“Tramp Stamps, Racism And ‘Icky’ Pronouns: 8 New Life Tips From “Bell Curve” Author Charles Murray
Weeks after Rep. Paul Ryan was slammed for citing his writing, “The Bell Curve” author Charles Murray is out today with a new book: “The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead: Dos and Don’t of Right Behavior, Tough Thinking, Clear Writing, and Living a Good Life.”
Murray, whom Ryan cited as a source demonstrating “this tailspin of culture in our inner cities in particular,” and the Southern Poverty Law Center labels a “White Nationalist,” addresses his new book to readers who are “in or near your twenties,” “intelligent,” “ambitious,” and “want to become excellent at something.”
He is most famous for co-authoring “The Bell Curve,” a 1994 book (in the author’s’ words) “about differences in intellectual capacity among people and groups and what those differences mean for America’s future.” Describing what they called “the cognitive differences between races,” Murray and co-author Richard Hernstein wrote that “It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences.” They also claimed, “There is some evidence that blacks and Latinos are experiencing even more severe dysgenic pressures than whites, which could lead to further divergence between whites and other groups in future generations.” (They describe “a dysgenic effect” as “a downward shift in the ability distribution.”)
Murray was supposed to conduct an interview with Salon (having agreed to it last week), but abruptly dropped out hours beforehand. In the interview’s place, here are some of his new book’s eight most memorable life tips:
On Tattoos: “As for tattoos, it does no good to remind curmudgeons that tattoos have been around for millennia. Yes, we will agree, tattoos have been common – first among savage tribes and then, more recently, among the lowest classes of Western societies. In America, tattoos have until the last few decades been the unambiguous badge of the proletariat or worse – an association still acknowledged in the phrase tramp stamp.”
On Pronouns: “The feminist revolution has tied writers into knots when it comes to the third-person singular pronoun. Using the masculine pronoun as the default has been proscribed. Some male writers get around this problem by defaulting to the feminine singular pronoun, which I think is icky.” Instead, “Unless there is an obvious reason not to, use the gender of the author or, in a cowritten text, the gender of the principal author. It’s the perfect solution.”
“Waiting For Excuses For The Inexcusable”: When Talking About The Third Rail Of American Conscience, Brace For Dumb Excuses
What excuses will they make this time?
Meaning that cadre of letters-to-the-editor writers and conservative pundits who so reliably say such stupid things whenever the subject is race. Indeed, race is the third rail of American conscience; to touch it is to be zapped by rationalizations, justifications and lies that defy reason, but that some must embrace to preserve for themselves the fiction of liberty and justice for all. Otherwise, they’d have to face the fact that advantage and disadvantage, health and sickness, wealth and poverty, life and death, are still parceled out according to melanin content of skin.
So they become creative in their evasions.
They use made-up facts (Trayvon Martin was actually casing the neighborhood) and invented statistics (black men and boys commit 97.2 percent of all the crime in America), they murder messengers (“You’re a racist for pointing out racism!”) they discredit the source (Can you really trust a government study?).
One waits, then, with morbid fascination to see what excuse those folks will make as federal data released last week reveal that African-American children are significantly more likely to be suspended — from preschool. Repeating for emphasis: preschool, that phase of education where the curriculum encompasses colors, shapes, finger painting and counting to 10. Apparently, our capacity for bias extends even there. According to the Department of Education, while black kids make up about 18 percent of those attending preschool, they account for 42 percent of those who are suspended once — and nearly half of those suspended more than once.
Armed with that information, there are many questions we should be asking:
Are black kids being suspended for things that would earn another child a timeout or a talking-to?
If racial bias pervades even the way we treat our youngest citizens, how can anyone still say it has no impact upon the way we treat them when they are older?
What does being identified as “bad” at such an early age do to a child’s sense of himself, his worth and his capabilities?
Does being thus identified so young play out later in life in terms of higher dropout rates and lower test scores?
How can we fix this, build a society in which every one of our children is encouraged to stretch for the outermost limits of his or her potential?
Those are the kinds of smart, compassionate questions we should ask. But again, we’re talking about the third rail of American conscience. So one braces for dumb excuses instead.
Maybe someone will claim African-American preschoolers are 73.9 percent more likely to fail naptime.
Maybe someone will contend that they thuggishly refuse to color inside the lines.
And you may rest assured someone will say that for us even to have the discussion proves hatred of white people.
