Both Sides Now

There's a Saturday-night radio program out of Chicago that I listened to when I was in high school.  It featured a range of music I hadn't heard before, from show tunes to cabaret to folk to blues to jazz, and occasional standup.  Rock was the only genre it excluded, because there were plenty of other outlets for that.  I first heard Tom Lehrer on this show, Tom Paxton, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, and many other performers.  When I moved to Bloomington it was too far out of range to listen to, though I'm surprised I never looked for it when streaming became an option. When I moved back to northern Indiana last year, I tracked the station down on the Internet.  The host I remembered was long dead, but it continues in the same format.

I find it less fascinating than I did fifty years ago, probably because other stations and programs offer the same kind of musical variety, and the rock press and Bloomington record stores had encouraged me to range even further.  If anything, the program now seems parochial to me, with too many sanctimonious folkies preaching love and brotherhood and too many cabaret artists serving up toothless satire.

Last night the problem started with the song above, and I nearly shut off the station.  It's intolerably dishonest. What's wrong is summed up by a comment under another video of the song posted to Youtube: "i really wish people on both sides of the argument would listen to this song. if we want change, we MUST be that change".  It's a paradigmatic example of "both-sidesism": the song puts George Floyd on one side, and Derek Chauvin on the other, and blames them both equally.  It puts Andrew Jackson on one side, and the Cherokees trudging along the Trail of Tears on the other, and blames them both equally.  It puts Harriet Tubman walking to freedom on one side, and her former owner, deprived of his lawful property, on the other.  It puts Richard Speck on one side, and the eight student nurses he murdered on the other.  It puts the Klan on one side and the NAACP on the other side.  It's reminiscent of Brad Paisley and LL Cool J's infamous duet "Accidental Racist" with its iconic rhyme "If you don't judge my do rag, I won't judge your red flag" -- "that whole let bygones be bygones" thing, as Paisley put it.

Now, I admit that there is a problem with some people on the left (for lack of a better word) stereotyping people who may or may not be their antagonists, by assuming that all West Virginians are Donald Trump supporters, ignoring West Virginia's tradition of left-wing activism; or gloating that poor whites are suffering under Trump's destructive policies.  This is what Patricia Roberts-Miller calls "demagoguery", the radical division of people into mutually exclusive groups, with all humanity on one side and none on the other.  But rejection of these tendencies in no way obliges me to postulate that the racist and the anti-racist are equally at fault, equally intolerant in the same way.  Bigots have been pushing that false equivalence for decades, and it's not only fair, it's necessary to reject their tactic.  I don't quite know how to contend with someone who thinks that black people demanding to vote is as intolerant as white people refusing to let them vote, but if you grant them that claim, you've already lost.

Copeland didn't write "Uncivil War," as you can see if you last till the video's end credits: it was written by her producer.  But she chose to record it.  I think perhaps she didn't really listen to the words, didn't think through what she was singing.  That itself would be a moral failure.  The song itself certainly is.

Beat Me, Whip Me, Make Me Feel the Bern!

I first read John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me in seventh grade.  I found a paperback copy in a classroom at my junior high school, picked it up and began reading, and couldn't put it down.  I have a vivid memory of sitting there reading it in the failing light of late afternoon.  I believe it belonged to a teacher, who let me borrow it.  Which, now that I think of it, took some courage on his part, in Indiana in 1963.  What if my parents had objected?  The book's radical (for the period) racial politics were only one reason to worry about parental backlash in those days and that place; it also contained many sexual references, most of which I didn't understand very well at the age of twelve.

Since then I've read Black Like Me at least four more times.  Until recently the only book that equaled its impact on my understanding of American racism was Jonathan Kozol's first book, Death at an Early Age, which I read soon after it was published in 1967.  But perhaps "understanding" is the wrong word, though both books have a lot of intellectual content: they affected me on a gut level, ensuring that I would never tolerate white racism or give any credence to the excuses and rationalizations white racists make for their bigotry.  Death at an Early Age brought home for me what it would mean to children to lose the opportunity for education because racism gave them destructive schooling: even if the Boston schools Kozol described had been repaired and improved immediately, it would do no good for the children who'd passed through them.  Meanwhile whites dragged their feet to ensure that the destruction of children's hearts and minds would continue.  The issue of reparations is relevant here; reparations are needed not just for slavery, but for racist oppression that continues right down to the present.  

Black Like Me showed me what it was like to be on the receiving end of what Griffin called the "hate stare," to have to waste hours searching for a public restroom, a restaurant that would serve you, a bank that would cash your traveler's checks; to know that any white person could view you as their servant, and demand not only obedience but subservience, always with the threat of lethal violence if you didn't comply.  (It occurs to me now that any kid, of any color, knows what this is like.)

I was bothered, though, by a theme Griffin took up a couple of times in the book.  First the white doctor who helped him darken his skin, and later Griffin himself in conversation with an older black man, lament the bad behavior of many blacks that prevents them from getting equal rights.  The older man sums up the situation:

"... So a lot of them, without even understanding the cause, just give up.  They take what they can -- mostly in pleasure, and they make the grand gesture, the wild gesture, because what else have they got to lose if they do die in a car wreck or a knife fight or something else equally stupid?"

"Yes [replies Griffin], and then it's these things that cause the whites to say we're not worthy of first-class citizenship."

