America Adopts the Colbert Approach On Race

Via Jamelle:

Sixty-nine percent (69%) of the nation’s voters say they’ve seen news coverage of the McCain campaign commercial that includes images of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton and suggests that Barack Obama is a celebrity just like them. Of those, just 22% say the ad was racist while 63% say it was not.

However, Obama’s comment that his Republican opponent will try to scare people because Obama does not look like all the other presidents on dollar bills was seen as racist by 53%. Thirty-eight percent (38%) disagree.

Poll results like this are a symptom of Americans assuming that a Stephen Colbert like committment to “not seeing race” and “not being a racist” are not the same thing. This notion is, of course, absolutely wrong. And although Jamelle would like to live in a world where we acknowledge race’s importance and “solve problems which stem from the long-term consequences of actual racism,” I think that, as far as the election goes, Obama should basically pretend he’s white.

Ignoring Black Conservatism

Jamelle already took a few shots at Myron Magnet’s City Journal essay on the supposed revival of “black conservatism” and “shifting the conversation from victimhood to responsibility,” but I think there’s a bit more wrong with his reading of black history:

In the 1960s, this can-do worldview changed. A vast transformation of American culture combined with the black-power movement and the War on Poverty to brew a toxic new orthodoxy among black leaders, who remain stuck in that era to this day. “Very few new ideas are allowed into this stifling echo chamber,” Williams reports. Despite startling African-American progress in the intervening half-century, “the official message from civil rights leaders remains the same. Black people are victims of the system, and the government needs to increase social spending. . . . Even the most dysfunctional and criminal behavior among black people is not to be criticized by black leaders” but must “be denied and hidden in the name of protecting the image of blacks as disadvantaged, oppressed, and perpetually victimized.” Dissent, and you’re an “Uncle Tom and a sellout.”

This is a very common narrative that has a major grain of truth to it. That’s because, before the 1960s, blacks couldn’t play “grievance politics” because no one would listen to their grievances.  For all intents and purposes, blacks were politically non-existent. So, during that time, it was no surprise that elite white people supported Booker T. Washington and that his message of hard work, self reliance and accommodation to the racist state. His message was popular because it was the only message allowed. Of course, many of those who followed Washinton’s advice were literally run out of their homes and businesses, which goes to show why the no-grievance message was rejected.

But even as blacks became much more political (Magnet seems to wish that they weren’t), black conservatism remained vibrant, even revived. Exactly how Magnet can talk about the 60s being a time where blacks transitioned from a can do message to “victimization” without mentioning Malcolm X, or the continuing strength and prevalence of black conservatives withing the black community is rather baffling. Ta-Nehisi Coates has done the best writing on this, of course, and it’s pretty obvious that the black conservative critique has maintained its place in the black community and even reached its zenith of influence and popularity in the early 1970s.

Also, and this is a point made by Coates, Jamelle and others, there never really was a black golden age. The problems of low-wealth, familial breakdown, frayed community bonds and the “pesky legacy of racism and discrimination” have basically ensured that, throughout history, that “for too many black people, things have always been pretty shitty.” And although I agree with many of Magnet’s criticisms of the black community and especially its political leadership, I’ve become incredibly tired of the dichotomy that black conservatives like to draw when writing these essays. Surely we can talk about personal responsibility, black fatherhood, more positive views about education AND the horrors of the drug war, labor market discrimination and all that “victimizing” stuff. It seems like people who are most concerned about the fate of black people, not scoring rhetorical points against their political opponents, would pursue that course…

Concerning the Cards

I think Yglesias is right when he says that the attacks McCain has launched on Obama - that he’s insubstantial and flighty (like  Paris Hilton and Britney Spears) - are quite similar to standard GOP attacks on Democratic candidates (wind surfer! looks silly in a tank!). He’s also right to say that whether or not these ads have some sort of racial subtext (again, debatable) is a self defeating response. As excited as many Americans are about have a black president, they are not particularly excited about having their subconsciouses explored for hidden racial bias.

I think we can all speak from experience that the first reaction to being called a racist, especially in the type of “you’re not openly a racist, but you have implicit biases and stereotypes embedded in how you see black people” that people are imputing on these McCain ads, is to get defensive. For Rick Davis, the next move is to get self righteous and start accusing Obama of “playing the race card.” Now, the truth of these accusations, by either camp, don’t really matter. What matters is that the McCain campaign is able to effectively get the meme out there that Obama is trying to guilt people into voting for him and will also try to bracket off any criticism as racially biased. This really doesn’t work well for Obama. All the people who are likely to believe that McCain’s ads have insidious racial subtext are voting for him anyway, and everyone else really doesn’t want to vote for a black candidate that reminds the voting public that he’s black.

