-cell research. Etcetcetc.
This isn’t a novel observation; Michael Moore devoted a whole chapter to it in one of his books. (”Stupid White Men,” I think.)
It would be great if some of the researchers would investigate this aspect of the wingnut psyche, to quantify and qualify it. Perhaps, one day, we might even find a cure for it.
When Buchanon ran for president several years ago, one of his big pushes was the build a wall along the Mexican border. So, his bigotry is long-standing. He was labeled a bigot in the media at the time, and was the butt of many jokes because of it. My personal fave was one by Joan Rivers who said: “Most people don’t realize that Buchanon has suffered too. Both his parents died in the Holocaust. That’s right, they fell off a guard tower.”
Another piece of BS in the Buchananite argument is that the hideous messes we see in Africa today have a lot to do with slavery and colonialism. Many of the people taken as slaves were originally living quite pleasant lives in a relatively egalitarian agrarian community before slavers showed up, killed their families, and hauled them off in chains. Expecting civil society and economic progress to thrive in circumstances where powerful outsiders regularly swoop in and murder or abduct the most productive members of society is utterly absurd.
Good god. Literally.
I had an interesting discussion skirting around the borders of this issue with a parishioner at my wife’s church yesterday. He’s a friendly Liberal Republican - lib on social issues, conservative on economy. And he just went off on his party on it’s immigration stand.
But then he had to qualify his answer on race - those dreaded words, “I’m not racist because . . ”
In his case, he can’t, or won’t, understand why blacks have an argument, or a ‘chip on their shoulders’. He didn’t put the answer in Buchanan’s phrasing, but the perception was identical - why can’t we all just get along like the nice hispanic people? What have we done?
Usually raising your voice and jumping on people during coffee hour is frowned on. Even by the pastor’s wife. So I just had to give him The Look.
So close and yet so far . . at least this middle-class farmer isn’t putting his words to print and grinding his political axe for the national racists to hide behind. Sigh.
Hmm. I think that the Chris Rock/bus driver classism issue is a very important one. It’s definitely a conversation that needs to be had, and by everyone - I think what Chris Rock was trying to do to a certain extent was ‘other’ trashy behaviour. I mean, when I see someone ‘white trashy’ I don’t for a minute worry that their behaviour will reflect badly on me. I ooze middle class from every pore. Racism is the reason black people have to worry about one ignorant person making them all look bad. If that bus driver and those women were white, he would never for a moment taken their behaviour ‘personally’ like he did.
So that’s (some of) my thoughts on that. But I also want to say that I worry about the direction this is taking. I’m reminded of the woman on ‘Fox and Friends’ the other day - ‘let’s have a discussion about racism, let’s talk about double standards!’.
An underclass (that is, let’s not forget, still mostly white in America) is a problem. But why are we turning this discussion on them? They are absolutely powerless in our society. I get that we should talk about it. I get that we should do it sooner rather than later. I get that we need to hold even the Bubbleses, Snoops, and Bodies to a higher standard that we do.
But this is NOT where our attention should be lying if we’re having a national dialogue on race. Black-on-black racism is SO FAR from the main issue here. We need to divert our attention to the real problem - what I hinted at earlier above - the way whiteness is standard. There are lots of lazy and resentful white people who don’t want to do that. But they have to. We can’t give em a pass. Obama emphasised understanding where they were coming from, and he’s right, we can’t just say fuck ‘em, tempting though it may be. But we can’t make excuses for them and let them off the hook either.
What the driver (and Chris Rock) are conveying are class distinctions.
Is it all a function of class or also a function of how one responds, psychologically, to generations of oppression of one’s people?
I could do a routine, in parallel to Chris Rock’s (and I know some commedians effectively have), of “there are Jews and there are Kikes”.
I think the key distinction is sometimes that you always have some people who respond to prejudicial stereotyping by (if perhaps entirely unconsciously) “saying”: “if you consider that I act like X because I am Y, I might as well have some fun and act like X”. “You think because I am Jewish, I am clannish, self-serving and have dual loyalties? well, I might as well be clannish, self-serving and have dual loyalties then”. I have seen similar behavior (albeit with more acknowledgement of and a greater sense of humor about it) amongst Italian-Americans and Irish-Americans. I am sure a similar phenomenon exists amongst African-Americans, Asian-Americans, et al.
Boy, Buchanan is just on fire this week. Did anyone else notice his reference on The Group this week to the Catholic priest child abuse scandal as “that gay stuff?”
I for one am thankful that, from time to time, Buchanan reminds me of exactly what he is because he often seems to make sense on issues such as the occupation of Iraq. But this is the man who declared Culture War in 1992.
I mean, when I see someone ‘white trashy’ I don’t for a minute worry that their behaviour will reflect badly on me. I ooze middle class from every pore. Racism is the reason black people have to worry about one ignorant person making them all look bad. If that bus driver and those women were white, he would never for a moment taken their behaviour ‘personally’ like he did.
Spot on, dinogirl.
Another manifestation of this that I’ve experienced (and blogged about before), is the burden of being the “first” black to hold a particular position in a company. I’m fully aware that other blacks that follow me will be unfavorably or favorably compared to me (and my performance). It also means that I am forced to prove my worth from the get-go because there may be an assumption that I was hired because of affirmative action rather than my merits. That’s a big burden to carry that whites, as the dominant group, do not have to bear. Is it fair? No. Is it real? Yes.
