“Why Bigotry Persists”: The Neanderthals Among Us Are Getting Better At Camouflaging Their Prejudices
Soon after Barack Obama’s electoral victory in 2008, conservatives began depicting the event as a triumph of cosmopolitan and secular intellectuals, people of color, liberal pieties, and “socialist” hopes. Grassroots organizing accompanied an agenda of legislative sabotage led by the Republican congressional hierarchy. Media demagogues stoked the flames of resentment. President Obama was mockingly called “The One” and excoriated as an Arab, an imam, even the Antichrist. Posters identified him with Hitler, placed his head on the body of a chimpanzee, implied that he was a crack addict, portrayed him with a bone through his nose, and showed the White House lawn lined with rows of watermelons. Six years later, the fury has hardly subsided: Thousands of young people check on racist websites like Stormfront every month, anti-Semitism is again becoming fashionable, Islamophobia is rampant, and conservative politicians are suing President Obama in the courts for his supposed abuse of power while their more radical supporters are labeling him a traitor.
Most of these people don’t see themselves as bigots. They long to reinstate the “real” America perhaps best depicted in old television shows like Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver. This completely imaginary America was orderly and prosperous. Women were happily in the kitchen; gays were in the closet; and blacks knew their place. But this world (inexplicably!) came under attack from just these (ungrateful!) groups thereby creating resentment especially among white males on the political right. They feel persecuted and wish to roll back time. Their counterattack is based on advocating policies that would hinder same-sex marriage, champion the insertion of “Christian” values into public life, deny funds for women’s health and abortion clinics, cut government policies targeting the inner cities, protect a new prison network inhabited largely by people of color, eliminate limits on campaign spending, and increase voting restrictions that would effectively disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of disadvantaged citizens.
Neanderthals still exist along with blatant examples of old-style prejudice and hatred. But the bigot is adapting to a new world. The bigot now employs camouflage in translating his prejudices into reality. To forestall criticism, he now makes use of supposedly “color-blind” economic and anti-crime policies, liberal notions of tolerance, individualism, the entrepreneurial spirit, local government, historical traditions, patriotism, and fears of nonexistent voter fraud to maintain the integrity of the electoral process. The bigot today is often unaware either that he has prejudices or that he is indulging them.
Unfortunately, popular understandings of the bigot remain anchored in an earlier time. His critics tend to highlight the personal rather than the political, crude language and sensational acts rather than mundane legislation and complicated policy decisions. Many are unwilling to admit that bigotry has entered the mainstream. It is more comforting to associate bigotry with certain attitudes supposedly on the fringes of public life. Words wound but policies wound even more. Everyday citizens grow incensed when some commentator lets slip a racist or politically incorrect phrase. But they are far more tolerant when faced with policies that blatantly disadvantage or attack the bigot’s traditional targets whose inferiority is still identified with fixed and immutable traits: gays, immigrants, people of color, and women.
Reactionary movements and conservative parties have provided a congenial home for true believers, provincial chauvinists, and elitists of an aristocratic or populist bent. Not exclusively: Liberals and socialists—though usually with a guilty conscience—have also occasionally endorsed imperialism, nationalism, racism, and the politics of bigotry. But while the connection between right-wing politics and bigotry does not hold true in every instance, it is true most of the time. It is certainly true today. Ideologues of the Tea Party provide legitimacy and refuge for advocates of intolerance while the GOP provides legitimacy and refuge for the Tea Party.
Not every bigot is a conservative and not every conservative is a bigot. Yet they converge in supporting an agenda that aims to constrict intellectual debate, social pluralism, economic equality, and democratic participation. Either the bigot or the conservative can insist that his efforts to shrink the welfare state are motivated solely by a concern with maximizing individual responsibility; either can claim that his opposition to gay rights is simply a defense of traditional values; and either can argue that increasing the barriers to voting is required to guarantee fair elections. Whatever they subjectively believe, however, their agenda objectively disadvantages gays, immigrants, women, and people of color.