It seems to me that Griffin had it backwards here. "These things" don't "cause" white racists to conclude that blacks are inferior -- they're invoked to rationalize the conviction that racists already hold.  (Karen Fields and Barbara Fields hammered this point home repeatedly in their brilliant Racecraft.)  What occurred to me when I read these exchanges was that white men, and not only poor ones, also "make the grand gesture, the wild gesture" and die in car wrecks or knife fights or something else equally stupid.  Better-off white men like George W. Bush will simply be bailed out of the trouble they get into; white trash may not, but no one will argue that whites are obviously inferior because of their propensity for violence and self-degradation.  The misbehaving, self-destructive whites are pathological individuals, a few bad apples, not representatives of their race.  Since whites are unmarked racially, nothing they do can give them a bad name as white people, in mainstream (i.e., white) discourse anyway.  Later still in the book, Griffin points out to a white interlocutor that certain social problems cited against blacks also occur among whites, but neither goes near the implications this fact has for white supremacy.

After Griffin published his experiences, the backlash, while predictable (and he'd predicted it), was still chilling.  He was hung in effigy in his Texas hometown, and the standard threats of death and mutilation were phoned in by cowards.  Judging from later statements, some of which are included in the Griffin Estate edition I read this time, Griffin became much more radical about American racism than he was in the 1950s, and was harshly critical of white media that tried to use him to speak for African-Americans, while refusing to turn to African-Americans themselves.  Of course it's doctrine that blacks can't be trusted to talk about American racism -- as the white racist philosopher Antony Flew put it, they're "prominently positioned to discover racism," because they're "generously paid" to do so. 

Damn, there I go again, pissing myself off; but it's not over nothing.  I've been reading a number of things lately that both informed and infuriated me: not just Black Like Me and Racecraft, but Ira Katznelson's When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (Norton, 2005).  Katznelson details how white racists were able to hijack social programs, from veterans' benefits to the New Deal and the G.I. Bill, so that American blacks would be excluded from coverage.  In general, liberals gave in quite easily to their efforts.  So, for example,

The South's representatives [in Congress] built ramparts within the policy initiatives of the New Deal and the Fair Deal to safeguard their region's social organization.  They accomplished this aim by making the most of their disproportionate numbers on committees, by their close acquaintance with legislative rules and procedures, and by exploiting the gap between the intensity of their feeling and the relative indifference of their fellow members of Congress [22].

It didn't help my mood when, a few weeks ago, some (white male) Bernie Sanders boosters erupted angrily over Black Lives Matters' decision not to endorse a presidential candidate: "Cutting off the nose to spite the face, by not supporting Sanders at this important time ..." wrote one.  Another wrote, "This group seems to be wearing blinders, only focusing on what they want to see. It is a great big world out there and economics is always the key no matter what race or ethnicity you may happen to be part of. Senator Sanders appears to be focusing on income inequality which certainly affects at least 99 percent of ALL people. We can all work together or we can all go down the toilet together."

They were sure that a Republican would become President because of BLM's treachery.  So, I asked them, no one will vote if BLM doesn't endorse a candidate? Or everyone will decide to vote Republican if BLM doesn't endorse a candidate? No one is capable of making up their own minds?  I didn't get a satisfactory answer, just more fulminating about how these blindered traitors were giving aid and comfort to the Rethugs.

I can think of numerous reasons why BLM might choose not to endorse a candidate.  It might be, for example, that the organization was too divided within itself to select one.  Partisans love to claim that they are political realists unlike their airy-fairy idealistic critics and opponents, but this simple political reality escaped these guys' notice entirely.  Maybe neither Clinton nor Sanders, in their belated and rather resentful attempts to 'reach out' to communities of color, persuaded BLM that they really deserved to be endorsed.  Sanders has talked about "making massive investments in rebuilding our cities, in creating millions of decent paying jobs, in making public colleges and universities tuition-free, basically targeting our federal resources to the areas where it is needed the most and where it is needed the most is in impoverished communities, often African American and Latino."  This sounds very nice, and might have impressed me more before my recent reading, which taught me that white supremacists are very effective at making sure that such "massive investments" are structured so as to exclude black people, and that white liberals and progressives are not very effective at preventing these exclusions.  Sanders no doubt means well, but it seems that he doesn't realize just how "divisive" (the word he used to dismiss reparations) it will be to invest in communities and people of color as well as white ones.

This wasn't the first time I've encountered such authoritarian behavior among Democratic partisans during this cycle (leaving aside past ones), and once again I'm amazed by their evident belief that they can win votes for their candidate by insulting and abusing the voters they're ostensibly trying to win over.  Put simply: you want my vote, so you must give me a good reason why I should comply.  Attacking me, whether honestly or dishonestly, doesn't seem like a good way to persuade me.  Castigating BLM as ungrateful darkies doesn't seem like a promising tactic for persuading them to reconsider their decision.

Now, like Ta-Nehisi Coates, I intend to vote for Sanders in the primary and will surely vote Democratic in November.  Doing so doesn't mean I can't criticize Sanders, Clinton, or any other candidate or politician; and criticizing them doesn't mean I hate them or will vote Republican.  I'm not going to change my vote because some of a candidate's supporters are assholes.  But if I were Sanders (I'm not sure about Clinton), I would not be pleased to know that my supporters are behaving like assholes on my behalf.  It's curious, really: liberals and progressives like to fantasize that they are well-informed and rational as opposed to the idiot Rethuglicans, but they also believe that the electorate (everyone except them, I guess) are stupid and can only be won over by appeals to emotion.  Even if they're right about that, you win more flies with honey than with vitriol.

"Liberal" Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry

There's been an ongoing argument about the meaning of bigotry, focusing recently on some vile things said by the noted liberal actor (and bogeyman of the Right and of South Park) Alec Baldwin.  I've been following at Ta-Nehisi Coates's blog at The Atlantic, so I'll quote some of his quotations.  Baldwin wrote the following to a gay journalist who'd written something he disliked:

George Stark, you lying little bitch. I am gonna fuck you up … I want all of my followers and beyond to straighten out this fucking little bitch, George Stark. @MailOnline … My wife and I attend a funeral to pay our respects to an old friend, and some toxic Brit writes this fucking trash … If put my foot up your fucking ass, George Stark, but I’m sure you’d dig it too much … I’m gonna find you, George Stark, you toxic little queen, and I’m gonna fuck….you….up.

