Tag Archives: race

07.13.16
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“Blacks? They Love Me. Blacks All Love Trump.”

Consolidating the African-American vote.*

Trump, to O’Reilly:

Asked what he would say to African Americans who feel as though the system was biased against them, Trump drew an analogy with his own campaign.

“Well, I’ve been saying, even against me the system is rigged,” Trump told O’Reilly. “When I ran for president I could see what is going on with the system, and the system is rigged.

“I can really relate it very much to myself.”

So sayeth the man who has been bailed out of every spectacular failure, every collassoal money loss, and who has used every trick available only to the rich to stay our of debtor’s prison and, indeed, make even more money. The system is rigged against him. He can relate.

In other news, Trump is polling at 1% with African-Americans.  And that’s Trump-outlier Quinnipiac, which has him at 33% of Hispanics, which is…not generally considered accurate. So I’m guessing 1% was as low as they could go, after getting a thumbs-up from Dennis Rodman, who wasn’t even asked. He just showed up.

It gets better!

Donald Trump is wildly unpopular among young adults, in particular young people of color, and nearly two-thirds of Americans between the ages of 18 and 30 believe the presumptive Republican nominee is racist.

Of course, as Twitter has shown us time and time again, believing someone is racist and believing that’s a bad thing are not always hand-in-hand, even distressingly among younger people.  Still, it doesn’t seem like there are enough.

That’s (note: above quote) the finding of a new GenForward poll that also found just 19 percent of young people have a favorable opinion of Trump compared to the three-quarters of young adults who hold a dim view of the New York billionaire.

S that’s reassuring at least. It’s sort of like when Adlai Stevenson was told he had the support of “all thinking people”, and he replied that while that was great, he needed a majority (how did he not win, again?). Except it’s the opposite, and can make us all feel a little better.

 

*Dennis Rodman is one of my favorite basketball players of all time. No disrespect intended.

07.13.16
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Trump’s “Moment of Silence” Lies on Dallas Shooter: Race Baiting Coming Loose and Dangerous

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Not Bobby Kennedy

On April 4th, 1968, Bobby Kennedy was set to give a speech in Indianapolis, to a largely black crowd, most of whom had not yet heard that Martin Luther King, Jr. was gunned down earlier that evening, shattering the last dreams of peace. If you listen to the speech, you can hear the shock and anger and despair billowing through the crowd as he breaks the news. He goes on the speak of love and anger, of violence and forgiveness. To quote him that night:

For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times.

My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.

And now Trump, last night, in nearby Westfield, to a crowd that was, I am assuming, not mostly black.

“The other night you had 11 cities potentially in a blow-up stage,” he said. “Marches all over the United States—and tough marches. Anger. Hatred. Hatred! Started by a maniac! And some people ask for a moment of silence for him. For the killer!”

There’s a lot going on there. Look at how he conflates the Black Lives Matter marches, post-Dallas, with the killed. They were “started by a maniac”. This is more than just saying that BLM should stop all activity in the face of the slaughter, as if injustice went away. That’s a common tactic. He’s not even saying that Micah Johnson was inspired by BLM: he’s saying BLM was further inspired by him.

That’s dangerous. Just as dangerous is his entirely bullshit claim that some people asked for a moment of silence for the killer. As TPM explains, this wasn’t even the only time he said it that day. He mentioned it to O’Reilly as well.

“It’s getting more and more obvious and it’s very sad, very sad,” Trump went on. “When somebody called for a moment of silence to this maniac that shot the five police, you just see what’s going on. It’s a very, very sad situation.”

So this isn’t an accident. TPM said “There were no media reports about anyone calling for a moment of silence for gunman Micah Johnson, though groups from Congress to the New York Stock Exchange held moments of silence for the victims of last Thursday’s mass shooting. Searches on social media for people making such calls also came up short.”

