“Who Gets To Be A ‘Neutral Observer’ On Race?”: It’s Hard To Be Neutral On A Moving Train
On “Meet the Press” yesterday, host Chuck Todd asked Gerald Seib, the Wall Street Journal’s Washington bureau chief, about the inherent challenges President Obama faces when discussing issues of race. “I’ve talked to people close to him,” Todd noted. “The president is self-aware that when he talks about race he thinks it polarizes the conversation and therefore he can’t – it defeats the purpose that he wants to have.”
It’s a perfectly fair point. The way in which the president approaches these issues is complex, and it’s not unreasonable to think the White House addresses these debates differently, in part because of expectations surrounding public reactions.
But something Seib said in response stood out for me:
“Yeah, and this is the great irony I think of the first African-American president. In some ways, he finds it harder to talk about race because he carries, you know, his own background into it obviously. He’s not seen necessarily as a neutral observer.”
This got me thinking: who gets to be a “neutral observer” on matters of race? And why can’t President Obama be one?
If the point is that the president, as an African-American man, is shaped by his experiences and background, all of which contribute to his personal feelings about race, I’ll gladly concede the point. But therein lies the rub: aren’t we all shaped by our experiences and background? Is it not true that every American, regardless of race or ethnicity, draws conclusions about these issues based on what we’ve seen, felt, and lived?
I’m sure Seib didn’t intend for his comment to be controversial, but his remark raises some obvious questions that deserve serious answers: are any of us neutral observers when it comes to race in America? Does our lack of neutrality matter or make our perspectives less valuable? Or more?
It reminds me a bit of the criticisms center-left Supreme Court justices have received after officiating at same-sex weddings. For some on the right, this is an automatic disqualifier when it comes to ruling on the constitutionality of marriage equality – these jurists, the argument goes, can’t be “neutral observers” because they know gay people, apparently like and respect gay people, and have been a part of weddings involving gay people.
But pure “neutrality” is a tricky thing to find. If a justice refuses to officiate at a same-sex wedding, is he or she better able to consider the constitutionality of marriage equality? What about if he or she officiated at an opposite-sex wedding? If a justice is outwardly hostile towards the LGBT community, is he or she suddenly better suited to hear the case?
To borrow an overused cliche, it’s hard to be neutral on a moving train.
Debates about race, bigotry, and justice are always multifaceted, but we all bring our own baggage onto the train with us. To assume there are some among us who have the privilege of serving as a “neutral observer” is a mistake.
By: Steve Benen, The Madow Blog, June 22, 2015
“Strange Justice”: A Victory For Right-Wing Ideology, But A Profound And Deep Loss For Racial Justice
Yesterday marked the twentieth anniversary of one of the great wrong turns in American civil-rights history, a grotesque decision that helped those who falsely and nonsensically believe that eliminating federal efforts to establish racial equality will somehow, in and of itself, establish racial equality. The horror of that day still reverberates, the pain of that moment still sears.
On June 12, 1995, the United States Supreme Court, in a ghastly 5-4 decision known as Adarand Constructors v. Pena, gutted the legal infrastructure upholding the country’s affirmative action programs:
In refusing for the first time to uphold a federal affirmative action policy, the court said that such race-based policies enacted by Congress must now survive the same judicial standard that state and local programs have faced since 1989. Known as ‘strict scrutiny,’ it is the toughest judicial standard to meet. To survive, a program must serve a compelling governmental interest and must be narrowly tailored to address identifiable past discrimination.
“Government may treat people differently because of their race only for the most compelling reasons,” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote for the court. She said the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws protects “persons, not groups” of people.
“It follows from that principle that all governmental action based on race – a group classification long recognized as . . . irrelevant and therefore prohibited – should be subjected to detailed judicial inquiry to ensure that the personal right to equal protection of the laws has not been infringed.”
O’Connor and her conservative court colleagues effectively struck Rep. John Lewis in the head one more time with this disgusting and destructive ruling, which was, of course, seized upon by right-wing ideologues to block pathways to black progress. The Adarand decision represented the Supreme Court’s shout-out to those who believed that the federal government had done too much to combat past and present-day discrimination.