And there's more, much more.  Just one more quotation, though it's more comical than bigoted.  When Baldwin's show on MSNBC was canceled, he responded thusly:

But you've got the fundamentalist wing of gay advocacy—Rich Ferraro and Andrew Sullivan—they're out there, they've got you. Rich Ferraro, this is probably one of his greatest triumphs. They killed my show.

I had to look up Rich Ferraro, who turns out to be a biggie (Vice President of Communications) at the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, a media-watch organization that real queer fundamentalists consider far too easy to get along with.  I do, of course, know who Andrew Sullivan is, and while I have to giggle at how he'd react to being called a "fundamentalist," he doesn't fit Baldwin's description either.  It appears, however that in the same statement, Baldwin admitted, "And I have to take some responsibility for that myself", which shows more self-awareness than I expected, but is probably just empty pro forma "balance."

Read the post I quoted these from if you need more persuading that, supporter of same-sex marriage though he be, Alec Baldwin is a bigoted misogynist homophobic scumbag.  I really can't see why there'd be any disagreement on the question.  But there is.  (By the way, for a pretty overwrought counterattack, try this piece, which rants about "witch hunts," "the militant lobby" and the like.)

Coates has been discussing one persistent defender of Baldwin, a writer named Wes Alwan.  Alwan is very scrupulous about applying the word "bigot" to Baldwin:

These condemnations are grounded in a number of highly implausible theses that amount to a very flimsy moral psychology. The first is the extremely inhumane idea that we ought to make global judgments about people’s characters based on their worst moments, when they are least in control of themselves: that what people do or say when they’re most angry or incited reveals a kind of essential truth about them. The second is that we are to condemn human beings merely for having certain impulses, regardless of their behaviors and beliefs. The third is that people’s darkest and most irrational thoughts and feelings trump their considered beliefs: Baldwin can’t possibly really believe in gay rights, according to Coates, if he has any negative feelings about homosexuality whatsoever. The fourth, implied premise here – one that comes out in the comical comments section following Coates’ post – is that we are to take no account whatsoever of the possibility of psychological conflict. We refuse to allow ourselves to imagine that a single human being might have a whole host of conflicted thoughts and feelings about homosexuality: that they might be both attracted to it and repelled by it....
 
It is just as ludicrous to condemn people for being afraid of or repulsed by homosexuality as it is to condemn them for having violent impulses.

I believe I've written before that I object to "homophobe" being used as a moral condemnation because of its pseudomedical history and definition: if homophobia is a disease or disorder, as it supposedly is, then its victims are not morally responsible for their condition, any more than a schizophrenic is.  They should, of course, seek treatment.  I do use "homophobe" loosely, to imply that a person has a gut-level aversion to gay people and to homosexuality, but I also stress that homophobia in this sense is not limited to heterosexuals but is very common among gay people.  (That's not a terribly radical notion, it's shared by many Culture of Therapy gay people and allies under the rubric of "internalized homophobia."  Of course all homophobia is "internalized."  I suppose the term is supposed to mean that the subject turns the homophobia inward, on him or herself, but the internalized homophobe seldom stops there.)  For this reason, when I'm in the mood for moral condemnation I prefer to speak of bigotry, but Alwan doesn't like that word either.

But it should be obvious how ludicrous Alwan's defense is.  Baldwin isn't being condemned for having antigay "impulses," but for overt behavior, repeated over a considerable period of time.  As for the "worst moments" defense, Baldwin has evidently had a lot of them.  If they were really bad moments when he wasn't in control of himself and don't reflect his better self, he could apologize, seriously and abjectly (by which I mean, not the usual obviously insincere "apologies" offered up by celebrities for PR purposes), and give his critics reason to believe that he's trying to change his behavior in the future.  Instead Baldwin continues to blame his critics.  That's not going to work.  I can't help thinking that Alwan wouldn't extend the same generosity of spirit to a right-winger accused of homophobia or bigotry or racism, but that's okay -- we have Michael Kinsley to do that.

Additionally, on Alwan's logic no one could ever be condemned for bigotry at all.  The more extreme and irrational a person's opinions, statements, and actions, in fact, the more we would have to invoke the same "dark" mechanisms that produce violent and bigoted "impulses."  Again, I wonder if Alwan is willing to extend the same compassion to illiberal right-wing bigots, or if he reserves it for liberals alone.

Coates wrote again on this topic today, addressing Alwan's latest entry, in which he reaches for a dictionary and argues that "bigot" just doesn't fit.  But as Coates shows, Alwan selects the meaning that suits him, and the word is wide enough to include Alec Baldwin.  Alwan wants "bigot" to mean someone who's "unpersuadable," though Baldwin's reaction to criticism indicates that he's exactly that.  Coates goes on to point out that just as Baldwin is complex, so were many notorious white racists such as Strom Thurmond.  Of course, there's a similar panicky overreaction to calling racists by the proper label.  Alwan complained, as Coates quotes him:

I worried, when I published a long post defending Alec Baldwin against charges of bigotry for calling someone a “cocksucking fag,” that I ran the risk of being seen as defending the indefensible. I knew that if the post got any attention, readers who are unfamiliar with my reputation as a (hardcore) liberal might interpret it as a particularly sophisticated piece of crypto-conservatism or closeted bigotry. And I also worried that friends who know me better might wonder how it is I could possibly make such a defense: my motives would be suspect. Indeed, the point of Coates’ marking a portion of my argument as “bizarre,” “terrible,” and “telling” is to signal – without openly calling me a bigot, a ploy that would be too embarrassingly obvious – the fact that my motives are in question: I’m a white guy defending another white guy, not someone making a principled argument (no matter how wrongheaded) about what I believe to be right. I am, possibly, a closeted bigot, dressing up my bigotry in a sophisticated argument; not, as I intend to be, a self-critiquing liberal who wishes to hold liberals – for the sake of consistency, intellectual honesty, and fairness – to their own liberal principles.

