CPAC: The Delicate Dance Of Disassociating Oneself From “White Nationalist” Groups
Although much of the attention is on the main stage at each year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, it’s the side events where the real kookiness occurs. These events can give CPAC organizers and attendees a headache as they try to walk the line between accepting certain groups under the umbrella of the conservative movement, but also trying to make it clear they don’t want to associate themselves with some of those groups’ more questionable qualities.
Take for instance a session on the dangers of multiculturalism, that included participants from the website VDARE, which has been labeled as a white nationalist hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Rep. Steve King was one of those who had to walk the fine line. When questioned about the Southern Poverty Law Center’s description of his fellow panelists he first reacted by going on the offensive. “I wouldn’t be sitting up on a panel with anyone from the Southern Poverty Law Center,” King told reporters. “I’m not in a position to judge people in the fashion they seem to be so free to do.”
However, King then danced a delicate series of mental pirouettes. He explained his respect for VDARE’s top dog, Peter Brimelow, while holding back from a full-on embrace. Brimelow, he said, was not someone he’d met before the panel, though he had read his books.
“I just remember I’ve read his books and I put his name in my memory, and I just remember that his rationale was a rationale that I could track and I’m glad we have his voice,” he said in response to a journalist’s question about the pair’s relationship. Meanwhile, CPAC seemed to keep their distance, with a spokeswoman directing the Daily Caller’s Alex Pappas to the sponsoring organization for comment and pointing out that it wasn’t organized by the American Conservative Union.
The host of the event was officially the group ProEnglish, and their executive director, Robert Vandervoort. CPAC opened itself up to criticism in giving him a platform as well, given that he “was also the organizer of the white nationalist group, Chicagoland Friends of American Renaissance” according to the Institute for Research on Education and Human Rights.
Still, at least they got some thanks. Vandervoort praised the leaders of CPAC for “for standing up to the leftist thugs who wish to shut down this conference and our freedoms of speech and assembly.”
The panel discussion itself focused on the idea that multiculturalism and making accommodations for non-English speakers so they can do things like vote or get a public education, was a terrible thing for America to do.
Dr. Rosalie Porter, chairwoman of the board of ProEnglish and a former bilingual teacher who now thinks of bilingual education as an “insane idea,” said that part of multiculturalism is “the idea that every culture is equally valid, and one must never be judgmental and one must not say anything critical about a culture.”
Brimelow said bilingualism was “about the distribution of power in the society” and “the determination of the elites not to press immigrants to assimilate.” King was late for the panel and wasn’t even on the program, but he blended right in when he showed up, calling English the language of “success” and asking why the left was “obsessed” with multiculturalism.
Multiculturalism has even infected Republicans in the House, according to King. He recalled how an unnamed Republican leader wouldn’t let him be the floor manager of a bill he sponsored to make English the official language of the United States because he wasn’t an immigrant.
“I wanted to bring it up in the House, I was in a perfect position to do so, I had all the co-sponsors, I had worked it, I had earned it and the timing was right politically, and the answer that I got was ‘we’re looking for someone who is an immigrant or the son or daughter of an immigrant to be the floor manager of the bill’,” King said. “And the answer that I gave that unnamed leader was ‘I don’t think much of your affirmative action plan to select floor managers of bills.’ And so there’s a fear of criticism.”
By: Ryan J. Reilly, Talking Points Memo, February 11, 2012
The Winds Of Racism On The GOP Campaign Trail
Here are some things you could learn about black Americans from the recent statements and insinuations of Republican presidential candidates, Republican congressmen and Republican-friendly radio personalities:
Black people have lost the desire to perform a day’s work. Black people rely on food stamps provided to them by white taxpayers. Black people, including Barack and Michelle Obama, believe that the U.S. owes them somethingbecause they are black. Black children should work as janitors in their high schools as a way to keep them from becoming pimps. And the pathologies afflicting black Americans are caused partly by the Democratic Party, which has created in them a dependency on government not dissimilar to the forced dependency of slaves on their owners.
Judging by these claims, all of which have actually been put forward recently, here is a modest prediction: This presidential election will be one of the most race-soaked in recent history. It is already more race-soaked than the 2008 election, which, of course, marked the first time that a black man became a major-party candidate.
I don’t know why this is. Perhaps because Senator John McCain, the Republican contender in 2008, generally and admirably refused to race-bait. But the Republican candidates in today’s contest aren’t so meticulous about avoiding the temptation to dog-whistle their way to the nomination.
A Dark Art
Dog-whistling — the use of coded, ambiguous language to appeal to the prejudices of certain subsets of voters –is one of the darkest political arts. In this race, Newt Gingrich is streets ahead of his nearest competitor in its use. In addition to his comments about black children working as janitors, he has repeatedly referred to Obama as the country’s “food-stamp president.”