The question comes down to whether there is anything we can do about people’s perceptions and snap judgments because of implicit bias. One thing I do know is that we won’t get anywhere if people have the attitude of Bill Kristol mentioned at #10 upthread:
Chris Rock’s frank illustration of classism in the black community probably shocks a lot of white folks, but why should it?
Well, it gave me a mild shock because it was the exact same thing once told to me by a former boss, one of the most bigoted people I know.
Understand, I’m not saying Rock was wrong or that he didn’t have the right to say what he did. But hearing my old boss’s words in a black man’s mouth really brought me up short.
Southern bias and prejudice against African Americans are strongly intertwined in a lot of northerners. Many of the major stereotypes of the two groups overlap. So, for a lot of people it’s become “I don’t hate blacks, I hate southerners.” The fact that those of us who are also progressives have serious, legitimate issues with evangelical culture adds another dimension to the problem. For example, the prejudiced view that southerners and blacks are uneducated is often defended by the reality of the anti-science and anti-intellectual positions of evangelicals. Intellectually, it’s fairly easy to keep these things sorted in their proper boxes – “prejudice against individuals” vs. “legitimate criticism of institutions”. However, emotionally, it is difficult not to conflate the two.
Pam, I posted a while back about my reflections on that, and that basically racist terms rely on the structure of racism to give them power. The second a white person says a racist remark, they’ve pretty much drawn upon a violent, nasty history to remind the person they’re still beneath them socially. Calling a white guy a honky or a cracker dosen’t have that institutional memory to draw on for it’s power, and instead relies on that person to feel guilty or offended for being linked to the historical offenders.
I think that’s why friends can get away with calling each other hurtful, even racist names on occasion, because they see it as equalizing: you aren’t above me because I can insult you, I’m not above you because you can insult me. Problem is that it can easily lead to a bullying relationship if one person can’t defend themselves, or it slips out into the general public when they assume that everyone’s experiences have been as neutral as their own.
Which then takes Chris Rock’s definition in a strange direction, because he’s redefining “nigger” not to mean “Black person” but to mean “Black person who embodies the worst stereotypes white people have of black people”. That’s not only killing the word as an equalizer but it means white people using the word in his definition are buying into the racist tropes to begin with. Chris Rock’s routine at the same time makes the term more offensive, and lets people feel justified in using it the exact way it was originally intended.
“With respect to having a national conversation on race, my recommendation is: Let’s not, and say we did.”
With respect to listening to the wingnut droolings of Bill Kristol on race - or indeed any other subject - let’s not, and say we did…
Just somethings that I found yesterday. Quotes on religion from some interesting sources…
“Which then takes Chris Rock’s definition in a strange direction, because he’s redefining “nigger” not to mean “Black person” but to mean “Black person who embodies the worst stereotypes white people have of black people”. That’s not only killing the word as an equalizer but it means white people using the word in his definition are buying into the racist tropes to begin with. Chris Rock’s routine at the same time makes the term more offensive, and lets people feel justified in using it the exact way it was originally intended.”
I always wondered if that particular use of the N-word was similar to the use of “Queen” among gay men - “Queen” embodying all of the worst stereotypical behaviors of gay men.
While it might be useful among the members of the affected community, isn’t it harmful in the long run?…
It is amazing to me that people still think only black people are poor (and that all black people are poor) and only black people benefit from anti-poverty programs. Indeed, it’s my understanding that it was the case during the New Deal that African-Americans didn’t qualify for many of the government benefits. But people seem to believe that anti-poverty programs are huge, and that they represent the handing over of exclusively white-generated revenue to exlcusively black recipients. It’s bizarre.
One of the things that makes race so complicated in this country is that race is a marker of class, so it’s hard to separate the two issues. No matter what their actual backgrounds, a black person is automatically assumed to be lower-class until proved otherwise (and it has to be proved over and over again) and a white person is automatically assumed to be middle-class until proved otherwise.
So for a white person to act like “white trash” isn’t threatening to other white people because it’s automatically assumed that they’re an outlier, an exception to the rule that white people are middle-class. But a black person who acts badly is assumed to be acting “naturally” because, hey, they’re all members of the underclass, so anyone who acts middle-class is the exception.
We’re having a national conversation on race every day. Too bad almost all of it consists of wingnuts like Buchanan shouting “Shut up shut up shut up!”
Odd how Patrick the Loose Buchanan talks of these programs in such glowing terms, when he’d do away with all of them if given half a chance.
Pat Buchanan really should be preserved - in a museum, where he can be trotted out every time some dumb fuck like Tony Snow says racism was finished in the ’60’s.
Put him in an all-white suit and stand him next to the “whites only” drinking fountain in Jim Crow exhibit at the Museum of Global Apartheid Regimes.
Chris Rock… well. rocks.
An elderly black patient of mine in Baltimore used to come visit me in the lab after he had finished his checkups (had survived prostatic cancer; I had drawn his blood before surgery and we struck up a friendship); we would usually go have a cup of coffee and sit for a bit once a month.
We would share the newspaper, gab about this and that… one day, he told me how angry it made him sometimes to watch the some of the younger black men ruining their lives with drugs and other criminal activity. In his opinion, it was as if they were spitting in the face of all of his generation. It was the only time I had heard him say the word ‘nigger” and it shocked me- then I realized, because goodness knows I have alot of white trash relatives, that we both were pissed at the lack of class. And when I told him that and gave some examples of my own “in-laws and outlaws”, he agreed with the similarity.
