Racism

Sarah Palin’s Linguistic Trap: or, How to Score Off Your Colleague’s Mistakes

Subtle racism is a funny thing. When Newt Gingrich called Barack Obama the “food stamp president,” I think we all reasonably understood that he meant one of two things, orpossibly both. First, that the economy tanked on Obama’s watch, which isn’t really fair, but a Republican trope nonetheless. And second, we thought he might be trying to use Obama’s race to equate him with the urban poor, largely dependent on food stamps, and indulge the background racism we so commonly see in the Republican base.

The genius of Gingrich’s line is that, like the best examples of “dog-whistle” racism, it can be interpreted as but does not depend for its existence on a harmful stereotype, like “lots of urban African Americans are on food stamps.” Overly sensitive? Maybe. But the best statesmen — something no-one has ever accused Gingrich of being — tend to avoid integrating background stereotypes into their speech, even by accident. So, adding to the candidate’s terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-week, we called Gingrich on it.

Enter Sarah Palin, the natural defender of rhetorical temperance. Responding to David Gregory, who also called Gingrich on it:

[David Gregory] made it sound like that if you’re black you’re on food stamps and the president is referring to you being on food stamps. I think that’s racist. And you know, enough is enough of this calling out, this racism, these false charges.

Beautiful. By acknowledging the premise at the right moment, Sarah makes it sound like, if Newt’s comment implied racism, it’s only because of Gregory’s built-in prejudices. But isn’t this how language works? We express symbols which conjure, in the listener, separate images depending on background cultural meaning. Isn’t it the speaker’s job — not the listener’s — to avoid linguistic landmines? If Newt had used the “n-word,” would it be Gregory’s fault, too, for associating the world with a negative portrayal of African Americans, even if it’s a portrayal that Gregory did not himself believe?

Who knows. But if we needed any further proof on this point, it should now be clear: Palin’s ignorance on things that matter is matched only by her truly impressive talent for sophistry.

President Obama and “Arrogance”

When I see articles spotlighting the President’s “arrogance,” I have to wonder two things: why is this relevant, and why is this something we care about, now, in this politician, but not in others? It takes a type of arrogance to run for office, but an extraordinary arrogance to run for President. Palin’s dismissive promise that she’ll run if there’s “no-one else” spotlights the question all presidential candidates must ask: am I the only individual capable of leading the free world?

Anyone who answers “yes” will necessarily be more “arrogant” than the common man; but this isn’t something we talk about in other candidates, or other politicians. Why?

I can identify two combining narratives, responsible for the label’s unfortunately common attachment to President Obama: the first is the “elitist” narrative, which the President has actually not lived up to. Playful boasting (“I’m Lebron, baby”) cannot be read for the truth of the matter asserted, and perhaps more importantly, is made in the common rhetoric, without “Harvard” flourishes (cf. “I’m Pompey Magnus, baby”).

The second relates to race. It’s hard to speak of the “arrogance” of a black man in high office without hearing “uppity.” This may be one of the times that the over-reference to race blinds us to an actual problem: talk about the President’s “arrogance” is a fairly explicit dog whistle to the racist right, but it’s something pundits can get away with, because we expect smart people, and liberals, to be arrogant.

The inescapable conclusion is that the myth of Obama’s “arrogance” is a tale built on his identity as a powerful, black, liberal, intelligent politician; not his acts. There’s nothing he can say or do to escape it. Clinton-style self-deprecation (“Bubba”) worked because it drew its essence from Clinton’s Arkansas roots. President Obama’s story of success from humble beginnings is a quintessentially American tale, but not the type we expect to hear from our leaders, and what we don’t understand, we essentialize.

The New Racism

In two of the Republican Party’s latest projects, both mainstreamed from the fringe — anger over the “Ground Zero Mosque,” and suspicion over whether the fact of one’s birth can suffice to make him “American” — some common threads emerge. First, both are conspicuously racial. Second, both are racist, in that they proceed from a generalization about an identity, to a specific, negative conclusion about each member.

But neither qualify as “racism,” at least in the traditional sense. The old racism looked for subjects: inferior persons and groups, who don’t deserve to participate in polite society. New racism, at least in these instances, contains no such assumption of white superiority. Quite the opposite: it looks for enemies. For example, in the “Ground Zero Mosque” narrative, Muslims aren’t doddering fools. They’re evil geniuses, exploiting our naive notions of religious freedom to crown an existential victory over The West. And then they’ll use the resulting apparatus to launch terror attacks, and otherwise subvert American culture. Genius!