Food stamps have been fixed in the minds of many white voters as a government subsidy misused by blacks at leastsince 1976, when Ronald Reagan complained of “strapping young bucks” who used public assistance to buy “T-bone steaks.” (It is distressing to remember, in light of Reagan’s subsequent beatification, that he was to racial dog-whistling what Pat Buchanan has been to Jew-baiting; it was Reagan who also introduced the “welfare queen” into public discourse.)
The genius of dog-whistling is its deniability. It would be difficult for a figure such as Rush Limbaugh to run for public office, given his record of fairly straightforward race-baiting. (Limbaugh, who in the words of Harvard Law School’s Randall Kennedy is an “excellent entrepreneur of racial resentment,” has been on a tear lately. He has accused Obama — who he says “talks honky”around white people — and the first lady of abusing public funds as payback for the ill-treatment afforded their ancestors.)
But “food-stamp president” is just indirect enough that Gingrich is protected from detrimental blowback, at least during the largely white Republican primaries.
Kennedy, who studies the role of race in national elections, told me last week of a rule he uses to measure whether a candidate’s appeal to prejudice will succeed: If it takes more than two sentences for a critic to explain why a dog-whistle is a dog-whistle, the whistler wins. Gingrich seems to understand this, and so, despite criticism from blacks, has made the term “food-stamppresident” a staple of his stump speeches.
New Realization
Kennedy offers the theory that this campaign’s dog-whistling may be prompted by a realization by right-leaning provocateurs that voters have become inured to charges of racism. I suspect another phenomenon has hastened this realization: A handful of black Republicans have abetted dog-whistling by making their own bombastic statements about the degraded moral health of the black community, the putative foreignness of the Obamas and the Democratic Party’s plantation-like qualities.
The former presidential candidate Herman Cain, who last week endorsed Gingrich, told me in an interview last year that Obama was more “international” than American. He also said that, unlike Obama, he rejects the label“African-American” because he feels “more of an affinity for America than I do for Africa.”
Representative Allen West of Florida, one of two black Republican House members, recently called the Democratic Party a “21st-century plantation” and compared himself to Harriet Tubman. In August, he said, “Today in the black community, we see individuals who are either wedded to a subsistence check or an employment check. Democrat physical enslavement has now become liberal economic enslavement, which is just as horrible.”
How far in intent is West’s message from this one, recently delivered by Rick Santorum in Sioux City, Iowa: “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.” (Santorum laterdenied that he said the word “black,” arguing that what he actually said was “blah.” The denial is not credible.)
The writer Gary Younge has noted that in Woodbury County, which includes Sioux City, nine times more whites use food stamps than blacks do. But it doesn’t matter: Santorum wasn’t driven from the race for making such a blatant appeal to white resentment — instead, he won the Iowa caucus.
An Odd Video
Recently, I watched an educational children’s video produced by a company part-owned by Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and presidential candidate (and current Fox News host). The video series, called “Learn Our History,” is meant as a corrective to a left-wing interpretation of the American story.
In one episode, a group of children are transported to Washington, in the late 1970s, a time when, we are told,“people are out of work and some of their morals are just gone.” The group, walking down a cartoon version of a street from “The Wire,” is confronted by a black mugger in a tank-top emblazoned with the word “Disco.” (Yes,“Disco.”) The mugger says to the time-travelers, “Gimme yo money!”
I asked Huckabee why the video advanced this particular stereotype. We had been speaking about the rationale for the video series, and he had just finished telling me that the project was meant to encourage moral leadership. Then he told me he had nothing to do with writing the show’s scripts, but it was his impression that the mugger wasn’t meant to be black. In any case, we were talking about a cartoon, he said, and cartoons traffic in“caricature.”
This is something cartoons share with many of today’s leading Republicans.
By: Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic, January 31, 2012
Insulting Comments At Fox News Debate Show Newt Gingrich Clueless On Black Americans
If you want to understand why the GOP is so ill prepared to compete in an increasingly nonwhite America, just look at the exchange between Fox News questioner Juan Williams and Newt Gingrich halfway through last night’s Republican presidential debate.
It being Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Williams asked Gingrich whether some poor and minority voters might not be insulted at his claim that poor kids lack a work ethic and that black people should be instructed to demand jobs, not food stamps. Gingrich, as is his wont, haughtily dismissed Williams’s question, to wild applause.
Then Williams tried again, mentioning a black woman who had taken Gingrich to task for calling Barack Obama a “food stamp” president. By this point, the overwhelmingly white crowd had begun to boo the only African-American on stage. When Gingrich insisted that Obama was indeed the “food stamp” president—because more Americans are now on food stamps—and dismissed Williams’s criticism as “politically correct,” the crowd began to scream with delight. By the time Gingrich finished his answer, the crowd was on its feet in a standing ovation.
