Alan Grayson says: "Now you know what the "T" stands for." http://t.co/dkynan345j pic.twitter.com/OvHJ3U4vw1
— billmon (@billmon1) October 22, 2013
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I like Alan Grayson, but then, verbal abuse has been a proud part of my peoples’ traditions going back many centuries.
Alan Grayson is definitely making being the Democratic Ann Coulter work for him: http://t.co/rEGFILmu89
— billmon (@billmon1) October 22, 2013
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Apart from discussing the proper use of rhetorical overkill and the concommitent application of fainting-couch-fu, what’s on the agenda for the evening?
Liberty60
A liberal who can throw punches?
NOT ALLOWED!!
ranchandsyrup
The stompee becomes the stomper. Well played AL. Well played.
Aimai
I wish he’d be more matter of fact amd less dpiteful sounding.
Lurking Canadian
It is clearly beyond the pale for Grayson to suggest that an organization waving Confederate battle flags on the White House lawn would have any sympathies in common with the Klan. I mean, the nerve of that man!
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Foul!
It’s in the Constitution, next to Calgary being part of the United States, that ALL Democrats must ALWAYS apologize for not being hard right conservatives.
Hilter accused his opponents for being racists.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
They had to send out that one black teatard to refute this. I imagine they’ve prolly got one black person in sheets at each cross burning the KKK does so if they are ever confronted with a spotlight and/or the press, (s)he can pull off the pointy hat and exclaim, “We’re not racists!”
SiubhanDuinne
“If the hood fits, wear it.” HAHAHAHAhahahahahahaha. Wonderful!
Punchy
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Godwin’d in 5. Nice.
JPL
@Liberty60: The repubs are so low, you can throw kisses and blow them over.
I’ve never been fond of socialism, communism, hitler, kkk statements because they become meaningless. Just use the facts because anything else detracts from their atrocities. It’s one reason I never liked Alan Grayson because he is making it about him and words and not about the crimes they commit. Just my opinion.
although.. i did like the hood statement
J.D. Rhoades
I think it’s just terrible that the fascist commie socialist America Hating DemonRAT terrorist loving traitors are engaging in name-calling again.
MattR
@Aimai: Did you read the full statement he put out (available at the HuffPo link Anne Laurie provided)? It listed numerous specific examples to back up his assertion.
MattR
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader:
I believe his name is Clayton Bigsby.
Chris
FAN FUCKING TASTIC. Just emailed it to some liberal friends who’ll get a good LOL out of it.
I really hope the right wing punditocracy latches onto this and runs with it for a few days. Not only would it give them something to talk about besides the ACA website, but they’re never more hilariously lost than when they’re trying to indignantly deny/defend/excuse (usually all at once) the racism they’re accused of.
JPL
@MattR: When you use offensive comparisons, the MSM doesn’t put in the full statements. That’s why I have problems with it. OMG.. he said we were lynching people,do you believe it and we only wanted jobs for the other.
Ash Can
In general, Grayson is a little too histrionic for my taste. Having said that, however, the fact remains that the Tea Party is hand-in-hand with the KKK, and it doesn’t exactly break my heart to see him call them on it.
Short Bus Bully
Shorter GOP: “Cross burnings are part of the southern tradition, and… Jesus! arblegarble…”
Turgidson
BOTH SIDES DO IT fodder for the Village. But who fucking cares anymore. The Teabaggers have poisoned the country against them irredeemably at this point, and they’ll just prove Grayson right if they make a public display of getting bent out of shape about what he said.
Fred Fnord
@JPL: Imagine, the MSM not being fair to Democrats. Because when Democrats are nice and calm, they immediately become utterly fair.
John O
Sometimes you have to be a vicious son of a bitch to move the middle. It has always been so.
(Full disclosure, there have been 5-10X in my life I have been so rhetorically mean I still regret it.)
Grayson is a helluva lot closer to the truth the Coulter is. I generally dig him because I think he’s a necessary weapon in the political wars.
GxB
I have a love/hate thing with Grayson. He says things that desperately need to be said, and socks the bullies square on the nose, but a fight is all these goons are spoiling for. I’m sure they (with a huge hand from the MSM) make hay from this all too well. The high road is painfully slow at affecting change, but ultimately it seems to be the only way to go.
MikeJ
@John O:
And I’ve had a thousand esprit d’escalier moments when I thought of the perfect vicious thing to say too late.
Liberty60
@JPL:
Oh, I agree. As a steady diet, or if thats all we had was Godwinizing, I would turn away in disgust.
But making politics personal, socially ostracizing the other side, making them feel- in a million tiny incremental ways- ashamed and sheepish to publicly wave their flag, is in fact a very good political tactic.
Part of me does want to see liberals be more passionate, more engaged in moral rhetoric of good versus evil, and less of the “look at this chart!” kind of wonkery.
The policy that Paul Ryan wants to enact isn’t poorly chosen, it isn’t fiscally unwise; it is evil, a rejection of the most basic premises of our society. Full stop.
Omnes Omnibus
@JPL: Okay, you aren’t a rhetorical bombthrower – neither am I – but it is nice to have one around for when you need one.
Anoniminous
If they want to avoid being told they are “hand in hand with the KKK” (h/t Ash Can) then they have to stop being racists.
It ain’t that hard. (Really!)
JPL
@Omnes Omnibus: The problem I have is when the message becomes about an individual rather than a cause.
handsmile
As always, what Digby said: “Oh no, somebody was rude to the Tea Party”:
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2013/10/oh-no-somebody-was-rude-to-tea-party.html
Chris
@Liberty60:
If anyone doubts this, consider their very successful efforts during the seventies and eighties to turn “liberal” into a word for liberals to run away from.
Bill E Pilgrim
I always loved this, in keeping with the general tone here, the best example I know of someone basically cheering Grayson on as he eviscerates Republicans while also thinking he’s a complete lunatic.
Excerpts:
BTW there are enough “I hate anyone critical of Obama” types here that I know at least one will respond with “Oh now I like Grayson even more” or whatever because he was mean to Matt Taibbi once, so just saving you time and getting that one out of the way. You’re welcome.
Spaghetti Lee
@JPL:
I think human psychology and society, political and otherwise, defaults towards making things about individuals instead of ideas. Ideas are abstract, wide-ranging, and hard to understand. Individuals are concrete and singular and easy to deify/vilify. Frustrating, sure, but I figure as long as that’s the game, you might as well find people like Grayson who like playing it.
JPL
Since I live in GA, I will hear someone call the President Barry. After that I tune out, and have no idea whether or not the rest of the word salad makes sense. When Cruz is called Raphael, I feel the same way. Most arguments can be made without going to the extreme. Although, I did like the hood argument.
Another Holocene Human
Grayson sucks. He’s a shitty legislator and he hardly makes up for weasel shitbag clown-impersonator (stop in the name of comedy, puleeze) Ted Yoho also being in the Florida delegation. He would never have gotten back in if there were competitive districts; there would also be more Ds in the Fla delegation with competitive districts.
I recall there being more Klan activity in MD than in FL. That’s not an attempt to state the counterfactual, that MD is somehow more racist (although it is pretty fucking racist). Just that that mode has little relevance here. So he misses the mark even so. It’s only topical because Florida Man hit AP and the twitters again.
Stetson Kennedy, whose papers just went to the University of Florida, well, they said papers, but his widow said it was his AV materials, did more to fuck those white supremacists assholes shit up through mockery and elaborate pantsing on national radio than Grayson could ever dream of accomplishing.
Low rent Weiner.
Spaghetti Lee
@Bill E Pilgrim:
In his capacity as an attorney he once basically threatened to have me dismembered and have my body parts dumped in a tin canister and fired into the center of a burning supernova.
Hmm, interesting. Perhaps Burns or Omnes can weigh in on the relevant legal doctrines?
Chris
@handsmile:
That’s a great article. I especially love the long and incomplete list of right wing terrorist incidents and attempted incidents since Obama’s election, a nice response to the “but duuuude, we’re not VIOLENT!” nugget they’ll pull out when compared to the KKK.
RobertDSC-Power Mac G4 Dual 1.25
Funny, if the MSM morons ask the President to comment, I’d wish that he would comment that since the Teabaggers acted like terrorists during the shutdown/debt limit period, he doesn’t have a problem with what Grayson said.
WereBear
If Alan Grayson has said anything that isn’t true, call him on it.
If he’s over the top, it’s only because the other side, IS.
Another Holocene Human
@JPL: I attempted to troll a Cuban coworker who is also a Republican, dunno if he would actually cop to being one now that their brand sucks but he is one, seriously, by saying 2013 was the year of the Cuban with Cruz and Rubio in the Senate. He got mad and went off on some incoherent rant, I think touching on being in America and speaking American at one point but then veering into the necessity of teaching his nieces and nephews good Spanish… I kind of lost his thread but it was so deliciously philosophically incoherent that I was laughing on the inside. I also really couldn’t understand why he didn’t puff out in the slightest manner of nationalistic pride unless his embarrassment over his being a Republican hit critical after all the Romney gaffes and everyone in Florida does, even the GOP, consider Rubio to be a pathetic loser. I mean, I know I think Rubio is AAA sent to the majors, just a real hot house Florida Legislature GOP clown who can’t roll with the big boys and is too stupid (Dunning Kruger) to understand how he got himself into the mess he’s in. (Hey, he won a plurality in a three way between a weak Dem and Charlie Crist, so there’s that.)
Even among Florida GOP Cubans the shine came off when it was revealed he had been lying about being the wrong kind of Cuban*; the wrong kinds of Cubans presumably are D voters anyway.
*-communist-leaning impoverished cigar factory workers who emigrated long before the revolution. think Ybor City
TG Chicago
@Turgidson:
Given that we were just starting to make some headway in the press showing that both sides aren’t actually the same, this isn’t at all helpful.
In what was is this remotely helpful?
TG Chicago
@Liberty60:
I agree with this, but this is NOT the way to do it.
Belafon
@handsmile: That was worth the read.
Omnes Omnibus
@Spaghetti Lee: Rule 11(c) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure says that a “court may impose an appropriate sanction on any attorney, law firm, or party that violated the rule or is responsible for the violation.” Clearly, Grayson thought that the rules violations was quite severe to have sought such a penalty.
raven
Fuck em if they can’t take a joke.
Chris
@raven:
John Travolta?
aimai
@MattR: Oh, yes. Of course he’s correct. I’m not saying he’s not. But there is something about the luscious hyperbole which I think detracts from what he’s saying. I think JPL upthread agrees with me. I’ve got no problem with saying it straight out and then just pulling a Republican/Martin Luther “Here I stand, i can do no other.” Instead of taunting them with it and sounding smug I wish he’d just say:
“Why does the Confederate Flag keep showing up when they protest our first black president. Even if you disagree with the policies of the Democratic Party how do you let your own party be hijacked by the actual party of treason and Jim Crow? Doesn’t that strike you, yourselves, Republican voters as despicable? And if you don’t like it why won’t any of your leaders denounce it?”
The problem with Grayson is that he’s all offense, all the time. The Republicans can’t hear him because they are so angry and the Dems don’t need to hear him. If he wants to really change things he can either talk to us only–in which case I don’t need the hyperbole, or he can talk to some hypothetical middle of the road republican who probably is genuinely ignorant of or unhappy about the state of his own party.
I guess I just don’t see the utility of Grayson’s public gnashing of teeth. Of course they are the party of the KKK but who does it help to point it out?
JPL
@Another Holocene Human: Rubio was on CBS this morning. Sarah Palin would be proud. He tied himself into knots explaining his beliefs. He is like Cruz but he is not.
raven
@Chris: Ha, it was WAY before that. Proly heard it in basic training first.
raven
@aimai: We can’t all be bodhisattva’s.
eta but I suppose we should all try
Omnes Omnibus
@aimai:
If every Dem in front of a microphone were doing it I would agree with you, but they’re not. I like seeing a variety of voices out there. Maybe Grayson’s will resonate with people. I mean, the nature of today’s Republican party should be obvious to even the casual observer, but it is not. Perhaps some over the top rhetoric will help make the point to those casual observers. We shouldn’t demand that political messaging be to our taste; rather we should demand that it be effective. Let’s see if it is.
raven
@Omnes Omnibus: Not everyone gets all tingly when these fuckers say “My friend the Congressman”.
Burnspbesq
@Spaghetti Lee:
You’re talking to somebody who once quoted Shakespeare in a brief, so I have no beef with creative use of language in legal argument. Am I surprised that Grayson would try to bully opposing counsel? Not even a little bit.
Baud
@Burnspbesq:
Please tell me it was “‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
Omnes Omnibus
@raven: “My friend the Congressman” can be insulting or pejorative if it is said in the right tone of voice. And yeah, that is the style of argumentation that resonates with me, but it doesn’t work for everyone. Sometimes someone has to call a shitbag a shitbag.
@Burnspbesq: I once quoted The Lorax – in a footnote.
SiubhanDuinne
@Another Holocene Human:
I am reporting you to the Department of Redundancy Department.
SiubhanDuinne
@Another Holocene Human:
@SiubhanDuinne:
And yes, I did read the rest of your post :-)
SiubhanDuinne
@raven:
Zackly.
raven
@Omnes Omnibus:And plenty of the time these dorks really mean it.
It reminds me of when I officiated high school hoops. Fuckers would be all up in your ass and then want to come chit chat when the game was over. Fuck that.
Drexciya
I’m not remotely comfortable with a white person viewing himself as so far above racism that he can declare another group of white people the “KKK” simply because their racism is more obvious. In order to wield that caricature, he’s blithely summoning almost a century of racial violence against black people just to more damagingly insult his political enemies. It’s not his history to wield, it’s not his moral right to separate himself from pronouncements of who America’s KKK is and by doing this, he’s both preempting the black victims and descendents of black victims who are disadvantaged from that violence and he’s using their suffering as a way to give himself attention. I can’t think of a single reason to support this and the fact that people can equate racist imagery and racist language with being in the KKK shows a detachment from black life, black suffering, how black people process history and racism that makes me queasy. The KKK was a specific thing, what their victims suffered was similarly specific and it’s beyond dishonest to pretend that the KKK didn’t exist because they upheld norms that white American society generally assented to. It’s an insult to their victims to equate political enemies to them in an act of breezy, comical hyperbole. And that insult is deepened by how strongly it demonstrates how cartoonish black life and black history is to some of you.
