“It’s Instructive Whose Sticking Up For The Worse”: There Are Two Americas, And One Is Better Than The Other
Matt Lewis writes of the controversy over Duck Dynasty that “There really are two Americas” and that the divide over the show “has as much to do with class and geography and culture and attitude as it does with religion.”
That’s true.
Specifically, there’s one America where comparing homosexuality to bestiality is considered acceptable, and another where it is rude and offensive.
In one America, it’s OK to say this of gays and lesbians: “They’re full of murder, envy, strife, hatred. They are insolent, arrogant, God-haters. They are heartless, they are faithless, they are senseless, they are ruthless. They invent ways of doing evil.” In the other America, you’re not supposed to say that.
There’s one America where it’s OK to say this about black people in the Jim Crow-era South: “Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.” There’s another America where that statement is considered to reflect ignorance and insensitivity.
In one America, it’s OK to attribute the Pearl Harbor attacks to Shinto Buddhists’ failure to accept Jesus. In the other America, that is not OK.
There are two Americas, one of which is better than the other. And it’s instructive who’s sticking up for the worse America.
The conservative politicians who are complaining that Phil Robertson’s firing flies in the face of “free speech” are generally smart enough to understand that Robertson doesn’t actually have a legal right to be on A&E. When Sarah Palin and her cohorts talk about the importance of “free speech,” they mean something much more specific: That the sorts of things that Robertson said are not the sorts of things a private employer should want to fire someone for saying. That they are, or ought to be, within the bounds of social acceptability.
But they’re wrong. The other America — the America I live in — has this one right. Racist and anti-gay comments and comments disparaging of religious minorities are rude and unacceptable and might cost you your job. It’s not OK to say that gay people are “full of murder.”
I will add one caveat, in the vein of Andrew Sullivan’s comments. The things Phil Robertson said should get you fired from most jobs. But starring on a reality show is a special kind of job, one where demonstrating that you are a good person who follows good social conventions may not be necessary.
For example, if at a Business Insider function I were to flip over a table and call one of my colleagues a “prostitution whore,” I’d probably be fired. But when a Real Housewife of New Jersey does that, she’s doing her job just fine. Similarly, Phil Robertson represents some very real pathologies of his culture, and his job is to provide a look into the reality of that culture to the TV viewer.
In some sense, when Robertson compares gays to terrorists, he’s doing his job, too. So I’m sympathetic to the idea that A&E shouldn’t suspend him for this. But if they shouldn’t suspend him, it’s because it’s acceptable for Robertson to say unacceptable things, not because his remarks were acceptable.
By: Josh Barro, Business Insider, December 20, 2013
“A Thinking, Moral Person Doesn’t Defend Nostalgia For Jim Crow”: What Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson Can Teach Us About Empathy
Yes, I have something to add to the Duck Dynasty controversy, wherein reality TV star Phil Robertson got in trouble for expressing anti-gay views, was suspended by A&E, and has now become the cause celebre of nitwit conservative politicians from across the land. This won’t take long.
I’m not even going to bother addressing the idiocy of the “constitutional conservatives” who think the First Amendment guarantees you the legal right to (1) a cable reality show and (2) never be criticized for anything you say. Nor am I going to talk about Robertson’s anti-gay statement, except to say that nobody buys you couching your bigotry in “biblical” terms just because you call yourself a Christian and throw out some scriptural references. Once you start campaigning to have people who eat shellfish and the sinners who work on the Sabbath executed (the Bible says so!) then we’ll accept that you’re just honoring your religion.
It’s Robertson’s comments about how happy black people were living under Jim Crow that I want to focus on, because they have something to teach us about empathy and individual change. Ta-Nehisi Coates says what needs to be said about the actual reality of which Robertson was so blissfully unaware, but in case you haven’t seen it, here’s what Robertson said about the Louisiana of his youth:
“I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field…. They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!… Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”
I don’t have trouble believing that Phil Robertson never saw the mistreatment of black people with his own eyes, so long as he’s thinking about mistreatment as dramatic things like lynchings and cross-burnings. Maybe as a child, he wasn’t aware of what life was like for black people in Louisiana in those days. But he isn’t a child anymore. He’s a 67-year-old man, and it’s 2013. And part of being a thoughtful adult is realizing that maybe the narrow world of your childhood, as seen through a child’s eyes, was not in fact the entire world. By now, Robertson has had plenty of opportunities to learn about the horror of the Jim Crow era. He can read, and I imagine he owns a television. It shouldn’t be news to him. We’ve had a rather lengthy discussion about it over the last half-century or so.
What Robertson is saying is, “Forget about all that—the real truth lies in what I saw, which is that the black people I knew didn’t complain to me about Jim Crow, so that means that for all intents and purposes it didn’t exist.” But empathy requires us to at least try to imagine that our own experiences might not be the same as everyone’s. Sometimes it even requires that we consider the possibility that our experiences, and the perspective we originally had on them, distort reality. If your neighbor let you borrow his shovel and you thought, “What a nice guy,” and then later you found out that he also used that shovel to bury the 14 runaways he murdered, you wouldn’t say, “He couldn’t be guilty, because he was a nice guy who once lent me his shovel.” You’d understand that the shovel-lending, nice though it may have seemed at the time, didn’t accurately reflect his entire person.