Alwan's tangled up in his own apologetics.  I think it's obvious enough that in defending Baldwin's behavior he is "defending the indefensible."  That doesn't make Alwan a bigot, of course; it makes him an apologist for bigotry.  ("Apologist" means "defender," in the older sense of "apology."  It didn't originally mean saying you're sorry, it means making a defense.  If you read Plato's Apology -- his version of Socrates' defense speech at his trial -- thinking that Socrates told the Athenians he was sorry for corrupting the youth and denying the gods, you're in for a surprise.)   Whether Alwan's "a closeted bigot" I don't know, and I'm not saying he is.  But I don't see that he's a "self-critiquing liberal" either, self-critique appears to be absent from his discourse, along with "consistency, intellectual honesty, and fairness."

I got into this with some other commenters under Coates's earlier post.  Some people were arguing that calling someone is a bigot is a "global" condemnation of the whole person, with the implication that he or she can't change and will always be Evil.  I've run into this claim in past debates, and it always baffles me, because as far as I can tell Baldwin's critics assume that Baldwin could change his behavior if he wanted to, but he clearly doesn't want to.  He didn't claim that his behavior was a "worst moment," he denied that he behaved badly at all.  In that case I see no reason not to call him a bigot, even on Alwan's assumptions.

Another commenter claimed that you only call a person a bigot if you intend to cut off all contact with them.  I don't have any contact with Baldwin in the first place, and I'm not a fan of his work either.  But if I did, I would certainly cut him off and have no contact with him.  On the other hand, I know quite a few bigots, in real life and online, and I don't always cut off all contact with them -- on the contrary, I keep criticizing their attitudes, opinions, and behavior.  My judgment of them as a bigot doesn't assume that they can't change; I assume that they can change their behavior if not their attitudes, and I let them know that if they want to be around me in the future, they had better moderate their rhetoric in my company or I'll give them a hard time for it.  What surprises me, somewhat, is that these fine liberals apparently see criticism and shunning as nuclear options, extreme measures that they would never consider using themselves.  If this is true, and I don't entirely believe them, then I would say it doesn't speak well for them.

In the real world, I have spent (wasted?) a great deal of time patiently debating with bigots of various stripes, explaining to them why I think they're wrong, trying to answer their reasoning and self-justifications.  I don't cut people off impulsively, without a good amount of information about them, though I admit that as I get older and more experienced and can spot a bigot on the horizon, I'm less apt to let such people get near me in the first place.  And some behaviors, such as calling someone a cocksucking fag, set off enough alarms in themselves that I see no reason to withhold judgment on them for very long.  If someone wants to be regarded as a good person, he or she had better refrain from such behavior in the presence of strangers.  And no, being a supporter of gay rights (or civil rights), or having lots of gay (or black) friends doesn't give you a pass on using slurs.

Of course, bigots of various stripes have encouraged this kind of wishy-washyness, by wailing that "The accusation of racism is one of the worst things that anyone can call you in public life", or that "The word racist is truly hurtful. It’s not who I am. It’s not who I ever was. It’s just not fair. It’s just not right."  There is legitimate debate over just what racism and other types of bigotry are and how they work, but that's not what is going on here.  Rather the aim appears to be to define bigotry as something so monstrous that almost no one can fit the definition.  But the real mystery to me is why liberals are colluding in that endeavor.

The National Debt

Just a quickie before I go out to have lunch.  Ta-Nehisi Coates has another good piece on President Obama's speech about the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin.  The racist Right reacted predictably, just as Obama's fans did.  (I cite Coates because he's a supporter but can still praise Obama for doing something good without drooling.  He's also been very critical of the President's record on race; praise from him is earned.)

The New York Magazine article I linked to included a tweet by Ann Coulter, rather mild from her I thought.  But I began thinking about a statement about immigration Coulter made some months ago:

ANN COULTER: What did we—can I just say, what have we done to the immigrants? We owe black people something; we have a legacy of slavery. Immigrants haven’t even been in this country.

As I wrote back then, it would be interesting to know what Coulter believes "we owe black people."  What does Coulter believe we owe Trayvon Martin and his family? This remark was a rhetorical flourish, using African-Americans as a club to beat Mexicans with, not anything Coulter would stand behind.

There's another passage from Obama's speech that I want to quote; I thought Coates had mentioned it, but I can't find it now.  Here it is, from Garance Franke-Ruta's post on the speech:

Now, this isn't to say that the African-American community is naive about the fact that African-American young men are disproportionately involved in the criminal justice system, that they are disproportionately both victims and perpetrators of violence. It's not to make excuses for that fact, although black folks do interpret the reasons for that in a historical context.

So, if you encounter someone who asks some version of Neal Boortz' rhetorical question:

The answer is "Yes."  I've been hammering on several Facebook friends who've posted memes about this or that white child who was killed by brutal black men, and why didn't this story get national attention?  (The implication being "reverse racism," the Liberal Media only cares about Teh Black.)  The answer to that one, of course, is that when you check out those cases, you find that the killers were promptly arrested, tried, and usually convicted.  Rather different than what happened to George Zimmerman.