Grayson’s comments and celebrations of Grayson’s comment (predictably coming from predominately white quarters) further illustrate the need to increase the progressive sphere’s social awareness. The white dominance, racial dismissal and social ignorance that’s casually thrown around in liberal blogs is repugnant and I’m not sure how it makes moral sense to use black suffering – suffering that belongs to no white person – as little more than a political podium to make your opposition look bad and yourself look good. It’s not just belittling to black victimhood and detached from the specificity of the KKK’s actions (much less the motivations that justified those actions which were rooted in America generally, not just southern KKK members), it’s relegating black life to nothing more than a grenade you can throw at your opponents when white liberals recognize a breech of racial propriety. You’re not identifying and discussing all the forms of the racism that are real and meaningful to black people, you’re discussing the forms of racism you can absolve yourselves and your own lives from. I use this word a lot, but there’s something remarkably duplicitous in the racial convenience that many white liberals comfortably use as a personal shield and while I see a lot of discussion about race, I see absolutely no empathy directed toward the victims of racism. And I see no meaningful effort to identify – much less thwart – the racism that flows from the democratic will of a legitimate state whose citizens are casually rooted in white supremacy.
This is sickening and I don’t think it should have ever been frontpaged. It has nothing to do with “civility” and everything to do with “decency” toward the parties you consider your allies. This isn’t your thing to dredge up, this isn’t your thing to discuss, and every time it does come up, people not only show they can’t talk about it, but that they’re completely unwilling to develop the intellectual and empathetic foundation to approach it. I can distinguish between the KKK and typical, nonviolent white racism because my life forces me to. I can distinguish between offense, insults, microaggressions the rationales that justify policing of black agency and actual threats to that agency because my life forces me to. I see racism as inseparable from whiteness because, again, my life forces me to. Why do white liberals feel they can walk around democratic circles and not be mindful of the same distinctions? When did racism become this innocuous thing that got reduced to Something That Only People Who Say The N-word do? And why do you think so many white liberals are comfortable with defining racism in a way that excludes the very things they think and accept as normal fixtures of American life?
raven
@Drexciya: Let me be this first to say I think you are full of shit. Thank you, thank you very much.
SiubhanDuinne
@Burnspbesq:
Thank heavens this is an open thread. Story, please!!
MikeJ
Republicans call Obama a communist on the floor of the congress damn near every day they’re in session. I’m not going to get that upset about one person identifying the people flying the treason flag.
Burnspbesq
@Baud:
No such luck. I described the documents that supposedly created a trust in the Turks & Caicos Islands as “full of sound and fury.”
Turgidson
@TG Chicago:
I don’t think we were making any actual progress in dislodging the “both sides” dodge in any lasting way. The media, predictably as the sunrise, moved deftly from “hey, wait a minute, the GOP is insane! Why weren’t we told?” to “ZOMG the ACA website’s problems are Obama’s HindenbergKatrinaWatergate!”
Grayson gave them an extra shiny object to chase, but if it wasn’t him, it’d be something else, or they’d just fill the time with healthcare.gov concern trolling. The media was going to do whatever it took to sweep the GOP’s derangement under the rug and get back to their usual piffle.
Drexciya
@raven
Do you think it’s unreasonable to not make a flaming cross with KKK members beside of it the first thing I see when I come on this site today? Do you think it’s unreasonable to think that I shouldn’t have to suffer through a strong and negative emotional reaction frivolously? And do you think it suggests something…unpleasant that such imagery could be glibly dredged up just to make a “funny insult” against political opponents?
Ash Can
@Drexciya: But what if the Tea Party leaders and members are cozy with KKK members and leaders? How then to describe the Tea Party? And if whites (in this case, Grayson) remain silent and stand around waiting for a person of color to step up and say something, instead of calling out the problem ourselves, how are we doing the right thing?
kc
@Drexciya:
Oh, good God.
Baud
@Burnspbesq:
Oh well. “To thine own self be true.”
Omnes Omnibus
@Drexciya: White people can’t call out other white people for bad behavior? Sorry, there are a lot of aspects of race relations in which I don’t get to have much of a voice and deservedly so, but both the Tea Party and the Klan are an embarrassment to me as an American and I think it is just fine for me to celebrate either group being humiliated or ridiculed.
Villago Delenda Est
@Drexciya:
Derp, derp, derp.
For three fucking paragraphs.
Villago Delenda Est
@Drexciya:
Derp, derp, derp.
For three fucking ENDLESS paragraphs.
raven
@Drexciya: Do you think it’s unreasonable of me to not give shit about your daily lectures? I’m a Vietnam Vet and I go events where other vets sometimes wear “If you weren’t there shut your mouth”. Nobody but Nam vets have the right or ability to talk about Vietnam, right?
Well, bullshit.
trollhattan
I seem to remember Grayson getting “in trouble” for noting the Republican answer to health insurance for the poor was “hurry up and die.” Funny how on-target he was with his shrillericity.
Speaking of things equal parts proud and appalled, I must note my first witnessing of our dog killing a rat. “Aaaargh, Gracie, let it go! Let go of it! Drop it! Aaargh! Drop! That! Rat! Drop it! Gracie! Drop the rat! Gimme that rat! Arrrrgh!
“Uh, good girl.”
This is the killer. Killer, I tell you!
http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4034/4480306155_4cab1bcd09_o.jpg
raven
@trollhattan: If you are not a Dalmatian you have no business talking about rats.
SatanicPanic
@trollhattan: boy has he ever been vindicated on that one. What’s the Republican plan? Repeal and replace? No, it’s just repeal. That’s it. Get sick, die quickly. Would make a good album title, actually.
Burnspbesq
@SiubhanDuinne:
In an earlier stage of that case, I got the taxpayer’s lawyer disqualified for conflict of interest. The opinion granting that motion is in the casebook on ethical problems in tax practice.
The lawyer I got disqualified was later indicted for money laundering, but was found to have been entrapped by an IRS informant. He then sued the IRS special agent who ran the informant for, among other things, violating his First Amendment right to advocate the use of bogus offshore trusts as tax shelters. That lawsuit was dismissed on qualified immunity grounds.
It was quite a thing.
raven
If I may say so, Corey Booker is on Rachel.
Baud
@raven:
I hope he gets in Ted Cruz’s face in the Senate (but he won’t).
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Y’all already cover this?
This is not, as you might expect, a Darrell Issian stroke of genius, it’s the house Energy and Commerce Cmtee,
debit
@raven: If you are not Corey Booker how dare you speak about him!
raven
@Baud: You know he was a tight end at Stanford? He’d mop the fucking floor with Rafael.
raven
@debit: ding
Baud
@raven:
Ok.
TG Chicago
@SiubhanDuinne: Wow. Kind of ironic to see this in a thread where we’re accusing the other side of racism.
raven
@Baud: Not that he would, it was Stanford after all.
kc
@Villago Delenda Est:
For three fucking ENDLESS paragraphs.
Run through an academic jargon generator.
Ksmiami
@Liberty60: passion
? Martin
@TG Chicago:
Firebaggers always put rhetoric over action, so his rant was better than anything that Obama ever did.
TG Chicago
@Drexciya: Excellent point. Thanks.
kc
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
You gotta be kidding.
Omnes Omnibus
@kc: No, he doesn’t. We all wish he was, but sadly no.
Drexciya
@Ash Can
Ash Can, the KKK was a terrorist group that used racially specific violence, widespread lynching and the destruction of homes and neighborhoods to run black people out of their property and to police their behavior. “Being cozy with KKK members and leaders” is consistent with a southern rooted party with primarily white demographics that actively uses assertions of white supremacy and fear of its loss to maintain its demographics. That doesn’t make it the same thing as the KKK and I don’t see the point in summoning that comparison unless you want to just draw attention, because that parallel could be more easily made with the police – which is taxpayer funded and democratically ordained – than the Tea Party. And I still wouldn’t make it.
I don’t know what’s insufficient about using the word “racism” and “racist” to identify them. And I don’t really see it as much of a problem that the word encompasses more behavior and accurately describes more people than Tea Party will ever have in its ranks. As far as I can tell, Grayson’s remarks aren’t coming from modern linguistic deficits that fail to capture some new and emboldened undercurrent in American politics. It’s coming from the fact that there’s an apparent and unfortunate utility in portraying “racist language and racist caricatures inspired by white-centric/white-focused politics against black people/POC’s” as a Tea Party/Republican thing instead of as an American thing. I can see how white Democrats and white liberals benefit from that conversation and that distinction. I can see how white Democrats and white liberals – potentially motivated by legitimate shock about the severity of a racism they weren’t aware of – can see it as an expression of things that they, their tastes, their politics, their interests and their country are removed from. I don’t see how I do.
Usage of KKK imagery sans KKK like behavior serves a transparently political function, but it’s not one that’s premised on identifying and eradicating racism and its symptoms. It’s premised on limiting honest discussions of its scope for the sake of maximizing the political benefits. Otherwise, why limit it to the Tea Party? Why pretend that typical components of American society are things that are unique to the Tea Party? Why not even mention the Republican Party generally? It’s passing strange behavior. This is many things, but it’s not behavior I identify as consistent with concern over racism and my existence in this society.
Ksmiami
@Drexciya: oh please… As a melanin challenged wan I know exactly what the teatards mean when they let their freak I mean confederate flag fly. It is proof that they are not patriotic and have not read the constitution. I’m sick of the dems having to play sensitive and tolerant of the other sides viciousness screw them
raven
I rest my case.
xenos
The Klan may have operated primarily as a terrorism organization against African Americans, but it also attacked Jews, Catholics, and political enemies, including union organizors. I do not see why some victims of the KKK get the power to denounce others for acting Klan-like and others don’t.
TG Chicago
@Omnes Omnibus:
Strawman. Not what Drexciya said.
Drexciya
@Omnes Omnibus
That’s not even close to what I’m trying to say.
In what way do you separate the Tea Party from white American culture and in what way do the Tea Party and the Klan resemble one another? Again, as far as I can tell and as far as Grayson’s missive went, the Tea Party is the KKK because they’re racists. In what way is that a powerful insight and if American society is generally racist in ways that victimize black people as much (or more), in what way is it politically useful to pretend like Tea Party behavior is behavior that’s unique to them? And if it’s not unique to them, do you think it’s a poor exercise to consider why we’re being asked to call them out and separate them from all the rest of modern political discourse/citizenry?
satby
@TG Chicago: Nope. NOT even close to an excellent point.
trollhattan
@raven:
That true? Oh man–pay per view gold. “Grayson-Cruz, oh-point-five rounds of fury!”
Lurking Buffoon
I’m not a vegetarian, so I do appreciate when Grayson throws some red meat.
MJ
So when Democrats shrink back and don’t defend themselves we (and the MSM) call them weak, now we have a Democrat in Alan Grayson who calls it like he sees it and there are some who wring their hands and think he’s being too mean.
Democrats can’t win can they? Obama gets treated with the most disrespect I have ever seen a sitting president have to endure but god forbid Alan Grayson call the Republicans out on it.That’s being “mean.”
Screw the media and screw the wishy-washy liberals/Democrats who get the vapors at a Democrat having the balls to defend his party and his president.
Hopefully Grayson won’t apologize.
kc
@TG Chicago:
Yeah, it is.
“This isn’t your thing to dredge up, this isn’t your thing to discuss.”
Comrade Jake
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: LOL – they’ll probably ask McAfee what he thinks of climate change while they’re at it!
Redshirt
“My peoples'”?
You mean, American?
Burnspbesq
@raven:
Submit your proposed order to the clerk’s office.
gwangung
Hm. That’s not what I get.
And let’s not conflate individual with institutional tactics; they’re two prongs of the same problems, but in my book, they need separate approaches.
Omnes Omnibus
@TG Chicago: It was not intended to be a strawman. But in the future, as a white Protestant, I will be sure to use the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and the Duc de Guise and Duc d’Aumale as my comparison. No one will understand my rhetorical point, but that’s fine.
imonlylurking
Somebody here posted a link to a story about the Elder Gods being used during the Cold War as the equivalent of WMDs. I read it but didn’t bookmark and now I want to show it to somebody and I cannot find the link! Does anybody remember this story?? HALP!
kc
I mean, I would agree that the Tea Party, while it is chock full of white people who worry about black people taking their stuff, is not equivalent to the KKK . . .
Burnspbesq
@Drexciya:
I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you sincerely believe that you have a point that is both valid and worth making, but incomprehensible gibberish isn’t the right tool for the job.
xenos
@Omnes Omnibus: I would understand it, but I suppose that just supports your point.
Drexciya
@Burnspbesq
Which part of that post would you like me to explain? Is there a portion you found particularly incomprehensible?
ETA: Honestly, that goes for anyone with questions. I’m displeased to be sure, but I’m not unwilling to entertain a dialogue. I’m particularly interested in how the original post was interpreted and what substantive issues there are with the content. I think I’ve been consistent and clear, but in areas I haven’t, I’m more than willing to elaborate.
Omnes Omnibus
@Drexciya: Your opinion and mine may differ on this, but here goes. As a straight, white, nominally Protestant, American male, I have had a shitload of unearned privilege tossed my way. This is a problem – for everyone. There is, however, a significant difference between someone who recognizes that and some one who blithely accepts it. And there is an even bigger difference between those first two groups and those who intentionally seek to play up racist themes and tropes in order to push their agenda. The Tea Party and the Klan both do that. The TP may not have robes and may not yet have lobbed bombs, but I personally do not doubt that they are the same creatures.
jeffreyw
@imonlylurking:http://www.amazon.com/The-Coldest-War-Milkweed-Tregillis-ebook/dp/B007CJ8CUC/ref=pd_sim_kstore_1. This one?
nineone
Fuck Al. Last month he was using “Rill ‘Murrican” Klan sympathizers Tucker Carlson and Sarah Palin to dog The Prez out over Syria. Now the worm has turned and he’s backed the wrong muthafucka for a second time? Naw, Son. Find a stadium and have your choice of seats. You might be amusing, but your judgement is suspect.