Compared with old racism, in its governing principles, new racism seems to proceed from a place of less strength. Part of this we can read as a triumph. Equal protection law conclusively bars the majority from making theories of racial inferiority manifest in societal rules; if we no longer build or credit those theories, the law (combined with societal growth) has presumably generated some positive feedback.

However, neither this feedback, nor the intervening years since the civil rights movement, have done anything to quiet the underlying tensions. Equalizing the races has just flattened the conflict. The dangerous notion  of cultural incompatibility persists, and simply finds its voice anew in the consequence of the flattening. If all are equal, the Other can’t be lessened; but he can be feared. Glenn Beck can’t say Obama’s race makes him inferior, but he can ask whether it means he hates white America. It’s the same story, just from a different perspective.

As of yet, we lack the vocabulary to deal with this new racism. Consequentially, we let it slide. Glenn Beck is still on the air. More and more Republicans rush to condemn the “Ground Zero Mosque,” and in so doing, acquire a campaign issue without having to actually think about policy (call this a side benefit). Sooner or later, though, someone will have to address it.

What Substitutes for a Republican Agenda

I’m often upbraided for equating the Republican center with the lunatic fringe, but increasingly, one substitutes for the other. That allegation gained credence yesterday, when John McCain (R-AZ), Jeff Sessions (R-AL), and Mitch McConnell (R-KY) all pledged their support to a nativism-inspired partial repeal of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Of course this plan has no real chance of success. Constitutional amendments are notoriously (and deliberately) tough to pass. This holds especially true with repeals of foundational principles: one doesn’t lightly tinker with the Fourteenth Amendment.

What’s more remarkable than the mainstreaming of anticonstitutionalism is that this represents the first sign of life from the Republican Party’s policy wing. Think it over. The Party offered no alternative to Obama’s financial reform bill (Grassley’s bemoaning of the death of strong derivatives reform — an outcome he himself suborned, and made no attempt to avoid — emphatically does not count). They half-heartedly proposed alternatives to the healthcare bill, but abandoned them as quickly. And for all that the tea parties push “repeal and replace,” all party functionaries, formal or otherwise, have much to say on the former, and nothing on the latter.

On all other matters the group has rather studiously hewed to Representative King (R-TX)’s theory that “having ideas” might be more of a liability than an asset. In some ways, this push for repealing birthright citizenship represents no change. No policy will come of it. Like the constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, this is just a showy way to make a divisive, nasty point, and sate the bloodlust of an increasingly ascendant periphery. I know (and am told) that there are intelligent, mainstream conservatives out there. But where are their representatives?

National Popular Vote and What Constitutionalism Is Not

Politico, and everyone else, come late to the story that states are starting to look past the Electoral College, by directing their electors to vote not for the state’s favorite, but for the winner of the national popular vote.

This plan has actually been in the works for a while. Under the initiative, led by National Popular Vote and seconded by all the right election law groups (the Brennan Center & FairVote), once states comprising a majority of the Electoral College votes (270) pass enabling legislation, all states so bound will give their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, without regard to the winner of their state’s popular vote. It’s a clever way to work around the Twelfth Amendment, by working within the Amendment’s structure. Since the amendment specifically references state procedures, NPV is a violation of neither the letter of the law, nor its spirit. It’s just creative.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, conservatives don’t like it (see supra RedState). Their arguments, however, demonstrate two things. First, conservative respect for states’ rights ends precisely where their self-interest begins. Second, more than us, and thus contrary to the narrative continually leveled against us, the modern far-right seems to regularly confuse emotion and politics with law, and constitutionalism. Take the common argument against government spending: that it’s unconstitutional, by which the speaker means “unwise,” or possibly, “novel.” Maybe. But those aren’t the same, are they? Or RedState’s preface to what passes for its anti-NPV originalist/legal argument: “[NPV] is well within the boundaries of what the Constitution envisioned. I just disagree.”

Oh? Well, that’s not how the system works. The presence of the federal Constitution does not elevate all arguments to the constitutional level. The Constitution creates discretion, and a set of possible outcomes. Most debates center around the selection of one such outcome over another. The assertion that one outcome lies outside of the permissible range therefore carries real meaning, expands the consequences of the debate, and ought not to be made casually, lest we confuse the limits of the rule of law with the limits of wisdom. By design, the two are not coextensive.