I think the Obama campaign gets this, and we’re probably unlikely to see even the slightest hint of them “playing the race card” for a good long while. Now, if they could be a bit more agressive with pointing out that all of McCain’s economic policies stand to benefit filthy rich people like him, that McCain seems to have no problem lying about his opponent and that he has policies no one agrees with, I’m pretty sure we’d all be better of.

The Weirdness of Jesse Helms

I feel I’m taking the standard liberal line when I say that I’m quite sad for Jesse Helms’ family about his passing, but I also thought the day he left the Senate was one of the happier days of my poliitcal life. He was, unquestionably, the most sucessful openly racist politician in a time when blatant racism was supposed to be a disqualifer from participation in public life. Not only did he hold bigoted views towards black people, he also was responsible for the HIV ban, had an enduring hate for multilateral institutions and a certain fondness for reactionary right-wing governments abroad. He was, in short, the apothoseosis of everything wrong about Republicans from 1964 onwward.

But he was also a relic. In the past few years, there’s been a flourishing of commentary among liberals about how Republicans used white racism (or resentment, if you want to be nicer about it) to maintain political dominance from 1968 to 1992. Paul Krugman’s Conscience of a Liberal and, to a lesser extent, Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland, are good examples of this trend. The weird part about this commentary is that it comes as the very same time that mainy powerful Republicans are openly trying to overcome this legacy.

In 2000, Bush became the first Republican to win the White House since Eisenhower who didn’t rely on some implicit fear of black people/crime/urban disorder to win support. He didn’t give any speeches in Philadelphia, MIssissippi, ran no Willie Horton ads and even made a point of reaching out to black and Hispanic voters. Ken Mehlman even made a public apology to african americans for the GOP legacy on race. Karl Rove had a grand political strategy that involved shaving off some blacks and lots of Latinos from the Democratic coalition. Of course, by 2004, there was plenty of fear-mongering as well as reliance on homophobia to whip up votes, but it would be dishonest to ignore the progress the GOP made since 2000. This was also the period when open racism (against black people) finally became a disqualifier for being a powerful Republican. Trent Lott was forced out of his minority leadership, while Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms both retired.

So why are so many mainstream Republican and conservative figures and organizations rushing to defend and praise Helms? The core of the Republicans agenda these days (terrorism and social issues) isn’t the same mix (crime, urban disorder, states rights) that invited a reaching out to  anti-black racists. And while I agree with Mark Schmitt that Republicans are banking on a certain type of white/”American” identity politics these days, it’s still markedly different from the subtle and sometimes not so subtle race baiting of Nixon, Reagan, Helms et al. Part of it is quite easy to explain: you simply don’t let your opponents define your political movement in the worst possible terms. But still, Jesse Helms is not very relevant to what the GOP is doing today, and if the conservative movement ever wants to shake its reputation for racism, a full throated denunciation of the most openly racist Republican of the late 20th century would be a good place to start.

PS - This would be a good oppurtunity to link to David Weigel’s excellent essay on Helms. The crucial point Weigel makes is that Helms wasn’t a very effective politician - North Carolinians didn’t like him for bringing home pork or any traditional legislative achievements, they liked him because he hated liberals and liberals hated him. He really was the purest form of conservative resentment that made it into real politics.

So Obama Was Totally Right

The basic nut of Obama’s “bitter” remark was that because there’s been economic stagnation for a lot of people and a general lack of responsiveness to their plight from the political system, they’ve turned to symbolic cultural issues to express their political identity. Another implication of this type of reasoning is that much of the racially motivated voting we see in Kentucky and West Virginia - poor, white states - can be explained by a combination of outright racism as well as a feeling of zero-sum competition among poor whites and blacks.

Jim Webb, who’s the closest we have as a national spokesman for working class whites, says that Obama is doing poorly because affirmative action has whipped up resentment:

“We shouldn’t be surprised at the way they are voting right now. This is the result of how affirmative action, which was basically a justifiable concept when it applied to African-Americans, expanded to every single ethnic group in America that was not white. And these were the people who had not received benefits and were not getting anything out of it. …. The fact that they would line up and vote this way is not so much a comment on Barack. … I think Barack Obama is saying a lot of good things that will appeal to this cultural group in time.”

We get some anecdotal backing of this type of reasoning in this great Al Jazeera piece about Eastern Kentucky, the most depressed and whitest region of the state:

At 2:10, a man just out-right says that he fears an Obama presidency would mean that blacks would someone enact retribution on whites. Sounds pretty bitter to me.