Reasonable people can disagree about this or that policy as it applies to any of these groups. Any policy, progressive or not, can be criticized in good faith. But ethical suspicions arise when an entire agenda is directed against the ensemble of what President Reagan derisively termed “special interests.” No conservative political organization today has majority support from women, the gay community, or people of color. There must be a reason. It cannot simply be that the conservative “message” has not been heard; that members of these groups are overwhelmingly parasitical and awaiting their overly generous government “handouts;” or that so-called special interests are incapable of appreciating what is in their interest. A more plausible explanation, I think, is that those who are still targets of prejudice and discrimination have little reason to trust conservatism’s political advocates.
Is the conservative a bigot? It depends. Is the particular conservative intent upon defending traditions simply because they exist, supporting community values even if they are discriminatory; and treating political participation as a privilege rather than a right? Critics of the bigot should begin placing a bit less emphasis on what he says or feels than what he actually does. That conservative can always rationalize his actions—platitudes come cheap. But then perhaps, one day, he will find himself looking in the mirror and (who knows?) the bigot might just be staring back.
By: Stephen Eric Bronner, Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University; The Daily Beast, September 28, 2014
“Our ‘Real’ America”: Whiteness Is Still A Proxy For Being American
Anyone can make a fool of himself. So it’s tempting to dismiss last Thursday’s mega-gaffe by Florida Representative Curt Clawson as indicative of nothing more than the fallibility of the human brain.
But think about the nature of Clawson’s goof. Sitting across a congressional hearing room from Nisha Biswal, an official at the State Department, and Arun Kumar, who works at the Department of Commerce, Clawson addressed the two Indian-Americans as if they were representatives of the government of India. Which is to say: He had trouble recognizing that two Americans who trace their ancestry to the developing world are really American.
In today’s Republican Party, and beyond, a lot of people are having the same trouble. How else to explain the fact that, according to a 2011 New York Times/CBS poll, 45 percent of Republicans think President Obama was born outside the United States? Is it because they’re well versed in the details of which kind of birth certificate he released and when? Of course not. It’s because they see someone with his color skin and his kind of name and think: Doesn’t seem American to me.
In fact, Obama’s opponents, including Democrats, have been raising questions about his Americanness since he began seeking the presidency. In a March 2007 memo, Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s chief campaign strategist, argued that she should attack Obama for “not [being] at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and his values.” Had Obama been white and named Joe Smith, Penn’s line of attack would have been inconceivable, since Obama’s thinking and values were typical of a liberal Democrat’s, and similar to Clinton’s own. Penn’s effort to question Obama’s Americanness was entirely a function of the fact that he traced his ancestry to the third world and had spent some of his childhood abroad.
Since Obama defeated Hillary Clinton, it has been the Republicans’ turn. Newt Gingrich has claimed Obama possesses a “Kenyan, anti-colonial worldview.” Dick Cheney has said, “I don’t think that Barack Obama believes in the U.S. as an exceptional nation.” Indeed, a major thrust of the GOP’s attack on Obama is that he doesn’t understand America, doesn’t believe in America and wants to turn it into something fundamentally different from what it has always been. Bill Clinton, by contrast, was attacked relentlessly for his supposed lack of personal integrity and failure to serve in Vietnam. But conservatives rarely questioned his connection to the United States.
It’s not just Obama. In various ways in recent years, conservatives have questioned the Americanness of American Muslims. Michele Bachmann suggested that Huma Abedin and other Muslim-Americans serving in the national-security bureaucracy might be more loyal to foreign Islamist movements than to the United States. Another former Republican presidential candidate, Herman Cain, in 2011 said he would not appoint a Muslim to his cabinet because “Muslims in this country, some of them, try to force their Sharia law onto the rest of us.” A Public Religion Research Institute poll that same year found that 63 percent of Republicans believed Islam contradicts American values.