Sophisticated players should realize this, because your average political debate ought to be had on the narrowest ground possible, to encourage cooperation, and avoid the needless gridlock that occurs when ego and ideology come into play. That’s simply not possible if one player tacks a frivolous “constitutional” claim onto every issue.

Was Jeremiah Wright Relevant?

I think, no; but because Sarah Palin’s dredging up this bit of ancient history, in light of recently discovered emails from top journalists hoping to bury the story before it broke, let’s examine.

Off the bat, note that it’s not like “liberals” and “media elites” were the only ones who wanted to move past Wright, and fight the election on ground that actually had some bearing on matters of policy. Palin’s boss did, too. On his say-so, the following ad never ran:

Consider, too, the only theory under which Wright becomes relevant. Despite Obama’s extensive public record on matters racial and political, Wright represented Obama’s only linkage to the more controversial elements of America’s black community, elements which, in all other respects, Mr. Obama had conspicuously avoided, for his entire life.

Wright was a weak way to make a weaker argument, one likely to inflame passions out of proportion with its merit, and otherwise distract the American populace from matters of grave importance — like the collapsing economy. If we conceive of journalism as a way to mediate the flow of information and the cultivation of an educated populace, and not as a campaign adjunct with a discrete agenda, then the journalist’s job is precisely to avoid these kinds of stories. Politicians may fire as they bear (and reap the consequences), but journalists should function as gatekeepers. Someone has to.

Diversity: How the Other Half Lives

Ross Douthat — who isn’t a moderate common-sense conservative but plays one in the NYT opinion pages — yesterday penned his latest overwrought defense of his party’s fringe, this time hoping to mainstream the right’s worrying rediscovery of reverse racism.

For those just joining us, one of the right’s dominant narratives in the time since Obama’s accession is that a black man’s success necessarily implies the end of white dominance, with all the horrors that attend such an inversion. The idea that black and white America exist in some sort of zero-sum relationship sometimes finds more toned-down iterations, or spawns spin-off theories — like the idea that a minority Supreme Court justice can’t understand white America — but in all, the theme, that minority victory means white defeat, is the same.

This species of thought isn’t as noxious as classical racism, but we should realize, the difference is one of degree, and learned subtlety. It’s still racism, and it’s still wrong. Per Ta-Nehisi Coates, “the most potent component of racism is frame-flipping–positioning the bigot as the actual victim.” Any narrative that puts race at odds with race is inimical to a happy, just society, no matter how much you dress it up.

Douthat’s column takes this new, old racism — the medium favored by your Becks and Buchanans — and tries to equate it with an affirmative action system gone awry, favoring poor blacks and minorities over poor whites. But they’re not the same. Beck and Buchanan find their force in anger and emotion; Douthat’s assertions about the problems of modern affirmative action, if true, are based on facts. The latter is legitimate. The former is race-baiting, and can’t be so bootstrapped into respectability.

Further, Douthat’s claims about affirmative action are interesting for what they imply: not that affirmative action is wrong (as we used to hear), but that it’s not working equitably. To identify affirmative action’s problem, Douthat has to accept its central conceit: that experiential diversity, using race as a proxy, might be beneficial to academia. The remedy for Douthat’s wrong is not an end to affirmative action, but true evenhandedness in its implementation. That, and that alone, is something we should probably get behind.

So, what we’re left with is a column that makes some interesting points, but strains to leverage them into an ex ante rationalization of pure polemic from the movement’s lesser (but more popular) lights. In other words, classic Douthat. And a metonym for post-2008 conservatism as a whole: a clever, well-intentioned minority chained to a dying movement, struggling to lend its credibility to the frothing majority. And failing.

The “Other” on Our Soil

In disappointingly predictable fashion, America’s favorite half-term governor, Sarah Palin, offers her thoughts on the New York mosque “controversy”:

Peace-seeking Muslims, pls understand, Ground Zero mosque is UNNECESSARY provocation; it stabs hearts. Pls reject it in interest of healing

Triggering the only reply she seems capable of generating: Twitter snark. Politico calls this “fully master[ing] the new media.” I call it being defined by it, to the exclusion of all meaningful content. But let’s engage on the merits.