I had heard co-workers call each other that, sometimes teasing and sometimes as a chide, but it was the first time I had heard it used by a black person disdainfully and/or angrily.
Left_Wing_Fox, you hit the nail on the head. Someone upthread mentioned being shocked by the routine, but I’ve encountered more whites who love it, and as you said, use it as an excuse for using the slur.
Actually, Rock’s routine is just a variation on a very old trope in which a white person declares that there are both black and white ni**ers. The funny thing is that I’ve never heard any of them declare that there are both black and white cra**ers.
As a rule, we don’t have to bear it - but when we do, it’s an eye-opener. In St. Louis, I worked for a black-owned/woman-owned IT company. The owner told me in no uncertain terms that a.) I was the first white guy she’d ever hired, b.) that she wasn’t entirely comfortable hiring me, and c.) future hires of white guys would depend on how well I did.That last point was often said jokingly, but there was more than an edge of truth to it - her clients tended to be majority-black entities, and she’d had a few white contractors work for her who couldn’t get past that.
Those were some good years, but definitely very educational.
Sheesh, I’m sure you’re aware of the concept of familiarity and context. That is, if your name is Robert, your mom may still call you Bobby because she always has, your high school friends might always think of you as The B’ster, but in your professional life you go by Robert or sometimes Rob. So if a new colleague–or your boss–insists on calling you “Bobby” or “The B-ster”, that’s not going to be OK, and “But your mom calls you Bobby!” isn’t a real argument.
So it’s really not all that puzzling that the same words have different meanings depending on who says them, and in what context.
Thank you for pointing that out. As I was reading the story I was thinking “If those women were white, they’re what my mother’s family [who are Southern working-class whites] would call white trash.” It’s class, and more than that, a particular kind of behavior associated with class. Because if those three women were carrying take-out food from The Slanted Door, were wearing expensive designer clothes and were yakking on their iPhones, people would certainly loathe them just as much. But there wouldn’t be that element of what-do-you-expect-from-their-sort.
A better comparison might be “I like gay men, but I hate faggots.” I’ve heard that a lot from gay men.
That’s something that’s always struck me. The fact is, African-American culture is very Southern — even as it took root in Chicago or Harlem. The fact that white liberals feel comfortable slamming Southern whites (I can understand, and frankly, I’m guilty too) has always seemed like a dodge to me. It’s a way to be able to get away with the cathartic contempt that only bigotry can provide — but still be righteously “hating hate.” I call bullshit.When I lived in Seattle, I twice heard conversation ridiculing the eating of catfish, worse yet, fried. (My own parents did this when we moved from Baltimore to Texas when I was 9.) These were people who took a very strong stand against racism; their comments were meant to disparage those who are white and Southern (and therefore, invariably racist pigs, right)?
I didn’t bother to point out that they were actually making fun of soul food. The irony was too delicious, though not nearly as delicious as fried catfish itself. When it’s not greasy, that is.
It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.
Yeah, because running your own society in your home country is not as good as struggling as a sub-human intruder in a Western European world.
This reminds me of the time Allan Bloom came to my college for his Closing of the American Mind lecture series. That particular book was one of the first of the “waaaaah! Multiculturalism is destroying Western civilation/How come there’s not a white history month?” genre. He railed through his lecture at the ridiculous “liberals” putting oral traditions and non-literary art on the same level of Shakespeare, and how academia gives too much credit to these backwards tribal societies in Africa.
In the Q&A, I asked him if maybe some Americans are going out of their way to acknowledge the achievements of tribal societies because they felt guilty about what American settlers did to the Native Americans. His response?
“Well, I think our problem was that we didn’t properly educate the American Indians.”
I asked him who the hell asked us to “educate” them. (He blathered something about “what if they’re eating their children” and dismissed the whole discussion with “Dallas grows the strangest radical feminists” or something.)
Because I was taking History of the Native Americans classes, I knew Bloom was full of shit and his “they’re eating their children” was hyperbole beyond the known limits of stupidity. But you know, since none of our “regular” history classes covered anything like “what did Native American cultures look like before we fucked them up?” and Bloom’s bullshit goes unchecked.
I really, really want to see “black history month” focus more on pre-colonial African history, so that when Buchannan et al pop off with “Black people are soooooo much better off since slavery!” it triggers the bullshit detector in everyone, and not just those few who have studied the subject. (Actually, I want to see that kind of topic covered in regular world history classes, but I’m willing to start small.)
mnemosyne, “race as a marker”, etc., reminds me so much of my own parents (two white Greatest Generation folks who grew up in Pennsylvania and Michigan). My perceptions of class and status were so skewed, partly because my family usually lived in white, lower middle class suburbs near Detroit. We lived there, we weren’t visiting or stationed there or conducting anthropological research, and yet my parents persisted in reminding us that, as my mom said (and this is a direct quote), “We like to think we’re a little better than the other people on our street”.
I guess this was partly because my father went to a small college on the GI Bill, and got a job teaching elementary school (the district let him get his teaching certificate concurrently). So they were educated. But not a lot.
But one couple they knew from college, a black couple, were among their closest friends for years.* These two people went on to get doctorates in education. They always looked so elegant and they knew about travel, and were well-informed, and continued to live in a difficult part of Detroit because they were devoted to their neighborhood. In other words, these two people were way more than a few rungs above my parents in terms of education, taste - class - and yet my parents considered them equal and appropriate friends. Had my parents met a black couple who were actually their peers, that couple wouldn’t have been good enough.