Via LGM

Does Hip Hop Cause Cultural Decline

Ross Douthat is right to point out that even though calls of cultural decline are often times superficially cyclical, it’s still possible that specific epochs of cultural decline are worse than others. Specifically, just because in the past, black conservatives pointed to jazz as symbolic of cultural degradation among blacks, and that today, Bill Cosby and the like are making a similar criticism of hip-hop dooes not mean that, ergo, jazz equals hip hop. As Ross said, I doubt that Dr Dre, despite the considerable merits of The Chronic, will become not only domesticiated by the bourgoise (he already has) but actually high brow.

It’s just true that the decline of the black family, especially the poor, urban black family in terms of single motherhood, the fraying of social bonds, lack of strong norms oriented towards middle class sucess and the whole host of problems that have been festering in urban areas since the mid-to-late 1960s are especially acute. But that doesn’t make these overblown claims that hip-hop, which is largely a response or an epiphenomenon of this horrendous social reality, is somehow deserving of the criticism that Cosby et al throw at it. Hip hop is not responsible for people not graduating from high school, committing crimes, not becoming fathers of their children etc. Sure, the value system that most hip hop that black people actually listen to isn’t exactly positive, it’s also not exaclty normative.

What hip-hop really “promotes” more than anything is a certain bravado and exaggerated sense of masculinity that makes a certain type of sense as a short-term survival strategy in an urban environment that many rappers come from. But inveighing against the music itself, is as pointless as inveighing against jazz was. Douthat may or may not be right to say that there actually were real problems with drinknig and gambling associated with jazz establishments, but it was still stupid to see the music as anything resembeling causal. This is especially true in the case of hip hop because it has so escaped its roots as being primarily a form of music for the urban, black underclass and is now America’s popular music. Which is to say that it’s less responsive to real conditions on the ground in black communities, and now more responsive to the tastes and expectations of its racially  and culturally diverse (read: largely white) audience. Cosby is probably right to go after norms and expectations in the black, urban community that he sees as negative, but going after a popular music form will do him no good.

Kansas Is Not The Emancipator, Memphis Is Not the Slaveholder

Stephen Suh sounds kinda weird when he gloats that “KU’s last three opponents in the NCAA tournament - Davidson, North Carolina and Memphis - are from the old Confederacy.” And while Suh is right to point out that Lawrence (Berkeley of the Plains!) is a center of progressivism in a pretty red state and that Kansas has a wonderful history of being a free state, tying college basketball to the Civil War, or  any cultural conflict is pretty stupid.

Why is it stupid? Because every player on the the “old Confederacy” team of Memphis is black. And so are most of the Davidson and North Carolina players. Hell, the overwhelming majority of college basketball players are black.  And lot’s of them aren’t from the same state their school is in!

Suh’s grafting of historical conflict on college sports is hardly unique, however.  Michael Lewis pointed out once that in many Southern states, the main college football rivalry often has lots of class-based undertones to it. Look at, for example, Ole Miss vs Miss State or Auburn vs Alabama. Lots of these games are essentially, for the alumni, middle and upper-middle class vs lower middle class and working class. The only problem is that the game itself is mostly played by inner-city black athletes who have no real connection to these largly white class-based rivalries and divisions.

You Really Should Root For Memphis Tonight

The contrast would have been more stark if they hadn’t already defeated “old school” Kevin Love or were playing “will over skill” Tyler Hansbrough in the final, but if you care about the representations of black athletes in college basketball, root for Memphis. Jason Zengerle argues that most of Memphis’ outlaw reputation doesn’t come from its all black team but it instead comes from their just-sleezy-enough coach, John Calipari. And Zengerle is convincing - Calipari did turn around the program from nothing to potential national champions in eight quick years, and did plenty of skeezy stuff along the way, but there’s no getting around that Memphis is the “blackest” college basketball team in recent memory, and since the media has been collectively sucking the toes of two undersized white big men (Hansbrough and Love) - we should all try to balance out the karma.

So why is Memphis the blackest team ever? That’s because they are clearly the most talented team out there, both on a physical level and on pure basketball ability. They appear to have a team of junior Tracy McGradys - tall, athletic guards and swingmen who can run the floor and finish with impunity. And despite the fact that their second best player - Chris Douglas Roberts – went to a magnet school in Detroit, he still has some very intense ink all over his arms that surely creeps out white sportswriters. They also play in a very “black” fashion - as in most of their points come off either fast breaks created by their players being the quickest on the floor or by Douglas-Roberts and Derrick Rose creating opportunities off the dribble. Why do back-door cuts (even though Memphis actually executes them very well) when you can just isolate your best players have them blow by the defense? Another reason for so much of the national media doubting that the team that clearly had the best players (and only one loss) could make it this far was that they couldn’t shoot free throws. This criticism, despite how well it fits into the portrayal of Memphis as a team with all talent and nothing else, had the side-benefit of being true. In the regular season, they really couldn’t shoot free throws. Too bad they hit 20/23 against UCLA and in the Conference USA tournament and in last years Tournament, they shot around 75%.