The link between the GOP’s tendency to question the Americanness of Muslim- Americans and Clawson’s assumption that the Indian-Americans sitting across from him were not American becomes clearer when you realize that in contemporary American discourse, “Muslim” is often seen as a race. Several of the most high-profile hate crimes committed in “retaliation” for 9/11 occurred not against Muslims but against South Asian Hindus or Sikhs. Representative Peter King has called for profiling suspected terrorists based upon their “religious background or ethnicity,” even though Islam is no more an ethnicity than is Christianity. The implication, of course, is that Muslims are brown.
One even sees traces of this tendency to un-Americanize immigrants from the developing world in the way some Americans see Hispanics. When Arizona in 2010 passed a law empowering law enforcement to detain anyone who presented a “reasonable suspicion” of being in the country illegally, critics rightly wondered what criteria the police could possibly use to suspect someone of being undocumented other than the fact that they looked or sounded Hispanic. A 2012 poll by the National Hispanic Media Coalition found that one-third of Americans believed most Hispanics in the United States were undocumented. In other words, many Americans associate being Hispanic with not being legally American. That’s pretty similar to the assumption Congressman Clawson made about Biswal and Kumar.
There’s no point in continuing to ridicule Clawson. Everyone’s entitled to a dumb mistake. But it’s worth noting how unlikely it is that he would have mistaken an Irish-American for a representative of the government of Ireland or a German-American for a representative of the government of Germany. Throughout our nation’s history, whiteness (itself a shifting category) has been used as a proxy for Americanness. And as Clawson reminded us last Thursday, it still is.
By: Peter Beinart, The Atlantic, July 27, 2014
“Redskins’ Running Out Of Downs”: The Profit Principle Always Trumps Tradition
We interrupt your viewing of the sport the rest of the world calls football in order to take note of a potentially game-changing (or at least name-changing) development in the American version of the game. As many American football fans know by now, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has canceled the Washington professional football team’s trademark registration on the name “Redskins” (and also “Redskinettes”) on the grounds that “they were disparaging to Native Americans at the respective times they were registered.” You can’t legally register “marks that may disparage persons or bring them into contempt or disrepute,” according to the order.
It’s been clear for some time now that – despite the from-my-cold-dead-hands denunciations of team owner Dan Snyder – there is a realistic path forward for changing the name: not moral suasion as such but the power of the marketplace. Once Snyder, and if not him then his 31 other team-owning National Football League colleagues, start to see their collective bottom line erode, they will do the right thing.
As my colleague Pat Garofalo wrote a little more than a year ago: “The Redskins are the fifth most valuable sports franchise in the world, so cutting off the trademark spigot would likely be more effective, sadly, than the string of Native American leaders who have come forward to explain the derogatory history of the term with which Washington endows its team.” And as ProFootballTalk.com’s Michael David Smith writes:
Could Redskins owner Dan Snyder, who insists that he will never change the name, afford to lose that money? Yes. But even if Snyder is so devoted to the Redskins name that he’s willing to lose money over it, losing the ability to trademark the name wouldn’t just cost Snyder money. It would also cost the other teams, and the NFL’s merchandising partners, money. Snyder’s fellow owners aren’t going to stand for that.
Snyder and his colleagues are all people of principle, after all, and in this case I suspect that the “profit” principle will trump its “tradition” counterpart.
None of this should come as a surprise. As USA Today wrote last month (h/t Washington Post):
If the team were applying for federal trademark protection for its “Redskins” name today, it would almost certainly be denied: At least 12 times since 1992 the USPTO has refused to register such marks on disparagement grounds, including seven applications from the Washington team (for terms such as “Redskins Fanatics” and “Redskins Rooters”) and one from NFL Properties (for “Boston Redskins”).
I understand the desire to cling to tradition; and I even get the knee-jerk instinct to oppose things that smack of political correctness, but cultural grounds shift and sometimes in weighing political correctness we need to place more emphasis on the “correct” than on the “political.” Perhaps the name Redskins might have been acceptable in 1933 when then-owner George Preston Marshall changed the franchise’s name from the Braves to the Redskins. (Despite what Snyder says, Marshall didn’t select the name to honor its putatively Indian coach but rather, he said at the time, so that he could keep its logo whilst disambiguating his then Boston-based team from the baseball franchise of the same name.) There was probably also a time when someone could have gotten away with Washington Darkies or Washington Wetbacks, but neither of those names would fly today. Neither should Washington Redskins.
