“Touching On White Privilege”: President Obama’s Moment Of Introspection Evokes A Conservative Tsunami Of Bile
Today, Barack Obama did something he has only done a few times in the years he has been on the national stage: He talked about race. In an extemporaneous statement to White House reporters, Obama discussed the reaction to the trial of George Zimmerman for the killing of Trayvon Martin. He spent the first third of his remarks talking about where African Americans were coming from, in an implicit plea for empathy from white Americans. He didn’t accuse anyone of ill will, but he did in effect say, “Here’s how black people are feeling and why,” in an attempt to explain the sources of people’s disappointment and pain. After that, he talked about what government might do to make these kinds of tragedies less likely—training for police officers, and perhaps a rethinking of “stand your ground” laws if they make conflicts more likely. He ended on a hopeful note, saying, “as difficult and challenging as this whole episode has been for a lot of people, I don’t want us to lose sight that things are getting better. Each successive generation seems to be making progress in changing attitudes when it comes to race.”
We’d challenge conservatives to pick out a single sentence in Obama’s statement that they could say was unfair to white people, or encouraged anything other than greater mutual understanding. But all too predictably, some conservatives showed once again that empathy is something they are either utterly incapable of or simply find politically inconvenient. There is no anti-Obama rage like the rage he provokes on the right when he brings up race. It doesn’t matter what he says. No matter how humane, how encompassing, how careful—should Obama ever so gently suggest that race is something with which we as a country still struggle, a tsunami of bile is inevitably directed his way. If you weren’t on Facebook or Twitter to see it today, count yourself lucky that your faith in your fellow Americans wasn’t brought down a notch or two by all the ugliness. If you had read that reaction without actually seeing what Obama said, you would have thought he marched into the press room in fatigues and a beret, shouting “Black power! Black power!” and talking about hunting down whitey.
We suspect that the part of his talk that irked conservatives the most was this: “There are very few African-American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me. And there are very few African-American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me, at least before I was a senator. There are very few African-Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often. And you know, I don’t want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African-American community interprets what happened one night in Florida. And it’s inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear.”
The reason that this particular plea for empathy and understanding can generate such an angry reaction is that it touches on white privilege. It’s easy to say, “Well I’m no racist,” but it’s harder to acknowledge that if you don’t get followed when you walk into a store, if you don’t have people lock their doors when you walk by, if you don’t see women clutch their purses when you enter an elevator, if you aren’t subjected to frequent “stop and frisks” by the police because they say you made a “furtive movement,” and if you don’t worry every time your son goes out at night that the wrong person will consider him a criminal and initiate a series of events that leads to his death, then you’re the beneficiary of a society still infused with racism. To be told, even by implication, that you benefit from an unequal system? That’s just intolerable.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 19, 2013
“The Most Common Kind Of Racist”: Like Many On The Right, The One That Doesn’t Realize He Is One
Best I can tell, the furor over Jack Hunter, a long-time South Carolina-based neo-Confederate who co-authored a book with Rand Paul and then joined his Senate staff, is more or less “blowing over.” But Hunter himself may be keeping it alive by protesting his innocence and trying to cover his tracks. Even Will Folks, the famously provocative South Carolina conservative blogger (and Paulite fellow traveler) who regards the original Washington Free Beacon piece about Hunter as a neocon “hit job” on his boss, thinks he’s jumped the shark:
“The role of a radio host is different from that of a political operative,” Hunter said in a statement responding to the story. “In radio, sometimes you’re encouraged to be provocative and inflammatory. I’ve been guilty of both, and am embarrassed by some of the comments I made precisely because they do not represent me today. I was embarrassed by some of them even then.”
Really?
That certainly seems to be at odds with what Hunter said eight years ago when The (Charleston, S.C.) Post and Courier filed a report on his controversial commentary. Back then he was totally unapologetic about his racially tinged comments – saying he “stood by every word.”