Crap. Should I post this? Is this part of the discourse on race? Pam, please delete this if it’s embarrassingly off-topic.
*btw, I do not know that this couple considered my parents as among their closest friends. My parents have always been kind of obnoxious. Everybody says so. Being obnoxious transcends race, which is what the bus driver didn’t seem to comprehend.
Crap. Should I post this? Is this part of the discourse on race? Pam, please delete this if it’s embarrassingly off-topic.
No, it’s not off-topic. Your assessment that your parents would have considered a couple of equal education and socioeconomic status as inferior is probably on point, because it fits into the theory that you have to be “superblack” (think Sidney Poitier in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner) to impress or “gain parity” with whites who have digested the stereotypes.
That Chris Rock routine has become a red flag for me - I work in a bar in a suburb of NYC and anytime that routine is mentioned its by white men looking to justify their own racism. (”I’m not racist - I just agree with Chris Rock!”)
I don’t find what Rock says shocking, but I do see similarities between what he says and what family members say about Chasidic and Ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities. Basically they will rail against “THOSE” Jews and assign all anti-Semitic stereotypes to them.
As far as I can tell, its a way to not deal with racism by othering a segment of the larger community.
I don’t know how to deal with it at work, I don’t know how to deal with it in my relatives. I usually walk away…
It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.
Am I the only one who is also picking up the “Africa is a mess because blacks can’t run things” message from Pukecannon? Kind of like “gee, we did the slave thing, but it was only for their own salvation with Jesus and their own good”.
Never mind that Africa is all messed up because the legacy of european colonialism. Yep, the can’t govern because they are black! Not because they are paid extremely low amounts to extract their own rich resources. Not because the continent’s power structures were torn down and reorganized for the benefit of leaching out resources and promoting infighting. Not because power reverted to hand-picked dictators who would continue to do business with colonial rulers once the Europeans washed their hands of all the costs of governance.
I haven’t read the comments yet, but what I want to say may go anywhere.
Dear Pam, thank you so much for all the thoughts you have provided about race since so long ago. I am not American and I believe that racism, a universal and probably identical phenomenon at its core, is expressed in slightly different ways across the world. But what you write, however local now and then, is always thought-provoking, interesting, to the point, and susceptible of generalisation. You (and the commenters) have taught me so much.
The lunacy surrounding Obama’s discourse has totally proved your point: discussion is desperately needed. It’s not just these ravings that you quote today, but the strange things that I have been reading in supposedly leftwing blogs. Thank you, then, for providing a space of calm, cool and collected rationality. This is a vital discussion where we should try to lose the fear of appearing ignorant, foolish and, yes, racist - we should be open to be corrected and change our minds. I don’t usually comment, but if I had a question that sounded risky to me, I would ask it here or at your pad, where I know that I would be answered with clarity and all the kindness you could muster, which is a lot.
I don’t want to derail the debate - I just needed to get this off my chest. Thank you thank you, Pam.
I’ve never understood why a black person would want to use the N-word
The same reason my Polish college roommate had no problem using “dumb Pollack.” The difference between us was that the minute there was a black girl that she and her friends didn’t like, they called her a nigger. I NEVER even though about calling her or her fellow Poles, Pollacks.
Buchanan and the jackasses at Fox aren’t interested in having an honest discussion about race. They just want to rile a bunch of white resentment/racism to sink Obama’s campaign. That’s the problem with Obama’s speech, as great as it was, it gave an opening to these mofos to nitpick, race-bait, twist what was said in a very dishonest manner. And now pro-Obama people are practically forced to respond, to the vile trash that Buchanan is tossing into the discourse mix.
Obama supporters are about to get a wake up call in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, where Clinton is demolishing him among white blue collar voters. Obama will probably get the nomination, but he’ll lose in November if he doesn’t gain better traction among white (and perhaps latino) working class voters.
Let me say I do think delivering an anti-racist message to poor and working class whites is important. I’m very skeptical in can be done in the context of presidential campaign.
My perceptions of class and status were so skewed, partly because my family usually lived in white, lower middle class suburbs near Detroit.
My best friend is white, blonde, and grew up in Detroit. The city. I think it was near 7 Mile Road.
And yet every person she met who was also from Michigan asked her which suburb she was from. Every single one. Because, of course, no white people live in Detroit, and certainly no white people going to a private college in Los Angeles could possibly have grown up in Detroit. It took several reiterations of, “No, I’m from THE CITY” before they got it.
She’s the person I always think of when I think of how race and class intersect. If you stood her up next to Spike Lee, who grew up in middle-class Brooklyn and whose parents and grandparents went to college, and asked which one of them had parents who dropped out of school in the 8th grade and had a family of six kids, 9 out of 10 people would point to Spike. Because my friend is white and blonde, so of course she’s from the middle class.
Is anyone else surprised by the fact that Huckabee seems to be the only major Republican in the country that “gets it” with regard to the whole Wright flap?
A couple of points.
First, when wingnuts talk about huge gobs of dollars spent in welfare, they’re including social security in the mix. It’s worth reminding people of this particular lie, because there is no means test for social security. It’s a program for everyone, based on the truism that programs for the poor end up being poor programs.
Second, one issue that needs more exposure is the reasons for a greater rate of incarceration for black folks. I haven’t ever tried to dig into the issue… has anyone crunched the numbers and done the research to figure out root causes? Has anyone put together an accessible explanation?