Now, maybe someone somewhere said something that only Trump was privy to, but even so, why bring this up? What purpose does this serve except to further stoke white anger and the law-and-order backlash? It seems likely that it is made up, like his “thousands of Muslims” celebrating 9/11, and it is cut from that same cloth. It is meant to stir up racial hatred and anger, and he knows that facts won’t matter. It’s a lie that can be repeated. And if someone dredges up some dark corner of the internet or some random tweet that makes it seem almost plausible, well, all the better for him. If they can’t, no big deal. It’s already out there.

There is no way to overestimate how dangerous this kind of rhetoric is. It’s not even a dog whistle. It’s pure division (while of course decrying division). It’s absolute race-mongering, and would make George Wallace proud. It’s appealing to the darkest heart of America. It’s jamming a knife in a suppurating wound, just to see what will happen.

You can’t get further away from Bobby Kennedy, and not just due to Kennedy’s eloquence and Trump’s monosyllabic turnip-truck pratter. (“Aeschylus? Good poet. Not great. Not classy.”) One man speaks to the best of America hoping to be worthy of it. The other speaks to the worst, hoping to drag us down daily into his despair, hoping to forever lost wisdom under the vengeful eye of a graceless god.

07.11.16
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A Quick Follow-Up To Deliberately Missing The Point

Times: 

John Jay LaValle, the chairman of the Republican Party in Suffolk County, N.Y., said Mr. Trump had been “on message and extremely focused” in the Saturday gathering.

“Mr. Trump has decided to deal with it head-on, like he does with all issues,” Mr. LaValle said.

“People are starting to see we have very serious threats around the world, and even some social unrest in America that, quite frankly, this administration is not keeping a handle on.”

Trump! 

Look what is happening to our country under the WEAK leadership of Obama and people like Crooked Hillary Clinton. We are a divided nation!

“This un-American Kenyan anti-colonialist terrorist-loving fist-jabbing Jay-Z-liking Mexican coddling real racist isn’t leading his cop-killing, thuggish, also real racists into unity and harmony with us. Divisive! Sad!”

07.11.16
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Missing The Point on Race Isn’t A Bug; It’s A Feature

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Breaking: this man has stupid things to say about race.

There may be no bigger example of deliberate and pernicious point-missery than the fake controversy around Black Lives Matter. At this point, anyone who says, “well, actually, I think all lives matter” is purposefully ignoring that “all lives matter” is the very point of BLM, in which the “matter” is doing the real heavy lifting. Indeed, the pseudo-ecumenical sophist is doing nothing more than maintaining a brutal status quo, in which black lives, especially black male lives, matter very little.

The thing is, that’s exactly the point. We saw this over the weekend, where many of the usual suspects followed the lead of Joe Walsh, only a little more toned down. (except, sort-of-interestingly, Newt Gingrich, though Pierce puts to rest the idea of Newt, man of reason.) There is perhaps no more surprising headline than the one in the Times this morning: “Rudolph Giuliani Lashes Out At Black Lives Matter.”

Giuliani has spent an entire career playing fast and loose with race and with white backlash. Anti-homeless and anti-squeegee campaigns were signifiers: you can take New York back (and make it great again). His police force saw many instances of shocking violence, and most of the steps that made the city safer were the result of positive action taken by his predecessors. That isn’t to say he didn’t do anything well, but his form of local authoritarianism was always more than slightly-tinged with race. Now that he is clearly never running for anything again, since America made it clear in 2008 that simply having been mayor on September 11th doesn’t qualify you for the big job, he’s free to unfurl his proudest banners.

“When you say black lives matter, that’s inherently racist,” Mr. Giuliani said in an appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “Black lives matter. White lives matter. Asian lives matter. Hispanic lives matter. That’s anti-American, and it’s racist.”

…

“They sing rap songs about killing police officers, and they talk about killing police officers, and they yell it out at their rallies and the police officers hear it,” he said.

Right, the raps! The rap singers with their rap songs!

Actually, you know what? While it’s always fun to make fun of people who say things like “they sing rap songs”, it’s actually sort of important, and not just because Giuliani is out of touch (as, to be clear am I). This is also deliberately missing the point, and doing so in a way that shifts responsibility. The anger inherent in some music is a reaction, not a cause, but it serves the purposes of race-baiters and reactionaries like Rudy to pretend otherwise.