An even stronger pushback to the Hunter apologia came from his one-time editor at the Charleston City Paper, Chris Haire:
Long before last’s week Washington Free Beacon story kicked up a two-day media storm, Jack Hunter knew that the Republican establishment was working to out him as a neo-Confederate and a racist, a move he believed could hurt the one-time City Paper columnist’s boss, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul. He’d even sent me an e-mail asking me to remove dozens of posts, ones that he said no longer reflected his current worldview.
While I told him that I would have removed one or two posts — it’s not uncommon for writers to hastily pen a column they later regret — I found the breadth of the request to be excessive, and to be honest, quite cowardly. Doing so, I told Jack, was a repudiation of the very persona he had created as a writer and radio personality. It was a denial of the very views that had made him a local media celebrity and a rising star in the so-called liberty movement, and as such, a slap in the face to all those who had ever supported him. It was best, I said, that if those points of views no longer applied to him, Jack should pen a column detailing how he had changed his mind, but he declined. And frankly, that told me all I needed to know about Jack’s conversion. It was solely for appearances only.
After reading Jack’s statement about last Wednesday’s controversy du jour — the one that let the rest of the U.S. know that a neo-Confederate secessionist was part of Sen. Paul’s inner circle — I still haven’t changed my mind. In his statement, Jack — much like Rand himself — tends to treat the damaging information as something akin to a youthful indiscretion, a one-time accident, or as something that was nothing more than an over-the-top personality that he had created while he was a member of the 96 Wave crew and had long-since abandoned. Rubbish. The Jack Hunter of the Charleston City Paper years was every bit as radical as the Jack Hunter of [local radio] 96 Wave.
Then Haire kinda gets mad:
Over the course of editing Jack for years, it was clear to me that when he spoke of Southerners, Southern values, and the Southern way of life, it was as if the South to him was solely populated by white people, and everyone else was an intruder or at best a historical inconvenience. Jack Hunter may have never railed against miscegenation, championed segregation, uttered a racial slur, or participated in a lynching, but it was my opinion then and it is my opinion now that Jack is the most common kind of racist, the one that doesn’t realize that he is one. In fact, like many on the right — from Pat Buchanan to Newt Gingrich to Rick Perry to Rush Limbaugh — Jack traffics in race-baiting rhetoric and repeatedly aligns himself with racists but then refuses to own up to the meaning and purpose of his actions….
And the same applies to Rand Paul.
This is why if Jack Hunter really cares about Rand Paul he’ll quit his staff and find himself a new career. The more he talks and the more his very recent history is discussed, the more it raises questions about Paul–not just for associating with the likes of Hunter, but for the parallels between Hunter’s views and his own, if not on race, then on many elements of public policy and history that touches on race.
As for Paul, he should probably spend less time lecturing African-Americans on why they should be conservatives and a lot more time convincing conservatives to listen to his arguments about the invidious racial effects of the War on Drugs. Then we’d have a lot less reason to suspect that Rand Paul is a friend of Southern Avengers everywhere.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, July 19, 2013
“Peter King For President?”: Republicans Had Better Hope Not
If U.S. Representative Peter King (R-NY) is serious about pursuing the Republican nomination for president in 2016, then the GOP will have a real problem on its hands.
Congressman King’s interest in a White House bid was first reported on Wednesday night by Newsmax. The next day, the Long Island Republican elaborated on his plans in an interview with ABC News.
“I’m going to certainly give it thought. I’m going to see where it goes,” King explained. “My concern right now is I don’t see anyone at the national level speaking enough on, to me, what’s important – national security, homeland security, counterterrorism.”
“The big debate that Republicans seem to have in the Senate on foreign policy is whether or not, you know, the CIA was going to use a drone to kill an American in Starbucks,” he added, in a shot at Kentucky senator Rand Paul. “To me, we should be going beyond that and we should go back to being a party – whether it’s Eisenhower, Reagan, Bush – of having a strong national defense, and that should be, to me, an essential part of the presidential debate. And so far, that’s missing.”
Of course, if national defense has been missing from the presidential debate, it’s probably just because said debate won’t begin for another two years. But if King does insist on bringing the issue to the forefront of the Republican presidential primaries, then that’s very bad news for the GOP.