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader:
Which one? ‘Cos there’s a few. I know they all look alike….
Burnspbesq
@Burnspbesq:
ETA: The image works because it is immediately understandable by anyone who has even a rudimentary knowledge of 20th Century American history.
Juxtaposing a picture of the Tea Party with a picture of a White Citizens Council or the John Birch Society fails because it has to be explained, and if you’re explaining, you’re fucked.
James E. Powell
@Burnspbesq:
You’re talking to somebody who once quoted Shakespeare in a brief
I thought everybody did that.
Ash Can
@Drexciya:
Hey, that’s cool. And I’m a retired editor, so heaven knows I’m all for semantics. But I do believe that there has been some documented overlap in Tea Party and KKK membership. By all means, correct me if I’m wrong, but I do think this is the case.
Also, I find it interesting that you’re focusing on past Klan behavior in your criticism of Grayson’s point (and the commenters’ support of it here). The Klan’s historical behavior is well documented, of course. You yourself described the violence and intimidation. But as Lee Atwater infamously alluded to in his “you can’t say ‘nigger'” piece, racism has, in many insidious ways, been driven underground. It’s far more subtle than it was in past decades, sensational news tidbits notwithstanding. So how then to deal with the new, improved, outwardly-laundered KKK? The same people and ideas are still there; they’re just finding more mainstream and acceptable ways to insinuate themselves into American life. They’re not marching through town squares on every third Sunday of the month, they’re not broadcasting weekly radio programs, they’re not (ostensibly) holding bake sales and pot-lucks for their local Congressfolks. But they’re no less active, and no less racist. And they’re still influencing policy that has, ultimately, the same detrimental effect upon their victims as in years past. Do we ignore the present incarnation because the past one’s harm was so much more immediate?
Oh come on, you were doing fabulous up to here. How can it not be obvious that this is the context at hand?
Omnes Omnibus
@xenos: Congratulations and exactly.
kc
“Halloween 3: Season of the Witch” is the best Halloween sequel. Of course it’s not really a sequel.
Omnes Omnibus
@efgoldman: TMI
Suzanne
@efgoldman:
Concur with you and raven here. In fact, I submit that white people have even more of a moral responsibility to criticize each other for racism, just as I think men have to collectively get their shit together on sexism and rich people should enforce social standards on each other w/r/t not being douchebags to poor people. Etc etc etc.
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus: Au contraire. Not nearly enough information. I want to hear this story.
Cervantes
@GxB: The high road is painfully slow at affecting change, but ultimately it seems to be the only way to go.
Yet somehow Republicans have changed the country while scrupulously avoiding the high road.
kc
@Suzanne:
I want video.
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne: EF’s boxers should remain a mystery to us. I am just a little disappointed that no one asked about my Lorax quote in a brief. That was good shit. So I guess I am a little bitter.
Drexciya
@Omnes Omnibus:
I’m speaking from an entirely separate angle. I’m gay, black, atheist and very likely to be legally shot for walking in the wrong areas in the wrong ways (and have been stopped many times for doing exactly that). While, from your vantage point, it may be useful to perceive a difference between the two, from my vantage point I have an incredibly difficult time seeing the difference between being a racist and being a beneficiary of racism.
My great grandfather used to live in Tennessee, and whenever I helped my uncle care for him once he was blinded, he used to tell me stories about the land that he and his family owned on the shore of a nearby river that you could see every time you crossed the bridge to get into town. He was ran off that property by the Klan, his home was burned, and he ended up spending the rest of his life in a shack, on his daughter’s property. That’s where he died. As far as I know, he wasn’t capable of reading or writing and the courthouse refused to give the land back once the Klan subsided because he was given no legal documents for his ownership of the property.
Every time I crossed that bridge, it was rather easy to look across the river and see beautiful houses facing the water and I even know some of the people that own them. While these people may be perfectly nice and may think the most flattering things ever about black people, they live on stolen property and are fine with living in an area and in a country where white success was premised on systematic and individual black exclusion from that success. Sometimes through terrorism, sometimes through government action/negligence, and oftentimes, through democracy.
What you’re calling “different” ultimately leads to, and socially/politically codifies the effects of a powerfully racist history. Have you considered that the “privilege” you identify makes it easier to maintain the idea that the difference you’re identifying is meaningful? You may not have planted the seeds, but you eat the fruit. Why does that minimize your moral culpability? That’s not specifically directed to you, but it’s something I’d like an answer to. Because I don’t understand why that distinction is necessary unless you want to benefit without feeling bad for benefiting.
Burnspbesq
What’s insufficient about simply calling the Tea Party racist is that it leaves room for a rejoinder and lacks the capacity to wound.
Your reaction to the image is all the proof anyone should need of its power, and it takes a “no, you are” response completely off the table.
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus: actually, I want to hear all about it! “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better, it’s not.”
I don’t get to quote Dr. Seuss when designing buildings. SAD.
Omnes Omnibus
@efgoldman: Drexcliya had a point in that Grayson was being over the top, but as I noted above, the two groups are not more than a finger’s breadth apart in thought.
@Suzanne: I was writing a brief where I needed to cite a number of Justice William O. Douglas’s environmental opinions (in a favorable light), and after putting all of that in, I started to laugh as I thought, “I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees.” So I put the quote in a footnote.
Also, for those who are interested, there is some real value in googling Drexcliya. A reminder of horrific crimes comes up.
kc
@Omnes Omnibus:
I Googled Drexciya and learned about some techno musicians.
Drexciya
@Ash Can
In my experience, racism is a very, very, very white thing. It is not a southern white thing. It’s not a Republican thing. It’s not a Tea Party thing. And the racism of Chicago, Oakland, New York City and Boston is as much a threat to my existence as the racism of southerners. In some ways, it’s even moreso, because they’re less likely to own the rationale for their political responses. Now, if you think, as I do, that racism is an endemic factor to political expression – particularly from a white vantage point – perhaps you can see why the utility of pretending that racism and damaging racism is a southern tea party thing is rather unclear to me. Adopting anti-racism is a laudable and necessary goal, but not if it comes with the price of narrowing our conception of racism so thinly that it avoids its other, equally damaging incarnations.
kc
@Drexciya:
What do you want him to do?
Suzanne
@Drexciya:
Because they CANNOT HELP IT. I literally do not think there is anywhere on Earth that one could go to escape white privilege. So short of getting shot into space, individual whites are literally unable to escape this system. You cannot be morally culpable for something you didn’t build if you are trying to tear it down.
Omnes Omnibus
@kc: Dig a little deeper. Their name referred to a myth comparable to Plato’s myth of Atlantis, which the group revealed in the sleeve notes to their 1997 album The Quest. “Drexciya” was an underwater country populated by the unborn children of pregnant African women thrown off of slave ships that had adapted to breathe underwater in their mother’s wombs.
Spaghetti Lee
@Drexciya:
not if it comes with the price of narrowing our conception of racism so thinly that it avoids its other, equally damaging incarnations.
But I don’t think people here are doing that. You asked above why white people think that they can’t be racist unless they use the N-word or similar phrases. I can’t think of any regulars here who think that’s true. There have been many, many discussions about how talk about cutting welfare programs and suchlike are secretly coded phrases specially designed to appeal to white racism. That infamous Lee Atwater quote gets referenced every other day. So I’m not sure what you’re seeing that you think needs connecting.
Burnspbesq
@Omnes Omnibus:
Maybe, but at the same time he/she seems to have missed a larger point. Any time you spend fighting your friends is time you’re not spending fighting your enemies.
Belafon
@Drexciya: By the time I was born, 1969, the KKK had stopped their killings of blacks. But that did not mean, or does not mean, that they were finished. My senior year in High School, 1988, they attempted to hold a march through my town. There were two reasons for it: A recruiting drive and to continue to project their influence over minorities. The First Amendment meant they were allowed to do it, but luckily even my home town in West Texas had grown enough that the citizens made enough noise that it was canceled.
The KKK is still around, still active, still recruiting, and still threatening. And there are plenty of people in this country still accepting of their message, especially here in the South (there are still places that black people know not to stop in), though by no means exclusive to here. And there is a huge amount of overlap with the Tea Party, whose members like to talk about those “others” getting things they don’t deserve. There are plenty of people who understand exactly what the Confederate battle flag stands for and a large number of them are in the Tea Party. Do you know how long that flag would have stayed up at a Democratic protest? Not even long enough for him to have gotten it out of the truck.
So your Tea party /= KKK might be technically true in the sense that there is no grand wizard. But the techniques – Obama is not American, he’s from Kenya; he’s muslim, he’s an idiot, he’s a tyrant – are pretty much from the playbook of those who think it’s their job to keep blacks in their place.
Omnes Omnibus
@Drexciya: Does a burglar have a right to call out a serial killer?
FlipYrWhig
@Drexciya: By that same token, why would it ever be acceptable for a white person to distance himself from another white person by using the label “racist”? You seem to suggest that that’s not off limits. A KKK comparison is off limits, but the concept of racism isn’t? Aren’t all those points about privilege and history and such all still intact? I don’t get where you’re drawing the line.
Suzanne
@efgoldman: I think Frank Gehry already has the market cornered on that shit.
Plus, I do hospitals and airports.
feebog
@Drexciya:
You have that “victim of racial injustice” patter down pretty good. By your reasoning, only Jews could ever feel the horror of the Holocaust.
Spaghetti Lee
KC @ 134, That’s why these sorts of arguments annoy me so much. I don’t think there’s anything white people can do that would satisfy of some of the more passionate fighters for this cause. White people not talking about racism is bad because we’re ignoring the problem. White people talking about it to non-whites is bad because we’re trying to replace their views on it with our own. White people talking about it to other white people is bad because we’re not getting the POC perspective. So many discussions I’ve had with social justice/whatever you call it people have felt like a rigged game where the house wins no matter what I do, so eventually I just stop playing. I’ll give Drexciya credit in that they seem honestly interested in hearing what people they don’t agree with have to say, which is more than I can say for some people in that group.
(edited to remove spam-tripper)
Drexciya
@Suzanne
That’s a powerful sentiment. And telling. Why do you think being shot into space is more likely for you than dismantling the fruits of white supremacy and distributing them in ways that acknowledge that there’s a national debt here and that it hasn’t come close to being paid? Your protestations of political helplessness misstate a distorted political power that was afforded by my lack thereof. They also misstate the agency embedded in eating those fruits. Consider, if you will, that something more important and something more damaging than powerlessness is making you assume that “you cannot help it.”
FlipYrWhig
@Drexciya: so after we’re done chastising ourselves for the sin of thinking we’re ever sufficiently non-racist, then what? Eternally admitting our systemic culpability seems like it’s going to demand an awful lot of time.
FlipYrWhig
@Drexciya: hey, have you considered that vocally differentiating oneself from racists might be a fairly useful way to combat the power of presumed white unity?
kc
@Omnes Omnibus:
But that’s a story the group created, right?
Anne Laurie
@Drexciya:
African-Americans took by far the worst abuse, but Klansman were not as pure-heartedly “specific” as you might believe. My father’s Irish Catholic cousins, immigrants to Alabama, were welcomed by the KKK burning crosses on their new homestead in the late 1940s.
Burnspbesq
@Suzanne:
I could go for replacing John Wayne with a new terminal that combines elements of Disney Hall and Sagrada Familia.
? Martin
@Ash Can:
I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to find overlap in Democrats and KKK, though. Remember, the state with the highest ratio of Dem to GOP voter registration (in favor of Dem) is West Virginia. Hillary won WV by 5:2 margin, at a point when Obama nearly had the nom sewn up. In the 2012 primaries he lost several WV counties to a felon serving 18 years in a federal prison (who notably, was white). People would rather have voted for a felon than the guy they knew would win the nomination.
But in that sense, those ideas were and are always there, widely held even among Democrats. The main difference really has been that Democrats made a strategic decision to pursue policy that ran against those ideas held even among Democrats, mainly because it was good for the party. The GOP made the opposite decision. That’s caused people to move between the parties to some degree, but Democrats have hardly raced strongly toward the light. Prop 8 passed in California in an election that Obama won by 25 points. Democrats here strongly support immigration reform, but that’s mostly because of the massive Latino base. Among white Democrats, it’s an uneasy proposition. They support it, but not out of a broad civil right sensibility.
The real thing the Tea Party and the KKK have in common is the willingness to overtly pander to straight, Christian whites. That’s not nothing, but I think it gets murky beyond that. There’s an awful lot of the Tea Party that doesn’t ascribe to the KKKs methods or general attitudes. Yeah, the Tea Party is damaging to the nation, but I don’t think this comparison is necessary to make that clear to the public. Hell, the GOP is destroying itself, why give them something to rally around – why attack them? They’re doing that without any assistance whatsoever.
Suzanne
@Drexciya: I think getting shot into space is, in my lifetime, more likely than getting all the world’s white people to agree to stop being assholes because the evidence of my senses tells me that lots of white people still like being assholes. I personally make an effort to not be an asshole and encourage my fellow white people to do the same. Sometimes I fuck up and act like an asshole, and i hope that But I will not be successful in convincing white Americans to upend their entire society because of wrongs committed by their ancestors or people who looked like them. Like it or not, those wrongs can never be righted. Never. No amount of wealth distribution or reparations can ever fix it. That is not to say that we shouldn’t try, but you are going to die unhappy if that is how you measure success.
To be honest, I am not really going to argue this with you anymore because I don’t think you argue in good faith. You took a statement I made on a thread once virulently out of context and got personally insulting rather than trying to find mutual understanding, so I am not really inclined to give you the same leeway.