It’s part and parcel of the execrable and odious charge that BLM is “inherently racist.” Saying that they shouldn’t stand up and say “our lives matter too” puts the onus back on the black people to accept what is happening to them, to accept a country that for hundreds of years has enslaved, hanged, oppressed, segmented off, red-lined, unjustly incarcerated for cheap labor, and murdered black lives. And well yes, as Giuliani and others point out, more black lives are taken by other black people, that’s also the point. We treat that as something terrible happening in some blighted community, and not as a national fucking tragedy. Not as something inherently wrong with America, but just with black people, who usually don’t live near the rest of us. We take a tongue-clucking anthropological remove, and then get offended when a movement demands of us not to.

This demand to get back in line is seen in other examples of point missing, like when Dan Patrick, Texas’s lunatic Lt. Governor (which seems to be the breeding ground of horrible people), said this:

“All those protesters last night, they ran the other way, expecting the men and women in blue to turn around and protect them. What hypocrites,” Patrick said on Fox News. “I understand the First Amendment. I understand freedom of speech, and I defend it. It is in our Constitution and is in our soul, but you can’t go out on social media and mainstream media and everywhere else and say that the police are racist or police are hateful or the police are killers.”

That’s perfect: the BLM protesters are hypocrites because they expect the police to do their jobs at all times. They expect to be protected by the police when there is danger, but also expect not to be unfairly harassed or arrested or beaten or murdered. Pick one or the other, hypocrites!

It’s easy to make fun of Patrick. But he’s not wrong, per se: he’s articulating a very clear worldview. If you are black, you should always listen to the police. The responsibility for your safety is in your hands, and that is unquestioning obedience. That’s the code. Police have power over all of us, but especially if you are poor or a minority. Then they have life and death power, always, and you have to respect that, and fear it, and don’t expect to change anything. When they say shut up, you better not think they said stand up, because then you’re dead. If you want even the barest modicum of protection — if you want police to do their jobs — then the price is unquestioning subservience, no matter what.

Again, these aren’t bugs in the thinking. It’s the whole point. For a lot of right wingers, the point of the police is to keep Them from Us, using whatever means needed. Reaction to that injustice is a deliberate provocation, and should be quashed. (This attitude is not the case, I should say, for the huge majority of the police, as you can see in the reaction in the Giuliani story).  That’s their story, and it is an American story. I won’t return the favor and say that’s just a right-wing problem. It’s part of our eternal and inescapable tragedy.

07.08.16
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The Dallas Backlash: Joe Walsh Makes It All Clear

H/T Slate

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I wasn’t calling for violence, against Obama or anyone. Obama’s words & BLM’s deeds have gotten cops killed. Time for us to defend our cops.

Joe Walsh is a dimbulb Tea Party punk who briefly became the face of yapping white suburban anger in Northern Illinois in 2010 before being put back in his place by Tammy Duckworth. He’s the voice of those who think that police don’t have enough power, who thinks that anyone of color who looks askance at a cop is a thug who deserves to get shut down, and who, it goes without saying, defends traditional family values.

The collar counties in Illinois go through spasms of reaction, like the seismic reverberations of white flight. Walsh rode that wave until it broke, but these horrible shootings (which now seem to be the broken reaction to police-based murder) are tailor-made for a racist like him. He’s one of those goons (who are also the entirety of the FOX News lineup, all of talk radio, and like 80% of elected GOP officials) who have wanted to bury Black Lives Matter since it came up, because an organized effort and consistent spotlight on systemic injustice makes them uncomfortable. It’s far better to imagine it a violent militant movement, with gun-toting cop-killing rapists around every corner. This plays right into his hands.

It also plays into the hands of Donald Trump, who has tried to rally the “Law and Order” white reaction to his side, with some success. Expect failed authoritarians like Rudy Guiliani to be all over tying this to Obama, and of course to Hillary, for not “defending cops”, as if anything Obama has ever said about it has been untrue.

What this does is allow any talk of black rights or black lives to be smothered in a sea of righteous anger. Your concern for your lives, it will essentially be said, is costing other people their lives, and their lives are, need we say, more worthy. They are the ones that matter.