King’s positions on homeland security and foreign policy line up rather neatly with those of the George W. Bush administration (notably, former attorney general and noted torture advocate Michael Mukasey was the first Republican to go on record in support of King’s hypothetical candidacy). In other words, they are ridiculously unpopular. If voters were clamoring for a return to the Bush era, then Mitt Romney — whose diplomatic and national security teams were stacked with Bush administration veterans — presumably would not have been the first Republican presidential candidate in three decades to lose to his opponent on questions of foreign policy and national security (President Obama trounced Romney 56 to 44 percent among voters focused on the subject, according to exit polls.)
Making matters worse is King’s apparent inability to advocate for these positions without invoking startling racism. If the Republican plan to appear less hostile to minorities isn’t already completely dead by 2016, then a presidential campaign by a man who has declared that “we have too many mosques in this country,” and that “85 percent of American Muslim community leaders are an enemy living amongst us” — among many other racist broadsides against the Muslim community — would certainly deliver the coup de grâce.
Furthermore, a King candidacy would be sure to bring out the worst in his fellow candidates. With a lifetime 75 percent rating from the American Conservative Union, King would draw attacks from the right throughout the primaries; it’s not hard to imagine a fierce argument over King’s support for closing the gun show loophole, for example, becoming the 2016 version of “let him die!”
And none of these issues with a potential King candidacy even touch his decades-long support for a violent terrorist organization.
Happily for Republicans, King is likely just floating a presidential bid as a way to raise both his own profile and money for his congressional campaigns. But if he actually does enter the 2016 race, it would result in another huge blow to the Republican Party’s already tattered brand.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, July 19, 2013
“Family Struggles”: McDonald’s Employees Don’t Need Financial Planning, They Need Raises
McDonald’s recently partnered with Visa to put out what they call the Practical Money Skills Budget Journal (pdf), a “helpful” tool for McDonald’s employees to keep track of their earnings and expenses. There have been a flurry of responses to the “McBudget” including realistic comparisons, snarky analysis, and talk of unicorns as a means for transportation. Others have defended the budget, claiming that it gives low-wage workers the necessary tools for financial planning.
Coincidentally enough, we also recently released an online tool related to family budgets—along with Elise Gould and Nicholas Finio, we developed EPI’s Family Budget Calculator, a measure of just how much income it takes for families to buy the necessities for an adequate but modest lifestyle. Our basic budgets include the cost of rent, food, health care, child care, transportation, other necessary expenses and taxes in each of 615 communities across the country. While families at these budget levels may be able to pay their bills and put food on the table, our family budgets imply a pretty austere lifestyle. There is no savings, no vacations, no cable or internet service, and, certainly, no restaurant visits.
The EPI family budgets look at six different family types, ranging from a one-parent, one-child households to a two-parent, three-child households. When you combine what we found in our rigorous family budgets with the McDonald’s budget, some startling results stand out. Meeting the goals in the McDonald’s sample budget requires a monthly net income of $2,060, which is $816 less than what a one-parent, one-child household needs in rural Mississippi, where the post-tax cost of living is lowest. And it is $1,397 less than the median one-parent, one-child family budget. One could argue that our family budgets (which presume the presence of kids) are not particularly relevant to McDonald’s employees, on the grounds that minimum wage workers tend to be teenagers themselves. But that would be wrong. We have shown before that the bulk of the minimum wage workforce are adult employees working at least 20 hours per week, not teenagers or part-timers looking to make a little extra spending money.
Ironically, by suggesting that someone needs a monthly net income of $2,060 to meet their sample budget, the McBudget implies that one 40-hour week minimum-wage job is severely inadequate, and that even two full-time, full-year minimum wage workers would fall short of even this unrealistically low standard. This may be why the McDonald’s budget suggests a second job. A full-time, full-year worker would need to earn about $15.00 an hour (before taxes) to reach this budget level, or would have to work more than 40 hours each week. The McDonald’s sample budget is also underestimating (often radically) many basic necessities, such as rent and health insurance ($20 per month!), and missing others, like child care, that are essential for sustaining employment. (Since its original release, they have increased the heating allowance from $0.00 to $50.00 per month.)