Omnes Omnibus
@Drexciya:
Fundamentally, the difference is that I vote for people who are trying to break down that privilege. I donate money to groups that are doing the same. It probably won’t come in my lifetime, but people like you and I will eventually be recognized as equals both in the legal sense and in society. I look forward to that time. I hope it comes sooner rather than later and, in my own small way, I am trying to work towards it. The distinction comes in in that there are people who are explicitly working against those thing ever happening. I don’t deserve kudos from my stance, but, goddamn it, the other side deserves every damned sling and arrow that comes its way.
FlipYrWhig
OK, let me throw something else into the mix. Rape metaphors. I have heard it said many times that likening something to rape minimizes the experience of people who have been raped. I get that. It certainly seems like bros who say, “Dude, I totally got raped by that level of the game” are being midlessly awful. But what about saying that coal companies are raping the earth? Is that also minimizing? The analogy only works if both are terrible things, right? So I get the desire to say that KKK iconography shouldn’t be used casually for a cheap laugh. I’m just not sure that this qualifies as a cheap laugh. That’s why I’m not getting the same sense of righteous rage–because this feels biting, like an acknowledgment of deep racism, not a minimization of it.
MikeJ
@Burnspbesq:
And focus the heat ray to burn down all of the OC?
kc
@Spaghetti Lee:
The wall of academic jargon is as off-putting to me as the general air of someone looking for reasons to be aggrieved.
Ash Can
@Drexciya:
I’ll grant you the semantical point, but it’s a stretch. This, however:
leads to the question of what should be done. Obviously, and quite unfortunately, there’s no legal recourse, nor is there an established societal procedure for redressing this type of situation, in which the crime is so far removed, practically if not chronologically, from the current situation. So who gains from, proverbially, visiting the sins of the parents upon the children? And, again, I’m limiting this to the specific instance that you’ve described.
I think you suspect you understand the ambiguity here (and I’m being generous) because you follow that up by saying that you’d like an answer to that yourself. After all, if the difference between the direct and indirect lines of culpability isn’t clear here, there’s no reason you’d even bother commenting here (unless it was to express yourself in much different terms).
I’m not saying that I don’t think you’re bringing up valid concerns. Quite frankly, being white and having a suburban/borderline rural Midwestern background, I don’t consider myself qualified to judge. What I can do, however, is compare your arguments to the facts and evidence immediately at hand. I applaud you for voicing your opinions and analysis — and most definitely for describing your backstory — but if I see problems in your reasoning I’m going to pipe up.
kc
@FlipYrWhig:
That’s when you need to start dismantling those fruits.
Suzanne
@Suzanne: Argh, can’t edit.
Should have read, “Sometimes I fuck up and act like an asshole, and i hope that others in their kindness will kick me in the ass a bit so I learn not to do it again.”
Drexciya
@Belafon:
No, they had not. But that’s not the point I wished to make.
The threat that the KKK posed was that they destroyed black property and took black life, correct? I think my perspective would be better understood if you accepted that I think – justifiably – that they’re nowhere close to the only or strongest sect in American politics that does this. Black wealth was destroyed in the 2008 financial crisis because the banks specifically targeted minorities and made them pay more for toxic loans. Black neighborhoods are worth less specifically because black people are in them. The construction of modern American cities and modern American ghettos is the consequence of segregation and localized terrorism that relied on government and corporate organs excluding black people from American success and American life and taking full advantage of the powerlessness that inspired. Not only are black people disproportionate victims of state violence, but laws are written to disproportionately effect and police us. And then send us to prison for life (or execute us) once we fall victim to them. Nowhere in my posts did I deny that the dynamic you mentioned exists, and nowhere did I undermine its importance.
But racism is so much more, so much deeper and so much more ingrained than the memes used by Republicans to organize around white populist politics. It’s, again, not at all useful to me have a discussion about racism if we’re not having a discussion about all of the parties society capably positions to express and enact racism. I can’t see the KKK as a particularized evil because historically and presently, it’s not. I don’t benefit from us using the KKK as the Ultimate Expression of Racism when the tools they used have been capably ceded to the state and to this country’s social, cultural and political norms. Grayson specifically intended to draw that distinction both because it’s personally useful for him and because he’s only affected by and incensed by the racism that effects his political standing. That’s a nonstarter for me, and it’s not an argument that’s made with my political interests in mind. I don’t see what’s particularly controversial with finding ought with this.
Chris
@Drexciya:
Right, because the Ku Klux Klan never targeted white people. Jewish immigrants. Catholic immigrants. Jews or Catholics even if they weren’t immigrants. Any kind of immigrants. Anyone who tried to organize or join a union. (And the teabaggers, for that matter, aren’t still targeting those two communities – immigrants and working class people – race or not).
Fucking tool.
Omnes Omnibus
@kc: As far as I can tell, that is correct. The point was that it was a reminder of the the conduct of slavers. A reminder of something horrific that often gets overlooked. I have a bunch of ancestors from early New England; in general, large scale slavery didn’t take there. However, a shitload of sea captains from there made money as slavers. Eventually, this stopped and abolitionism (in the white world) grew out of that region. FWIW, most research indicates that my ancestors weren’t shitty to African-Americans – instead, we were horrible to the Native Americans, including being big cheeses in the Pequot “War” and cheating NA’s out of a monster chunk of Long Island.
Chris
@xenos:
Ah, shit. Sorry, X. It was worth saying twice, though.
@Drexciya:
And this makes a comparison to the Ku Klux Klan inappropriate how? The Ku Klux Klan wasn’t a Southern thing. It might’ve started out that way, but by the time of its revival in the 1920s it was very much a nationwide brotherhood. You don’t like white racism being used as Southern imagery only? I agree. Then again, how is the Ku Klux Klan comparison inappropriate?
ruemara
Can’t stand Grayson, since he’s not much more than a bomb throwing back bencher who has yet to to do something legislative. Doesn’t mean he isn’t right this time. I just hope at some point he becomes an effective legislator.
Ash Can
@Drexciya:
OK, this is helpful. Much of my confusion regarding your arguments stems from the fact that I don’t consider racism, or the Tea Party, or even the KKK, as exclusively Southern. Those three things — including the KKK — are proven to be and demonstrably not confined to the South, and I don’t think of them as such. Moreover, I believe that, regardless of the anti-South rhetoric you’ll find here, the majority at least of the commenters here realize this.
Violet
@Drexciya:
Do you spend your time, money and effort protesting the theft of land from the Native Americans by American immigrants and settlers? That land was stolen and entire communities were wiped out or forced to move from ancestral land. You yourself may live on land that was stolen from them. Do you protest this? How do you live with yourself knowing that you live on stolen land? Or if you don’t live on it, you may visit it and stand on it then, and you get to enjoy whatever has been built upon it. How can you do that?
kc
@Omnes Omnibus:
Okay, thanks.
The group sounds interesting. I’d never heard of it before I googled the name after seeing Drexciya (the commenter) post here. I’ll have to check out their music.
Suzanne
@Violet: Some would argue that the idea that land can be considered property at all is a grievous wrong.
jurassicpork
Mike Flannigan asks why the Democrats feel the need to negotiate with a political party that hasn’t enough steam left to close down a hot dog stand.
And, personally speaking, why throw punches at Grayson and comparing him to a screaming harpy like Ann Coulter for stating the obvious? The Tea Baggers ARE holdover Birchers, Aryan Supremacists and KKK racists. Please. Let’s stop pretending this isn’t screamingly obvious and trying to ignore the 5000 pound white elephant in the room.
JordanRules
@Drexciya: I agree with most of what you’re saying I guess I’m just wondering why the response can’t be.
Yes, but…the Tea Party and KKK are this way because…
Then you start the larger discussion.
I feel like you’re saying… No, but…they aren’t this way because it will prohibit us from having the larger discussion.
And I don’t think that is always the case.
I think ‘Yes, but’ is a better place to start because it aknowledges the particular wrongs without surrendering to an argument that the systemic ones will be ignored or subsummed unless we semantically tear down the common thread, one that happens to engender engagement and prepares all parties more sufficiently to discuss the larger issue.
Suzanne
@Ash Can: I don’t think that anyone here thinks that racism is purely a Southern thing, though there does seem to be a specific flavor of racism that’s really PROUD!!! of being racist running through that subculture. That’s the difference IMO. The KKK put their racism literally on display, and the Tea Party is in the same vein, though obviously less severe. The reason that Grayson’s comment is effective communication is because he’s picking up on that display quality. That’ snot to say that the KKK or the Tea Party are the only racists. Though I know you know all of that. Duh.
aimai
I think the reason I feel the blanket KKK comparison isn’t helpful is that it lets regular white tea party racism–the racism of structural inequality, the craven servility of its corporate servitude, its jingoism and nationalism off the hook. Its fatally easy for a tea party dude with tea bags hanging from his tricorne hat to hear grayson and just shrug his shoulders and say “but thats not me.” And that’s not a useful place to be.
Its like a hitler comparison, or the word fascism. Those words mean something historically and there are very good reasons to use them in some cases but the right wing uses them carelessly so that everything they don’t like about Obama, for example, is both hitler and stalin, both fascism and communism. We don’t pay any attention to that because its so patently stupid. We know it takes specific things for something to be hitlerian, or communist, or fascist.
If you want to get someone to change their behavior (the tea partier) or you want to change the way they are handled in the media (a much more likely outcome) you have to chose your invective wisely so you aren’t dismissed as merely throwing words around. And you also can’t move directly to comparisons which shock your audience because they will simply tune you out.
The tea party is not, in fact, “just like” the KKK because what the KKK is in people’s memories is people in white sheets who did dirty deeds under cover of darkness. Of course the neo confederate wing of the Republican party and the KKK have the same goals–especially with respect to reinstituting the domination of an oligarchy over foreigners, immigrants, non christians, non whites etc…etc..etc… But in popular imagination its quite a different thing to seek to do lawfully, in the light of day, what the bully boys did under their sheets.
Its a comparison that has to be worked hard at and delivered slowly, with surgical precision.
J.D. Rhoades
@aimai:
In the early 90’s I was pretty much on the political fence. Then I saw the ’92 Republican convention where Pat Buchanan brought the batshit crazy, raving about “culture wars”, and Rich Bond told me that people like me were “not real Americans.” I decided right then and there I wanted nothing to do with those assholes. That’s why we point it out. We remind fence sitters of what they’re associating themselves with if they follow the Teahadists.
xenos
Every inch of this planet is stolen land. I once spent a summer doing archaeology near a village on an Apache reservation. The reservation had been placed where this community was already living and farming, so these folks were pretty proud that they lived where they belonged and did not feel misused by the US government.
But what was I excavating out of their land? A nice sequence of Pueblo/Mogollon settlements, all abandoned or burned up in the 13th century when we start to see lots of Apache arrowheads appearing everywhere.
I don’t mention this to excuse anything, but please get real.
JordanRules
@Ash Can: Agreed. Didn’t pull that Southern strain from the initial argument and believe most who engage here don’t see any of this as even semi-exclusively Southern.
That KKK imagagery is very American.
catclub
@ruemara: “I just hope at some point he becomes an effective legislator.”
I remember reading something about him that said he has become just that. I _think_ it was about illegal foreclosures.
And I searched, and got this:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2013/07/florida_democrat_alan_grayson_is_the_most_effective_member_of_the_house.html
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Drexciya:
So what’s your actual plan? Be specific. You can’t come in with this kind of rhetoric and then claim that you’re just trying to make people think or whatever it is you usually try to weasel away with.
You say you want something very specific. What is your plan to get it? How do you think you can get it without any coalition-building with the people who currently have it? Bloody revolutions tend not to work out well for anyone. It’s going to be hard for you to enjoy living in one of those houses by the river if the price of it is total societal collapse.
Chris
@J.D. Rhoades:
I was the same way ten years later. Except in my case it was reading the right wing blogosphere, and realizing that yes, the dumb hippies’ hyperbolic assessments of our right wing were perfectly accurate.
PsiFighter37
I’m not a fan of Grayson, mainly because I think he grandstands a lot without actually getting anything done in Congress (just from a legislative standpoint; I don’t know how well he does constituent services).
That said, this is fucking spot on. The MSM tiptoes around the dogwhistle racism thrown at Obama like nothing is happening at all. And they probably don’t pick up on it, because the whole fucking lot of these mediocre shit-shoveling legacy hires never had to fucking live in the real world or understand that there’s more beyond the lilly-white 1% thunderdome (aka the Citadel from Mass Effect) out there.
If the MSM bothered to note that everything about Teabagger criticism of the President has to do with him not showing enough deference or fucking respect to those stains of month-old shit on their tighty whities, it would have been a big fucking help. Anyone who is willing to listen, I tell them that these fucking backwater sister-fucking halfwits are just mad that there is a black man in the White House.
It is the goddamn truth, and nothing else. I’m a mixed-race person myself, so it is not that fucking difficult to keep an ear out and realize when shit’s going down. My grandmother, whom I love dearly but lives in the middle of bumblefuck, tried sending me some shit about Obama being a secret Bill Ayers-loving terrorist before the 2008 election, and I told her to never send me that shit again and that she should know better.
Bring on the polyglot meteor, bitches.
PF37 +7 (sipping on a Sixpoint Bengali Tiger right now)
Omnes Omnibus
@JordanRules: Thank you for this comment. You made a very good point. “Yes, but…” is a better conversation starter than “No, however….”
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@aimai:
I think that Grayson’s aim is to point out what everyone always said about the National Review and the John Birch Society — there was no difference in their fundamental beliefs, only in their tactics and rhetoric.
There’s no fundamental difference in beliefs between a teabagger congressman trying to keep Those People from getting health insurance and a KKK member burning a cross on someone’s lawn. The only difference between them is the tactic used to get to the same desired result.
JordanRules
@Suzanne: That’s pretty much what my child brain told me when I waas like 10. And as I grew up and learned more, that initial inkling seemed even more correct.
