Currently viewing the tag: "Racism"

What the Crippity-Crap?

by Matmos on 31 March 2013

Just, what, yesterday, I opined re: my deteriorating ability to differentiate fact from fiction? Right? Well, screw that previous noise; the following takes the cake and the whole damn Sunshine bakery.

Via The Washington Monthly, here’s some snippets from KKK plans rally in Memphis Saturday to celebrate white peoples’ rights by Samanth Bryson, Scripps Howard News Service:

There is a lot to be angry about if you’re in the Ku Klux Klan.

As local leader of the Loyal White Knights, Edward the Exalted Cyclops organized a barbecue last month to make plans for Saturday’s demonstration to show that white people still have rights.

Edward curses sparingly, drinks rarely, and keeps his hair clipped short — his tribute to his old-fashioned Christian values. With a voice to match his hulking frame, Edward issues commands, not requests, and rarely bookends his sentences with “please” or “thank you.”

and

To Barker and Edward, the Klan’s agenda is pretty simple: Send the immigrants back where they came from, silence the homosexuals and the communists (known as liberals today), promote sobriety and abstinence, end abortion, and discourage the mingling of races in a way “God never intended.”

While Edward and Barker don’t dispute the Klan’s racist history, they deny they’re interested in harassing black people.

and

Eventually the talk turns to homosexuality, and Edward’s sister qualifies one of her statements by saying that they don’t necessarily hate gay people, just homosexuality. Edward rebukes her. Of course we hate ‘em, he says.

Somebody, please, tell me that article was a joke.

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Dude, Ixnay on the Etbacksway

by Matmos on 28 March 2013
Ketchikan’s KRBD recently broadcast a story about Congressman Don Young (R-AK). In one segment, Young waxed nostalgic about Tha Browns of his youth:
My father had a ranch. We used to hire 50 to 60 wetbacks to pick tomatoes, you know. It takes two people to pick the same tomatoes now. It’s all done by machine.
Today’s example of Republican Hispanic Outreach brought to you via The Mudflats with some side trips down other memory lanes by Shannyn Moore (“Asked for specifics, Young answered, “Buttf**king.””) and Alaska Ear (“Don explains seemingly contradictory comments to a TV reporter: “I don’t agree with what I said.”")
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TownHall’s List Of Racist Liberal Quotes As Pathetic As You Might Assume

by Lev on 27 March 2013

Conservative “humor” at its finest

This is the list. Check below the fold for a detailed scorecard. The gist of it is that only eight of the 25 count as quotes uttered by mainstream liberals that might be racist, at least possibly. The list itself almost refutes the premise (being, of course, that liberals are the real racists). The list consists of several distinct categories–undeniably racist quotes that are nearly as old as I am or that were uttered by “liberals” who are so obscure I’ve never even heard of them, quotes that aren’t racist but are troublesome (many of which were ubiquitous for a moment before dying with a shrug), factual statements or statements of opinion delivered with an attitude the writer doesn’t like, with the odd bit of hearsay and hilariously out of context quotes that can’t be racist because they make literally no sense because so much has been removed there is no coherent point. Obviously, this is done to ensure that the audience for this sort of thing feels the suggestion of racism alone, and naturally gives Hawkins the benefit of the doubt. Just goes to show how much work this whole “rebranding” is going to take.

What’s also striking about the list is how distant so many of the quotes are to the heart of liberal/progressive politics. C’mon, Ralph Nader is no liberal, though at least he’s famous. And the liberal/leftist split might not be as intuitive for a right-winger, so I wouldn’t press that point home. But the actual problem with this list is that, while many of these people are liberals, almost none of them have any power, or much visibility. Whereas, you can find sitting Republican officeholders who call the President of the United States uppity, that terrorists would be “dancing in the streets” should he be elected and that he discriminates against white people, that Obama ought to be opposed simply because he’s black. This is to say nothing of a certain former Senate Majority Leader waxing favorably upon the days of segregation, or all of Glenn Beck’s racial rhetoric on his defunct FOX News program, which ended not so long ago. These are considerably more bothersome than some writer nobody’s heard of saying white people shouldn’t vote, or thirdhand quotes about Rev. Joseph Lowery’s views on white people in the afterlife, or that Harry Reid used the word “Negro” once, which mostly just proves he’s really old, or Joe Biden’s famously tortured relationship with the English language. The latter of which refutes the whole premise–Biden is given two “racist” quotes, but if they are intended to “prove” that Biden secretly fumes at all those damned furriners, why would he accept the post of Vice President under a black man? Spend so much time with him, maintain such an attitude of respect and affection for him? I suppose it’s possible in the way that Oliver Stone’s theory of the JFK assassination is possible, but it’s not exactly the most simple or plausible explanation, especially given Biden’s complete inability to keep his feelings to himself. Which is not to deny the existence of liberal racism across the board, I sure as hell know that there’s some out there. But that’s not something I worry about because those people do not wield significant power at this point. Among conservatives, they do.