So if you’re a basketball fan - and not some annoying student-athlete fetishist who yearns for a mythical past when college players went to class, stayed in school, did backdoor cuts, and didn’t dunk (which actually happened) - then you should root for Memphis. Memphis is basketball at its best - a group of incredibly talented individuals who work together to play some amazing ball.

Conflict of interest alert - If Memphis wins, I win my school’s tournament pool. So please, if you care about my happiness, root for Memphis.

Why I am a Democrat - Helms Edition

Dave Weigel’s review of a biography of Jesse Helms is very good, and not just because of the goofy picture of Barack Obama he links to (sorry Ryan Avent), but because it captures the last generation of Republicans who not only pursued a horrid policy agenda, but were so uncouth. While the face of Republican perfidy today are technocratic monsters like Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld, Jesse Helms was the embodiment of the ugly resentment that was at least partially responsible for the power of his party.

Helms was the embodiment of a very certain type of conservatism, the type that is not only reactionary politically (which his certainly was) but is also reactionary at its very essence. Helms defined himself in opposition to whatever “liberal elites” wanted - whether it be civil rights, gay rights, UN dues or arts funding. Weigel points out that Helms was not that popular among North Carolinians for any particular legislative achievements or the pork he brought back home. They didn’t consider him an especially effective politician. When his pollsters ran the numbers in a hypothetical governor’s race in 1984 against Democrat Jim Hunt, who he defeated in the Senate race that year, Helms overwhelmingly lost. He instead was able to win election after election because he went after the liberal elites that so despised him. He thrived off their disdain and his disdain for them – he even refused to go on Sunday talk shows despite him being head of the Foreign Relations Committee because he claimed that his constituents didn’t watch them.

Helms was also very important to me on a personal level. When I grew up in the 1990s, Helms’ loathsomeness was catching up to him. Finally, he was being recognized as a racist, homophobic crank by most respectable Americans. But he was still a powerful Republican senator! And since I could only conceptualize politics in very simple terms, I was able to latch onto Helms as the embodiment of everything my family and I despised. I find that much of my base distaste for Republicans, regardless of whatever policy agenda they put forth, is based around the fact that Helms represented their base for so long and with such perverse distinction.

Da Speech

What I think The Speech showed more than anything about Obama is that he’s a very smart man who isn’t really content to make tacky, soundbyte points and really thinks about issues in a cerebral, intellectual fashion.  He was also extremely human, especially in this passage, where he analogizes Reverend Wright to his white grandmother.

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

It was unfortunate that Obama had to address having a fiery, angry black minister.  It would be highly unlikely for any black politician not to come from a background  like this, and much of the reaction to Wright, as Chris Hayes said, is a feigned shock that  “America’s black friend has a black friend.”  But he was able to give a very subtle, complex speech about the roots of racism and its present reality today. There’s been a ton of commentary all over the political blogosphere, so I don’t really have much to add…

Can A White Guy Just Like Black Music?

I guess the subject of how white people can relate to black culture just isn’t on my mind. Stacey Patton, who actually grew up in a dysfunctional, black, inner city household (unlike Margaret Seltzer) and wrote a memoir about it, has a piece in the Post Outlook section that looks at white people’s fascination with black culture - going all the way back to the 1600s - and sees it as all too often a minstrel-y cultural appropriation, with little possibility for genuine cultural dialog or appreciation.

First, she gets a lot right. As a white guy with few black friends or acquaintances, I can say that I am in some ways “fascinated” with black culture. I love rap , motown, funk, blues, soul food etc etc. Am I genuinely respecting black culture, or am I just using it as a way to make myself feel cooler? I can’t say conclusively, but it’s clear that many whites, and myself, have a “long-standing white fascination with blackness” that often doesn’t let actual black people articulate their culture for themselves. Where I part with Patton is in thinking that white people can, and have, genuinely enjoyed black culture in a respectful, dynamic manner.