The fascinating thing about the exchange is that Gingrich is not a racist. I suspect he genuinely cares about the African-American poor. In fact, he’s convinced himself that his willingness to say things that many African-Americans consider insulting is an expression of that concern; that only he cares enough about African-Americans to speak the “politically incorrect” truths that black leaders won’t.
Gingrich’s problem isn’t racism; it’s ignorance. Only someone profoundly ignorant of African-American politics would suggest that black Americans have spent the past few decades seeking food stamps, not jobs. We celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day, after all, in part because of the speech King gave at an event called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. If you look at the budgets proposed by the Congressional Black Caucus over the years, you’ll see that they often include huge, FDR-style government jobs programs. Gingrich may not think that’s the best way to go about providing jobs, but to suggest that African-Americans and their leaders don’t consider jobs important just reveals how shut off from Africa-American politics he actually is.
I’m sure Gingrich also sees nothing offensive in calling Obama the “food stamp” president. After all, under Obama the number of people using food stamps has gone up! So because Alan Greenspan presided over predatory lending policies by banks, perhaps we should have called him the “Shylock” chairman of the Federal Reserve. And if child molestations by priests rise on this administration’s watch, perhaps we should call Joseph Biden the “pedophilia” vice president.
Gingrich would never use those phrases, of course, because he’s familiar enough with Jews and Catholics to understand why they’d find them offensive. But for Gingrich—a veteran politician from the state of Georgia, speaking at a debate in South Carolina on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday—not to understand why calling the first African-American in the Oval Office the “food stamp” president would offend African-Americans is simply amazing. The most plausible explanation is that Gingrich inhabits a cultural and intellectual bubble. A bubble called the Republican Party.
I don’t doubt that Newt Gingrich wants to help African-Americans, just like I don’t doubt that George W. Bush wanted to help Iraqis. But in politics, if you want to help people, it’s a good idea to learn something about them first.
By: Peter Beinart, The Daily Beast, January 17, 2012
The GOP’s Blatant Racism
In the British original of The Office the main protagonist, David Brent (US reincarnation: Michael Scott), wistfully recalls a tender moment during his favorite war film, The Dam Busters, involving the hero pilot, Wing Commander Guy Gibson. “Before he goes into battle, he’s playin’ with his dog,” says Brent.
“Nigger,” says his sidekick, Gareth (Dwight in the States), recalling with glee the name of the dog.
Brent flinches, eager to mitigate the slur. “Yeah!… it was the ’40s,” he says, “before racism was bad.”
The problem with the illusion of a postracial society is that at almost any moment the systemic nature of racism, its legacy, methods and impulses, might have to be rediscovered and restated as though for the first time. If the problem has gone away, those who point it out or claim to experience it are, by definition, living in the past. Those who witness it in action must be imagining things. Those who practice it are either misunderstood or maligned.
So it has been these past few weeks with Republicans on the stump, campaigning as though in a time “before racism was bad,” when Rick Perry’s family had a hunting lodge known as Niggerhead and white people could just run their mouth without consequences. In Sioux City, Iowa, Rick Santorum was asked a question about foreign influence on the economy. As he meandered incoherently through his answer, he came out with this gem:
“I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.”
“Right,” said one audience member, as another woman nodded.
“And provide for themselves and their families,” Santorum added, to applause. “The best way to do that is to get the manufacturing sector of the economy rolling again.”
The black population of Sioux City is 2.9 percent. In Woodbury County, in which Sioux City sits, 13 percent of the people are on food stamps, an increase of 26 percent since 2007, with nine times as many whites as blacks using them.
Just a few days later, in Plymouth, New Hampshire, Newt Gingrich told a crowd, “I will go to the NAACP convention and explain to the African-American community why they should demand paychecks…[instead of] food stamps.” African-Americans make up 0.8 percent of Plymouth’s population. Food stamp use in Grafton County is 6 percent—a 48 percent increase since 2007.
And then there’s Ron Paul, who would like to repeal civil rights legislation and who once claimed that “order was only restored in LA [after the Rodney King riots] when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks.” Or at least newsletters bearing his name did—newsletters he paid for and once defended. Paul now claims that they had nothing to do with him.
The point here is not to accuse the GOP hopefuls of racism. That would be too predictable and has been done with great effect elsewhere, prompting denials that are beyond pathetic. Ron Paul, it turns out, has been passing as Malcolm X. “I’m the only one up here and the only one [including] in the Democratic Party that understands true racism in this country is in the judicial system,” he said. Santorum’s defense, on the other hand, is that he temporarily lost the ability to speak English. The best he could come up with, after several attempts, was that he really said “blah” people.