What a long, strange road we have traveled from the high land of idealism and hope to which the human rights movement brought us 50 years ago, down to the swampy lowland of justification and circumscribed horizons we find ourselves slogging through now. It is noteworthy that this story of institutional bias against children barely out of diapers scarcely skimmed — much less penetrated — an American consciousness presently preoccupied by basketball brackets and the mystery of a doomed jetliner.
Small wonder. Those things ask very little of us, other than a love for sport and a capacity to feel bad for other people’s misfortune. This, on the other hand, cuts to the heart of who we are.
Last week we learned that their schools routinely bend little black boys and girls toward failure. And the people who make excuses should just save their breath.
There are none.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Miami Herald; Published in The National Memo, March 26, 2014
“The Toxic Culture Of Conservatism”: Conservatives Have A “Racist Jokes” Culture Problem
Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s reelection campaign had one of those days yesterday. You know, one of those days where you hold a press call with the lieutenant governor but instead of asking about your latest campaign ad like they’re supposed to, all the reporters insist on asking about how the campaign’s finance co-chair recently stepped down because campaign staffers made racist jokes.
Billionaire healthcare mogul Mike Fernandez was Rick Scott’s top fundraiser until last week, when he abruptly quit. The Miami Herald offered some detail on what led up to the decision:
Despite the praise, Fernandez has been unhappy for weeks with the struggling campaign’s direction and the attitude of some of its workers.
Fernandez began expressing his frustrations at least a month ago when he sent an email to top Scott allies and complained about two campaign aides who had joked around in a cartoon-style Mexican accent en route to a Mexican restaurant in Fernandez’s home town of Coral Gables.
The Scott campaign can assure you that it was not that bad:
“Mike was not in the van,” Scott’s campaign manager, Melissa Sellers, said in an email to the Herald.
So no harm done! Sellers also said: “If something was said in an accent, no one remembers what it was.” (Obviously someone remembers, but fine.)
The incident was reminiscent of the recently released internal emails from the staff of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. Those emails revealed an office where campaigning and politicking trumped governing, but they also showed a staff that saw absolutely no issue with forwarding deeply offensive (and stupid, and unfunny) “jokes” involving the inherent hilarity of people of color.
There has been some debate recently on the subject of urban “culture” and its relation to poverty and white supremacy. Conservatives argue, essentially, that the structural forces (white supremacy) holding back “urban” economic advancement have largely receded, and so, where there is still poverty, the problem is “cultural.”
With that in mind, I’d like to posit that one reason conservative minority outreach fails so often and so consistently is because of a tailspin of culture, among Republicans, of generations of men being giant racist pricks. Not just racially “insensitive,” like an old man who doesn’t know it’s not OK to say “Oriental” anymore, but actively, intentionally, overtly, aggressively racist pricks. Like “attend a blackface-themed frat party on MLK Day” racist. Most of us don’t think forwarding a racist joke or speaking in an insulting “comedic” accent is appropriate at the workplace. Unfortunately, for those raised in the toxic culture of conservatism, the sort of mentality that leads government employees to do those things is widespread.
There will be no successful minority “outreach” for the GOP — not even among the “high-achieving” groups — until this culture is addressed. They’ll have to do this work for themselves. Charitable groups have tried for years to educate and help conservatives, but they keep falling back into the same tragic patterns: asking “why isn’t there a WHITE history month,” demanding access to institutions of higher learning based not on merit but on skin color, infringing on free expression merely because it makes them uncomfortable. The list goes on and on. It’s time for the right to stop feeling entitled to lessons in basic human decency, and start addressing their own pathological culture.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, March 25, 2014
“The Intent Is Pure Partisan Power Politics”: The GOP’s Racial Dog Whistling And The Social Safety Net
You’ve no doubt heard the famous quote about race in politics spoken by the late Lee Atwater, the most skilled Republican strategist of his generation. Liberals have cited it for years, seeing in it an explanation, right from the horse’s mouth, of how contemporary Republicans use “issues” like welfare to activate racial animus among white voters, particularly in the South. Race may be an eternal force in American politics, but its meaning and operation change as the years pass. It’s time we took another look at Atwater’s analysis and see how it is relevant to today, because it doesn’t mean what it once did. Atwater may have been extraordinarily prescient, though not in the way most people think.