The classic example of white appropriation of black culture is Elvis. Here was this truck-driving hick, singing songs in a unmistakably black style, who even adopted the sexually potent persona of many black entertainers. Did Elvis just plunder black culture in a disrespectful, stereotypical manner? I would argue that Elivs, and many of his Jewish songwriters, had a genuine respect for black music and that they “appropriated” it because they loved it and found it to be more vibrant and dynamic than what middle-class, white, 1950s culture had to offer. Or take the Rolling Stones. They even claimed to have written Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain.” Yet I think to call Mick Jagger a cynical appropriator of blackness is entirely missing the point of what him, Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin and all the British-Bluesmen were doing. They were taking music they loved and putting a slightly new spin on it, combining black 12 bar blues with some Scotch-Irish ballads, merseybeat and pop songwriting and creating a whole new form of music that was heavily indebted to the Delta Blue, but distinct. This is how cultural evolution happens. If we were to draw firm lines between cultures and music, saying that white people couldn’t do black music, we’d have no Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Janis Joplin, or even Jimi Hendrix.

Patton tries to work her way out of the conundrum of calling the representatives of America’s most culturally vibrant period cynical minstrels by claiming that “Most of these white artists made undeniable contributions to American popular culture, and their gifts and the value of their work, unlike Seltzer’s, are not in dispute. At the heart of the matter, though, lies the question of whose voice should speak about and interpret the black experience in America — and whose voice white America wants to hear.” But then she claims that Eminem is just like Paris Hilton dressing up in blackface and equates white people listening to gangsta rap with Janet Cooke’s fake 8 year old heroin addict. It’s certainly true that white people prefer to have other white people represent blackness or black culture, but to call Eminem a minstrel is just a horrible misrepersentation and gets to the core of why oversensitivity about saying who’s allowed to “represent blackness” often leads who misunderstanding the context in which white people actually engage with black culture.

Take a look at Eminem for example. If Bill Clinton was the first black president, then Eminem is the first black white rapper. He came from a very dysfunctional household, his father walked out on him and his mom just after he was born and he was always shuffling between Kansas City and Detroit. Usually, people with this type of “white trash” background - which is also typical of many black urban families - would express their considerable angst in rock or country music. Marshall Mathers had all the emotional and poetic capacities to be Kurt Cobain, but he decided to be Eminem, why? This is the part that cultural critics like Patton can’t help but ignore - it was because he is one of the most talented rappers of his generation. Take away all the self-promotion, controversy over his lyrics and the cultural fascination with his whiteness, and you have someone who is an amazingly skilled MC. When he was coming up in the Detriot hip-hop scene, his race certainly wasn’t an advantage, so the only way he could gain attention was just by being way better than every other local rapper. Just like so many black people in largely white environments, he had to prove himself by being that much better than everyone else.

Listen to the Marshall Mathers LP and the Eminem Show, just as a hip-hop fan, and tell me that he isn’t scarily talented. Yes, it’s certainly true that he got more mainstream attention because of fascination with his race, but I would argue that it wasn’t because white people wanted a familiar face to transmit black culture for them - Eminem, if you remember, was hated by much of the cultural mainstream as either as a profane and bad influence on youth or as a poser - but because people were so amazed by a white guy who totally embraced the persona and mannerisms of a rapper. It was because of our willingness to draw such stark, artificial lines between race and culture that Eminem was such a culturally captivating figure. Another thing critics like Patton who only see his race and then listen to his music and assume that it’s all “appropriation” can’t seem to get their heads around is that Eminem was able to speak to legions of white teens who love rap music, but don’t feel that black rappers, with their own unique experiences and perspectives, can truly speak to them. Eminem, on the other hand, could. This was a genuine feeling felt by many white teens that can’t just be labeled as appropriation or as demeaning fascination with blackness. Patton, however, just can’t seem to recognize that in today’s culture, where hip hop is America’s popular music, that the lines between black culture and mainstream, white culture are very fuzzy, just as they should be.

Orlando Patterson and the 3am Ad

Orlando Patterson marks out a pretty daring thesis in his much blogged about NY times op-ed, namely that the imagery in Clinton’s infamous 3 AM recalled Birth of a Nation and that its implicit message wasn’t just that Obama’s foreign policy was weak or that he was inexperienced, but instead that “the person answering the phone might be a black man, someone who could not be trusted to protect us from this threat.”

I think Patterson is wrong to say that Clinton was consciously, or even subconsciously, trying to stir up racist thoughts or images in voters mind, instead, I agree with Yglesias’ point that the ad was “run of the mill fearmongering, reflecting Clinton’s ideas about the politics of foreign policy.” But Patterson, who really is making a fool of himself with such an easily refuted and slippery op-ed, is on to something about why using this instinctive fear mongering - literally, if we elect Barack Obama, your children will be unsafe - is bad politics for liberals and progressives.