Perhaps the most repugnant aspect of this decision was the concurring opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas–an opinion that rhetorically lynched his own black brothers and sisters. Then-TIME Magazine columnist Jack E. White was correct beyond refutation when he observed:
These days Washington seems to be filled with white men who make black people uneasy, like Newt [Gingrich] the slasher, Bill [Clinton] the waffler and Jesse the crank—Helms, that is, not Jackson. But the scariest of all the hobgoblins may well be a fellow African American, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. In the four years since George Bush chose him to fill the “black seat” vacated by Thurgood Marshall, Thomas has emerged as the high court’s most aggressive advocate of rolling back the gains Marshall fought so hard for. The maddening irony is that Thomas owes his seat to precisely the kind of racial preference he goes to such lengths to excoriate. And as long as he is on the court, no other black need apply: Thomas fills a quota of one.
The most disturbing thing about Thomas is not his conclusions, but his twisted reasoning and bilious rage. In his written opinions, he begins with premises that no self-respecting black would disagree with, then veers off into a neverland of color-blind philosophizing in which all race-based policies, from Jim Crow laws designed to oppress minorities to affirmative-action measures seeking to assist them, are conflated into one morally and legally pernicious whole. He delights in gratuitously tongue-lashing the majority of blacks who disagree with him on almost every civil rights issue. He heaps scorn on federal judges who have used the bench to enforce and expand civil rights, accusing them of a paternalistic belief in black inferiority…
[Thomas] does not hesitate to incorporate dubious theories into his opinions when they suit his purposes. In his brief concurring opinion in the court’s Adarand Constructors v. Pena, in which the court suggested that federal set-aside programs for minority contractors may be unconstitutional, Thomas wrote, “Inevitably, such programs engender attitudes of superiority or, alternatively, provoke resentment among those who believe that they have been wronged by the government’s use of race. These programs stamp minorities with a badge of inferiority and may cause them to develop dependencies or to adopt an attitude that they are entitled to preferences.” That claim reflects the wisdom of Gingrich country, where, as the House Speaker opined last week, most problems poor black people face are caused by their own “bad habits.”
What Thomas, O’Connor and their right-wing friends will never admit is that bigotry will always be with us; it is hard-wired into our very nature, and thus the federal government will always need to take measures to ensure that bigotry does not strangle the aspirations of Americans of color. To that end, there will never be a day that we can get rid of affirmative action. We will always need goals, timetables, set-asides, preferences and yes, even the dreaded quotas, as they are nothing more than tangible measures by which we seek to reduce racial inequality.
The Adarand decision did great violence to the dream of racial equality. It empowered aggrieved right-wing whites to attack affirmative action programs with vicious vehemence, and put white progressives on the defensive against dubious claims of so-called reverse discrimination. The case was a victory for right-wing ideology, but a profound and deep loss for racial justice.
By: D. R. Tucker, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, June 13, 2015
“The Bullies Are Being Persecuted? ROTFLMAO”: Marco Rubio Pathetically Plays The LGBT Victim
Poor Marco Rubio. With history rushing past him, its dust gritty in his eyes, he, the bully, resorts to playing the victim.
And so it was on Tuesday, when he tried—in this now-practiced right wing way—to claim that he and other Christians were the victims of LGBTs and their demands for, er, basic equality and civil rights.
What else can Rubio do? People like him have lost the argument.
All they can do now, after years of fostering a climate of prejudice and persecution against LGBTs, is to claim that with the prospect of equality, it is they, the bullies, who are persecuted.
They cannot argue how equality affects them negatively, so merely claim to be victims.
This is all they have, after years of using every trick in the book to keep LGBT people unequal, feared, and stigmatized.
It would be funny, this attempted sleight-of-hand, this laughable co-opting of the language and mantle of victimhood, if Rubio’s words were not so disgusting, and such canards.
On Tuesday, Rubio dared to use the phrase ‘hate speech’ when describing how, one day, those who objected to marriage equality would be seen as propagating hate speech.
Does Marco Rubio have any idea of the toxicity of the phrase he is flinging around to score some cheap political capital?
Does he have any idea of the true ‘hate speech’ LGBTs have suffered, not just on political platforms at the hands of people like Marco Rubio in their stoking of their Christian voting base—words like ‘unnatural,’ ‘pretend families,’ words of exclusion that seek to put us outside the boundaries of family, home, and love?
