Women Share of CBC Membership Higher than Congress as a Whole
Tweeting about this post of mine, Dayo Olopade asked “Where are the black women in politics?”
This is probably too literal an answer, but they’re where you usually find influential African-American politicians—the United States House of Representatives. There are 74 women in the House of Representatives of whom 12 are African-American. That makes women about 30 percent of the Congressional Black Caucus, higher than their overall representation in the House which is about 17 percent. The black women in congress are all Democrats, and the Democrats have a higher women’s share in the caucus, but even so the Democratic caucus as a whole is only 22 percent female. Since most of the people who vote for Democrats are women, this is a pretty ridiculously low ratio, but the fact of the matter is that the African-American community seems to be blazing the trail in the direction of somewhat-less-inequality.
The world’s largest share of women parliamentarians is found in Sweden where men help take care of children and there’s a robust political tradition of “feminist natalism.” In the United States, voters show no inclination to discriminate against women who run for office but women are much less likely to be recruited to run.
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The Truth About Zora Neale Hurston
Damon W. Root at Reason pretty convincingly argues that African-American involvement in the mainstream conservative movement has somewhat deeper roots than I said here. He cites this Saturday Evening Post article from author Zora Neale Hurston, who was apparently a Robert Taft supporter in ‘52 and New Deal hater:
Throughout the New Deal era the relief program was the biggest weapon ever placed in the hands of those who sought power and votes. If the average American had been asked flatly to abandon his rights as a citizen and to submit to a personal rule, he would have chewed tobacco and spit white lime. But under relief, dependent upon the Government for their daily bread, men gradually relaxed their watchfulness and submitted to the will of the “Little White Father,” more or less. Once they had weakened that far, it was easy to go on an on voting for more relief, and leaving Government affairs in the hands of a few. The change from a republic to a dictatorship was imperceptibly pushed ahead.
Seeing as how Hurston is a mainstay of high school curricula, it seems like there should be more awareness of these facts about her perspective. Obviously she was unrepresentative of black opinion during that period, but it’s interesting history.
Booker T. Washington and the Black Conservative Tradition
Reading Steven Hahn on Booker T. Washington, I kept thinking that the effort to re-evaluate Washington’s career would benefit from the concept of a “black conservative” political tradition that Ta-Nehisi Coates deployed in his profile of Bill Cosby. To the Google I went and wasn’t surprised to see that Coates had written as much already back in March, reviewing the same book Hahn was reviewing.
At any rate, I think it’s an important idea—the kind of thing that seems obviously correct once you understand it but that, to me at least, was totally unfamiliar until I heard it. But the basic point is that within the African-American political tradition, like within the white political tradition, there’s a conservative strain and a liberal strain. The conservative strain is pessimistic about race relations and nationalistic in its orientation, whereas the liberal strain is optimistic, cosmopolitan, and integrationist. But because this controversy within black politics is embedded inside a larger white-dominated political context it often gets confused. Sometimes, as in the conventional reading of Washington, the black conservative appears to white American liberals to be the timid appeaser of white supremacists. And other times, as with a Malcolm X, he looks like a dangerous radical black nationalist.
It’s only extremely recently that the idea of an African-American aligning himself, à la Clarence Thomas, with the mainstream conservative movement in America could be remotely possible. But even so, that didn’t mean there was no ideological conflict in black politics or that general rightist sentiments somehow didn’t exist.
A New Color Line
Ron Brownstein has an interesting piece about the gap in public opinion between whites and non-whites. But I think a lot of the analysis would benefit from additional demographic controls:
Only four in 10 whites say they support the health care reform legislation in Congress, compared with three-fourths of nonwhites. And just 30 percent of whites, compared with 45 percent of nonwhites, say that an Obama-like agenda of public investment in education and technology offers the nation its best chance at long-term prosperity. Far more whites than nonwhites would bet on a conservative approach of tax cuts and deregulation. The starkest finding of all is that three-fifths of nonwhites (including three-fourths of African-Americans) believe that Obama’s agenda will increase opportunities for people like them; but a plurality of whites — 38 percent — say his agenda will decrease their opportunities. College-educated white men believe, by 2-to-1, that Obama’s approach is reducing their prospects.
There are a lot of demographic differences between whites and non-whites. This raises a lot of interesting issues as to the extent to which non-racial issues are driving these differences. Are uninsured whites much less supportive of health insurance than uninsured non-whites? Do wealthy Latinos support tax cuts?
Progressive Urbanism: Stuff White People Like?
Aaron Renn has a slightly odd piece in New Geography in which he argues that, basically, the most-cited models of progressive urbanism don’t have enough black people in them:
The standard list includes Portland, Seattle, Austin, Minneapolis, and Denver. In particular, Portland is held up as a paradigm, with its urban growth boundary, extensive transit system, excellent cycling culture, and a pro-density policy. These cities are frequently contrasted with those of the Rust Belt and South, which are found wanting, often even by locals, as “cool” urban places.