Fear, especially fear for the live of one and ones own family, is a very powerful feeling. It can make people do amazing things, like lift cars, but it hardly encourages rationality or opendmindedness. When people feel that their kin are threatened, they are likely to turn in inward and reject Others, whether they be people of different races, immigrants, foreigners, gays - just whoever they view as “not them.” The history of fear of death leading to horrible acts of violence against the Other is just too long. But the actual empirical evidence that fear of death leads to reactionary politics is also pretty good. John Judis had a fascinating article that came out last August looking at social psychology research that showed when people were reminded of their own mortality, they would become marginally more reactionary:

Their first experiment was published in 1989. To test the hypothesis that recognition of mortality evokes “worldview defense”–their term for the range of emotions, from intolerance to religi- osity to a preference for law and order, that they believe thoughts of death can trigger–they assembled 22 Tucson municipal court judges. They told the judges they wanted to test the relationship between personality traits and bail decisions, but, for one group, they inserted in the middle of the personality questionnaire two exercises meant to evoke awareness of their mortality. One asked the judges to “briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you”; the other required them to “jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you physically as you die and once you are physically dead.” They then asked the judges to set bail in the hypothetical case of a prostitute whom the prosecutor claimed was a flight risk. The judges who did the mortality exercises set an average bail of $455. The control group that did not do the exercises set it at an average of $50. The psychologists knew they were onto something.

The implications for foreign policy, and how it ought to be presented, are very important for liberals and progressives. The Bush administration, as Judis explains, has based it’s foreign policy around vague, shadowy reminders of our own mortality. We were lead to believe that Saddam could attack the United States, that there are secret Al Qaeda cells everywhere, ready to strike at any time, etc etc. And the foreign policy that this type of fear mongering encourages is hardly a good one. When you think that these shadowy terrorists are going to butcher you and your family - tomorrow, diplomacy, multilateralism and soft power aren’t going to see that appetizing. Instead, killing as many of these terrorists as possible - even if means doing something stupid like invading Iraq. It’s not so much that the policymakers themselves - Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush, Wolfowitz etc - were transfixed by fear, it’s that they were able to build up support for the Iraq war as well as the massive clamp down on civil liberties by appearing to fear.

So if we want to reverse the worse parts of the Bush foreign policy - unilateralism, instinctive hawkishness, disregard for civil liberties - then we have to change how we approach foreign policy. That means that wordless, analysis-free summonings of fear (like Hillary’s ad) should be banished from the Democratic party playbook.

Oh yeah, I totally disown this post.

Glenn Greenwald’s Silence

I felt that since it’s MLK day, it was appropriate to mention how some of my political allies are opportunistically silent on instances of horrible bigotry.

I wrote a post about a week ago pointing out that Glenn Greenwald smeared Ezra Klein and Dana Goldstein for objecting to Ron Paul as an effective defender of individual freedom because of his retrograde views on abortion comments about blacks published under his name.  They wrote these criticism and Greenwald attacked them in December, well before Jamie Kirchick’s article came out on January 8th.  In the five days since I wrote that first post, Greenwald has not even mentioned “Ron Paul” once, let alone explain his thoughts on the candidate with a “sterling record across the board on liberty” who isn’t above implementing a political strategy based around race-baiting. For someone who writes roughly 23 billion words a week, one would think he could get around to it…

Where Have You Gone Glenn Greenwald?

Less than a month ago, conflict erupted in the liberal blogsphere.  Dana Goldstein and Ezra Klein noted that Ron Paul was a problematic defender of civil liberties because of his opposition to abortion rights as as his occasional racism and hostility towards civil rights laws.  Glenn Greenwald wrote two posts that make the 500 pages of War and Peace I have to read by February 5th look like a pamphlet, castigating Goldstein and Klein for being pro-choice fundamentalists who simply didn’t care about indiviudal rights, as evidenced by them thinking that because “Paul wants to destroy the minimum wage, dissolve Medicare, end the Constitutional right to choice, prevent gay adoptions, preserve “Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell,” undermine Social Security, dismantle public education, etc, etc…  and then call it true ‘liberty’” he wasn’t the best “liberty” candidate.

Both Klein and Goldstein noted that one reason they weren’t as hot on Paul as Greenwald was because of his history of race-baiting and racist comments published in his newsletters.  Greenwald, in the course of responding to Klein and Goldstein, simply did not discuss Ron Paul and race, even when he linked to Klein’s post where he explicitly said that Paul’s troubled history with racism was all he needed to not say kind words about him.  Dana Goldstein, in her “definitive takedown“  noted the known instances of racist commentary appearing in  Paul’s newsletters.  Greenwald in his two posts responding to them, didn’t mention “race” “racism” “black” or “newsletter.”  Now, to be fair, the newsletter story was not as big then, largely because Jamie Kirchick hadn’t yet written his article exposing just how widespread the racist commentary was.