There was one exception, where a Grand Jury decided that the accused shooter should not face the death penalty because he's a minor.  There are other differences, as that Snopes post shows.  The final outcome of the case isn't known, because it hasn't yet gone to trial.  One revealing thing about the meme I saw was that it referred to the Grand Jury as the peers of the murdered baby's mother; I believe it meant to imply that her "peers" hadn't done their job correctly, had even betrayed her.  Oddly, I saw similar complaints by some supporters of Trayvon Martin about the jury that heard George Zimmerman's case, that they weren't a jury of Trayvon Martin's peers.  Juries are supposed to be peers of the accused, not of the victim.  But in this case too, police action was swift and more or less effective, very different from the killing of Trayvon Martin.  These memes end up proving the opposite of what their makers and sharers want them to prove.

The Perils of Paula Deen

I had hardly any idea who Paula Deen was until this recent storm broke.  The first I heard of her was when she revealed she has Type 2 Diabetes, which won her some criticism because of the fatty, sugary, unhealthy recipes she promotes; but it barely registered.

That's one of the pluses of not watching TV or following TV culture; the negative to it is that when someone puts me in front of a TV, I can't believe what I'm seeing -- it's like news from another planet or a really alien society here on earth, though less interesting.  When I was visiting a friend last week, he had The People's Court on, followed by an hour -- though it seemed longer -- of Spongebob Squarepants, which I'd never seen before either and which seems to me unfit for children.  Or for adults.  The main thing I noticed was that almost all the commercials in that time block were for physical-injury liability lawyers and paycheck-advance companies.  It told me a lot about the state of the American economy.  But back to Paula Deen, tied to the railroad tracks by Snidely Whiplash, and the PC Train is bearing down on her.

So I had a twinge of recognition when I heard Paula Deen's name being blazoned on the Intertoobz, along with the "N-word."  Not the word itself, you understand, the euphemism.  I still didn't care, but then Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a very good blog post about the controversy.  Coates is one of the best writers about race in America, and he's become one of my prime daily reads.  His commenters add a lot, and it helps that the comments are heavily moderated, by Coates himself and a couple of volunteers.  He wrote about Deen:

I confess myself refreshed to hear Paula Deen respond "Yes, of course," when asked if she used the word "nigger." We have conditioned ourselves with a kind of magic to believe that racism is a matter of kindness and prohibitive vocabulary -- as though a hatred of women can be reduced the use of the word "bitch." But what does a country which tolerates the terrorism of Southwest, Georgia expect? What does a country whose left wing's greatest policy achievement was made possible by an embrace of white supremacy really believe will happen to children raised in such times? What do we expect in a country where many find it entirely appropriate to wear the battle-flag of the republic of slavery?

He also quoted from a New York Daily News story which made it clear that Deen hadn't just used the "N-word."

Deen, talking at an event months before losing her job for using the "N-word," recounted how her great-grandfather was driven to suicide after his 30 slaves were set free.

"Between the death of his son and losing all the workers, he went out into his barn and shot himself because he couldn't deal with those kind of changes," Deen said at a New York Times event. Deen, owner of a restaurant empire, asserted the owner-slave relationship was more kinship than cruelty. 

"Back then, black folk were such an integral part of our lives," said Deen. "They were like our family, and for that reason we didn't see ourselves as prejudiced." 

She also called up an employee to join her onstage, noting that Hollis Johnson was "as black as this board" -- pointing to the dark backdrop behind her. "We can't see you standing in front of that dark board!" Deen quipped, drawing laughter from the audience. 

At the same event, Deen at one point described race relations in the South as "pretty good." "We're all prejudiced against one thing or another," she added. "I think black people feel the same prejudice that white people feel."

As Coates commented, "Here is everything from Civil War hokum to black friend apologia to blatant racism. And people at a New York Times event are laughing along with it."  And in comments to his blog post, some readers took it upon themselves to defend Deen: she's an old Southern lady, she grew up in different times, she doesn't mean any harm, she's not a racist, and anyway, she was raised to be racist, so it's not fair to pick on her.

I'm four years younger than Paula Deen, I grew up in the all-white Indiana countryside, and I don't see that her age is any excuse.  (Curious, now I think of it: the people who use that excuse for celebrities or themselves are generally the first to jeer if someone blames crime on poverty and deprivation: whatever happened to taking responsibility?  But they themselves are imprisoned by their upbringing and Society, it's not their fault, nothing is their fault.)  My parents weren't notably political, and while they would not have tolerated my brothers or me using racial epithets, they weren't very enlightened about race.  I was talking about this with another lifelong Hoosier last night, who's just about Paula Deen's age herself, and we were both wondering why we had reacted so differently to the Civil Rights movement, compared to our peers.  I speculated that one reason my parents never spoke disparagingly about blacks was that there weren't any in our vicinity.

In any case, I am an old white man who grew up in even more racist times in a state that has a long nasty heritage of white racism, including years during my parents' lifetime when the state was run by the Ku Klux Klan.  The area where I now live was a Klan stronghold, and still is to this day.  Yet I sided with the Civil Rights movement from the beginning.  Deen, a few years older, could have done the same, then or since, especially if she grew up knowing black people.  If she cared about them as much as she claims, if she saw them as family, she could have wondered why they were organizing for their rights; she could have sided with them.  She chose instead to stick with her white Southern racist heritage.  And yes, that is a lifestyle choice.