So what’s next? The Redskins have vowed to appeal and as many reports have noted, the team did get a near-identical ruling tossed out in 1999 on the grounds that the people who brought it didn’t have standing. Will they get the same result this time? As Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio notes, the “difference this time comes from the surrounding debate on the name. In 1999, the opposition was far less organized and mainstream. In 2014, the opposition has coalesced and assumed a sense that it will last until the name inevitably changes.”
In the meantime, those Redskin deadenders who deplore the idea of changing the team name can take comfort: Prices are about to drop on the team’s paraphernalia.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, June 18, 2014
“Small Men With Ugly Thoughts Expressed Aloud”: Bigoted Gasbags Reduced To Their Proper Size
Lonesome Racist of the Week: Robert Copeland of Wolfeboro, NH.
He’s not as wealthy or prominent as Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, but the 82-year-old Copeland is no less detestable.
Until last week he served as one of three elected police commissioners in Wolfeboro, a town of about 6,300 people in central New Hampshire. A resident had complained to the town manager that, while dining at a local restaurant, she overheard Copeland use the N-word to describe President Obama.
Copeland didn’t deny making the slur, and brilliantly sent the following email to the other commissioners: “I believe I did use the ‘N’ word in reference to the current occupant of the Whitehouse (sic). For this I do not apologize — he meets and exceeds my criteria for such.”
Many people in Wolfeboro felt Copeland met and exceeded the criteria for being a bigoted gasbag, and a public meeting was convened. The crowd was virtually all white because fewer than two-dozen African-Americans live in the town.
Copeland sat there listening to all the outraged demands for his resignation, and never said a word.
Wolfeboro was in turmoil. It wasn’t as if Copeland could be ignored or led away like some demented old uncle. The police commission is in charge of hiring, firing and disciplining officers, and also setting their salaries. Copeland also worked as a dispatch supervisor.
The governor of New Hampshire and several state lawmakers condemned Copeland’s remarks about Obama and said he should resign immediately. So did Mitt Romney, who owns a house in the state.
After a few days Copeland gave up and quit. He’s now free to shamble around the house in his bathrobe and boxers, spewing the N-word as much as he wants.
He has little in common with Sterling besides hateful prejudice and advanced age (the Clippers owner is 80). After Sterling’s embarrassing mangled apology while being interviewed by CNN’s Anderson Cooper, some began to wonder if creeping senility is what causes old white guys to drop their guard and blurt whatever dumbass racist thought enters their brains.
They point to Cliven Bundy, 67, the deadbeat Nevada rancher who for two decades hasn’t paid grazing fees for the cattle he lets roam upon federal lands. When officers showed up last month to remove the livestock, they were met by a defiant Bundy and a band of armed supporters.
Bundy has claimed native rights to the lands, saying he doesn’t recognize the existence of the U.S. government. For “standing up to” the feds (and stiffing American taxpayers for more than $1 million), he was lionized by conservative radio hosts, Senator Rand Paul, Sean Hannity and the other parrots at Fox News.
If at that point he’d shut his mouth, Bundy would still be a media darling of the bug-eyed right. But while chatting with a New York Times reporter, he decided out of nowhere to offer some casual thoughts about “the Negro.”
He mused that black people might be “better off as slaves” rather than living “under government subsidy.”
Whoops. Here we go again.
Instantly Bundy became politically toxic. His cheering section at Fox fell silent, while Senator Paul, who has presidential ambitions, declared he didn’t agree with Bundy’s view on slavery and even unholstered the O-word (“offensive”).
Like Sterling, Bundy’s attempts to clarify his feelings about black Americans only made things worse.
“Are they slaves to charities and government subsidized homes?” he said two days later. “And are they slaves when their daughters are having abortions and their sons are in prisons? This thought goes back a long time.”
On CNN Bundy labored to stem the backlash with an incoherent reference to Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, while on his Facebook page he stated more clearly that he doesn’t believe anyone should be put back into slavery today.