But what has Greenwald, who said that Ron Paul had a “sterling record across the board on liberty”, written now that Paul has been exposed as a racist, or at least someone who didn’t mind having racist writing published under his name? If you search Greenwald’s archives for “Ron Paul”, you’ll find one mention of him since January 8th, when Kirchick’s article was published. On January 11th, Greenwald quotes Noam Scheiber’s reporting on the South Carolina GOP debate — that’s it.
Don’t you think that a fairly prominent blogger with a large following  who impugned Ezra Klein as not willing to say positive things about Ron Paul because Klein doesn’t want to “actually have to say or do anything that Chris Matthews would find strange, offensive or out of place” should say something about the fact that his favorite Republican, his Lone Voice in Defense of Liberty turns out to be a negligent race-baiter?  Shouldn’t he at least apologize to Klein and Goldstein and acknowledge that despite “Championing Mainstream Political Thought While Pretending to Oppose it” they were both right to smell a rat when it came to Paul.

Not A Conflict

So the Clinton and Obama camps have apparently called a truce to the epic race vs gender conflict.  Which is good, because I really don’t like the presidential campaign to feature long, pointless “LBJ vs MLK” arguments, but I really don’t see how this was a conflict.  Steve Benen has compiled a list of these supposedly racially charged comments, and while the “fairy tale” one was totally innocuous, one could not compile a similar list of Obama and his surrogates making these types of “gender-baiting” comments.

Obama hasn’t talked about how Hillary is angry, or weak, or school-marmish or any of the stereotypes associated with women.  No Obama fund raiser has introduced Obama at a campaign event and said that Hillary Clinton was baking cookies while Obama was community organizing. If anything, there’s Obama saying that Hillary was “likable enough” which didn’t seem to be a shot at her as a woman, just an observation that people don’t like her much, which while it may be motivated by sexism, really pales in comparison to what the Clinton campaign has unleashed.

But still, Clinton and her surrogates made a bunch of race-related comments while Obama didn’t really do much of anything.  This wasn’t a race/gender conflict, there was no conflict, there was an assault on one candidate using quasi race-baiting.

And when people in the media seem to place the blame for the “conflict” on Obama or spin out theories about how it will hurt Obama more than Clinton, they are legitimizing the Clintons’ ugly strategy.  While it may be true that perhaps Clinton will be able to turn this race into one where Obama is accusing Clinton of being racist and he looks like another Jesse Jackson, when one devotes their coverage of the “conflict” to just exploring how it could hurt Obama, with only cursory references to comments to which Obama responded to, that’s a Clinton-biased framing of the event.  The question isn’t Obama and the “race card” — the “race card” (which is just a horrible term) was played by Clinton and her surrogates, and if some reporters are pushing the narrative that Obama is “playing the race card” or is being overly sensitive by suggesting that his rival campaign has been race-baiting him, then they are, in my opinion, severely misdiagnosing what happened in the last week.

WTF Is Hillary Clinton Doing Campaigning With Bob Johnson?

I forgot how awful Bob Johnson is. He’s the worst type of Democrat, one who leverages the fact that he is a Democrat (and black) to support a plutocratic Republican agenda. Not only did he claim that the estate tax is racist and campaign for its repeal, but he also was a key backer for social security privatization, arguing that because blacks had lower life expectancy, they should privatize social security. But as Jonathan Chait explained, in an article that’s seemingly been lost in the TNR archive vortex, blacks actually benefit more from the current arrangement:

Social Security’s retirement benefits are progressive: They offer a higher rate of return to lower-paid workers. Since black workers, on average, earn less than the population at large, they benefit from this redistribution. This more than makes up for any loss they suffer from dying younger. On the whole, then, Social Security redistributes money from whites to blacks. Most plans for private accounts do not…. Johnson has his racial analysis backward.

So, why does Hillary want the support of a man who leverages his race and political affiliation to support a GOP fiscal agenda that she disagrees with? I’d really not want to believe that she sought Johnson’s support and is campaigning with him so that he can say things, “as an African American” that she or her white supporters wouldn’t be be caught dead uttering, but it sure looks that way. It’s this type of crap that makes me support Obama even more.

When Did We Last Hear of Bob Johnson?

Bob Johnson, founder of BET and first black billionaire, claimed, as an African American, that he was, “frankly insulted the Obama campaign would imply that we are so stupid that we would think Hillary and Bill Clinton, who have been deeply and emotionally involved in black issues — when Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood; I won’t say what he was doing, but he said it in his book — when they have been involved.” But what was his last involvement in politics? It was when, as Mark Kleiman reminds us, he campaigned for the repeal of the estate tax on the spurious ground that the tax which applies to 2% of taxpayers was racist. The estate tax which, in the year 2006, only 59 black people payed.