If a certain word unsettles you, you might want to read something else with your coffee, but it’s important we have Atwater’s quote, spoken in 1981 during an interview with a political scientist, in front of us:
“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.'”
As Rick Perlstein explained, the common interpretation of the quote—that Atwater was describing how the GOP shrewdly encourages and benefits from racism among voters while maintaining deniability for doing so—isn’t quite correct. Heard in context, it seems clear that the point Atwater was trying to make was that the GOP was evolving beyond racism, even if some of its favored policies were still better for some races than others. Eventually, the deniability wouldn’t just be plausible, it would be genuine.
At the time, this was more than a little ridiculous. Just a year before, Ronald Reagan had opened his campaign for president in Philadelphia, Mississippi, site of the murder of civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, then spent a good deal of his campaign talking about welfare queens. Four years before, Reagan had told Southern audiences about how frustrating it was to stand in line at the grocery store behind a “strapping young buck” buying T-bone steaks with food stamps. And seven years after the interview, Atwater would join with Roger Ailes to mastermind the “Willie Horton” strategy for George H.W. Bush, in which the mug shot of a menacing black convict became as ubiquitous in the campaign as flags at a Fourth of July parade.
But in 2014, Atwater’s vision of a GOP evolving on race has finally come to pass, though not precisely in the way he intended. Back then, attacks on safety net programs like welfare and food stamps were used by Republicans as a means to activate barely contained racist feelings, with the knowledge that the more hostility white voters felt toward minorities, the better it would be for Republican candidates. Today, we see the reverse: Stirring up a bit of subconscious racism, or attacking the rights of minorities in much more practical ways, is a means to attack the safety net and undermine government.
Take, for example, the issue of voting. When the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, it was meant to dismantle the system under which white Southerners had kept blacks from exercising their right to vote, a system created to maintain white supremacy. And when the Supreme Court struck down Section 4 of the law last year, Republican states rushed to rewrite their laws to do things like require ID in order to vote. Republican states all over the country have cut back on early voting, making sure to eliminate it on the Sunday before election day, when many black churches conduct “souls to the polls” voting drives after service. In Arizona and Kansas, Republicans even passed laws requiring that you not just document who you are but provide proof you’re a citizen in order to vote, laws that were just upheld by a federal judge.
Are the people who are going to be disenfranchised by a requirement for proof of citizenship going to be disproportionately minority? Of course they are. But that’s not the reason Republicans are so eager to impose these requirements. The reason is that the disenfranchised voters will disproportionately be Democrats. If there were a way to just as easily keep large numbers of Democrats from the polls without harming minorities particularly, they’d be perfectly happy to adopt that method instead. That’s why, for instance, in Texas the voter ID law passed by a Republican legislature and signed by Governor Rick Perry says that a gun license is a valid form of identification, but a student ID issued by a Texas university isn’t. When a legislature engineers a “racial gerrymander” to pack as many black voters into as few districts as possible, the goal isn’t white supremacy, it’s Republican supremacy. The result may be bound up in race, but the intent is pure partisan power politics.
And when Paul Ryan starts talking about how “We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work,” the racial implications may be perfectly clear (it’s the “inner city,” i.e. the place where black people live, that has a “culture” of laziness, as opposed to the places where there are a lot of poor white people). But Ryan’s real goal isn’t to get you mad at black people, it’s to get you mad at the safety net. I have no trouble believing Ryan, in a way, when he says that race was not the heart of his intent. The man who once said that “the reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand” is surely motivated primarily by a Randian contempt for the “takers” who might need help with food or health insurance, whatever color their skin.
Today’s GOP is a place where open expressions of racism are far less tolerated, no one talks about “strapping young bucks” anymore, and the next Willie Horton is presented with more subtlety—and deniability—than ever. How much of that is because the mainstream blowback from blatantly racial appeals is just too high (just look at all the flack Ryan got), and how much because of a sincere change in perspective? It’s almost impossible to say. But if America’s blacks and Hispanics woke up tomorrow and starting voting 60 percent Republican, the party’s leaders would welcome them with open arms, then call an emergency session of every Republican-run state legislature to get rid of all those voter ID laws.
Of course, that won’t happen any time soon, so Republicans will continue to pass laws limiting minorities’ ability to vote, and offer roundabout appeals aimed, some more directly than others, at the darker places where people’s less generous feelings about race lie. Were he alive today, Lee Atwater would probably say, “See? I told you so.”
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, March 24, 2014
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