And they may not like it, but white people who grew up in the South during Jim Crow have an extra responsibility to reflect on their own experience, their youthful perspective, and the reality so many people endured. They lived under a terrorist regime that treated them quite well while it committed horrific crimes against their fellow citizens. It may not be fair to say to someone today, “You should have stood against it,” particularly if they were young at the time. But it is fair to say that they now need to understand what it truly was, and if in 2013 they still think that blacks were “singing and happy” before they got welfare and turned all uppity, then they need to wake up.
OK, so I will say one more thing about the conservatives now rallying to Robertson’s cause. The way a thinking, moral person would react to his statements is to say, “Listen, I may not agree with his views about certain things, but he’s only one character on that program, and there’s a lot of value there.” A thinking, moral person doesn’t defend nostalgia for Jim Crow and compare gay people to those who commit bestiality. If you want to love this particular sinner but hate his sin, you’ve got to acknowledge the sin. And my conservative friends, the next time you’re wondering why gay people, black people, and pretty much anybody who is a minority of any kind all consider you intolerant? It isn’t liberals unfairly maligning you. It’s this kind of thing.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, December 20, 2013
“Duck Dynasty And Quackery”: Intolerance That Is Disarming Is The Most Dangerous Kind
I must admit that I’m not a watcher of “Duck Dynasty,” but I’m very much aware of it. I, too, am from Louisiana, and the family on the show lives outside the town of Monroe, which is a little over 50 miles from my hometown. We’re all from the sticks.
So, when I became aware of the homophobic and racially insensitive comments that the patriarch on the show, Phil Robertson, made this week in an interview in GQ magazine, I thought: I know that mind-set.
Robertson’s interview reads as a commentary almost without malice, imbued with a matter-of-fact, this-is-just-the-way-I-see-it kind of Southern folksiness. To me, that is part of the problem. You don’t have to operate with a malicious spirit to do tremendous harm. Insensitivity and ignorance are sufficient. In fact, intolerance that is disarming is the most dangerous kind. It can masquerade as morality.
A&E, which airs “Duck Dynasty,” moved quickly to suspend Robertson, as his comments engaged the political culture wars, with liberals condemning him and conservatives — including Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, a possible presidential candidate — rushing to his defense.
Let me first say that Robertson has a constitutionally protected right to voice his opinion and A&E has a corporate right to decide if his views are consistent with its corporate ethos. No one has a constitutional right to a reality show. I have no opinion on the suspension. That’s A&E’s call.
In fact, I don’t want to focus on the employment repercussions of what Robertson said, but on the content of it. In particular, I want to focus on a passage on race from the interview, in which Robertson says:
“I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field. …They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’ — not a word! …Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”
While this is possible, it is highly improbable. Robertson is 67 years old, born into the Jim Crow South. Only a man blind and naïve to the suffering of others could have existed there and not recognized that there was a rampant culture of violence against blacks, with incidents and signs large and small, at every turn, on full display. Whether he personally saw interpersonal mistreatment of them is irrelevant.
Louisiana helped to establish the architecture for Jim Crow. First, there were the Black Codes that sought to control interactions between blacks and whites and constrain black freedom. The Jim Crow Encyclopedia even points out that in one Louisiana town, Opelousas, “freedmen needed the permission of their employers to enter town.”
Then, in 1890, the State Legislature passed the Separate Car Act, which stipulated that all railway companies in the state “shall provide equal but separate accommodations for the white, and colored races” in their coaches. The landmark Plessy v. Ferguson case was a Louisiana case challenging that law. The United States Supreme Court upheld the law, a ruling that provided the underpinning for state-sponsored racial segregation, and Jim Crow laws spread.
Robertson’s comments conjure the insidious mythology of historical Southern fiction, that of contented slave and benevolent master, of the oppressed and the oppressors gleefully abiding the oppression, happily accepting their wildly variant social stations. This mythology posits that there were two waves of ruination for Southern culture, the Civil War and the civil rights movement, that made blacks get upset and things go downhill.
Robertson’s comments also display a staggering ignorance about the place and meaning of song in African-American suffering. As for the singing of the blues in particular, the jazz musician Amina Claudine Myers points out in an essay that the blues was heard in the late 1800s and “came from the second generation of slaves, Black work songs, shouts and field hollers, which originated from African call-and-response singing.” Work songs, the blues and spirituals were not easily separated.
Furthermore, Robertson doesn’t seem to acknowledge the possibility that black workers he encountered possessed the most minimal social sophistication and survival skills necessary to not confess dissatisfaction to a white person on a cotton farm (no matter how “trashy” that white person might think himself).
It’s impossible to know if Robertson recognizes the historical resonance and logical improbability of his comments. But that’s not an excuse.
By: Charles. M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, December 20, 2013
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