I know that a great many people think that the only reason there are more black folks in jail is because they commit more crimes (e.g.,Bill Bennett).
I blame a combination of racial profiling, the dr*g war, and the fact that poor people can’t hide their crimes as well as rich people.
Two more points:
If the liberal/left wants to deliver an anti-racist message to working class whites, they need to stop sending well-off college professors (like Dyson, Robert Jensen, Tim Wise) as the messengers. They inevitably start the conversation with how privileged whites are, and how they need to give it up. The conversation is just doomed from the beginning.
Also I do think a conversation on race and crime is important because clearly this a source of a lot of racial tension.
And certainly not because the europeans restricted the education of the locals in their colonies so that some newly-independent countries didn’t have a single damn citizen who could do so much as double-entry bookkeeping.
The legacy of the slave trade also messed things up horribly because the europeans typically employed africans to do the raiding and in-country transportation. So you had a whole population of locals whose wealth rested on a foundation of selling their neighbors’ bodies on an industrial scale.
poor people can’t hide their crimes as well as rich people.
Also, can’t defend against them as well. Lawyers are expensive, and good lawyers are even more expensive.
Great thread. I have a lot of disconnected thoughts.
On the Chris Rock routine - seeing how my dad (white, upper-middle-class, retired) eats it up has been very unnerving to me. My dad loves to make broad generalizations (not just about race, but about everything) and this gave him permission to do so, in his mind. Pam is totally right that Rock is making a point about class distinctions, that not every black person is criminal or uneducated etc. And that’s a point that obviously needs to be made to many people. But she’s also right that it skirts the issue of the underclass and how we think about people who are members of it.
I think that one of the things that needs to be teased out more is the emotional/moral/intellectual responses people have to poor people of their own race and to poor people of other races. Should we be judging? Should we not be judging? It is really hard to talk about it without making generalizations or rationalizations. There’s so much that’s tied together - race, class, behavior. So we can disapprove of the way some poor people (especially, it seems, poor young people) act, while still saying that it’s not about disapproving of their class or race because lots of other poor people of that race DON’T act like that (for example the hardworking, churchgoing widow). If I think, well, the behavior of those girls on the bus is alien, distasteful, and embarrassing to me, but maybe I shouldn’t judge them because I haven’t walked a mile in their shoes, does that insult the people who HAVE walked in those shoes and don’t act “like that?” I don’t actually think it does insult those folks, but perhaps others would disagree. And who is to say that acting “like that” (especially the loud talking) is any worse than my own social norms (quiet talking)?
I guess the question I am trying, ever so clumsily, to raise is, How do we/should we talk about the intersections between race, class, and behavior?
Apologies if this is a double-post; I waited awhile and it didn’t show up, so I’m re-posting.
Great thread. I have a lot of disconnected thoughts.
On the Chris Rock routine - seeing how my dad (white, upper-middle-class, retired) eats it up has been very unnerving to me. My dad loves to make broad generalizations (not just about race, but about everything) and this gave him permission to do so, in his mind. Pam is totally right that Rock is making a point about class distinctions, that not every black person is criminal or uneducated etc. And that’s a point that obviously needs to be made to many people. But she’s also right that it skirts the issue of the underclass and how we think about people who are members of it.
I think that one of the things that needs to be teased out more is the emotional/moral/intellectual responses people have to poor people of their own race and to poor people of other races. Should we be judging? Should we not be judging? It is really hard to talk about it without making generalizations or rationalizations. There’s so much that’s tied together - race, class, behavior. So we can disapprove of the way some poor people (especially, it seems, poor young people) act, while still saying that it’s not about disapproving of their class or race because lots of other poor people of that race DON’T act like that (for example the hardworking, churchgoing widow). If I think, well, the behavior of those girls on the bus is alien, distasteful, and embarrassing to me, but maybe I shouldn’t judge them because I haven’t walked a mile in their shoes, does that insult the people who HAVE walked in those shoes and don’t act “like that?” I don’t actually think it does insult those folks, but perhaps others would disagree. And who is to say that acting “like that” (especially the loud talking) is any worse than my own social norms (quiet talking)?
I guess the question I am trying, ever so clumsily, to raise is, How do we/should we talk about the intersections between race, class, and behavior?
Part of the issue with race come down to the fact that the Repubs have managed to use class to keep poor wihites convinced it’s in their interest to maintain a seperation. Poor people have more in common than the middle class no matter what their race, but poor whites continue to believe that with one lucky break, a bit of education, a better job, they can simply step into the middle class. Blacks have a much better understanding that it’s going to take a great deal more than that to become middle class, that in fact they have to be better than middle class to accrue any of the benefits of the middlbe class. I think that’s why poor whites continue to vote repub and against their own self interest. They refuse to believe that the divide is just as big for them. They think a little more money and I could be there. The divide is actually much bigger and much more subtle.
My dad used to make the mistake of assuming that all of Michigan was full of black people because they make up a large percentage of the population of Detroit. When the husband and I were first together, we went to the UP for a long weekend. I was telling my dad about the trip when we got back and mentioned that we got a lot of dirty and disapproving looks from old ladies for being an interracial couple. He remarked about how strange that was because there are so many black people in Michigan. I had to explain to him that outside Detroit and the other larger cities there, the state was mostly rural and white and we’d get the same reaction there as we would back home.
