NQ First Responders: UK on Racist America, Joe Klein on Racist America, and Michael Wolff on Racist America plus a Chappelle’s Show classic (VIDEO)
By LisaB on September 18, 2009 at 12:01 PM in Current Affairs
1) The Telegraph (UK) takes a look at “racist America” and isn’t so sure the label sticks.
But wait a minute. Mr Obama convincingly prevailed over John McCain in last November’s election, an event that many American liberals argued could never happen in “racist” America. He has, moreover, not been shot by a redneck, giving the lie to an almost routine pre-election assertion in Europe that a black man could never be elected President, and if he was, he would be assassinated.
The election was a little over 10 months ago. Has America really turned around and stumbled back into the sulphurous swamps of racial hatred?The short answer is no. Mr Obama is becoming a much less popular figure than he was when he entered office, partly because of the usual laws of political gravity, but also because of the unrealistic expectations he encouraged and the number of mistakes he has made.
———-
Similarly, Mr Obama has been anxious to avoid being boxed into the category of “first black president”. But he foolishly waded into a controversy over the arrest of a black Harvard professor by a white policeman, trying to score an easy political point by criticising the seemingly blameless officer.More seriously, Mr Obama is the leader of a Democratic party that is now coming dangerously close to proclaiming that any fervent opposition to him must spring from a racist impulse.
So, it’s not just the racists in the US who see this for what it is. Thank heaven.
2) Joe Klein at Time tries to redefine racism, since the old definition doesn’t seem to get what he wants.
First of all, I tried to make it clear that I wasn’t talking about classic white-black racism, though elements of that are present, to be sure. My sense of the teabaggers is more complicated: they are primarily working-class, largely rural and elderly white people. They are freaked by the economy. They are also freaked by the government spending–TARP, the stimulus package etc.–that was necessary to avoid a financial collapse. (I’m not sure Keynes is taught in very many American high schools.) But most of all, they are freaked by an amorphous feeling that they America they imagined they were living in–Sarah Palin’s fantasy America–is a different place now, changing for the worse, overrun by furriners of all sorts: Latinos, South Asians, East Asians, homosexuals…to say nothing of liberated, uppity blacks.
In that sense, Barack Obama is the apotheosis of all they fear. He is a child of what used to be called miscegenation–a mixed marriage. His father was a Muslim, his mother was sort of a hippy. She raised him in Hawaii, which is just barely American and in Indonesia (which is very suspicious).
Dadgum. Could the guy be more condescending? How could Joe Klein of Time magazine have the slightest idea what “freaks” a rural, elderly working-class low-melanin person? Generalizing much?
Maybe he thinks he’ll scare people by using such words as “apotheosis” and “miscegenation.” Certainly this little piece is full of slurs, suggesting these people are nearly too stupid to live and they see high school as the apotheosis of education. And Hawaii is a scary place. All those evil tiki idols (I saw that on The Brady Bunch).
Racist, ageist, classist Tool.
3) Over at Newser, Michael Wolff says that the problem is really semantic. You just need to use something other than the “r-word” to label somebody who disagrees with you.
Since all those racist people clearly aren’t Bull Connor reincarnated, perhaps a better word would suffice to describe them, with the added benefit of not having to defend use of “racist” to describe nearly everyone you know.
Has anyone, besides the self-aggrandizing loony fringe, ever actually admitted to being a racist? Nobody ever says, black people are so inferior (or when they are effectively saying this, they have a baroque rationale). Or, ohmygod, you’re right, it hadn’t occurred to me, I must be a racist. (At least when you accuse someone of being an anti-Semite, you can sometimes sense on their part a moment of self-doubt. Am I?)
When you accuse some of being a racist, they stare you down. You’ve gone over the line. You’re too crude—or else you’re a paranoid fantasist.
How dare Wolff assume someone might not appreciate being called a racist? All racists should know what they are and meekly accept the label – even if it’s news to them. Of course, since it’s likely to be news to the individual racist that s/he is one, Wolff kindly offers a “definition” on his terms.
Racism now is less about virulent intolerance than lingering suspicion and discomfort. It’s existential more than atavistic. We’re talking about some pretty primal sense of competition, about fear of change, and fear of the future, and everybody’s own vast disappointments and unhappiness, which are somehow not helped by there being important black people.
It is one of the singular perceptions of the Obama people that there was no political value in the notion of racism and that, in fact, the imputation tended to unify racists in their insistence that they are not racists. Accordingly, the White House is acting very cool about Jimmy Carter’s weighing in on the subject—and even rolling their eyes.
“Singular perceptions.” Yeah, singular all right. And no, I don’t agree. But this idea of racism not knowing it’s racism has been discussed before.
Last October, one of WaPo’s best wrote a column saying that BO’s defeat in the November election would be only due to “unconscious racism” among whites. So, that meant ANYONE could be racist. I covered that one for NQ in “Who Are the Racists and How Do You Know?”
Here’s WaPo:
If Obama loses, I personally will feel disappointed, frustrated, hurt. I’ll conclude that a fabulous opportunity has been lost. I’ll believe that American voters have made a huge mistake. And I’ll think that an important ingredient of their error is racial prejudice — not the hateful, snarling, open bigotry that terrorized my parents in their youth, but rather a vague, sophisticated, low-key prejudice that is chameleonlike in its ability to adapt to new surroundings and to hide even from those firmly in its grip.
I said:
So a racist doesn’t even have to know he’s a racist? He can hide it from himself and unconsciously come up with fake reasons not to vote for Obama? So anyone not voting for Obama will have to spend the rest of whatever time is devoted to hashing out this part of American history trying to prove a negative.
———-Saying racism is the ONLY reason Obama might not win assumes both that Obama is completely unassailable as a candidate and that a majority of whites are unassailably racist in their hearts. Neither is true.
———-Saying a national election can be lost due to (white) racism indicts a majority of that population before any vote is cast, particularly since no one can legitimately point to exactly WHICH whites would be responsible. So, they’re all potentially guilty. That’s simply prejudice.
Well, it’s still prejudice, no matter how carefully you label it and no matter how carefully you select the population you dislike.
4) Since we’ve all been talking about race in the last few days, I thought I’d post one of my favorite bits from the sadly defunct Chappelle’s Show. The classic Racial Draft. Note: NSFW – language and NOT PC.
| Chappelle’s Show | ||||
| The Racial Draft | ||||
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by Ronald Scott
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