Or, as Tommy Craggs said, ” A lot of subtext is going to become text in the next few days. Seems only right for Walsh to have gotten us started.”

Obama, and by connection Hillary, are “to blame” for this because they recognize that things aren’t right, and that we have a long history of violence toward black Americans. Black Lives Matter is hated because they refuse to conform to the official story, to the legend of justice. That’s why they have to be smeared. They have to be discredited. The mythology can’t stand up to the light.

The story is that official unwillingness to sweep police violence and the pervasive violence and injustice against the black community under the rug is un-American, and dangerous. Both might be true, but that tells you more about America than anyone is comfortable with.

06.24.16
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“Make America White Again” Landmarks On The Road To Hell

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2016!

The story of Rick Tyler, running for Congress in Tennessee’s 3rd, is a few days old already, which I know is eternity in internet time. But we’d be remiss not to mention it. It seems like most of the commentary, understandably, is of the “christ, what an asshole” variety. And he is! He’s one of those hateful flakes who keeps running and losing (unlike hateful Jeff Flake, who keeps winning), and amping up his message every time to make himself more known. No such thing as bad press, right?

But Jesus…

“For these reasons we are confident that a widespread and creative billboard advertising game plan could go a long way toward making the Rick Tyler For Congress candidacy both viable and a force to be reckoned with. Clearly we are in uncharted waters, in that there has never been a candidacy like this in modern political history. Of great significance, as well, is the reality of the Trump phenomenon and the manner in which he has loosened up the overall spectrum of political discourse.”

“The Make America White Again billboard advertisement will cut to the very core and marrow of what plagues us as a nation. As Anne Coulter so effectively elucidates in her book, Adios America, the overhaul of America’s immigration law in the 1960’s has placed us on an inevitable course of demise and destruction. Yes the cunning globalist/Marxist social engineers have succeeded in destroying that great bulwark against statist tyranny the white American super majority. Without its expedited restoration little hope remains for the nation as a whole.”

Now, stipulating that:

  1. It’s northeastern Tennessee, and not totally representative of America
  2. He doesn’t have a chance of winning
  3. The second paragraph is winger word salad, seemingly engineered from the snatches of talk radio that he picks from the gaping ether of his mountainous home

This is still scary stuff. Even in that 2nd paragraph, he gives ultimate lie to the conservative movement, not injecting racism into its normal language, but making plain that’s what has always been its animating force. It was a comforting story Trump laid bare as myth. And that’s the point of this.

He’s encouraged to lay out a nakedly racist billboard by the Trump campaign, and its success. That he won’t be successful doing so isn’t a contradiction of the awesome forces Trump, and Trumpism, have unleashed in our uncertain world.  (Don’t think this wasn’t essentially the Brexit slogan.)  If he tried to pull this shit in the 50s or 60s, there’d be a lot of people telling him it was pretty tacky, and no one would have tried it after at least the early 70s. Even naked racists like Helms and Thurmond knew they had to pretend there were other motivations to their salivating hate.

He won’t win. He won’t come close. And he has been condemned, in all quarters (though if Trump has been asked about it I haven’t seen). He’s a sideshow, after all, right? It’s just a slight stone rolling down a hill. But they all are, until it’s an avalanche. It’s always a sideshow, until the carnival has taken over the town, barkers running madly in the streets and the clanging sirens and blinking lights of the decaying midway blare through your window every night, exposing you to the nightmares of your soul.

06.23.16
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Brexit Quote of the Night: Labour and Immigration

Via The Guardian

Chuka Umunna, the London Labour MP, said that the referendum result highlighted “particular issues” for the Labour Party adding:

I don’t actually think for a lot of our supporters and voters sovereignty was quite the issue that immigration became. Why did it become such an overwhelming issue in spite of all the warnings of the experts? A lot of people said that you are saying this about the economy but we don’t actually feel we have a lot from that economy for the moment.