And on the ‘black people and niggers’ thing–if I had a dollar for every time I’ve had to hear one or both of my parents making those kinds of remarks, I’d be very wealthy. My mom in particular, who for some reason regards herself as very enlightened regarding race, constantly goes on about ‘those black people’, you know, ‘the ones who listen to rap music and steal things.’
I’ve also gotten a lot of racist comments about my husband that are meant to be complimentary. He’s Sri Lankan, but he’s very dark (a lot darker than a lot of black people I know). When I first brought him home to meet the family, several of my aunts and uncles (and my parents) went on and on about how intelligent and well spoken he is, and then added, ‘but he’s not really black, though’, as if African ancestry would have made him any less intelligent or acceptable. And my sister, whose live in boyfriend and ‘baby daddy’ really is African American, gets all sorts of backhanded remarks about him. It almost all comes from our parents’ generation (very few of our cousins think anything one way or the other about either of our relationships), but it’s entirely ridiculous.
If the liberal/left wants to deliver an anti-racist message to working class whites, they need to stop sending well-off college professors (like Dyson, Robert Jensen, Tim Wise) as the messengers. They inevitably start the conversation with how privileged whites are, and how they need to give it up. The conversation is just doomed from the beginning.
I’ll agree with you on that one. Though I’m not necessarily offering myself up, I think finding someone who isn’t an academic who actually thinks about the issue from the perspective of an average person is what is needed to bridge the gap. It’s not unlike dealing with homophobia. People are much more likely to be swayed into dashing stereotypes by getting to know someone LGBT - you know, someone who’s not an activist, but your next-door neighbor who wants to be able to visit their partner in the hospital.
I think most of these “Archie Bunker” voters have little contact with blacks outside of their workplace (if they are even any there), and thus the only images they see are perp walks or academics who they cannot relate to telling them what they should think, or that it’s time to give up white privilege that these voters don’t believe they have. That’s disastrous strategy.
I do think that Obama was making headway into these voters until the Wright controversy — they got a glimpse of blackness that intimidated them; and they are now incapable of hearing the idea that Obama’s goal is to move past the static beliefs of Wright in regards to race. It also provides an easy out to say that they can’t vote for him now, and feel comfortable with that assessment.
“I do think that Obama was making headway into these voters until the Wright controversy — they got a glimpse of blackness that intimidated them; and they are now incapable of hearing the idea that Obama’s goal is to move past the static beliefs of Wright in regards to race. It also provides an easy out to say that they can’t vote for him now, and feel comfortable with that assessment.”
I immediately think of my parents, my (now deceased) grandparents, and all of the other on-the-edge-of-overt-racist white people I know and have known over the years. And I can’t say you’re wrong.
I guess that’s the fundamental question of 2008 - Would those people ever really have voted for Obama? Or were they just hunting for that excuse to vote against him, an excuse happily supplied by the Reichwing in order to pull another presidential coup…?
I don’t know the answer, but I’m really afraid of what we’re going to learn in November…
Re, Africa’s problems:
Let us also not forget the stupid boundaries the colonialist powers drew. As well as the destruction of the wisdom of ancient cultures by Muslim and Christian cultural imperialists.
The one silver lining: This whole situation will probably quiet conversations about whether this country is more racist or sexist. Answer: both.
Ben:
I’m sure there’s that, plus a variety of other factors (are you including prosecutorial discretion in racial profiling?). What I’d like to have (in addition to world peace, universal compassion, and a pony) is a site that shows the specifics in a way that helps people understand.
Buchanan claims that blacks are 7 times more likely to engage in criminal behavior than whites. If you pressed him on all of these points, maybe he’d be “generous” and admit that this could account for perhaps twice the rate of conviction and incarceration, but that still “proves” that a black person is three and a half times more likely to be a criminal, and it’s not “white America’s fault” that they made this choice three and a half times as often.
So somehow, there needs to be a way to counter that meme.
And, I’m embarrassed to realize that I don’t know how to do so. I don’t know where to look for the numbers, much less how to analyze them.
I had seen that routine by Chris Rock before.
I think it reveals a lot about American black culture, especially considering his audience seems to be heavily black, and are laughing their asses off at Chris Rock’s comments.
But is this sort of thing new? I’m white, and I despise white trash with a passion.
LongHairedWeirdo:
How do you counter it? With facts like this:
http://www.centralmaine.com/news/stories/030905overcrow.shtml
My home state of Maine has gone from 96.9% white to 96% white in the past decade, a fairly flat rate. Essentially, we’re a white state with blacks making up one percent of our total population.
Yet our jails and prison system are terribly overcrowded, with one of the fastest growing incarceration percentage rates in the nation. Gee, maybe skin color has NOTHING to do with whether or not one is a criminal!! Maybe it’s a matter of drug/alcohol abuse, poverty, class or pathological factors.
But of course, Buchanan and his ilk would find some sort of excuse for this as well…
Moderation is good… in moderation… Louise’s turn in the Spamulator. Wheeeeee!!!!!!
“…Louise’s turn in the Spamulator. Wheeeeee!!!!!!”
Hope you didn’t just eat a big meal…
Nah, I’m fine… but a bit woozy and dizzy! That was fun; have no idea why everyone gripes about the Spamulator so much.
Now the patented Bush Administration War Zone “Mission Accomplished!” Tilt-a-Truth is another matter- that ride makes me really nauseous. I dunno how the Republicans manage to hang on and not lose their lunches.