? Martin
@Ash Can:
Let’s take for a moment a hypothetical where all racial privilege as a matter of policy has been eliminated as of today. We’re left with a situation where the average net worth of white families is $250,000. The average net worth of black families is $25,000. We may have eliminated any forward looking discrimination, but we’re left with a real lingering inequality that serves as a recurring privilege long past the policy has been addressed. The only real solution is to erect a black privilege (temporarily) to counter that real effect which was born out of the prior racial privilege. It’ll eventually disappear, but it’ll take generations, and so the privilege is transmitted even through generations not yet born.
Everyone in higher ed sees this first hand. My kids merely by virtue of being white are vastly more likely to go to college, to a better college, to graduate from college. We are more likely to live in a high-achieving district, go to a private school, get SAT prep, take AP and honors courses, be able to study and do extracurriculars rather than work. Once admitted, he’s less likely to have to work as a student. None of that is a function of policies within education. It’s purely a byproduct of wealth. I didn’t benefit from that privilege, but my wife did, and her parents gave us just enough help when we got married that we could go on the virtuous path of paying off student loans, home ownership, investment, and so on, rather than the path of carrying loans, renting, and not building wealth. The difference between those two paths was far less than the (very real) $225,000 wealth disparity above. There is quite literally a ‘White National Bank’, with assets spread out among all of us. That’s almost $18T in assets being used to finance the next generation of privilege, and it needs no policy support, not even a cultural bias.
But it turns out that the policy support is there, but in a very, very abstract way. The anti-tax movement and the ability of huge sums to go to political causes due to CU are, even if indirectly, designed to reinforce this economic privilege. Taxing wealth would directly attack this disparity but is largely taboo here. Taxing unearned income is the next best thing, and there’s been few policies as reliably attacked even by Democrats as taxation of unearned income. The natural progression from Lee Atwater’s ‘nigger nigger nigger’ to ‘forced busing’ is to ‘wealth preservation’. When whites have all the money, you can make every policy perfectly race neutral and that privilege will continue with little erosion. Adding in ‘money = speech’, and you can probably keep it running forever.
YellowJournalism
I’m still waiting to read an answer to Violet’s question.
Violet
@xenos: Yep. People migrate. They have as long as there have been humans. They move for various reasons–sometimes their group gets too big and they need more space and access too food and water. Sometimes a natural disaster happens that forces them to move. Or any number of other things. People move. Land is lived on by new people. Will continue to happen.
MikeJ
Does anybody think Red State has ever had a thread wondering if it’s hyperbole to call Obama an anti-American usurper who likes to kill babies and take away guns while raising taxes?
JordanRules
@J.D. Rhoades:
I think that is a very important testimony.
And, people who knee-jerk because “how dare they be called racists’ were always going to find a reason to double down and never want a larger discussion any way. Call ’em out! Save the larger discussion for people willing to have it.
PsiFighter37
@MikeJ: No, because they don’t have enough fucking brain cells to figure it out. Stupid answers to stupid questions!
TheMightyTrowel
@PsiFighter37: I just want you to know that I simultaneously respect and fear your alcohol tolerance. At +2 I can’t spell, let alone write reasoned paragraphs.
moonbat
Didn’t Congressman Clyburn call the Tea Party out the other day after their little Confederate rally in front of the White House as acting like the Klan? Was that okay?
It is true and important to acknowledge that horrible things have been done in this country in the name of race and profit and racism is definitely NOT a Southern states only phenomenon, but then what?
All people of good faith and, I hope, better intentions can’t allow themselves to become paralyzed by the past to the point that they don’t call out the wrong in the strongest terms when they see it. The more we quibble about semantics, the bolder these jerks become and I am sick of it. I acknowledge my internal biases and my privilege, but dragging all that baggage behind me, I’ll keep trying to make things better for everyone and make those waving the Confederate battle flag in our capital as though they were doing something patriotic feel as uncomfortable as possible.
Chris
@MikeJ:
A thread like this never happens without that exact thing occurring to me. And I’ve spent enough time in both blogospheres to know. Both sides really don’t do it.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@JordanRules:
The KKK was mostly restricted to the South until the 1910s, when it was hugely revived as a nativist white supremacist political movement. A lot of people don’t realize that the “classic” Klan activity is actually the second iteration of the group that spread far and wide across the entire US. The infamous Rosewood massacre took place not in the 1800s, but in 1923.
The “bad old days” that people think of when they think of the KKK aren’t nearly as old as some assume.
Omnes Omnibus
@MikeJ: Oh, I am sure they h………. Fuck it, I couldn’t finish typing the sentence.
That is the frustrating thing to me here. I know I don’t have a clue of the Black Experience. I can’t. All I can do is to try to do the best I can to make sure that the Black Experience of my kids (or my nephew and niece) are as close as possible to the same.
JordanRules
@? Martin: Martin, where did you “learn” this? Not sure if learned is even the right word. I admittedly haven’t searched out many sources that speak to generational wealth and priviledge. I’ve encountered Tim Wise and a book I lost that I can’t recall, but I’m always fascinated to know where the few people I stumble on who can speak on it gathered the seeds from.
Spoke on it quite eloquently too. I have a hard time putting it together, but it’s usually very emotional for me.
MikeJ
@Omnes Omnibus: And the follow-on to my question: why would it bother the teahadists to say any damn thing they want (dildo Christmas tree! Born in Kenya!)? There’s no discernible downside. Ok, some lefties sneer at them on blogs. Big deal.
scav
As I have no desire to be lectured tonight on how I may or may not be human and the limits acceptable discourse on all subjects by She Who Must Be Obeyed, I’ll just drop off the latest group open to being sued as a party of the ghey. Native American tribes challenge Oklahoma gay marriage ban.
PsiFighter37
@TheMightyTrowel: You’re quite possibly the only one who shows respect. Possibly because I am a bit sloppier on other times, but because some of the commenters here ain’t a fan of drank moi.
In all honesty, this gets me riled up. I have been saying ever since that heart attack shit-turd in waiting Rick Santelli blathered on about a program designed to save low-income Americans (probably a decent amount of them white) being a handout to poor folk, i.e. minorities, that the Teabagger Party was all about hating on the coloreds. It was never about a fucking movement to protest taxes or bailouts or (if you want to move onto what really drives their freak-a-leak) guns or abortion. It was about the minority man holding them down.
As someone who has a not-too-different life path from Obama (born into a mixed-race family to a Caucasian mother, lives out of country, moved around a bit as a kid, worked hard enough to go to a good school and do okay post-grad), it fucking offends the shit out of me. There are valid critiques of Obama, but the Teabaggers make it personal because I know what that cracker shuck and jive is all about.
Bob In Portland
@Drexciya: There is a difference between being a racist and being a beneficiary of racism depending on how you define beneficiary.
Dolly Llama
@? Martin: Martin, if Mr. Cole ever opens up the books for a front-pager here and doesn’t at least talk to you, I’ll be disappointed.
Drexciya
@Ash Can:
While my best case solution is unfeasible, I don’t think it’s at all unfeasible to assume that America has a particular responsibility to correct the effects of an economic, social, political and cultural oppression that we only took meaningful steps to ending in 1964 (and are now taking similarly meaningful steps to overturning). The “solutions” frequently presented to address this have typically been on white terms and in ways that flatter the social consciousness of the dominant majority. Which is to say, we view improvement and success in a deracialized vacuum and assume that if a Rising Tide Lifts All Boats that it’s, in general, a good thing, regardless of whether your boat is above water or under it. I think it’s a framing that warrants rejection and that the only way to undermine the effects of racism is for the federal government to favorably, indiscriminately and generously single out African American slave-descended populations.
Black unemployment has consistently been double that of the white population. Not only should there be free training and free college for all available vocations and trades, there should be regionally realistic quotas that make an affirmative point of hiring even underqualified black people in more-than-isolated numbers and providing them training to be capable.
Blacks have consistently been imprisoned at incredibly high rates and the effects of mass imprisonment doesn’t only effect those within prison, it effects families who are now woman-dominated in a patriarchal society that pays women less. It effects kids who not only have a forced absence in their lives/well being, but are at direct risk of the state in terms of being taken away from their homes and sent to prison themselves. And it effects the prisoners themselves once they’re released and who now find that they can’t vote and can’t get jobs because resumes require you to list your imprisonment. All for crimes that were, inn a vast majority of cases, victimless, and all for crimes that they were specifically and racially targeted for.
In the short term, not only should the drug war end and mandatory sentencing be overturned (something that’s widely used not just in the south), but prison, in general should be reconsidered and almost all black people should be released. There are other, more agreeable and more generally applicable reforms (they should have constant access to their families, solitary should be abolished, prisoners should make at or above the minimum wage, they should have more room, more privacy, more freedom generally, their right to vote shouldn’t be removed in prison or out of prison and they should be modeled after Scandinavian prisons), but my more immediate concern is that America’s criminal justice system and jury system can’t be trusted and that racial bias is inseparable from decisions that sentence black people at higher rates and for longer stretches of time. That basic inequality should be reflected in how black people are policed and how they are punished and the best effect is to release them and move them into jobs/money-making programs immediately.
And lastly, yes, they need reparations. They also need consistently favorable loans to acknowledge that black people started their efforts to attain freedom with less power and less economic potential than every other American demographic. Black wealth has not only been removed from black neighborhoods/families, but they were specifically banned from earning it for most this country’s history. Not only should they be directly given money, they should be given the purchasing power and ability to create independent economic pockets that circulate, spend and favorably embrace black people and black wealth. Ghettos should resemble areas of Tulsa Oklahoma, and areas of Detroit and New Orleans in their prime and they should be welcome avenues for black wealth and prosperity to be increased.
And more superficially, it would be very nice if black exclusion in media, the absence of black stories and the embrace of negative black caricatures and portrayals were more frequently questioned and fought against.
While “White People Being Nicer” is a laudable goal, I’d be much more satisfied with a specified and government mandated/supported increase in black power and black economic prospects. Black success shouldn’t be dependent on white largesse, because white largesse isn’t dependable. Furthermore, black success shouldn’t require acquiescing to varying examples of white power in order to be realistic. Black people would be much better positioned if they didn’t have to wait for white people to behave in order for the risks of living in American society to be minimized and it would be pleasant if government-mandated black empowerment were embraced as a valid policy alternative and valid corrective to government-mandated black oppression.
It doesn’t eliminate racism, but it would absolutely make its effects and its risks less dire. If you’re racist, you wouldn’t even have to change your opinion of black people for this to happen. What’s more, I don’t have to live with your racism in order to sufficiently promote myself to modern living standards. That’s a classic win/win.
And wouldn’t you know? All of that leads me to this:
@Omnes Omnibus:
No, you do not. No, they do not.
Pretty much everything I mentioned is abjectly against the Democratic party platform, entirely unmentioned in it and would face incredibly large swathes of resistance from most Democrats, most liberals and pretty much all Democratic discourse if it were expressed and implemented as party goals. There’s a reason why Barack Obama – whose writings suggest an exceptional level of racial awareness – is forced to play the role of Black Scold when he speaks in front of black audiences. There’s a reason why Eric Holder, who’s easily one of the best allies black people have had, has to express his clear political opinions in race-neutral and politically/practically conservative ways. There’s a reason why even the policies that are intended to help black people have to help “everyone” before they’re implemented, and there are even more reasons why both of them would be politically reviled if they embraced a more explicitly anti-racist agenda. It’s because the party needs white people for political success and white people would oppose all of this, en masse.
All of this, and all realistic solutions to racism first require an acceptance of disproportionate white power and then, even more importantly, an acknowledgment that racial parity is impossible without simultaneously diminishing some of your economic/political power and increasing the economic/political power of black people. When we entertain the conclusion that racism can be addressed without white sacrifice, we’re entertaining a fantasy that assumes that power that was acquired by the explicit distribution of pain doesn’t require “pain” to remove.
Now, I’m coming up in an era where, just like with Reconstruction, the securities that black people may have gained in the past 50 years are being gradually overturned. This not only includes the minor acquisition of wealth in the 90’s, but the weakening of the VRA and the revival of successful voter suppression. The structural inequities that we attribute to the Times of Yore (in terms of unemployment and policing) still exist in equally as strong numbers. And stuff like Stop and Frisk/Stand Your Ground is consistent with national American norms. There’s no honesty in pretending like half-measures are capable of being sufficient here.
And there’s going to be no effort to correct those half-measures without people gaining a full appreciation of how successful and thorough American racism and American anti-black oppression is and has been. People could entirely stop being racist tomorrow and if nothing else happened, the effects of racism would still persist in just as stark and disturbing ways. Putting your fingers in your ear does nothing to change this.
Keith G
@Suzanne: For most of the last …oh…10-20 thousand years of human history, “theft” was the primary (if not the only) way that land was acquired. Even our dear original Americans were known to intensely contest the right to occupy favored hunting and agricultural land.
My Hungarian ancestors moved here when they were cleansed off their land and my Irish family (those who were not purposely starved to death) were lucky to get here after barely escaping a brutal British spawned genocide.
xenos
@? Martin:
Well put. Although as the US becomes more multiethnic this is becoming more clearly a matter of class rather than just race. We can argue about sex, race, and religion all day long, but much of it is just a distraction from the issue of class, and who has access to capital and whatever it is that constitutes the means of production nowadays. I live in a very class-conscious European community, and they are not any better at figuring this stuff out than Americans are.
johnny aquitard
@Ash Can: I didn’t find his statement histrionic. It seemed a matter of fact documentation of Teabagger bigotry.
The crazy thing is, you don’t need to go to histrionics for it to sound over the top. Simply stating the obvious of what’s been staring us all in the face lo these nearly 6 years without disguising it under a hood of he said/she said false equivalence sounds shocking because, well, in truth what the Tea Party has been saying is in fact shocking.
Suzanne
@Drexciya:
Black success shouldn’t be dependent on white largesse, because white largesse isn’t dependable.
dogwood
@Dolly Llama:
I’ll second that.
Keith G
@Drexciya: I agree with the needs that you write about. And, I am concerned that best remedies for which you advocate will not happen. Most seem just as impossible as it would be for me to get the title to my great-great-great grand father’s property in County Cork.