As noted, Palin’s invective gets the facts wrong: the “Ground Zero mosque” isn’t a provocation, because it’s meant to serve a Muslim community already in place, not draw some new group. Besides, “provocation” is besides the point. What we’re seeing is xenophobic unease at the presence of a group, one we perceive as affiliated with “the enemy,” on our soil. Nothing else.

This sentiment is ancient and typical of our reaction, as a country, to any external conflict. In the early 19th century, we were at war with England and France. Responding to perceived espionage Congress passed — and President Adams signed into law — the Alien and Sedition Acts, permitting the executive to unilaterally imprison or deport any foreigner with perceived French sympathies. In World War II, we imprisoned 110,000 Japanese-Americans along the West Coast — with Supreme Court approval. These incidents share two commonalities. Both stem from an inability to separate the foreign enemy from those who look or speak like him, but don’t share his loyalties, and, in fact, hope to build a home in our culture. And following both, we swore — never again.

Sadly, American Muslims have already suffered through the third repetition of this disappointing trend. We’ve imprisoned and tortured Muslims for being Muslim, and being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or having a name that sounds like the enemy’s (Arar, El-Masri, Habib, etc.). We’ve subjected them to racial profiling, despite the fact that, mathematically, a suspect’s race or religion cannot contribute meaningfully to an analysis of potential criminality. Today we risk denying fellow citizens the earned right to enjoy their community, simply because we don’t like that their ethnicity reminds us of a wrong which they did not perpetrate, which they themselves decry, and whose re-occurrence they’ll contribute to preventing. Integration and co-existence, after all, are the greatest enemies of radicalization.

This can be our generation’s Korematsu. Or we can break the trend. Palin and Lazio have chosen their sides. How long will it take until we’re equally ashamed of them?

We Used To Be So Brave…

The prologue to an old episode of This American Life highlights a successful attempt to destroy the Ku Klux Klan by making it the butt of jokes — and not an object of fear — but, in the process, shows how watered-down the rhetoric of equality has become. The episode recounts how an informant, in the 1950s, fed the popular Superman radio show material about the Klan, with the ultimate aim of making the Klan into a villain for Superman to destroy, and a mockery of itself. ]

Along the way to a final showdown, the show’s protagonists give rather stirring defenses of American values, and otherwise attack the mindless bigotry that the Klan embodies. One Klansman is mocked for saying, in a voice quaking with rage, that “we’ve got to save America from fo-o-o-oreign elements!”, while an unlikely hero shrugs off Klansmen as ”poor fish who want to hate and blame someone else for their failures in life,” “little nobodies who want to believe some other race is inferior so they can feel superior,” and “jerks who go for that ’100% American’ rot.” After all, “you must know there’s no such thing as what we call ’100% American’!”

Good for them. But it’s disturbing that, today, those same ideas sound like left-wing propaganda. Just one year ago we concluded an election cycle where a Republican candidate dared classify parts of the country as more “American” than others, and today’s conservatives nakedly advocate racial profiling, and insist that every Muslim is per se dangerous until proven otherwise.  When did calling bigotry what it is fall out of the mainstream?

Proposed Immigration Bill Kills Birther Theories

In one of the more noxious “conservative” proposals to come down the line in quite some time, over 90 House Republicans have pledged their support to the “Birthright Citizenship Act of 2009,” which would, contrary to its title, end the notion that citizenship is the right of all born in this country. Put in their words, the BCA would solve the “anchor baby problem,” by providing that no child born on American soil shall take citizenship at birth, unless at least one parent is a citizen. So much for 4,000+ years of jus soli, and the idea that modern conservatism has anything to do with preserving tradition.

The more interesting implication of the bill, though, is this: because the bill assumes that the current state of the law provides citizenship to all persons born on American soil, it’s an implicit rejection of the more “rational” birther theory — that Obama, despite being born in Hawaii, fails to qualify as a “natural born citizen,” because one of his parents wasn’t a citizen.

Of course, it’s blatantly unconstitutional, too (“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” U.S. Const., Amd. XIV, § 1).

You really have to wonder why this bill was ever even written. If it’ll never become valid law, why go to the trouble of writing it? Have we really fallen so far that we’ll draw up and push legislation just to slake our constituents’ desire to offend the groups that the bill would target, in theory? Apparently, yes.