Matt Yglesias

National Review Wants Cops to Kill Civilians

Beware? (cc photo by jondoeforty1)

Via Ta-Nehisi Coates and Radley Balko, National Review offers us the appalling views of one LAPD officer:

So, since the president is keen on offering instruction, here is what I would advise he teach his Ivy League pals, and anyone else who may find himself unexpectedly confronted by a police officer: You may be as pure as the driven snow itself, but you have no idea what horrible crime that police officer might suspect you of committing. You may be tooling along on a Sunday drive in your 1932 Hupmobile when, quite unknown to you, someone else in a 1932 Hupmobile knocks off the nearby Piggly Wiggly. A passing police officer sees you and, asking himself how many 1932 Hupmobiles can there be around here, pulls you over. At that moment I can assure you the officer is not all that concerned with trying not to offend you. He is instead concerned with protecting his mortal hide from having holes placed in it where God did not intend. And you, if in asserting your constitutional right to be free from unlawful search and seizure fail to do as the officer asks, run the risk of having such holes placed in your own.

The fact that African-American men are disproportionately likely to be put in this position, and that some police officers have this mentality, does a lot to explain the generalized distrust of cops by many people in that demographic.

Meanwhile: This is insane. Most people like and respect cops, and honor the work they do. But it’s a profession that’s honored precisely because the people doing the job correctly don’t do the job this way. Police officers, in the course of duty, subject themselves to extra-normal risk of harm for the sake of the welfare of others. This is the mentality of a foreign occupying army, not a well-functioning police force.

Race Obsessed Victor Davis Hanson Attacks Sotomayor for Delivering Single Speech on Hispanic Issues

Victor Davis Hanson argues that Sonia Sotomayor is “race obsessed”:

In her now much quoted 2001 UC Berkeley speech she invoked “Latina/Latino” no less than 38 times, in addition to a variety of other racial-identifying synonyms. When one reads the speech over, the obsession with race become almost overwhelming, and I think the public has legitimate worries (more than the Obama threshold of 5% of cases) over whether a judge so cognizant of race could be race-blind in her decision making.

Jason Zengerle observes that the speech probably used the terms in question a lot because she was attending a symposium on “”=Raising the Bar: Latino and Latina Presence in the Judiciary and the Struggle for Representation.”

In the real world, the only “race obsessed” people in this debate are the Victor Davis Hanson’s of the world who’ve consistently refused to see the Sotomayor nomination through anything other than the lens of her ethnicity. Zengerle alludes to the fact that nobody on the right seems to be upset about Justice Alito’s speech “Reflections on growing up as an Italian-American in New Jersey”. It’s just a broad fact of American life that the majority of people define themselves, in part, as members of an ethnic community of some sort (those who don’t appear to be predominantly of Scotch-Irish ancestry). The fact that Sotomayor has referenced this on some occasions is not an “obsession.” What would be truly bizarre would be a Latina judge who for some reason went around refusing to ever speak on this topic.

Meanwhile, in the Sotomayor debate it’s the opposition who are unequivocally presenting themselves as the defenders of racial (white) interests and the voices of racial (white) grievance. Which makes sense. After all, whites are a numerical majority in this country, so it stands to reason that white identity politics is and always has been a more viable political strategy than black or Latino identity politics. But we should all be clear on who’s doing what here.

And ’twas ever thus. Here’s Victory Davis Hanson’s National Review on the Civil Rights Act of 1957:

The central question that emerges–and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by meerely consulting a catalog of the rights of American citizens, born Equal–is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes–the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced ace. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists. The question, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage. The British believe they do, and acted accordingly, in Kenya, where the choice was dramatically one between civilization and barbarism, and elsewhere; the South, where the conflict is by no means dramatic, as in Kenya, nevertheless perceives important qualitative differences between its culture and the Negroes’, and intends to assert its own.

Same as it ever was.

NR’s Sotomayor Cover

Neil Sinhababu has a smart take on the NR Sotomayor cover:

[T]he way I see the joke actually depends on incongruities between the stereotypes of the nonwhite ethnicities involved. The Buddha-like pose and Asian features are tied to lofty pretensions of sagelike wisdom. And what sort of person is it who’s pretending to be some kind of sage? A Hispanic woman! As if.

The in-joke in this cover is for people who have already internalized a stereotype of Hispanic women as hotheaded and not that bright. Put one of them in the Buddha suit, and if you’ve absorbed the right racist stereotypes, the incongruity is hilarious.

I think that definitely captures some of what’s happening here. It should also be said that some of the ugliness of this whole thing clearly stems from the whole dysfunctional relationship our political system has to Supreme Court appointments. I remember from the Alito nomination that it’s somehow very difficult to articulate the view that “the president is someone whose ideas I think are wrong so I’m convinced that his SCOTUS pick also has bad ideas, but those who like the president are bound to see this differently.” Instead, there’s incredible pressure to “unearth” the “truth” about the nominee and how deep down he or she is history’s greatest monster.

NR’s Sotomayor Cover

So National Review decided to run this very odd cover image of Judge Sonia Sotomayor:

It seems that what happened was that, as conservatives are wont to do, they tried to do something that would be racist, but also arguably not racist. Hence, instead of depicting a Latina with a racist stereotyped image of a Latina, they depicted her with a racist stereotyped image of an Asian. It’s hard to know exactly what to make of that. But National Review editor Rich Lowry seems to have known exactly what to make of it since as this post makes clear he was anticipating people criticizing the imagery.

At any rate, then he waited around a bit, got the accusations of racism he was waiting for, and then got to engage in every white conservative’s favorite passtime of wallowing in self-pity and calling his accusers humorless.

Unfortunately, there’s not a good shorthand term for the psychology behind this kind of behavior. “Racism” doesn’t, I think, capture it. But there’s this deranged fascination with walking up to the line and dancing around there in hopes of getting called on it. Then you get to become indignant. Because, again, the contemporary right’s main view on race is that actual racism against non-white people is only a tiny problem compared with the vast social crisis that allegedly exists around people being vigilant against racism.

Hat tip on this to Brian Beutler who adds a funny unrelated joke “Also featured on the cover in the current issue: ‘Jonah Goldberg On His Critics.’ That better be a long article.”