But look closely at these exemplars and a curious fact emerges. If you take away the dominant Tier One cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles you will find that the “progressive” cities aren’t red or blue, but another color entirely: white.
In fact, not one of these “progressive” cities even reaches the national average for African American percentage population in its core county. Perhaps not progressiveness but whiteness is the defining characteristic of the group.
This strikes me as largely an adventure in definitional games. Why would you take an accounting of American cities that leaves out the three largest cities? Should we really list Travis County, TX (i.e., Austin) as part of a phenomenon called “The White City” when its proportion of non-Hispanic whites—51.8%—is dramatically below the national average? Austin is a bit less black than the country as a whole, in other words, but it’s also less white. Rather than an disproportionately white city, it’s a disproportionately Hispanic and Asian city.
But to take what I think is the ray of truth here, if you take a place that’s under-invested for decades in walkable urbanism and then create a bit of walkable urbanism the tendency is for that bit to become very expensive. And since African-American households have lower incomes and substantially less wealth than white households, the tendency is for the walkable urban places to become white. But to raise this as an objection to building walkable urbanism is like saying that we shouldn’t try to have great public schools, because poor people might not be able to afford to live near them. That’s totally backwards—the inability of poor people to afford to live in good school districts highlights the need for more good educational opportunities not fewer. By the same token, if investments in walkable urbanism cause prices to shoot up and price people out of the area that shows that we need more walkable urbanism.
Meanwhile, a number of “uncool” sunbelt cities are working to change their policies. Miami Mayor Manny Diaz is pushing for bicycles, there are newish light rail systems in Houston and Dallas and Phoenix, etc. And I’m not sure why majority-black Washington DC—home of by far the biggest and most successful example of postwar urban rail investment in America—doesn’t count as an example of progressive transportation policy.
Race in America and Europe
Pat Buchanan says, of white people, “America was once their country. They sense they are losing it. And they are right.” I affiliate myself with what Adam Serwer has to say about this, but it also seems like a good jumping-off point for something I’ve been meaning to write about since I came home from Europe.
There’s often a kind of conventional idea on the left that the United States is an unusually racist society. And I think there’s also often a kind of image of Europe as a place where more of the progressive agenda has been achieved than in the USA. But I think that you’ll find if you look at Europe through the eyes of the liberal agenda that while the German left has certainly been more successful than the American left at securing universal health care, it’s been much less successful at promoting a tolerant, integrated, multicultural society. And allowing for the errors implicit in making any kind of sweeping generalization, I’d say that’s pretty generally the case across Europe. This Swiss People’s Party campaign poster would, I think, make Jesse Helms blush. And I’m not even sure which of the Northern League posters from Italy is the most egregious.
In the US, in other words, racial problems have been more salient for a long time since we’ve been a racially diverse society for a long time. But by the same token, for all the problems we have with us today, we’ve made enormous progress over the years. Racial and ethnic tensions are a common problem in the world, and the United States manages diversity pretty well in comparison with other places (not just in Europe) even if we fall short in some absolute terms. Just look at Barack Obama. I think we’ll be waiting a while yet before someone of non-European ancestry is elected head of government in a European country. Denmark has some great public policy ideas, but it’s also kind of made itself into the gated community of nations in a way I don’t find particularly appealing.
At any rate, in some sense it’s probably true that white America has “lost” “its” country, but that’s a good thing. It’s everyone’s country!
Right-Wing Anti-Anti-Racism
If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand times, but it’s continually striking how thoroughly defined modern American conservatism is by opposition to opposition to racism. Isaac Chotiner observes a National Review article chuckling over the fact that John Derbyshire’s bigotry discomfits liberals while Adam Server brings us folks who wouldn’t necessary make the kind of racist statements Rush Limbaugh makes nonetheless circling the wagons to defend him from his critics.
Next time Republican strategists are wondering why Michael Steele’s embrace of hip slang hasn’t brought black people flocking to their doors, conservatives might want to consider some of this behavior. I suspect it’s not helping the right with its endless quest to woo Jews, either.
I Thought We Knew Too
Ta-Nehisi Coates expresses surprise at the apparent fact that most white people aren’t aware that African-Americans generally have some white ancestry:
I don’t raise it to highlight anyone’s ignorance, or to browbeat people, or argue for Black History Month starting in January. I raise it because this is as much about my ignorance as yours. Put bluntly–I thought you knew.
But you know what, I thought we knew this too. Certainly I knew and I didn’t consider this an obscure piece of trivia. How sure are we that white people are really that ignorant, as opposed to the press just being asinine in its coverage of Michelle Obama’s ancestry. There’s lots of asinine press coverage of lots of things.