As I expected, a lot of my Facebook friends from high school are furious that Paula was fired by the Food Network.  One of them posted a close paraphrase of Deen's remark, quoted above, that "they" say the same thing about "us" that "we" say about "them."  Whether he was unconsciously quoting her or they were both plugged into the same collective unconscious, I don't know, but I don't say such things about "them," so don't include me in that "we."  One circulating meme complains that she was fired for something she did once, twenty years ago; which shows that they are not paying attention.  As the stuff I quoted above shows, it's about a lot more than that.  Another calls for boycotting the Food Network until they bring Paula back.  Today there were old white people quoting Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton to the effect that there are more serious things to worry about than Paula Deen's racism.

Should the Food Network have dropped her?  Or all the other sponsors who're bolting like rats deserting a sinking ship?  I don't know.  A lot of people forget that no one has a First Amendment right to have a television show on any given network.  The First Amendment right in that instance belongs to the network, not to its employees.  I've already spent more time on Paula Deen than she deserves, and I doubt very much she'll ever miss a meal.  To some extent it's true that Deen is a scapegoat; as Coates says, she's part of a larger pattern that includes her sponsors and much of the country.  I don't know if I would have fired her, but what gets me is the people who don't just defend her right to have her views, they defend the views themselves.  I could be persuaded that there are graver problems facing African-Americans today than the malign stupidity of Paula Deen, but I know the people who are defending her, and they don't care about those graver problems either.  The problem with Deen is that she is typical of many older white Americans, who wish the past sixty years had never happened.  Individually it's easy to see them as dinosaurs, dying off rapidly; but collectively they are a large part of the racial problem in this country.

Benign Malignity

Ta-Nehisi Coates had a great post at the Atlantic site last week. (I'm just now catching up with some unfinished posts.)

I want to highlight one of the comments on the piece, which read in part:

Unfortunately, acknowledging that you might be racist is akin to admitting that you're a pedophile in this country. So let's try it this way, though it's pretty basic and I don't mean to insult anyone. I think the point is that many white people experience the world as pretty benign. They are presented with, for example, more-or-less ample opportunity to get ahead if they work hard. When they hail a cab, they generally get a ride. When they ask a cop for directions, they don't get frisked, when they ask a bank for a loan, they don't get overly screwed, when they apply for a job, they get a fair hearing, etc. So when they see a disproportionate number of black people are poor, they think they are not taking advantage of the opportunities that are on offer and so define problems getting jobs, etc., as of their own making. They certainly don't think they bear any resposibility for the situation and resent policies that are specifically race-based. 

My immediate reaction was to agree, in part, and then to wonder when "acknowledging that you might be racist" began to be "akin to admitting that you're a pedophile in this country."  White racism has always been the historical norm in the United States.  (Saying that doesn't mean I think racism is unique to the US.  I'm just talking about my country, the country whose history I know best.)  It's perfectly acceptable to be racist, 'privately' among white people and in public as long as you refrain from using the N-word.  At worst it's an open-secret peccadillo, like Uncle Bob's mistress that everyone knows about but doesn't admit they know about.  As long as you don't talk about it, you don't have to take a stand.  Even those people who do openly throw around racial epithets, however, deny that they're racists and become indignant or distraught if someone calls a spade a spade.  Nobody cuts pedophiles the kind of slack that white racists routinely enjoy.

However, I disagree that white racists "experience the world as pretty benign."  (I say "white racists" instead of the commenter's "many white people," because the people he's talking about -- whites who claim that racial minorities are getting unfair special treatment -- are racists.)  From what I've seen and heard, racist whites don't experience life as largely benign.  On the contrary, they protest furiously that they have no privilege, that no one ever handed them anything on a platter, that they worked hard for everything they have, yet here they're being robbed by the government that spends their tax dollars on lazy welfare bums who want to sit at home doing nothing but expect to be supported.

While I'm talking about Coates, I also want to point out his response to a passage from one of Obama's speeches.  In 2007 Obama told a (presumably black) audience in Selma, Alabama:

Folks are complaining about the quality of our government, I understand there's something to be complaining about. I'm in Washington. I see what's going on. I see those powers and principales have snuck back in there, that they're writing the energy bills and the drug laws. We understand that, but I'll tell you what. I also know that, if cousin Pookie would vote, get off the couch and register some folks and go to the polls, we might have a different kind of politics.

Coates wrote:

But Cousin Pookie did vote -- at historic levels, no less. And Cousin Pookie's preferred candidate has taken that vote and continued about the business of busting all the other Pookies out there for things the candidate did in his youth. And those busts are happening at rates well beyond Pookie's other American neighbors. There is no reason to think this will change any time soon. That saddens me.

Obama used the "Cousin Pookie" trope several years before 2012, when black voters did come out in record numbers, so perhaps someone who wanted to could quibble with Coates on that point.  But I don't think that's important.  More important is what he goes on to say, that Obama's Presidency has underscored the useless of voting as a means of producing social change.  What did Cousin Pookie get for getting off the couch and voting?  Contempt from the man he voted for, who climbed to power on his back.  As an African-American icon, Obama is much more like Clarence Thomas than, say, Thurgood Marshall.

In Post-Post-Racial America

Ta-Nehisi Coates recently wrote an op-ed for the New York Times that has been getting some well-deserved attention.  He began with an incident that befell the actor Forest Whitaker in a deli near Columbia University, in Coates's own neighborhood.  An employee, suspecting Whitaker of shoplifting, insisted on frisking him in public.  Whitaker didn't call the police at the request of the employee, who was fearful of losing his job, but he lost his job anyway.

Some of the comments under the op-ed are appalling, like this one from "Scott" in Chicago:

I am starting to have misgivings about articles like these: All that is good in the world (that I have observed) comes from tolerance and a willingness to forgive. Nothing ever good stems from quests for perfection and purity.