So what’s a realistic plan? What is the process that is effective, that will address the issues that you have discussed, and that can get the broadest range of support in this troubled democracy.
Poly-syllabic rhetoric is cool, but a workable plan is better.
Drexciya
@@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
I find this post fascinating as well. Regardless of whether I’ve shown some of the solutions I favor, I think it’s a bit…much to make “having a plan” a requisite starting point for registering certain complaints. It adds to a dynamic where people who most openly voice certain social concerns are given a higher bar for participation and opinion voicing than other parties are and I reject the idea that I needed to have “feasible solutions” to validly and usefully disagree with Grayson, FPing Grayson or you. I see no reason why my bar for participation should be higher than those who thought this incident was perfectly cool and innocuous.
As an aside, why do you associate potential avenues for justice as ‘societal collapse’? If I burned the house down, for instance, I would go to prison. Whereas them and the people who made it possible for them to live there would not. I’m not endorsing or suggesting that as an alternative – it isn’t. But I think it’s helpful to note that there would be no justice there and that ‘societal collapse’ would be defined by my response to them and not society’s reaction to me. But that leads to a different consideration.
Why is the societal collapse they endorsed and caused less catastrophic than the one caused by responding – possibly even angrily – to it? There’s a sense, potentially guided by self-serving perceptions of the civil rights movement, that the only justifiable way to respond to this country’s racial history is in a calm, collected, We’re All Humans And For Everyone fashion. That expectation is another form of a “high bar” that denies the justification and humanity of publicly unvoiced and racialized feelings, some of which involve perfectly understandable violence. I think it’s ridiculous to expect me to be and aspire to be a saint in response to a history that’s never applied that requirement to itself.
And for the record, I have no interest in living there. My anecdote was illustrative, not aspirational. But I’m sure you knew that.
Suzanne
@Suzanne: I fucked up my blockquote. Baaaaaah.
MattR
For something more lighthearted, anyone watching this new “At Midnight” show with Chris Hardwick that comes on after Colbert? I have been enjoying the first episode and a half. It has a bit of a Remote Control feel to me.
(EDIT: And the current question for the contestants to answer during commercial break is: “What does Ann Coulter plan to do with He-Man?”)
PsiFighter37
@Suzanne: I blame healthcare.gov, like any true patriot.
Suzanne
@Drexciya:
As a victim of violence a few times over, go fuck yourself.
xenos
@Suzanne: It is not white largesse to ask for black support in the course of instituting policies that alleviate poverty generally. It is not white largesse for me to donate to, say, Deval Patrick when he is the most talented politician on my side who happens to be running for Governor of my state.
As a white Democrat I need people of all backgrounds to agree with me (or straighten me out, as needed), and to support one another in building a functioning polity. Coalition-building is the basis for nation-building, wherever you are.
Yatsuno
Can I mention now that Grayson is Jewish?
Origuy
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): The cross-burning that we think of as emblematic of the Klan didn’t start until 1915. They got it from a book called The Clansman, that inspired D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. It was originally a way for the Scottish Highland clans to call the the warriors to battle.
The Klan in the 20s was as strong as it was anywhere in Indiana. The governor and many other politicians were members; the Grand Dragon boasted that he was “the law in Indiana”. He found out differently when he went to jail for murder of a German-American woman named Madge Oberholtzer.
Omnes Omnibus
@Drexciya: Everything you say may well be true, but it is not a refutation of what I said.
FlipYrWhig
@Suzanne: It’s fun to play Fantasy Politics! You set out what you think would be fair and right, and then some stuff hypothetically happens, and eventually (but not soon enough!) the world is a happier place. We’re still working on Step 2, but once it’s in place, we’re two-thirds of the way to Utopia!
JordanRules
@Drexciya: I enjoy the thorough response full of detail.
Has this template ever been used to effectively redress centuries of an unequally hurtful power dynamic?
If so, has it been successful?
JordanRules
Bad block quotes. Arrrggg!! FYWP, all day.
FlipYrWhig
@Drexciya: right, so, in other words, asking you to explain the part where the nice plan, you know, _happens_… that’s just more cognitive oppression? Fine, my plan to fix climate change is that everyone learns to fly, because that will eliminate cars and their pollution. If someone says, uh, how are you going to do that, I’ll just refer them to my other vehicle, the high horse.
Suzanne
@xenos: You’re right, but every one of the social reforms Drexciya calls for would require majority support. This country is not over 50% black. Whites are needed for a majority. You could call this “white largesse” or just trying to be fair, but it’s not happening without some white people.
But Drexciya is admittedly writing a Christmas list here, not actually trying to do the hard work of making things better. I, too, can sit around dreaming stuff up, but I am interested in tangible, measurable results.
Suzanne
@FlipYrWhig: The thing that is the most telling is that EVEN IN THE HYPOTHETICAL, one group of people comes out the loser. It’s just the group of people of which Drexciya is not a part.
Spaghetti Lee
@Suzanne:
Given the bit about inequality born out of pain requiring pain to correct, I wonder if democratic rule is actually in the cards here.
kc
@FlipYrWhig:
“Cognitive oppression.” Hehehe.
Omnes Omnibus
@Spaghetti Lee: There are theoretical legal arguments that in order to achieve equality a thumb needs to be kept on the scale. It is the basis for affirmative action. The questions are how hard should the thumb come down and when should it stop?
Drexciya
@Suzanne
First off, while you may be aware of this, I feel the need to point it out: it’s our federal government too and we’re adequate tax payers. Secondly, I think there’s a desire to write off my concerns and statements as another variant of far leftist, puritan concern trolling from quasi-libertarian Firebaggers. I think that would be mistaken, and I think you’d be surprised by both my support for the Democratic party as a necessary project and my assent with the needs and political utility of coalition-building. The problem is that the nature of this political issue and the policy needs necessary to address it are not only historically entrenched and deep; they require all existing parties to agree to undermine their own political and economic interests for the benefit of a group they don’t belong to – and in most cases, feel no personal or political attachment to. Given that modern whites feel no culpability in our system’s currently racist underpinnings, the task becomes even more herculean. Is there a precedent for such a thing happening to people that broader society feel no responsibility for? I don’t think there’s one.
And it’s, for that reason, that I think even my most modestly stated policy goals are impossible. That doesn’t undermine their necessity, because, again, not only is every other policy solution not working, it’s further entrenching the depth of a racism that becomes more deniable and less open to direct acknowledgment with each policy alternative that’s heralded under the assumption that POC’s are primary beneficiaries.
I persist because regardless of their impossibility, I don’t think my policy goals should be impossible. I think all of you have a moral requirement to agree with them and perhaps take measures – both nationally and interpersonally – to make them more possible. Further, I understand that white people are human and capable of empathy and that not all of them will look at that list or my posts and see a totem of absurdity and unreason. I think expressing myself in a broader fashion and contributing to, promoting and supporting voices who come from where I come from and who agree with what I agree with is a necessary first half-step.
My presence here – which I don’t like, which I take no pleasure in and which I find enormously stressful/angering at points – is an expression of my understanding for the need for a coalition, and for white people to acknowledge that racism doesn’t end unless you start taking steps to end it. It also requires accepting that those steps won’t be toward progress for you. Coalition politics is a two-way street, and ever since we’ve been voting, we’ve voted in ways and for parties that tend to lend benefits to white people and white people alone. I think as members of that coalition, you have a requirement to do the same for me and mine for once.
I think being way, way more mindful of both microaggressions and the general deficit of POC/black voices in the parties that liberals blogs link and respond to is a very easy, immediate corrective to make, by the way. Not just because it adds variety, but because you can attain a better understanding of your responsibilities as coalition partners if you root your concerns in an awareness of and acknowledgment of needs you don’t share. Is this not basic and agreeable?
YellowJournalism
@Yatsuno: Shhhh! Don’t change the narrative. This conversation is interesting. And it’s the second one I’ve seen where Violet has posted a challenging question to Drexciya that went unanswered.
FlipYrWhig
@Suzanne: That doesn’t even really bother me. The part that bothers me is the notion that to explain how it’s supposed to work would be yet another racist aggravation in its own right, or something. That’s what all the stuff about burdens to participation and such all suggests. A wish list for a new system, in order to have any hopes of being actualized, kinda needs to show signs of being _systemic_. Social workers don’t say that before we help abused kids we have to first have a long discussion about the inherent racism of the US legal system where we all nod sagely about the wrongfulness of deep structures and practices. They figure out how to get Child Protective Services on the damn phone.
Drexciya
Also, I really like Martin’s posts.
FlipYrWhig
@Drexciya: there’s no coalition. There’s no politics! You’re just saying you want Things to be Better. Awareness and mindfulness aren’t actions. Desires aren’t actions. You’ve left out the middle and dodged it any time anyone has challenged you to get specific. It’s futile. It’s a totem of futility.
Drexciya
@YellowJournalism:
Do you think black people are/were in a similar place relative to Native Americans that white people are/were relative blacks?
If your answer is “no,” which I certainly hope it is, then I see no compelling reason to respond to the post. It was based on accepting the equivalence of an intentional false comparison. I don’t have much time for games. If them or you wish to argue the point, however, I’d be interested.
Omnes Omnibus
@Drexciya: How do we get there? It takes people doing things. This website happens to be full of people who are interested in doing things. Moreover, many of us of various racial backgrounds are doing things. they may not be the the exact things you want. They may not be for the specific reason you desire, but if you want a coalition, you do need to work with people.
JordanRules
@Omnes Omnibus: Yep. Which is where my line of thought about thinking beyond it comes from. It doesn’t seem to work out well when you’re still taking pieces from a compromised system and re-assembling them from a place of redress to achieve ‘equality’.
I’m not speaking from an anarchists eye, positing that we should blow the whole thing up but we should blow past the previous models and see what is out there for integration with where we are today and where we should be going.
It’s not intended to discount the historical pain by not addressing it in a way the redistributes it, rather it’s to affirmatively address it in a way to find meaning that carries with it one of the most important progressions in human history.
I’ll forgoe my 40 acres for 40 leaps forward in human social evolution that can help leave a planet for 40 more millenia.
Suzanne
@FlipYrWhig: oh, it bothers me. I am a person who dreams shit up, and then figures out how to actually build it. In my case, that is literal. I literally draw lines on paper and then have to figure out how to make that a physical, tangible thing that stands up against the wind and weather. Intellectual wanking of any sort is worthless to me without an action plan. On the Meyers-Briggs, I am an “S”.
As I alluded earlier on the thread, I am also offended by Drexciya’s behavior on a thread a number of weeks ago. I suggested that racism is not always, 100%, in every situation the greatest social ill that we face, that sexism, classism, homophobia, ableism, etc are also awful and manifest themselves in other damaging ways, and I was called RAAAAAAAAAAACIST! So I am not too inclined to give Drexciya much intellectual quarter here.
PsiFighter37
@Suzanne:
ZOMG it’s like you’re the new Larry Johnson #throwback_tuesdays
PF37 +french fries
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Drexciya:
When your complaint is People are living on property that they stole from my relatives, the only possible response is, What do you want us to do? Your complaint is very specific and so, by its very nature, demands a very specific response. I’m assuming that There, there, it’s too bad, I feel sorry for you would not be considered an adequate response, but you refuse to say what an adequate response would be, other than Here’s the keys to my house so you can move in.
Your bar for participation was not higher. But once you started bringing in the fact that you expect compensation for what your relatives suffered, you raised your own bar.
Again, it depends on what your “potential avenues for justice” are. If you picture those avenues coming through the law and lawmaking process, then society can probably adjust. If you picture them coming at the point of a gun or the blade of a machete, I’m pretty sure that qualifies as “societal collapse.”
Let me guess — you were nowhere near South Central Los Angeles in 1992, so you still have romanticized notions of what riots are like and who they harm. I may be white, but even I could see that the houses that burned down didn’t belong to white people — they belonged to black people. The businesses that were looted and burned were in black neighborhoods, not white neighborhoods.
I am against violence and rioting because, contrary to what you seem to believe, it primarily injures those doing the rioting, not the elites people imagine they’re rioting against. A huge part of what allowed Nixon and Reagan to come to power was the urban riots of the late 1960s and the “white flight” to the suburbs that followed. You can romanticize those violent days all you want, but they led directly to the reversals of civil rights that you decry.
I’m not saying you should aspire to be a saint. I’m saying you should aspire to not injuring yourself even further than you already are. You should aspire to not burning down the businesses and homes that your neighbors own. You should aspire to self-preservation. But you refuse to see that because you’re caught up in the romance of the revolution that’s tainted the left since the 1960s.
So let’s use it for illustration. Let’s say that there is a revolution and things are 100 percent reversed. Your descendants fully take control of what those white people have now and leave their descendants living in hovels as your relatives did. So your ideal is to have your descendants become the kind of people you currently claim to hate — people who take no responsibility for the actions of their ancestors and insist that it was their own hard work that got them into those nice houses facing the riverfront.
Yatsuno
@Drexciya:
Nope. They were worse. Native populations by the time of the arrival of the Pilgrims were one tenth of what they had been. Native American had a systematic genocide carried out against them organised by every European conoising power in the Americas. The Aztecs were reduced from a thriving civilisation to barely surviving the Spanish conquest. And before Africans were enslaved in the Americas, Natives were enslaved, raped, beaten, and murdered. This continued with western expansion until they could be herded onto reservations and left to rot with zero financial assistance. So yeah, white people suck. But can you at least acknowledge there are some who want to make things better?
Omnes Omnibus
@JordanRules: Honestly, our country would be a lot better shape if the Radical Republicans had been able to freely impose their version of Reconstruction. Forty acres and a mule as a starting point. It didn’t happen. So that thumb on the scale should still e there. And, at the same time, we should be fighting to create a society where it is no longer necessary. For different races, sexes, sexual orientations, etc.
? Martin
@JordanRules: Learned it by winning the game. I grew up in a poor white household. Parents were young – and my parents married 6 months before I was born (I wan’t a preemie). Was the first in the family to graduate from college. Worked full time all through college. Busted my ass – first job was when I was 13. I got some of that privilege mostly through my grandparents, but I couldn’t see it.