Race and Health Reform
My sense is that politically speaking it’s counterproductive to talk about the role views about race play in shaping the health care debate. Still, these appear to be the facts:
As evidence of the link between health care and racial attitudes, we analyzed survey data gathered in late 2008. The survey asked people whether they favored a government run health insurance plan, a system like we have now, or something in between. It also asked four questions about how people feel about blacks.
Taken together the four items form a measure of what scholars call racial resentment. We find an extraordinarily strong correlation between racial resentment of blacks and opposition to health care reform.
Among whites with above average racial resentment, only 19 percent favored fundamental health care reforms and 57 percent favored the present system. Among those who have below average racial resentment, more than twice as many (45 percent) favored government run health care and less than half as many (25 percent) favored the status quo.
Something that I find interesting about this is that if you put the argument a certain way—”racism has a lot to do with opposition to social insurance programs in the United States” people get very upset. But if you say something like “European social democracy works because post-WWII European countries were so homogeneous, but mass immigration is causing consensus around the welfare state to break down” then you come to expressing something approaching conventional wisdom among the center and right in the United States. These strike me, however, as nearly identical points of view just being expressed slightly differently.
The Popularity of the Civil Rights Movement
Race moved closer to the forefront of the most recent episode of Mad Men and it struck me that one thing the show doesn’t necessarily do a great job of making clear is that in the early 1960s the basic civil rights agenda was pretty broadly popular among white northerners. Getting the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law was a big struggle largely because the procedural rules and traditions of the senate gave southern members a lot of ability to block broadly supported legislation. What’s more, Democratic leaders were reluctant to push hard on an issue that tended to split their coalition. But when it finally did come up for a vote only six northern senators voted against it—Byrd of West Virginia, Hickenlooper of Iowa, Goldwater of Arizona, Mechem of New Mexico, Simpson of Wyoming, and Cotton of New Hampshire. During Mad Men times, both of New York’s senators were pro-civil rights Republicans.
And similarly, the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the Civil Rights Act of 1960 were both supported by a majority of northern Democrats and a majority of Republicans. Civil disobedience and mass marches were controversial, the civil rights movement was very unpopular among white southerners, northern whites obviously weren’t free of racist sentiments, and something of a backlash against the civil rights movement would come in the near future, but as of 1963 the civil rights cause was broadly popular in the north.
And specifically it’s been indicated repeatedly in the past that Sterling-Cooper is tied in with the northeastern establishment wing of the GOP, which at the time was definitely supportive of civil rights legislation.
Fear of a Black President
Maureen Dowd touches upon a paradox. On the one hand, a lot of anti-Obama anxiety seems driven by race. But on the other hand, a lot of the hysteria seems eerily normal: “Democratic presidents typically have provoked a frothing response from paranoids — from Father Coughlin against F.D.R. to Joe McCarthy against Truman to the John Birchers against J.F.K. and the vast right-wing conspiracy against Bill Clinton.”
I think the crux of the matter is that since 1928 or so, the Democratic Party has typically presented itself in national politics as representing a coalition of “outsider” groups—Catholics & Jews back in the day, nonwhites and seculars more recently. The actual identity of the leader of the coalition matters, but only at the margin. It could be a patrician from upstate New York or a war hero from South Dakota or a cracker from Arkansas at the top of the ticket, but fundamentally no matter who’s in charge the election of a Democrat represents the mainstream’s loss of power to the outsiders. Clinton’s win, notwithstanding Ricky Ray Rector and all the rest, still represented the triumph of the “cares what black people think” political coalition and thus enhanced power for black political machines. Thus the reaction to an actual black president is different, but not all that different, from what you saw previously.
The Always Vulnerable Steve Cohen
Rep. Steve Cohen
I think a white guy representing a majority-black district is always going to be vulnerable to a primary challenge. Still, I wonder if this kind of crude campaign tactic is really going to fly:
The black candidate, former Mayor Willie W. Herenton of Memphis, has argued that Tennessee needs a black voice in its currently all-white delegation. He is running a blistering campaign against Representative Steve Cohen, a fellow Democrat with a precarious hold on the majority black district.
“To know Steve Cohen is to know that he really does not think very much of African-Americans,” Mr. Herenton said in a recent radio interview on KWAM. “He’s played the black community well.”
It strikes me that effective political appeals to racial solidarity, whether coming from white candidates or coming from black candidates, normally find more success by keeping this sort of thing as subtext rather than text. Foregrounding the race issue so explicitly tends, I think, to make it seem as if you don’t have a real rationale for your campaign. And given that Cohen is extremely left-wing and acutely aware of the local demographics, it seems very unlikely that you’ll find a concrete example of him failing to zealously represent black interests in congress.