That one got 764 recommendations.  I see no basis in Coates's op-ed for Scott's accusation that Coates is on a quest for perfection and purity.  It would be closer to the truth to say that Scott is demanding "perfection and purity" from the targets of American racism.  But I started to have misgivings about people like Scott long ago.

Then there was this one, from "Ross" in Rochester NY:

You cannot take one data point and extrapolate it into a conclusion. When you do that, you're guilty of the same behavior that allows people to see a black murderer on the news and conclude all blacks are bad people.

Of course there is not just one "data point", there are many.  This is a popular tactic: accuse the critic of being obsessed with one isolated incident, then as the isolated incidents multiply, change the subject: the critic is indulging in "reverse racism," or dwelling on events that happened long ago, or something like that.  But the attempts by many white people to minimize racism in the US constitute data points, with a multiplier effect as they try to deny the significance of the original events.

Then there's Jorg Lueke from Minnesota:

I hope that the author has recovered from his fatigue of good people. The attitudes of guilt, victimization, and anger, are understandable for a moment but they are not attitudes to live by if we want to live in a society where prejudgements no longer occur. The owner commited no wrong act and yet now both author and wife will spread negative feelings and emotions every time they see this deli potentially infecting their friends and children. Will that make things better? For what really? Because they read about someone else being treated poorly once by an employee? We need to work on living in the moment and acting in the momeent with lover, understanding, and compassion. Compassion for Forrest Whitaker, compassion for the Deli owner, compassion for the employee. Guilt and anger do not break the cycle.

Notice: "someone else being treated poorly once by an employee" -- the Gothamist article I cited above included a report by an eyewitness to the frisking on Forest Whitaker that she has "seen the guys there do this to a black customer before. I have also heard them say some racist crap about the Obamas too. It is unlikely I will be shopping there again."  So it's not "being treated poorly once", though how many times can you treat one person poorly before it becomes a problem?  Jorg Lueke seems to be notably lacking in "compassion" for people who must endure poor treatment constantly: he sees them as bitter complainers.  He also fails to show compassion for Ta-Nehisi Coates, who in the op-ed clearly expressed his conflicted feelings about what to do.

Best of all, "Ralphie" from Fairfield CT:

Yes racism is a terrible thing -- and to be called a racist, or have it inferred that you are a racist simply on the basis of your skin color is also a terrible thing.

This is what is known as false equivalence, as well as lying: Coates had not called anyone a racist "simply on the basis of the color of your skin."  (I've often encountered this tactic in online discussions of gay issues: if I refer to "homophobes" or "bigots", someone will accuse me of assuming that all heterosexuals are bigots.  Since I hadn't said anything like this, it becomes clear that they assume that "homophobe" and "heterosexual" are equivalent.  But they aren't: many heterosexuals are neither homophobic nor bigots, and many gay people are homophobes and antigay bigots.)  Ralphie goes on to express his belief that "we've made great progress over the last 50 years" -- against the resistance of people like him, I'd say -- and begs us not to "cast the 'R' word about as if it explains every unhappy event."  The "'R' word"!

Coates also posted to his blog at the Atlantic about the incident and the op-ed.  The discussion in comments there is much better than at the Times.  Like this comment, the first in the thread:

What I don't think white people understand is the collateral damage this causes to black people who have to deal with what Forest Whitaker went through, from a psychological point of view. You start to see ghosts. You think you see racism everywhere in your interactions with white people. For some, it becomes such a problem that is inhibits their own personal/career growth.

I'm a white person, and I understand that collateral damage at least intellectually.  I have tried to imagine what it would feel like to have grown up knowing that hostile people were looking at me, waiting for an excuse to yell epithets at me, or better, to get me alone in a secluded place and beat me up?  Or seeing me as a threat, just for existing in the space they consider to be theirs?  The closest I've come to feeling it has been some occasions when I was out for a walk late at night, and was almost the only person in sight on a street -- except for a woman who I could see gather into herself at the sight of me, not knowing whether I was a threat or not.  Some men get indignant about that; I don't.  It doesn't begin to compare to growing up black in America, and I'm not saying that it does.  Most of the time I'm invisible in white society; black people never are, from the day they're born.

Some would argue that I have a double standard here.  I've been asked what I would think, while I walked down an empty city street late at night, if I saw a group of  young black men approaching.  I would feel somewhat apprehensive, it's true, but no more than I feel when I see a group of young white men approaching.  The 18-35 age group among males commits most crimes, I believe.  But I have been out walking late at night in large American cities and passed groups of young black men who paid me no attention at all.

Coates commented in reply, "From a cold calculating position, even if it is racism you can't know. There's nothing you can do about it, so you shouldn't bother thinking about it."  But not thinking about it doesn't always work.

Someone else posted a great quotation from Martin Luther King that I will hang on to:

Now the other myth that gets around is the idea that legislation cannot really solve the problem and that it has no great role to play in this period of social change because you’ve got to change the heart and you can’t change the heart through legislation. You can’t legislate morals. The job must be done through education and religion. Well, there’s a half-truth involved here. Certainly, if the problem is to be solved, then in the final sense, hearts must be changed. Religion and education must play a great role in changing the heart. But we must go on to say that while it may be true that morality cannot be legislated, behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that is pretty important, also.
--Martin Luther King, Jr., Address at Western Michigan University, December 18, 1963

(You may remember, as I do, a distinguished white philosopher from England who couldn't grasp the point King was making here.)

Some commenters seemed to miss King's point (though maybe I flatter myself by supposing that I get it).  One said that "No, you can't use legislation to make people less racist but you can use it to erase the racism that was legislated into existence."  Another said that passing a law against lynching is "quite good enough."  King said, "I think that is pretty important, also", which seems to me quite different than "quite good enough."  King didn't deny that other institutions besides the law must be active against racism -- he was rejecting the claim that because the law can't do everything, it can therefore do nothing and shouldn't be tried.