My wife was on the other side. She grew up solidly middle class. Her dad was in his 40s when she was born. They had a house and her dad was deep into his blue collar career, pension, health insurance, the whole bit. She didn’t need to work as a teenager, got support through college, etc. So after we met and decided to get married, her parents gave us some money to get started. It wasn’t a huge amount (at least relative to that number above) – $20K or something like that, but that’s a hell of a downpayment on life. It allowed us to quickly get out of debt and to put some money in the bank. We bought our first house 2 years after getting married. That $20K was key. I can’t tell you how much better our life turned out because of that.
But in my job I see the opportunity disparity. Students that live in low-income areas, with underfunded schools, no AP courses, having to work to support their families with household incomes of $5K per year, taking the bus to a school an hour away simply to escape the inner-city gang culture that permeates their local school. These students are working immensely harder than my kids will ever need to work and they will have fewer opportunities in spite of that effort, and it’s entirely due to our ability to live in a high-income area. And we meet the parents of our kids friends and discover that quite a few of them in this high-income area are living WAY above their means, but they know that there’s opportunity here for their kids. So they live on the edge of financial ruin because that’s the way out. We can only live here because of that $20K, which we grew into $600K in home equity over 15 years. I’ll take credit for the decisions made along that time, but that first decision never could have been made without the $20K, and it’s paying dividends for my kids, who have a greater advantage on life than even my wife did.
Along that route, I realized that once you can escape debt and have enough in assets to get the free bank accounts and no-fee credit cards, and the cash back, and all of those little perks that come with wealth, it becomes increasingly difficult to NOT grow that wealth. And I realized that was the system that benefitted me, in part because my grandparents enabled that for my parents for my benefit, and because my wife’s parents enabled that for us for our kids’ benefit. Rather than paying people for capital, you’re getting paid for it. There’s a magic line that if you can stay above it, you’ll almost certainly rise (assuming you don’t blow it on stupid shit), and if you’re below it, you’re almost certainly fucked and even Powerball is likely to just make you more fucked. If we had a living wage, that wealth inequity might be overcome eventually. But we don’t have that either. And we have a wealth gap that is so massive that it’s statistically pre-determinative now.
And the situation isn’t any different if we look at Latinos or Native Americans. It’s the same economic system – dumping the indigenous folks in places that are unproductive and keeping the natural wealth with the whites.
@Dolly Llama: I’ve been here since around when DougJ was given the FP gig. If Cole wanted me posting, he’s had plenty of opportunity to contact me. But I’m not really well suited to it. He’s made some pretty good choices, IMO.
Just Some Fuckhead
How you shut-ins, alcoholics and assorted functional idiots can so thoroughly muck up a Balloon Juice thread will be studied by anthropologists for years.
Self-righteous gay atheist black man, no one gives a fuck about your teen angst, particularly in a pseudonymous forum populated by freaks who carry pet pics in their wallets.
Martin, if I had a fucking nickel for every time you’ve used a long “smart” comment as a vehicle for showcasing your fabulous job, wealth, kids, great choices and perfect teeth, I’d be a rich man like you. You are exactly the type of white people who make the rest of us look bad.
Nineone, you can climb up off my balls and suck my dick.
PsiFighter37
@Just Some Fuckhead: Uh…it’s an open thread? Kinda hard to fuck that up, sugar.
? Martin
@xenos: Here’s a nice study on the effect:
Those are all inter-related factors, all tying back ultimately to wealth. We know that SAT scores correlate most strongly with wealth above all other factors including race. The ability to get your kids several years of SAT prep actually does pay off. And that, along with funding disparities in schools related to tax base (also wealth) means that education opportunities are statistically driven by wealth. The education gap drives the income gap, which further increases the wealth gap.
But austerity is driving up the cost of education. Our tax structure rewards home ownership and penalizes renters. Taxes are higher for earned vs unearned income. Everything is structured toward wealth and away from income.
max
@PsiFighter37: I have been saying ever since that heart attack shit-turd in waiting Rick Santelli blathered on about a program designed to save low-income Americans (probably a decent amount of them white) being a handout to poor folk, i.e. minorities, that the Teabagger Party was all about hating on the coloreds. It was never about a fucking movement to protest taxes or bailouts or (if you want to move onto what really drives their freak-a-leak) guns or abortion. It was about the minority man holding them down.
And serious as a heart attack dude, soon as they start spewing the tenther/secession/revolution speak in December 2008, I was like, ‘Fuckin’ hold it, man, this isn’t funny, this is the start of some seriously ugly shit.’
Two things – yesterday (the 21st) Rod Dreher put up a post arguing (that the Tea Baggers aren’t concerned with the deficit like they should be) with a letter he received from a Bagger, which contained this:
Putting aside the argument over well-nigh imaginary federal debt crisis… ‘ghetto blacks’. (And Dreher was telling the guy he didn’t understand the budget, and was actually correct about that.)
Item two, billmon just linked to a Texas Observer article which included this:
The problem is not that racism or what have you is confined to the South, it’s that white supremacy is not an ideology of kooks in the South but at this point predominant (if there ever was some point at which it was NOT actually predominant) among white people. (Hey, it surprised me, given that I earlier thought that sort of thing was dying off – since it seemed to have gone underground for a time – but that’s neither here nor there, since it’s loud and proud again now.)
max
[‘These guys see the The Turner Diaries as a plan, man.’]
MattR
@Yatsuno: I think you misread that the same way I initially did. How much of that oppression and enslavement of Native Americans was done by black people? Drexciya’s point seems to be that since his/her people didn’t steal the land initially, it is not a problem for them to now live on it.
Omnes Omnibus
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Define “muck up.” Was it going any place about which you gave a shit?
Suzanne
@Just Some Fuckhead:
It’s 2013.
That shit is on my iPhone.
Duh.
YellowJournalism
@Drexciya: I read Violet’s post as a question of how you deal with benefitting from another group’s suffering and loss, since you made the (legitimate) argument that white people continue to benefit from a system of racial oppression. How much you benefit in comparison to a white person was not part the question, from what I read.
You live in a country where it took the remarks first black president to make the general public look more closely at the use of a degrading, derogatory term for an entire race of people as a mascot for a fucking football team, a moment that seems to have faded and gone. So, because you have interesting opinions on other subjects, I would have enjoyed seeing what you had to say about the question Violet proposed.
And I also wonder how you feel about Grayson’s right to use the KKK comparison now that you know he is directly connected to a group that has been attacked by the KKK.
Drexciya
@Omnes Omnibus :
What does “working with people” mean to you, and why would you interpret my actions as not doing that? Furthermore, in the context of this space and broadly, this coalition, in what ways do you think black people are being worked with? We vote together, certainly. Is that sufficient, in your estimation? If so, why?
Separately, I’d ask that FlipYrWhig stays mindful that me stating some of my Best Case Policy solutions was done because it was seemingly assumed that there were no solutions and that I had none in mind. Now that I’ve stated them, regardless of how impossible I admitted they were, I’m now being critiqued for those very solutions not being realistic. I’m not sure that’s particularly necessary. I also think you’re underestimating the degree to which the colorbind expressions of racism have made it much more difficult for older and younger generations of white people to identify the presence and depth of a racial problem, and that the statistics, arguments and pain that flows from a fundamental unequal system are removed from public consciousness because its current forms are expressed in ways that aren’t obvious (i.e there are no Whites Only signs anymore, but there are stores and whole neighbors that only have white people in them). We have something of a segregated racial experience in this country and I think without explaining that, exhaustively, that the potential for even building a coalition around this is lost.
I’m not just saying that I want things to be better. I’m expressing, both personally and generally, the sense that this is a thing that exists and is important and negatively effects legions of people in ways I’m not sure are appreciated. Can a coalition be built around problem-solving when a significant portion of that coalition thinks they’re already solving it and that there isn’t much left for them, personally, to do and think about? Does anything happen without disempowered people creating a mindfulness of and a voice for that disempowerment?
JordanRules
@Omnes Omnibus: Oh I agree, reconstruction gave us the bustling communities of black economnic power like Tulsa and Detroit that Drexciya mentioned. Shit, I’ll go back further and say Ghana after emancipation wasn’t a bad idea.
The thumb hasn’t ever really been on the scale though and that scale is wrought with the same confusion and bias that facilitates the PIC (prison industrial comples) now.
So the only thing I see coming from a redistribution template is revolving guilt, anger and violence. Palestine. Throw in the romanticized notions of violence and what has proven to be the outcome time and time again (hat tip Mnem). Throw in the natural comparative dynamics of oppression of other groups not addressed in this model (hat tip Yutsy and Suzanne) and you have got to think of a bigger, better model.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Drexciya:
It’s interesting that you assume that white people like, well, me, have no black relatives for whom we may be willing to sacrifice some of our personal progress if it meant we could instead advance their progress. Progress that benefits my whole family is progress even if I don’t personally benefit from it.
(For the record, said relatives are my (biracial) niece and nephew on my husband’s side.)
YellowJournalism
@MattR: okay, so I misread it, too. But doesn’t the point still stand that he or she is benefitting from Native American oppression by living on that land? There were black settlers who expanded into the West. Yes, their ancestry was forced onto those continent, but that doesn’t deny that another group suffered while another prospered.
Felonius Monk
@Drexciya: Oh Noes, your tender fee-fees are hurtin’. Tough shit!
While it is unquestionably true that most of the KKK’s violence has been directed toward Blacks since the Klan was first formed in 1865, they have also directed their hate and violence toward Jews, Catholics, and various immigrant and ethnic minorities.
In 1915 the Klan lynched Leo Frank, a Jew, in Atlanta.
And here is a little bit of history (via) about their anti-Catholic activities:
So I think us non-Blacks have good and justifiable reasons for calling out these KKK assholes and doing everything we can legally do to eradicate this cancer. And if that offends your tender sensibilities, then I suggest you go hide under the covers until the world is made safe for you.
johnny aquitard
@Another Holocene Human: I
. The thought occurred to me that for most of the history of the Klan there have been many more people in MD than FL.
Florida didn’t become habitable until the advent of air conditioning and DDT malaria eradication and swamp drainage efforts, i.e., after the 1920’s, which was the peak of the Klan activity and membership. It was AFAIK the last time overt membership could be acknowledged with any expectation of political success in a major election, with David Duke in the Louisiana state legislature in 1988 the exception.
Chris
@MattR:
Drexciya’s point to us for this entire thread has been that it doesn’t matter how we got to a position of privilege, only that we’re benefiting from it. So I hope that’s not the response to the American Indian situation, because it rather undermines everything that’s been said.
Violet
@MattR:
So if someone steals Drexciya’s car and then either gives or sells it to a third person, then Drexciya would be just fine with that because the new owners of the car didn’t steal it in the first place? Somehow I don’t think it would work like that.
YellowJournalism
@Chris: Okay you said it better than I was trying and failing to say it.
piratedan
land mines everywhere…. we anglos have a lot to answer for in our proud history as Americans when it comes to our former institution of slavery, our treatment of Native Americans, asians in the building of the west and our internment of our own citizens during WW II. With our supposedly enlightened understandings of today and the wrongs done, how do you reconcile, can you reconcile the damages done in today’s political environment without plunging the nation into armed conflict?
We have the first President of mixed ancestry inhabiting the most powerful position in the country and the worthy opposition is on a constant freak out over the implementation of their own former policies. Yet, change is coming, via government regulation, via the progress nationally over civil rights (albeit with the states pushing back against it just as vigorously). I just get the impression that Drexciya is like a Bolshevik trapped in a room of Mensheviks, change isn’t happening soon enough or enough of it to satisfy…. and I can’t say that its totally racially motivated, you could just as easily say that this is class warfare with the constant breakdown of the unions being the key to removing power from people that work.
Omnes Omnibus
@Violet: It should depend on whether the purchase knew the car was stolen.
Drexciya
@YellowJournalism:
Again, Violet’s post was quite a disingenuous false comparison and I can’t really respond to it seriously for historical reasons that I’m quite sure you’re aware of. Invaders who came here and stole land that didn’t belong to them aren’t the same as people who were brought here on slave ships, worked to death for several centuries, kept in poverty under various government and regionally mandated forms of oppression/terrorism and denied the ability to create or go to anything independent. There’s a degree of agency, power and intent that’s present in one example that does not exist in the other. What’s an interesting consideration to you is a nonstarter for me and hardly the basis for a fulfilling or productive discussion. If Violet wanted me to respond, they would have offered a different argument. As for this:
Nope. Thinking this assumes that the fundamental substance of my complaint was that he’s white and white people can’t say that. That’s pretty reductive reading of every argument I’ve made here so far and ignores the substantive and emotional issues I had with that reference. The behavior he felt morally justified in responding to was primarily anti-black in nature, and he took it upon himself to not just define – on behalf of blacks who didn’t ask – the nature of anti-black racism, but then he conveniently called a narrow slice of the American public that in no way encompasses the full scope of American racism the ” home of bigotry and discrimination in America today, just as the KKK was for an earlier generation.” For reasons that I’ve already stated, I think that framing is actively counterproductive and limited. Even if it weren’t offensive, it’d still be wrong.
And, as separate questions that I’ve went out of my way to engaged, I’m interested in how this particular brand of wrongness could be persuasive and appealing enough to warrant a front page post and praise, and I’m interested in why he Went There. I don’t think the answers to those questions are particularly present, but I think it’s worthwhile to consider them.
ETA: I’m not remotely dodging native issues and I’m not even against considering what responsibility black people have to their betterment and fulfillment (even if we did absolutely nothing, I would be all for taking whatever measures they thought were sufficient for their predicament). But pretending that black people, in that circumstance, are the same as white people in the other circumstance is hardly a pretext for a discussion. They’re not the same, and there’s no way I can talk about them like they are.
Violet
@Omnes Omnibus: That might only affect how angry Drexciya is at them. Either way, won’t Drexciya want the car back? Just like the Native Americans might want their land back that the white man stole but various people, including African Americans might be living on now.