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Shittiest Places In The U.S. Include…

by Metavirus on 21 March 2013
Guess which geographic area has the most miserable people?
Oklahoma Louisiana Alabama Arkansas Tennessee Mississippi Kentucky West Virginia
So hatred, racism, resentment and missing teeth don’t lead to happiness and contentment?? (via)  
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It’s Shit Like This….

by Matmos on 15 March 2013

…that’s bringing this situation to a head.

The ever-dependable Louie Gohmert (R-Daycare) at CPAC (from Raw Story via TPM):

Vietnam was winnable, but people in Washington decided we would not win it!

(Disclaimer: as much as I like giggling at Gohmert Pyle’s duh-ficiencies, he’s clumsily after making an argument for total commitment to a war once it’s been decided that a war is to be fought. So in context, while still bad, it’s not as bad as it sounds, armchair-quarterback-wise.)

However.

Regardless of original intent, bringing up Vietnam in the same sentence as “winnable” reinforces the notion that the speaker is (and by serial association: CPAC attendees, conservatives, and the GOP) a) living 40 years in the past, and b) stupid.

Odd bit of synchronicity over t’American Conservative, with Rod Dreher quoting Dan McCarthy:

Although the party still sees Ronald Reagan when it looks in the mirror, what the rest of the country sees is George W. Bush — much as post-Vietnam Democrats continued to think of themselves as the party of Franklin Roosevelt when in the minds of most Americans they had become the party of Johnson and McGovern.

So, Republican opens mouth, “something” falls “splat” to the floor, his specific audience cheers, and everybody else points and laughs. Same ol’, same ol’.

The only thing missing here from the Bumper Fun Book of Republican Rebranding’s big list of things to avoid is “bigoted,” and that’s implied by the fact that Gohmert was rending garments over a missed chance to carpet bomb the Yellows and the Browns.

And, of course, fellow CPAC attendees gettin’ all white power and whatnot doesn’t help:

Scott Terry of North Carolina, accompanied by a Confederate-flag-clad attendee, Matthew Heimbach, rose to say he took offense to the event’s take on slavery. (Heimbach founded the White Students Union at Towson University and is described as a “white nationalist” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.)

“It seems to be that you’re reaching out to voters at the expense of young white Southern males,” Terry said, adding he “came to love my people and culture” who were “being systematically disenfranchised.”

Smith responded that Douglass forgave his slavemaster.

“For giving him food? And shelter?” Terry said.

(More on slave days being grand from Metavirus.)

None of this is news, tho’ — it’s just one more week-long public meltdown in a years-long crisis of seeming and being. The party leaders, the seemers, think they just need to seem a little different, and all will be well, when in fact their glamours are transparent:

pithy-sounding statements backed up by nothing, meant to imply nothing, defended by nothing.

The party followers, the be-ers, the 27 percent, think they just have to be a little harder and all will be right — when in fact, what they are being is repulsive.

I’d like to have some kind of pithy resolution to this, but search me. We’re always going to have the former feeding off the latter; we just need to learn how to better manage the damage. From Lucretius, On the Nature of Things (transl. William Ellery Leonard, The Portable Roman Reader, ed. Basil Davenport, Penguin Books, New York, 1977, p.154):

For dolts are ever prone
That to bewonder and adore which hides
Beneath distorted words, holding the true
Which sweetly tickles in their stupid ears,
Or which is rouged in finely finished phrase.

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Slavemaster-Run Healthcare Keeps Blacks Addicted To Government Teat

by Metavirus on 15 March 2013
There was a brouhaha at CPAC when some rednecks asserted that slaves had it good cuz their owners put a roof over their heads – but this bit in particular stood out for me, from a presenter opining on Frederick Douglass’s upbringing:
Douglass was “born below poverty”. What does that mean? “Slavemaster-run health care,” Smith says. “Slavemaster entitlements.

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The Black Guy in the White House

by Matmos on 13 March 2013
From “S.C. Doctors Urge Lawmakers to Expand Medicaid Eligibility” in the Charleston Regional Business Journal, here’s a moment of clarity from Medicaid-expansion backer Kris Crawford (R-Florence), who describes expansion opponents thusly:
The politics are going to overwhelm the policy. It is good politics to oppose the black guy in the White House right now, especially for the Republican Party.”
Ah, yes, “the black guy in the White House,” or as I like to call him, “The President of the United States”. I can’t imagine how much that rankles folks in certain quarters, or as I like to call them, “The South”. Via ThinkProgress by way of LR.
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