Because ‘hate speech’ doesn’t end on political platforms. They’re the words that LGBTs hear before they are beaten by homophobes on street corners and in schoolyards. Beaten, sometimes fatally. How dare Marco Rubio seek to invoke a phrase like ‘hate speech’ to feed his own pathetic persecution complex? Has he any idea of the true cost of ‘hate speech’ as it has been used against LGBT people?
Rubio said ‘mainstream Christian’ teachings would soon be seen as hate speech in his scary new world where those pesky homosexuals are treated just as the same as everyone else under the law.
“Because today we’ve reached the point in our society where if you do not support same-sex marriage you are labeled a homophobe and a hater,” Rubio said. Absurdly. You are only labeled a ‘homophobe’ and ‘hater’ if you come out and say something homophobic and hateful.
Mr. Rubio, despite great provocation by you and others like you, LGBTs and their supporters—many of whom are Christian, by the way—who back equality actually think you can say and think whatever you like, as long as it doesn’t incite violence and hatred. If it does, they will object, as any reasonable person might.
If you claim that LGBTs do not deserve marriage equality, and your argument has the ring of prejudice about it—and it necessarily would because you are arguing against the principles of equality—then expect to be called out for it.
But you are not being silenced. You are being disagreed with. And now you’re feeling persecuted because it’s not just LGBTs calling you out on it, but all those who believe people should be treated equally under the law.
Simply, Mr. Rubio, when will you stop scapegoating LGBTs to score votes? Why are you so dead-set on maintaining inequality and discrimination? What’s in it for you? Rubio also said, “After they are done going after individuals, the next step is to argue that the teachings of mainstream Christianity, the catechism of the Catholic Church, is hate speech and there’s a real and present danger.”
Again, this is doom-saying nonsense, and yet another attempt to paint “the gay agenda” as an uncontrollable monster, out to silence its objectors.
The truth is that for years LGBTs have had to fight to be heard themselves, to be visible, to lobby for equality under the law.
LGBT activists have never said the teachings of mainstream Christianity or the catechism of the Catholic Church are pernicious. They have argued against those teachings being warped by bigots and opportunists like Mr. Rubio to attack LGBT people, and deny them their civil rights—but not for them to cease to exist or be practiced.
In a way, Rubio’s nonsensical words are heartening. They are like the last gasp of a poisonous old world order of determined prejudice and discrimination. How furious and scared he must have been to see Catholic Ireland face down the kind of misinformation and lies he and his cronies propagate against LGBTs on Saturday, and vote instead for a future of equality.
Rubio and others like him know their grip on fear and prejudice is loosening. And so now, he plays the victim: it’s the last pathetic piece of pantomime left to him.
Quite simply, even Rubio’s followers and supporters know LGBT people—and they do not like to see these family members and loved ones persecuted so viciously for whom they choose to go to bed with. And so, with the grit of history in his eye, Rubio continues howling in the wind—his words more and more lost in the tempest of history passing him by.
By: Tim Teeman, The Daily Beast, May 26, 2015
“Despicable She”: Coulter Hates ‘The Browning Of America’
When it comes to Ann Coulter—the conservative blonde avenger, the loud-mouthed provocateur, the human hot-button of mass-media notoriety who is forever tossing turds into liberals’ punch bowls—people always want to know: Is she for real?
Even the title of her latest book, ¡Adios, America!: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole, is guaranteed to raise many folks’ blood pressure and strain their credulity.
Does Coulter actually believe the tendentious claim in that title or other incendiary things she has said in the past—for example, that the 9/11 widows are greedy, fame-obsessed “witches” and “harpies”; that the United States should invade Muslim countries, “kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity”; that her Christian co-religionists are “perfected Jews”; that she only wishes that Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh had targeted The New York Times instead?
Or is she merely engaging in perverse, albeit attention-getting, performance art?
Apparently the answer is: a bit of both.
“I don’t know why liberals find this idea about me comfortable,” Coulter tells me over dinner, “but I just had lunch with a law school friend of mine, and I had forgotten—and he reminded me—that at law school I wore mink coats and took up smoking just to annoy liberals, so apparently I’d been like this for awhile. He said, ‘You’re exactly like you were in law school.’
“But I have summer-camp friends—who, when they see people say ‘this is just an act, she doesn’t really believe it’—they would write indignant letters and say, ‘No. She would march up to me on the hiking trail and explain that Nixon was being lied about.’ ”
We are sitting near the kitchen in a quiet Italian restaurant, a favorite haunt in the Upper East Side neighborhood in which she keeps an apartment; her other two homes are in Beverly Hills, California, and a wealthy enclave of Florida (unnamed here, at Coulter’s request, so as not to encourage stalkers), where she established official residence years ago to avoid state income taxes.