Drexciya
@Myself:
-present*
+pleasant*
JordanRules
@Drexciya: Technically an open thread. She links to the twitter owners account frequently. She then asked a question about rhetorical overkill and alluded to the open thread again.
I think many folks explained why they applauded it in the comments above. (Ie. KKK is more than violence against blacks, feeling of responsibility to point out racism, pissed about it, history of democrats being afraid to fight etc)
I also think you gave a very detailed explanation (illustrative, as you said) of what should be done to address the historical wrongs that enable the continued privilege of the day even though many people said you didn’t.
YellowJournalism
@Drexciya: I still don’t think Violet was being disingenuous. I think her point is valid for reasons myself and others have stated. Plus, I have never found Violet to be the type of commenter to post disingenuous questions on topics of importance. But you find it something not worth arguing, so it ends there.
As for Grayson, I was genuinely curious as I said, and I happen to agree that his comments are indeed offensive and counterproductive, although not to the extent or in the same context as it is for you.
Omnes Omnibus
@Drexciya:
Objection. Assumes facts not in evidence.
Here is the thing. I know I have benefited from white privilege among a variety of other privileges. I don’t think it is right that this has been the case. As I see it, what I can do is vote for the people who are interested in diminishing that privilege. I don’t see it as me losing a privilege but rather everyone else having the same privilege that I do. I can’t help who I was born. No one can.
I was taught something as a kid – my family backpacked, hiked, and climbed. The motto was leave the place cleaner than you found it. It works for me. If it is not enough for you, okay.
Drexciya
YellowJournalism, come on.
I explained exactly why I’m not entertaining the question. Don’t pretend like I don’t have a reason and I’m just aimlessly dismissing it because it’s Too Pointed For Me To Handle. A comparison of expressions of power without a mindfulness of power dynamics is analytically useless, particularly for sussing out degrees of moral responsibility and justifiable moral responses. In order to answer that, I’d have to ignore the things that make Violet’s question, as stated, absurd to entertain. It’s a game I’m not in the mood for. I can understand if you don’t accept my rationale for my not answering, but a rationale is there.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Drexciya:
The situations are not identical, but they are analogous, and it’s the analogy people are interested in. If white people today are fully responsible for the actions of their ancestors towards black people, why are black people not fully responsible for their ancestors’ actions towards native Americans? Buffalo soldiers fought in the Indian Wars and participated in enforcing the reservation system. Black people are benefiting from that system today, though of course to a lesser extent than whites do.
The question is whether you’re holding white people to a higher standard than everyone else when it comes to the actions of their ancestors. (I’m specifying “ancestors” because I think we’re all in agreement that people need to be held accountable for their own racist actions or inactions.)
Drexciya
@Omnes Omnibus:
If you think I’m assuming facts that aren’t in evidence, it’s not because you’re aware of all the facts, it’s because you haven’t been looking:
Drexciya
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
I don’t know how many times I have to say that this analytical framework is extremely problematic for me and difficult to think through in the way that you (and other parties) want me to. I’m really not dodging the question but “black people are benefiting from the system today?” Soldiers that had no political power, representation, agency or citizenship (even in indirect fashions) fought in wars against them? The comparison only works if you entertain the most facile conclusions about the given facts and avoid the complications that make parity – implied or directly stated – somewhere between difficult and impossible. If they’re not the same thing and everyone agrees that they’re not the same and if no one’s made a good argument for why they should be discussed as though the analogue has teeth, there’s not much I can do for you guys.
I wouldn’t even dislike this conversation – especially in a separate context – but like this? With these premises? No. Sorry. Except, not really.
Omnes Omnibus
@Drexciya: That wasn’t brought into this particular discussion until just now.
How many whites vote D? The ones in your coalition are likely to be those who don’t agree with the proposition. Hey, a metric shit ton of white people are assholes. But most of them ain’t in your coalition. I could go on and fisk the whole thing but, fuck it, judge me and mine by the standards of the assholes with whom I happen to share pigmentation.
Drexciya
Omnes, what specific planks of the Democratic party’s platform and this blog dedicates itself to the identification of racism, its effects and eradication of those effects?
ETA: Not that I think your objection is unfair. It’s a good point. But…
Omnes Omnibus
@Drexciya: The Democratic Party supports affirmative action. The Democratic party is on record as supporting equal rights for all people regardless of race, sexual orientation, ethnic background, religion, etc. As far as I know, this blog doesn’t have a platform.
Spaghetti Lee
@Drexciya:
Here’s the WH’s and the Democratic Party’s official pages on the matter, for what it’s worth:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/civil-rights
http://www.democrats.org/issues/civil_rights
And any attempt to outfit Balloon Juice with an enumerated platform would probably result in the longest and most tendentious comment thread in internet history.
Suzanne
@Spaghetti Lee: Balloon Juice’s platform: Yay pets. And: Go Stillers.
Having said that, John brought ABL and Elon James White on board specifically to bring a broader range of voices to the table.
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne: Fuck the fucking Steelers.
Suzanne
I just know that Pittsburgh is to blame for that “Black and Yellow” song that was all over the radio a couple of years ago, and fuck that song.
Drexciya
I think I’ll bow out for now and assume that any issues I have with both of those links/sentiments can be preempted based on my comments here. I’ll leave with a reminder that powder vs crack cocaine sentencing disparity was lowered from 100:1 to 18:1, if my memory serves.
Now, I fully support the Fair Sentencing Act and lauded both Obama (and Holder’s) efforts generally and in this thread. But…18:1. I have no idea how the rest of you might feel about a disparity like that and the fact that such a pronounced one legitimately qualifies as progress. But it consistently makes my heart sink. I’ll also note that race was mentioned in only one paragraph, relating to one subject. As though criminal justice issues make up the fullness of racial concerns and racist effects.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Omnes Omnibus:
According to Roper, 59 percent of white voters cast their ballot for Romney. So I’m pretty sure I agree with your premise that most white people are fucking idiots.
@Drexciya:
The point I’m making is that, especially in this thread, you’re on much firmer ground when you point to the current abuses — like otherwise qualified borrowers being steered to high-risk loans based on their race or black people getting substandard health care — rather than getting out into the weeds and talking about the distant past.
As I and several people pointed out above, the history of the KKK is by no means in the distant past — the worst of it is almost all in the 20th century. Why talk about the events of 1620 or 1720 when the events from 1915 forward are far more relevant to the problems we have today?
Omnes Omnibus
@Drexciya: 16:1 is progress as compared to the insane 100:1. 2:1 or at most 3:1 is probably where the sentencing authorities should come out. I worked in the federal courts during the 100:1 preiod and I am well aware of how this plays out. I also know that the vast majority of federal judges, both D and R appointed hated this rule.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
Last thought before hitting the hay: I can’t help but notice that we seem to have these big surges of white supremacism every time there’s new media to push it. Motion pictures? “Birth of a Nation.” Radio? Father Coughlin. Then TV, then Internet. Why is that?
Something to think about. Goodnight, all.
JordanRules
There is something at play here where someone is holding power in a discussion via a system that has so narrowly defined the spheres of available power that this temporary debate power becomes seductive. And it’s a panacea.
It’s feeling like a power flexing exercise due to expert status that can only be afforded to certain participants in the system rather than a genuine engagement. Cold comfort in light of what’s at stake.
You can have as many teachable moments as possible but they mean nothing against a backdrop where you already know what most of the responses and reactions will be and haven’t prepared yourself to figure out a different way to flex the muscle. And you know this because you are the expert.
Unearned privilege is the hardest to give up. You cannot expect most people to learn something that directly threatens their privilege. Change the paradigm or remain an expert, one is way more uncomfortable than the other.
Yatsuno
@Suzanne: And Zandar. And let’s not forget Mixie is half Latino.
Omnes Omnibus
@JordanRules: I get some privileges because of who I am. This isn’t right. But I can’t stop the store clerk from trusting me as opposed to a AA guy. I can’t fix that. What I can do is vote for people who support equality. I can support organizations that try to advance equality. I can indicate my disapproval of unequal treatment. I can also think about the things Drexciya has said and bear them in mind. I might not agree with them or I might think they are too limited, but I can take them into consideration.
Spaghetti Lee
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
If any other group-racial, gender, whatever-had a 59-41 split on any issue, no one would call the whole group “fucking idiots.”
No, I’m not one of those “white people are the REAL victims!” guys. But one of the reasons I find this check-your-privilege movement to often be insufferable is that it seems like half of it is people trying to one-up each other in describing just how terrible and awful white people are. Especially when one of the pillars is supposed to be that conventional wisdom or cultural stereotypes of a group should never affect one’s perception of a another individual person.
JordanRules
@Omnes Omnibus: You are constructively engaging and I won’t discount what you and very few others will take from this. But the hard truth is that most won’t and I think someone as well versed as our expert is, knows that. I think it’s inherent in the system that discussions about it yield few benefits. It’s not totally futile to have these discussions but I don’t think its meant to chiefly make folks think more I think it’s meant to elevate the expert as temporary relief from being unable to attain real power as defined by said system. An understandable draw towards power for sure (relatively innocuous, but still), the water flowing where it can, given the system.
A more constructive platform would instantly show an expert who uses their knowledge of privilege to mitigate theirs as a nod to finding a solution that does the same. But this is a redistribution effort which makes sense since that was the proposed solution and I find it full of holes; for proof, see history and this thread.
? Martin
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
It’s the porn law of tech. Any new technology is first embraced by those that were regulated out of the entrenched tech. Porn is always the first on any new tech – online video, DVD, BluRay, etc. They’re poor predictors of what tech will win, because they’ll cover all of their bets, but they are always first to market. I imagine that all other socially regulated groups are the same way – new technology allows a fast mover to get in and take a foothold before the regulators arrive.
bjacques
@imonlylurking:
If yer still reading this thread, the story is “A Colder War” by Charles Stross:
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm
Patricia Kayden
@Lurking Canadian: Grayson’s statement as highlighted in the Huffington Post article clearly explains why he feels that the T’Baggers are racists/bigots. His argument is so plain that I don’t get why anyone would criticize him for it. It’s the obvious truth. Good for him.
nineone
@Just Some Fuckhead:
I will take a number and get in line. I’m sure the accommodations are lavish.
You’re just jealous ‘cos the threadhog got all the attention and not you, so there.Neener.
brantl
Unlike Coultergeist, Grayson has never been proven wrong.
E133
This sums up the level of empathy this thread — and the society white people thrones over — shows to a Black person when they DARE sharing their experience of being the victim of institutionalized racism, every day, everywhere else as much as in their own party.
Oh the irony, when so many of you — self-proclaimed anti-racists — make the thread drown in your white-tears without shame (the anti-thesis of anti-racism).
Oh the irony, when so many of you — chasing the Black man for solutions — are so blinded by your butthurt White susceptibility (the anti-thesis of anti-racism) that you can’t see he is applying one now: taking the time to answer to you, trying to educate you — us, desensitized, unempathetic White people — so you — we — can grow being aware.
Aware that it is not RIGHT, and should NOT be the natural state of things, for a country to steal one race’s “chances at well-being” to give them to another race; the lucky ones remaining silent, “eating the fruit” as if it were theirs. “I was born White, what can I do about it except voting for the least-worse party that won’t even acknowledge that ?” You can stand up YOURSELF. You can grow being aware; and eventually spread the message YOURSELF, among your own circles of influence. You can make people realize how WRONG the situation is and how BADLY it needs to change, how QUICKLY it is to be done.
You can take the initiative, YOURSELF, to bring up how racially-ignorant one of the articles from your favorite liberal website is. You can work, by YOURSELF, on supporting people when they try bringing up how racially-ignorant one of the articles is. You can step up, YOURSELF, any time anti-racism would need it.
The irony when so many of us, self-proclaimed anti-racists, are calling out for solutions when we are part of the problem. Quit the whinnying, YOU are the oppressor. You want to prove people otherwise? Step up for it, AGAINST it. You can ACTUALLY BE non-racist.
First, you can stop denying it; silencing them.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
With the tea party so unpopular these days, my concern with Grayson’s imagery is that associating the tea party with the KKK may help them regain some national stature.
elftx
@Drexciya:
Please let me know when you have succeeded in getting the Coen brothers to remove that scene in “O Brother Where Art Thou”
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@JordanRules:
I will be completely honest with you — I have no idea what this means. How do I “give up” my unearned privileges of having been born white, middle-class, and straight? What is the process to do that?
This is why discussions of privilege often turn so acrimonious — most of us are fully aware that we received unearned privileges that should be given up, but no one seems to be able to tell us how we’re supposed to give them up. Merely pointing out that those privileges are unearned only takes us so far because, after a while, people want to know what they’re supposed to do about it. Apparently, we’re not even allowed to criticize our fellow white people for their racism, because that’s being patronizing and taking agency away from black people.
FlipYrWhig
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): Also, you can’t give them up, because you have them just by being you. So no matter how hard you try to shake it, it’s stuck to you, and trying to shake it is totally fake anyway because admitting it isn’t dispelling it and if you think it is you’re part of the problem. And asking someone how to do it is also the problem, because it fobs off your own responsibility. So get to doing that mysterious inexplicable thing that has no effects and can’t work, and don’t ask questions about it, or die trying.
FlipYrWhig
@E133: So… white privilege is something a white person can just talk away?
kc
@E133:
Really, this place is just full of virulent racists. It’s shameful.
kc_j
@Drexciya:
I don’t know how many times I have to say that this analytical framework is extremely problematic for me
Just acknowledge that your status is that of a secondary oppressor in the framework of a structure that was created by white Europeans but that benefits you far more than it does the native populations whose land and status was illegitimately taken and serves as the structural underpinnings of unearned and undeserved privilege that you exemplify by your breathtaking dismissal of the continuing victimization of an othered culture that is burdened by poverty far exceeding that of other minority populations and whose children even today are being stolen and sold to monied
whites and blacks.
How’s that?
kc
Geez, how did DougJ ever get away with trolling this place anyway?