What makes this situation so odd, is that for many, Obama is the “future” of black politics. He doesn’t market himself, explicitly, as the For Us By Us (FUBU) candidate — in short, unlike Jesse Jackson, he presents himself as the candidate for more than just black people. He also doesn’t use racial identity to accuse his critics of being racist simply by virtue of them being critics or to give himself a higher ground from which to speak. In fact, he’s the most charitable towards his ideological opponents of any of the Democratic candidates. Bob Johnson, on the other hand, is a political charlatan who takes advantage of his racial identity to defend his privilege and attack his opponents in the most vile way. Clinton, incidentally, supports maintaining an estate tax for all estates worth more than 7 million dollars. Is she a racist? Why won’t Bob Johnson say so?

Imaginary Hip Black Friend Was OK…

I really don’t want to believe that the Clinton campaign is running a covertly racist campaign, or is trying to portray Obama as the “black candidate”, but minipundit’s list of racially charged Clinton campaign is certainly disturbing.  I’m always skeptical of how coordinated any of this stuff is, Clinton has thousands of “advisers” and “prominent supporters” and I doubt how much influence Bob Johnson’s implication that Clinton is a better candidate because while she was a child’s advocate, Obama was snorting blow, has on voters.  At this point, very few who lean towards Clinton will admit she’s running a racially charged campaign, while Obama supporters can not wait to finally tar Clinton with race-baiting Obama.

From my perspective, I think we really have to wait to throw around such an extreme accusation. And while I certainly don’t like Johnson or Shaheen’s comments about drug use, I (like Josh Marshall) don’t think Bill Clinton describing Obama’s constant Iraq war opposition as “the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen” is a reference to his race, or an attempt at race baiting, it’s Clinton reaching for straws to explain why it doesn’t matter that Obama was always against  the war in Iraq.  But all this stuff, in such a short period of time, certainly doesn’t look good for the Clinton campaign.

Barack Obama Is My Imaginary Hip Black Friend

So the Clinton campaign is catching some flak because an advisor got quoted as saying this:

“If you have a social need, you’re with Hillary,” the aide said. “If you want Obama to be your imaginary hip black friend and you’re young and you have no social needs, then he’s cool.”

It’s not surprising they got some shit about this quote — any inclination that Clinton is race baiting Obama will provoke the anti-Clinton forces into a battle they most want to fight: the black man vs the psuedo-racist white people.  But after thinking about it a bit more, I find it reasonable and maybe even insightful. If you look at Obama’s base, it consists of people who are generally considered “cool.”  By this I mean that Obama supporters tend to be young, highly educated, and have higher incomes.  So, if you want to hang out with cool kids, you go with Obama. For example, Ezra Klein described Obama’s New York City rally as a “meat-market.” But, of course, not all of Obama’s supporters are cool, some of them are slightly nerdy high school seniors who are obsessed with politics.

The second element of Obama as “hip” is that many of these Obama supporters — well educated, high income people — don’t really, on average, interact with black people all that much, or have that many black friends.  Yet, in some sense, this is a group that is highly philo-black.  It’s a group that, at least in my experience, is very sensitive to many forms of racism and sees open, flagrant racism as a social faux-pas without comparison.  Also culturally, young upper middle class, college educated people have grown up in a time where hip-hop was the pop music that they all listened to.  Look at Ezra Klein, who loves early 90s rap, or Matt Yglesias, who discusses the formal logic of MIMS.

At my high school, where in so much as people care about politics they are all fervent Obama supporters, this pattern expresses itself very strongly.  The student body is simply enthralled with black music and black culture — the most popular music is oftentimes obscure, local Bay Area hip hop groups who don’t have much distribution outside of California.  Of course, the actual relations between white and black students are far from perfect, but we’re talking about Obama as an “imaginary” friend.  And so, for many students, including me, Obama is our Imaginary Hip Black Friend.  By supporting Barack Obama, we can align ourselves with anti-racism and black culture (Obama, unique among presidential candidates, plays basketball).  Additionally, if one were to meet Obama, you could easily think that there wouldn’t be the attendant awkwardness so that so often plagues black-white interaction.  But of course, none of us will meet Obama or get to shoot hoops with him, so instead, he’s our Imaginary Hip Black Friend.

It goes without saying, however, that this adviser was pretty dumb to get quoted as saying this.

Now Everything is Back to Normal

It’s comforting that, in these times of turmoil, we can still be assured that bloggers at the Corner, and Andy McCarthy in particular, are still willing to ascribe profoundly negative characteristics to a whole group of people based on little evidence besides the fact that they’re brown and Muslim.   From a fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, no less.