This is something, I think, we’re all learning not to underestimate. Economic issues matter enormously, but they matter this year, to an extent, in how they can reframed in an “us vs them” sort of way. The EU has been rent asunder by immigration, especially the Syrian crisis. This is a 100-yr fallout that isn’t just redefining the Middle East, but redefining Europe for a generation. America’s massive annexations in the 1840s are becoming the turning point of today’s politics. The world as we knew it for all of most our lives isn’t falling apart, but it is changing quickly, and when that happens, scapegoats are to be found, and demagogues can rally the dislocated.

I don’t think what happens there is what happens here. Too many differences. But the same issues are coming to ugly play in much of the “developed” world.  We live in the flicker.

06.13.16
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Racism and Obama’s Legacy: African-American Turnout in 2016

 

Grant Park, 2008

 

There are few things more annoying than when a white commentator starts to talk about “the black vote”, not in terms of numbers (which can be captured objectively), but in terms of psychology, because it not only assumes a familiarity with every black voter, but assumes that they think en masse. It certainly isn’t intentional racism, but it is a thrown blanket in ways we don’t do with other groups. The “white working class” is probably the broadest market segment for non-minorities, which shows the subtle racial distinction at play. We have “soccer moms” and “NASCAR dad” and so on, and then “the black vote”, and the “Hispanic vote”.  It’s pernicious, and assumes a group mentality in the place of actual examination.

That said, there’s no way Trump is going to get the black vote.

Lauren Fox at Talking Points Memo has an article this morning exploring how analysts don’t really expect a dropoff in the African-American vote, after the highs of Obama. That’s hugely important, because it can negate Trump’s perceived advantage in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and a few other rusty states where he hopes to get high turnout among the (white) economic dispossessed.

There are a couple of reasons for this. TPM talks about how this election is also about Obama’s legacy, which is accurate in a few ways. An election is always partly about the incumbent, whether he is running for another term or finishing up. 2008 was partly a repudiation of Bush; 2000 was about Clinton’s moral failings (the majority of the country still picked Gore, but he lost 5-4), 1988 was about Reagan, etc. In this case, where Republicans have made no bones of their desire to tear down any social progress made by the President, the legacy is even starker. They want to erase everything Obama has done.

It goes slightly deeper than that: they want to erase not just his policies, but his very existence. They want to destroy the thought that there was a successful black President, to make him a footnote. That’s been their driving goal, and there is no one more suited to that than Trump.

You couldn’t have picked a better candidate to remind everyone who cares about racial justice the huge stakes of this election. Trump of course rose to political fame for being the country’s top birther. He has demanded not just to see proof that Obama was born in America, which is flagrantly racist (he’s got dark skin! He’s not one of us!) but also, even more disgustingly, waged a campaign to demand Obama’s college transcripts. In a way, that is far more racist. Obama, of course, isn’t the brilliant and hyper-intelligent person most people see him as, see? He got into college through affirmative action, taking a spot away from “someone” who deserves it. He’s just another dumb…well, you know, right folks?

That’s the kind of campaign that Trump runs, that made him famous. He’s the one who says everything that can be said, everything that people who hate Obama not-so-secretly believe. He’s negating not just Obama’s political accomplishments, but his every achievement. He’s saying, plainly, that Obama doesn’t deserve to be here, that he’s President because of affirmative action, essentially. He runs a campaign of negation, making plain what other Republicans have been trying to do for eight years.

So there is that. But there is also something that Elijah Cummings, who might know more about this than I do, told TPM. “I think Trump helps drive black voter turn out. I really do,” says Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) “He has created more unforced errors than any politician I’ve ever seen…People question his judgement.”

Oh yeah, one thinks. That’s right: the “black vote” isn’t just about black issues, obviously. That’s what we were talking about up above. The “black vote” is made up of millions of humans, many of whom can see that a Trump presidency is terrifying. It isn’t just about Obama’s legacy or any of those issues. It’s about being an engaged voter. Maybe, at the end of the day, Trump’s legacy will be that we recognize that every voting bloc contains multitudes, and they can’t be reduced. That they contain humans. Humans who are horrified that such an unqualified ill-temepered racist chump could be President.