She has done very well for herself; she gets seven-figure book advances, and while her lecture fees are not in the Hillary Clinton range, Coulter has little cause for complaint.
She has arrived for dinner with the panache of a prom queen, making a grand entrance, graciously accepting the elaborate greeting of the maître d’ and stopping by a front table to trade kisses with talk radio host Mark Simone and Fox Business Network personality Charlie Gasparino on the way to her interview with The Daily Beast.
She is, as usual, dressed against type—that is, if one thinks her type is “matronly Republican Women’s Club activist from New Canaan,” Coulter’s gilded, suburban Connecticut hometown.
Instead, she wears tight, seemingly painted-on jeans, a hint of midriff showing beneath her blouse; at 53, she still rocks that “Vixen of the Right” thing that once prompted Playboy to ask her to take it all off. In a rare display of caution, she declined.
“I’m fanatical,” Coulter confides—describing not her ideology but her work habits. “I have no life. No friends. No family. No vacations. Nobody has seen me.”
She’s kidding, of course—Coulter has plenty of friends (including those, like Bill Maher, who find some of her political views objectionable; I’ve written about and occasionally socialized with her for years.) “I did take a break to watch Forensic Files,” she adds, mentioning the true-crime television series for which she admits an obsession.
Coulter has been a virtual shut-in, staring at her laptop, writing and Googling, Googling and writing, since the height of Florida’s hurricane season. The occasion for her reemergence in Manhattan—and her ramped-up appearances on Sean Hannity’s Fox News Channel program—is the publication of her 11th book (the previous 10 have made the New York Times best-seller list), an often-inflammatory, usually clever, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny screed against immigration, illegal and otherwise.
Coulter’s near-life-size portrait gazes unsmilingly from the book jacket of ¡Adios America!—looking very much like a hard-eyed, flaxen-haired border guard getting ready to send an unfortunate family of refugees back to wherever they came from.
“In order to change this country to one more favorable to crazy liberal policies, Democrats passed—and Republicans were hoodwinked into passing—this crazy 1965 immigration law that has changed the country in shocking and dramatic ways,” Coulter says, explaining her book’s premise and referring to legislation—sponsored by the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy—that abolished long-implemented preferences for immigrants from Northern and Western Europe over Africans, Asians and other third-world natives.
“This has been our law for 50 years now, and I blame the Republicans for idiotically continuing it,” she continues. “The Simpson-Mazzoli Act of 1986 [creating an easier path to citizenship for foreigners who illegally entered and settled in the United States] was a mistake. As for these idiot Tea Partiers or whichever conservatives are idol-worshipping Ronald Reagan, he was great for his time, but it was a different world. I don’t think he’s going down as the greatest president when he signed an amnesty law.”
Coulter—whose own ancestors arrived here from the Netherlands, England, Ireland, and Germany starting in the 17th century, she says—argues that teeming hordes of new immigrants, especially from Mexico, vote overwhelmingly Democratic, so current immigration policy is really “an evil-genius plan to change the country. That’s what the Democrats get out of it. Obama never could have been elected in this country but for Teddy Kennedy’s immigration act. Never, never, ever, ever!”
Coulter’s politically quixotic prescription: a 10-year moratorium on all legal immigration; a complete dismantling of the immigration bureaucracy, not only government agencies and sympathetic elected officials but also outside advocacy groups; the erection of an impassable fence along the entire U.S.-Mexican border (in her book, she praises the Communist East Germans for effectively, sometimes lethally, preventing their citizens from breaching the Berlin Wall); and a return to pre-1965 policies that give preference to highly educated, usually white Europeans.
“I wouldn’t care if they were white or not; I’m talking about peasants who come from backward cultures,” she says, although she expresses alarm at predictions that by 2050 Caucasians in this country will be a minority. “There are white people from backward cultures. They just don’t happen to come from a country contiguous to the United States. It’s backward cultures that are providing cheap labor and Democratic votes.” (Coulter, however, is unfailingly friendly to our waiter, who identifies himself as “Luis,” an immigrant from Ecuador who came here 10 years ago and is working his way toward U.S. citizenship.)