“Now the patented Bush Administration War Zone “Mission Accomplished!” Tilt-a-Truth is another matter- that ride makes me really nauseous.”
I know what you mean - I’ve been on a constant dramamine drip for the last 7-years…
When you drop a whole group of people into a 450 ft. deep pit, and then lift some of them (those that happened to be alive at certain historical moments) 300 ft., if you have a certain twisted mentality you congratulate yourself for “uplifting” these people while they still have great difficulty climbing the remaining 150 ft.
“I blame a combination of racial profiling, the dr*g war, and the fact that poor people can’t hide their crimes as well as rich people”.
“I’m sure there’s that, plus a variety of other factors (are you including prosecutorial discretion in racial profiling?). What I’d like to have (in addition to world peace, universal compassion, and a pony) is a site that shows the specifics in a way that helps people understand”.
Your wish…
http://www.justicepolicy.org/images/upload/map.swf
From an excellent diary over at BlueNC by Kosh:
It seems the main big problem with the conversation in this country is that a lot of white people have a problem not thinking in terms of group for oppressed groups.
What that means is, many white people get stuck at a point wherein they meet someone who actually fits the stereotype or doesn’t fit the stereotype and that person becomes a stand-in for all people of the minority. Usually, one person fitting a stereotype serves as an excuse to flee the responsibility of constantly fighting your own privilege and run screaming into “they’re all like that” territory.
There really is no one doing the same in the opposite direction. White people will never face that sort of thing even if they let themselves be paralyzed by the idea that someone might (the common white guilt trope of “But I, personally, wasn’t responsible for the big historical crimes against your people”). By and large, as default, white men will always be afforded rights as individuals and treated as their own entity.
Blacks, women, asians, latinos, etc and all the various combinations thereof don’t. They are the group in the eyes of whites and their actions not only have to burrow through the biases, but must come with the intense pressure of having to be model.
The biggest problem currently, well maybe not the biggest, but definitely a major hurdle, is this inability of whites to understand systemic oppression. There is this want to jump straight to “judging as individuals” without introspection into how whites view these individuals in terms of the group and all of the baggage that comes with. There is also class and conflating class, but that stems from similar blank slate, faux equality issues. Middle Class can be individuals, lower class are the group.
P.S. I think another big issue is this competition of oppressions game. There are a lot of people who are oppressed in one category, but oppressors in others who when asked to examine a privilege in one category and their role in it, immediately shrink to a topic where they are the oppressed and become dismissive to the oppressed of the original topic to hide that privilege.
No oppression can be lifted, no conversation can start, until we as people can look where we are in an oppressor role and learn to accept and face that. It is unsavory. It may not make us feel moral. But by exposing it, dealing with it, is the only way we become moral.
But is this sort of thing new? I’m white, and I despise white trash with a passion.
Congratulations! You have what is known as CLASS PRIVILEGE.
Now that we are in CLASS, please turn to the section on examining one’s own class privilege - and how having money, connections, access to healthcare and education, and role models contribute to a sense of entitled superiority at having attained certain goals from a head-start position.
Oh my goodness, did anybody else hear Lou Dobbs say that 99.5% of Americans are not racist, or some such garbage yesterday? Tony Snow 2.0…
Divergent Dana, that’s because Racism is Unamerican!
Mnemosyne and Ms. Peach Pie: OMG, the place-ness of Detroit and the not-Detroit part of Michigan. This is truly awesome. It is why I am always careful to say that I grew up near Detroit: growing up in Detroit is not a status I can honestly claim. Black or white, you earn the right to say “I’m from Detroit”. (By the way, I spent my early teens in a suburb located at 8 1/2 Mile Road.) My parents’ college friends spent the 1967 “blind pig” riot huddled on the floor of their house to avoid stray gunfire. I haven’t been to Michigan since Watergate Summer, but it is my understanding that Renaissance Center aside, much of Detroit still bears the scars of 1967.
How we talk about this: I think one avenue has always been to get people to recognize the exceptions they make. Black people are scary - but not that guy I work with: he’s one of the good ones. Gay people are out to destroy society - but not Uncle Dave (or the guy who does my hair), or the “girls” who live across the street - I actually kinda like them. It’s got to resonate that often our “exceptions” aren’t all that exceptional. And doG knows it doesn’t help to switch in counter-stereotypes, like how much worse “white trash” people are. In the Detroit area, there was always a certain amount of contempt for the “Ypsituckians” (Ypsilanti plus Kentucky) - white Southerners who came north to work during WWII and stayed. If we could just get it that after observing the requirements of basic human respect (a great leap forward, that), it’s a case-by-case assessment.
Sometimes all I want to do is give the whole world a snack and then put them down for a nap, while I watch over them.
I think residential and education segregation plays a big role too. I’m white and I work in a big city, with a very diverse set of co-workers and an internationally diverse set of colleagues. I spend my days with West Africans, Eastern Europeans, Southeast Asians, and American-born folks of many ethnicities and all class backgrounds. I commute on public transit and my last two employers have been explicit about looking as hard as possible to recruit candidates who are not all from the same (white, privileged) background. I spend a lot of time dealing with institutional barriers and the variety of human beings, such any given Ethiopian I meet doesn’t tend to become a stand-in for all Africans everywhere.
In contrast, my sisters live in ultra-white suburbs, work in 90%-white settings, and can go days without interacting with people of color in any meaningful way. They’re liberals, and they would bend over backwards not to be racist as they understand the word, but their actual real-world interaction with people of color, and especially black people, is limited to: service workers, former (social work) clients, and other generally poor and poorly-off folks.