Neither is the point to show how Republicans leverage racial anxiety for electoral effect. According to the Agriculture Department, more whites use food stamps than blacks and Latinos combined. By coloring poverty and food insecurity black, even in areas where few black people exist, Republicans hope to spin food stamps as a racial entitlement program, diverting attention from their attempts to balance the budget on the stomachs of the poor. Republicans want to slash spending on food stamps by around 20 percent and in June voted to cut the WIC (Women, Infants and Children) program, which provides assistance to poor pregnant women, mothers and children, by 10 percent. All of this is important. But efforts to encourage whites to identify with their race rather than their class, as though the two could be separated and then ranked, is an age-old ploy perfected first by Southern Democrats.
No, what feels new here is the collapse of the broad consensus about racial discourse in electoral politics since the ’60s. The Nixon Strategy dictated that racism would continue to be an integral part of electoral campaigns, but those who used it would work in code. Reagan visited Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered, to talk about “states’ rights” and went on to trash “welfare queens”; George W. Bush spoke at Bob Jones University; his dad had “Willie” Horton (the architect of that ad is now on Team Romney). The point was to frame a politics that scapegoated blacks in a manner that racists would recognize but that would also provide plausible deniability against accusations of racism.
Today it seems as though Republicans who might be put off by racist rhetoric are in short supply, as though the presence of a black president has left them blind to their own sophism. No candidate’s polling numbers nose-dived after his remarks; there was precious little in the way of mainstream media frenzy—as recently as 2006, George Allen’s “Macaca moment” cost him his Senate seat. There is no parsing these statements. They are what they are. We are back to the days when conservatives feel comfortable calling a spade a spade. Some commentators have described it as a dog whistle: a call set to a tone that rallies some without disturbing others—a special frequency for the inducted. But this is no dog whistle. This is Wing Commander Gibson taking his mutt for a walk and calling him loudly and fondly by name.
By: Gary Younge, The Nation, January 10, 2012
“Racist Undertone”: Nobody Likes To Talk About It, But It’s There
Talking about race in American politics is uncomfortable and awkward. But it has to be said: There has been a racist undertone to many of the Republican attacks leveled against President Obama for the last three years, and in this dawning presidential campaign.
You can detect this undertone in the level of disrespect for this president that would be unthinkable were he not an African-American. Some earlier examples include: Rep. Joe Wilson shouting “you lie” at one of Mr. Obama’s first appearances before Congress, and House Speaker John Boehner rejecting Mr. Obama’s request to speak to a joint session of Congress—the first such denial in the history of our republic.
More recently, Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, in a conversation overheard at Reagan National Airport in Washington, said of Michelle Obama: “She lectures us on eating right while she has a large posterior herself.” He offered a lame apology, but as Mary C. Curtis put it on the Washington Post’s new blog She the People: “Can you imagine how the incident would play out if an African American congressman made a crude remark about First Lady Laura Bush’s body? It certainly would have taken more than an insincere apology to wash that sin away.” This ugly strain was crudely evident in the “birthers” and their ridiculous demands that Mr. Obama produce his birth certificate to prove that he was American, and not secretly an African Muslim.
Just the other day here in Iowa, Mitt Romney’s son, Matt, said his father might release his tax returns “as soon as President Obama releases his grades and birth certificate and sort of a long list of things.” The younger Mr. Romney later backtracked, either because he was sincerely chagrined, or, perhaps more likely, because he recognized that it could hurt his father.
Sometimes the racism is more oblique. Newt Gingrich was prattling on the other day about giving “poor children” in “housing projects” jobs cleaning toilets in public schools to teach them there is an alternative to becoming a pimp or a drug dealer. These children, he said, have no work ethic. If there’s anyone out there who doesn’t get that poor kids in housing projects is code for minorities, he or she hasn’t been paying attention to American politics for the last 50 years. Mr. Gingrich is also fond of calling Mr. Obama “the greatest food stamp President in American history.”
Is Mr. Romney playing the same chords when he talks about how Mr. Obama wants to create an “entitlement society?” The president has said nothing of the sort, and the accusation seems of a piece with the old Republican saw that blacks collect the greatest share of welfare dollars.
Mr. Obama’s election in 2008 was a triumph of American democracy and tolerance. He overcame incredible odds to become the first president of mixed race, the first brown-skinned president. It’s pathetic that some Republicans are choosing to toss that milestone into the garbage in their blind drive to destroy Mr. Obama’s presidency.
By: Andrew Rosenthal, The Loyal Opposition-The New York Times, January 3, 2011
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