Coulter argues that U.S. immigration policies were demonstrably better a hundred years ago. “There was no mollycoddling of immigrants back then. With the Irish and the Italians, and even the Germans—especially the Germans—we were allowed to boss them around,” she says. “We could say, ‘No. No. You can’t do this anymore. You are an American now. Knock it off!’ The only problem with the fact that they [recent immigrants] are brown—well, you’re saying they’re brown, I’m saying they’re peasants—is that they’re piggy-backing on the black experience, and saying ‘That’s racist’ if you tell them to do things our way, and ‘You can just assimilate to us,’ not the other way around.
“Can you imagine the Irish or Italians or Germans saying that to our country back at the turn of the century? ‘No! Fuck you! You came to our country. Learn our ways!’”
Using language that many doubtless will find hair-raising if not downright offensive, Coulter speaks of the “browning of America”—a term she says she adopted as a negative after seeing it bandied favorably on MSNBC—and how the country is being ruined by an influx from Latin America, the Indian subcontinent, Vietnam, Nigeria, and other benighted locales.
“In Nigeria, everyone is a criminal,” Coulter claims. “But we take more immigrants from Nigeria than we do from Britain. Don’t react casually to that! That’s madness. The British are just going to other countries. And a lot of these countries, like Spain, are just shitholes now. Young, smart people are emigrating to Germany and they won’t be collecting Social Security immediately. Perhaps we should consider them rather than a Nigerian terrorist.”
Coulter adds that among the victims of Latino immigration, especially, are African Americans. “Hispanic groups will move into neighborhoods and say, ‘We don’t want any blacks here,’ and start physically attacking blacks,” she says. “It’s kind of wild. In most race relations, it’s never blacks who are victims of terror, it’s whites. Now blacks are being terrorized.”
So, Ann Coulter is the voice of African Americans now?
“I know they’re never going to adopt me, so you don’t have to say it in that sarcastic way,” she parries. “If they still hate me, I don’t care. They’re being totally screwed by this whole diversity and integration imperative, and they really are part of America. They are so important culturally in America—I mean the humor, the actors…they have the comedians and the music. I love Dave Chapelle, and my close personal friend Sherrod Small. I love Eddie Murphy, although he doesn’t do anything anymore. And Chris Rock.”
In ¡Adios, America! and over dinner, Coulter expands on her belief that when new arrivals from foreign climes are not busying themselves with “browning” the country, collecting welfare payments and swarming to the polls to vote Democrats into office, they are committing Medicare fraud, child rape, gang rape, honor killings and a host of other un-American activities.
She blames politically correct U.S. government census-taking and crime statistic policies—and the media establishment’s reluctance to identify the countries of origin of the alleged perpetrators—on the fact that she doesn’t have generally accepted stats to back up her assertions, merely horrific anecdotes and back-of-the-envelope guesses.
In her assertions about the allegedly low average intelligence of various “undesirable” immigrant groups, she relies on the studies of Jason Richwine, whose work on IQ and immigration was too controversial even for the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation, which dismissed him from his staff job there after his Harvard doctoral dissertation came to light.
Meanwhile, Coulter blasts the current crop of Republican presidential hopefuls—with the exception of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker—as “bozos” and “morons,” and heaps special contempt on Florida Senator Marco Rubio, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul (whom she accuses of favoring amnesty), and Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who lately pays lip service to tough policies, Coulter says, “but I don’t trust him.”
Coulter’s beau ideal is a two-time presidential candidate who insists he isn’t running this time around: 2012 Republican standard-bearer Mitt Romney.
He is the only politician whose immigration policies—including his much-derided notion from the 2012 campaign that illegal residents should be incentivized to “self-deport”—are closely aligned with Coulter’s, and she hopes that GOP primary voters will ultimately beg him to get into the 2016 race.
Calling herself a “one-issue” voter, Coulter excuses Romney’s flip-flopping on abortion rights (from pro-choice to pro-life) because “he flipped on it our way” and when he was pro-choice, it was 1994 and “he was trying to take out Teddy Kennedy” in the Massachusetts Senate race.
“Look,” Coulter tells me, “if he had to be Adolf Hitler but managed to take out Teddy, I would salute him to end that menace.”
By: Lloyd Grove, The Daily Beast, May 26, 2015
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 