That’s comforting to know, but at this point Bundy’s trespassing cows are his biggest audience.
He, Copeland and Sterling have blabbed themselves into caricatures. It’s not that they’re harmless (Sterling’s discriminatory practices as a landlord were punitive to many black families), but all the repudiation and ridicule has reduced them to their proper size.
They are just small men with small, ugly thoughts, and every so often it’s useful to be reminded that they’re still out there.
Lots of ‘em.
By: Carl Hiaasen, Columnist for The Miami Herald, The National memo, May 27, 2014
“There Is No Simpler Way To Put It”: Cliven Bundy’s An Old-Fashioned Racist – And He’s Not Alone
When I was a kid growing up in South Carolina, I was racist. I used the ‘n” word. I was taught that word by those around me, men and women who I looked to for moral guidance. My late father was a horrible bigot and he truly believed black people were simply beneath him. My late grandmother didn’t really use that word around me but she made it clear by her actions that anyone who wasn’t white was simply “lesser.”
Yet, these were two people who had more influence over me than pretty much anyone else in my youth. I loved them both and even today their deaths affect me emotionally.
When I was finally able to admit and embrace being gay to my family, something in me changed. I was moved from a place of hate to a place of empathy. I began to see the world not through the eyes of a privileged white Southern kid but from the perspective of someone on the other side of the railroad tracks. It was, in a word, sobering.
When I hear white people talk about race, I get a little clammy. When I hear Cliven Bundy talk about race, I get really pissed off. This “tea party” favorite, an American grandfather who’s a rancher with a very loyal family, seems to have bared his soul for the press. He likes the bully pulpit that comes from being a “taker,” a freeloader, a tax evader. He’s a man who doesn’t recognize the U.S. government in any way shape fashion or form. He’s also a man who said this, as reported by the New York Times:
“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.
“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”
The “negro?” Picking cotton? Seriously? Who the hell is this guy? Let me tell you who Cliven Bundy is. He’s a bigot who believes in “freedom.” In case it’s lost on you, Bundy is the ultimate government subsidy. He believes in feeding his cattle for free. He doesn’t believe he owes federal taxes. He doesn’t believe in the rule of federal law. Bundy is purely and simply a common criminal who deserves to go to jail.
He believes in using us in the press as his bully pulpit and we let him. Bundy believes in a land mass of 50 states, not one nation of 50 states. He’s a secessionist. He’s not a patriot as some have called him. George Washington was a patriot – who, not for nothing, used force to put down citizens who refused to pay the federal excise tax in the Whiskey Rebellion. Abraham Lincoln was a patriot, who by the way implemented the federal income tax. I’d love to hear Bundy’s wise opinion on Lincoln. No doubt he’ll tell us if we let him. No doubt we’ll give him that microphone. We should.
I guess the question we must ask is, does Cliven Bundy represent a thin and narrow sliver of American society or is he something bigger? With freedom fighters and birthers and tea partiers and their ilk rallying behind him and his right to steal from the American taxpayer, I’m convinced this man is no sliver of hate. Clearly, the freedom fighters hate what America has become and they’re convinced President Obama is leading us all down the path to Hell. Their new spokesman? Cliven Bundy.
This Bundy fellow isn’t a one-off. Conservative opinion columnist George Will seems to think so. He has opined that Democrats scream racism anytime we don’t like what we’re hearing. I’d probably agree if this were just Bundy but it’s not. Just Google Cliven Bundy and you’ll see his following, his supporters, his freedom followers. Even fools like Allen West support this racist.
I don’t know Mr. Bundy but I knew his type when I was a kid. There’s not much difference between my father and Bundy. That makes me sad. I always held my father on a pedestal even with his grotesque flaws. When I hear the Cliven Bundys of the world spew out their filth, their racism, I’m reminded of my ignorant childhood, of my grandmother’s and daddy’s view of the world and I’m horrified.
By: Jimmie Williams, an MSNBC Political Contributor; Published in U. S. News and World Report, April 24, 2014
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