That’s a long and meandering way of saying that I think that the a partial remedy for thoughtless racism is lots and lots of exposure to people from different ethnic backgrounds, such that you don’t think of any one of them as The Black Guy or The Jewish Woman. And the more people buy houses and send their kids to school to avoid poor folks, and the more poor = proxy for black, the less likely that is to happen.
BELOW — IS WHAT WAS SENT TO FOX NEWS
Wright controversy is also a FOX fabrication
Please do yourself a favor and spend a few minutes of your time to see and hear the FULL SERMONS of Obama’s Pastor and then let your conscious speak. As a Christian this is your moral duty. Hope fully you as FOX EXECUTIVES will then pass this on to Hannity & Co-conspirators.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvMbeVQj6Lw
Re: God Damn America
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOdlnzkeoyQ
Re: The chickens have come to roost
I read watch your TV on a regular bases Yes! in Politics (people, newspapers etc.) often differ in opinions. This is natural human trait. BUT to manipulate and give out false news and info is very distressing especially when it concerns ones faith.
I am a non-christian & it does bother me when Christians bash other Christians with false accusations. May God bless you and open up your heart. If you have to say something, do it —but do it without a prejudiced mind.
As reporter you will do what is right. - Blog this email to as many as possable!
PS: VERY IMPORTANT : Worth checking this out
Neo Nazi/White Supremacist Hal Turner Confirms Friendship And Kinship With Sean Hannity of FOX NEWS.
Reported by Ellen —Just Google “News Hounds”
dear ms. kate,
as proud white trash with bad teeth and cheap tattoos, i must inform you, i now love you.
—-
as to pat’s b.s about pell grants and medicaid, i glow in the dark like casper and i currently very much enjoy my pell grant, my illinois state map grant, and if my appeal goes through i will enjoy my medicaid even more. oh, and my pasty white dad has spent his adult life getting medical care at the VA hospital, and living off of unemployment until he was able to go on disability, and he supplemented that income by dealing drugs and growing pot in our backyard.
poor, on some type of public assistance, and criminal can come in all colors.
Divergent Dana. Of course, this is the same guy to whom no racist trope about Mexican immigrants is too unbelievable, unsupported or blatant to spread on national television.
Azatlan maps from the CCC? Oh yah.
Leprosy myths? Yep.
Refusal to integrate? Higher crime rates? You got it.
So yeah, maybe only 0.5% of the population dresses up in sheets and nazi costume, but unless you do you’re not “racist”.
Michigan is the most segregated state in the union, no? I grew up in a small German Catholic farm town outside Lansing (8 last names in the phone book, I kid you not) and then went to college at the University of Detroit. We had an Interracial Forum on Harmony at UofD. Looking back, it’s embarrassing how much I didn’t get it about my own privilege.
Southern bias and prejudice against African Americans are strongly intertwined in a lot of northerners. Many of the major stereotypes of the two groups overlap. So, for a lot of people it’s become “I don’t hate blacks, I hate southerners.” The fact that those of us who are also progressives have serious, legitimate issues with evangelical culture adds another dimension to the problem. For example, the prejudiced view that southerners and blacks are uneducated is often defended by the reality of the anti-science and anti-intellectual positions of evangelicals. Intellectually, it’s fairly easy to keep these things sorted in their proper boxes – “prejudice against individuals” vs. “legitimate criticism of institutions”. However, emotionally, it is difficult not to conflate the two.
Yes–it is true that the one demographic group it is still perfectly OK to stereotype are Southern whites. Even the most “open-minded”, “progressive”, “liberal” people will still make comments presuming that ALL people from the South are uneducated, Bible-thumping, racist, and talk like Granny on The Beverly Hillbillies.
The media, of course, perpetuates this–when is the last time you saw someone on TV who “just happened to be Southern” versus embodied a “Southern stereotype” (even if the show is set far from the South?)? Designing Women is the last (only?) TV show I can think of that shows “incidentally Southern” characters as thinking and intelligent; otherwise you only hear a Southern accent (outside of the VERY rare characters such as those played by Emily Proctor on CSI: Miami) is in a walk-on role where the character is meant to be Uber-religious, bigoted, or (most of all) uneducated and rubish. I challenge anyone to find a “left wing” blog other than those actually written by Southerners that does not,at some point, make derogatory, stereotypical comments about people from the Southern states.
Sorry, but stereotyping is stereotyping; Assuming that someone from Alabama is going to be a bigot and preach to you about Jesus is NO different, than assuming an African-American is going to steal your iPod out of your desk drawer.
“I always wondered if that particular use of the N-word was similar to the use of “Queen” among gay men - “Queen” embodying all of the worst stereotypical behaviors of gay men.”
A better comparison might be “I like gay men, but I hate faggots.” I’ve heard that a lot from gay men.
Actually, as a gay man, I agree with the first one–we oftne use “Fag/faggot” as a “homeboy” sort of way, but “queen” implies specific (negative) stereotypical traits. Though I guess there are also those who use them in the other direction.
Michigan is the most segregated state in the union, no?
West Michigan actually has some towns with a high percentage of blacks (Muskegon Heights, Benton Harbor), and some rural areas like Baldwin, settled in the early years of the 20th Century as a resort for blacks. Oddly, conservative bastion Grand Rapids had a black mayor as early as 1971