I don't know how much progress we have made against racism in the US.  Certainly there has been some, but not as much as most white people evidently want to believe.  Many racists have learned to avoid blatant expressions in public, but they keep leaking out anyway.  To some extent the Internet has facilitated their exposure, as people assume that what they say online is "private," even as it is publicly accessible; so you get incidents like the racist Hunger Games fans who were furious to find that some of the characters were black, and were played by black actors in the film.  And then you have "a fellow on Twitter by the handle of 'YesYoureRacist' who simply re-tweets people whose tweets are of the form 'I'm not racist, but [horrible thing]' -- it's an astonishing thing to see them all collected in one place."  Or the white Louisiana judge who refuses to marry 'interracial couples': "I'm not a racist, I just don't believe in mixing the races that way."  Besides, he has lots of black friends!

I don't have any conclusion today, because there is no conclusion.  This story is going to be in progress for a long time.

It Was a Hot and Steamy Day

I was about to say that I don't feel like writing today, but that's not quite it.  I don't feel like thinking today, and writing a serious post requires thinking.

Of course I'm far from alone in this, though I may be rare in recognizing and admitting it.  A former IU student and current Facebook friend said yesterday that the US (and our allies, of course, he added) needs to occupy Pakistan to keep more trouble from erupting in that part of the world.  I replied a US invasion of Pakistan would make things worse, not better; indeed, US aggression is a major source of trouble in that part of the world.  I didn't say we should invade, he protested; I still haven't had the energy to reply that you can hardly have an occupation without an invasion first.  It's my liberal friends who keep reminding me of Molly Ivins's slap at some Texas pol, that if his IQ sank any lower we'd have to water him, and that's what makes me feel like shutting down my brain indefinitely.  I can muster more energy and enthusiasm for slapping down my right-wing friends' howlers -- one of them just reposted this cartoon this morning -- than the complacent babbling of the liberal ones.

So, having said that, let me just refer you to Ta-Nehisi Coates's fine article "Fear of a Black President," which includes these heartbreaking passages:

I asked [Shirley] Sherrod if she thought the president had a grasp of the specific history of the region and of the fights waged and the sacrifices made in order to make his political journey possible. “I don’t think he does,” Sherrod said. “When he called me [shortly after the incident], he kept saying he understood our struggle and all we’d fought for. He said, ‘Read my book and you’ll see.’ But I had read his book.”

And:

In her new memoir, The Courage to Hope, she writes about a different kind of tears: when she discussed her firing with her family, her mother, who’d spent her life facing down racism at its most lethal, simply wept. “What will my babies say?,” Sherrod cried to her husband, referring to their four small granddaughters. “How can I explain to my children that I got fired by the first black president?”

What makes it particularly awful is that Obama fired Sherrod based on the lies of the unlamented right-wing provocateur Andrew Breitbart, who was already known to be fraudulent.  Sherrod was fired by the first black president for no damn reason except his political cowardice.

Meanwhile, over at The Sideshow, Avedon quotes Bruce Dixon of Black Agenda Report, and comments:

Dixon recommends getting out of the two-party, lesser-evil box and preparing for something new. I don't know how to do that, but I do know that blacks and whites alike are "more unemployed than we've been in seventy years, and more imprisoned than we've ever been," and I'm horrified at every "progressive" who somehow thought it was more important to defend Obama's presidency than to defend the Democratic Party and the nation against this rightward push, to the point where even primary challenges to bad Democrats were out of the question. Paul Ryan and other Republican Horrors are people who the Democratic leadership actively protected against real challenges in their districts. The only reason there are any Republicans in Congress from New York is that the Democratic leadership makes sure that happens.

Dixon is right: The Republicans are giving the Obamacrats cover to pass a right-wing agenda. 

The True Pure Centrist commented that the trouble is that people don't know the good things that the Democrats have done: the New Deal, the Civil Rights Bills, Medicare, and so on.  I can't speak for everyone, but I'm fully aware of all Democratic conventions.  It's actually hard to be unaware of those things, because Democratic apologists keep reminding us about them.  So I doubt the general ignorance is as widespread as TPC likes to think.  The trouble is that the great accomplishments he mentions were made a couple of generations ago (Cthulhu, I'm old), and that the last two Democratic administrations have been doing their best to to undo those achievements.

Of course, there are always haters.  This ungrateful Negro, for example, just had to carp and complain and find fault even in the Democrats' glory days:

No president has really done very much for the American Negro, though the past two presidents have received much undeserved credit for helping us. This credit has accrued to Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy only because it was during their administrations that Negroes began doing more for themselves. Kennedy didn't voluntarily submit a civil rights bill, nor did Lyndon Johnson. In fact, both told us at one time that such legislation was impossible. President Johnson did respond realistically to the signs of the times and used his skills as a legislator to get bills through Congress that other men might not have gotten through. I must point out, in all honesty, however, that President Johnson has not been nearly so diligent in implementing the bills he has helped shepherd through Congress.

Of the ten titles of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, probably only the one concerning public accomodations -- the most bitterly contested section -- has been meaningfully enforced and implemented. Most of the other sections have been deliberately ignored.

...

I'm sure that most whites felt that with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, all race problems were automatically solved. Because most white people are so far removed from the life of the average Negro, there has been little to challenge this assumption. Yet Negroes continue to live with racism every day.

--Martin Luther King, Jr., A Testament of Hope, 1969

It isn't we professional leftists who need to be reminded of what the Democrats did in the past: it is the Democratic mainstream that needs to take stock and stop trying to dismantle everything their predecessors (however half-heartedly) achieved.