What these two budgets make clear is that the struggles of tens of millions of American families to make ends meet is not a failure of financial planning, it’s a failure of financial resources. Even if McDonald’s employees meticulously track all of their expenses, they will still fall short of what is necessary to make ends meet, let alone actually be able to save $100 every month, as the McDonald’s budget suggests. It’s tempting to believe that all America’s low- and moderate-wage workers need to get by is better life skills, when in fact what they really need is a raise.
By: Hilary Wething, Economic Policy Institute, July 18, 2013
“Are There Any Republicans Against Racism?”: The GOP Can’t Reboot With Bigots In Its Midst
As a matter of history, black Americans — at least those who were allowed to vote — were Republicans for decades after the Civil War. But some found Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal attractive, and most found Lyndon Johnson’s support for civil rights irresistible. They left the Republican Party.
And they’ve stayed away since the 1960s, alienated by the GOP’s Southern strategy of race-baiting and pandering to the prejudices of right-wing neanderthals. If you wonder why black voters believe the Republican Party trades in the rankest bigotry, look no further than the reaction to the George Zimmerman verdict among conservative commentators. It’s been appalling.
Let me be clear: It’s perfectly reasonable to believe the Zimmerman jury arrived at the only acceptable verdict. Many analysts, including some black commentators, have stated that the prosecution simply did not prove its case.
But several conservative pundits have gone well beyond reason, smearing Trayvon Martin, indicting his friends and elevating Zimmerman to sainthood. They’ve shown a callous disregard for the grief that still envelops Martin’s parents. They’ve suggested that whites are more likely to be the victims of discrimination in the criminal justice system than blacks.
And those commentators, luminaries such as Rush Limbaugh, are widely regarded as leading representatives of the GOP. How could it be otherwise when Republican pols kowtow before them, engage them as campaign surrogates and dare not criticize them?
Thoughtful Republicans — the moderates and right-leaning modernists who accept diversity — need to convene a meeting to take their party back and restore the brand to its pre-1960s luster. They ought to name their group “Republicans Against Racism.”
They will have to be prepared to call out and criticize the insensitive claptrap and vitriolic nonsense that gets bandied about not only by Limbaugh, but also by other well-known conservative pundits, many of whom have been in the ugly business of dehumanizing and defaming the young Martin since his death drew public attention last year. They have portrayed Martin as a thug, a drug addict, a predator who deserved to die.
To stick with a prominent example, Limbaugh recently dedicated a show to mocking prosecution witness Rachel Jeantel — whom Martin talked to on his cellphone as Zimmerman followed him. Limbaugh claimed that Martin was a homophobe who “attacked” Zimmerman, believing he was a “pervert.”
Have there been similarly outrageous comments from talking heads on the left? Of course. The verdict has prompted name-calling, hot-headed denunciations and racial demagoguery from a lot of folk who ought to know better.
But there is an important difference: There are precious few significant ties between the Democratic Party apparatus and liberal commentators. When voters think of Democratic leaders, they think of President Barack Obama, who has been quite cautious in his response to the Zimmerman verdict, as he usually is on issues of race. Or they think of Attorney General Eric Holder, who has been more voluble, but equally cautious.
By contrast, a Republican Party in disarray has no clear leaders. After his loss to Obama, Mitt Romney has retired to private life. His running mate, Paul Ryan, has retreated to budget battles. House Speaker John Boehner can barely manage his caucus, much less speak for Republicans on a national stage.
Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter and others have happily stepped into the void, presenting themselves as senior strategists for the GOP. And party leaders have allowed them to get away with it.
A few Republicans recognize the problem this poses. MSNBC talk-show host Joe Scarborough, a former GOP congressman, wrote recently that “many conservative commentators were offensive in their reflexive defense of Zimmerman, as well as their efforts to attack the integrity of a dead black teenager.” He concluded that the GOP can’t expect to attract black voters as long as so many of its emissaries are flagrantly and intentionally offensive.
Scarborough is right. Surely there are other Republicans who recognize the dangers of having their party represented by loudmouths who trade in racial hostility.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, July 20, 2013
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