Tea Party Patriotism
I wouldn’t want to tell you that the majority of the people I saw at this morning’s tea party were such hard-core patriots that they felt the need to walk around waving flags of treason and slavery:
Still it did strike me as noteworthy that your basic tea party crowd isn’t the sort of crowd in which a Confederate flag is unwelcome. I feel like if you’d tried to bring this to a health care rally, folks would have gotten upset. But the tea parties, like a lot of big time conservative events, are a very racism friendly environment. This guy, for example, clearly isn’t so much the type to march with a racist shirt on as he is the kind of guy who’d march with a shirt ridiculing the idea of anti-racism:
As was the case with the bulk of the protesters, there was very little sense that anyone had any actual specific complaint with Obama’s health care proposals. That one woman loves the confederacy. This guy thinks guns are great and diversity is stupid. Many protesters feel that abortion is murder and/or that Barack Obama is in league with terrorists. But nobody had a sign urging the president to adopt more stringent cost control measures, or slamming the concept of regulations to require insurers to cover people with pre-existing medical conditions.
Max Boot’s Anti-Desegregationism
I learned earlier this week that before Max Boot became a national security expert and acquired his current wingnut welfare perch at the Council on Foreign Relations he was involved in other branches of right-wing crankier and even wrote a book called Out of Order: Arrogance, Corrption, and Incompetence on the Bench decrying—wait for it—judicial activism. Searching around in the book you can tell that Boot is a cut above your standard-issue conservative since he has the good sense to recognize that the entire “activism” controversy was spawned not in some rights of the accused case, but rather in the Supreme Court’s decision to rule that school segregation was illegal in the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision.
As he writes, “as with all modern judicial activism, the answer comes back, ineluctably, to Brown v. Board of Education.” Or, since “judicial activism” is a made-up nonsense word, the way I would have put it would have been that “as with all modern complaining about judicial activism, the answer comes back, ineluctably, to the fact that white supremacists didn’t like Brown v. Board of Education.” But of course Boot, being a contemporary conservative rather than a 1950s or 60s conservative, isn’t a white supremacist at all. He even goes so far as to concede that “the result is one we can all applaud.” He’s just more upset by the prospects of courts overturning the demographically expressed will of a herrenvolk democracy that denied its black citizens the right to vote in order to better be able to oppress them with the systematic application of terrorist violence than he is by the apartheid regime itself.
And so we get yet another classic expression of the weird conservative view on racism. They’re not exactly for white racism, and they get very upset if you accuse them of being for it. They’re just against doing anything about it and very concerned that efforts to do something about it are having all manner of dire consequences.
GOP Member of Congress Looking for “Great White Hope” to Tackle Obama
Jack Johnson (library of congress)
The Topeka Capital-Journal proves that mid-sized daily papers aren’t totally obsolete yet with this gem of a story about Representative Lynn Jenkins (R-KS):
“Republicans are struggling right now to find the great white hope,” Jenkins said to the crowd. “I suggest to any of you who are concerned about that, who are Republican, there are some great young Republican minds in Washington.”
A videotape of the presentation contains footage of Jenkins identifying three members of the U.S. House — Cantor, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis. — as future movers and shakers in the GOP. All are white, as is Jenkins.
Now to be fair, there are virtually no non-white Republican members of congress, so in suggesting that the party’s future hopes rest essentially on white talent Jenkins was arguably just stating the obvious. Joseph Cao has basically no chance of being re-elected, and that leaves the GOP with white people and the South Florida troika of Ros-Lehtinen and the Diaz-Balart brothers, none of whom are really going places.
That said, the article does an excellent job of contextualizing this remark:
The phrase “great white hope” is frequently tied to racist attitudes permeating the United States when heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson fought in the early 1900s. Reaction to the first black man to reign as champion was intense enough to build support for a campaign to find a white fighter capable of reclaiming the title from Johnson.
Which I think more-or-less captures a lot of the psychological subtext of the right’s tendency toward hysterical overreaction toward Obama administration initiatives. Jenkins’ press secretary, Mary Geiger, offered this implausible spin:
Wouldn’t it have been better to just try for a dead metaphor defense and say that Jenkins just didn’t realize what the phrase means? At any rate, Jenkins is a freshman one of the very small number of Republicans to actually defeat a Democratic incumbent in recent years, so you might think she’d have better political skills than this.
Lyndon Johnson in New Orleans, October 1964
On October 9, 1964 Lyndon Johnson spoke at the Jung Hotel in New Orleans and tried to explain to his fellow southerners why it was that he was pushing such a strikingly liberal agenda; an agenda that in many ways was at odds with his record:
When Mr. Rayburn came up as a young boy of the House, he went over to see the old Senator, the leader, one evening, who had come from this Southern State, and he was talking about economic problems. He was talking about how we had been at the mercy of certain economic interests, and how they had exploited us. They had worked our women for 5 cents an hour, they had worked our men for a dollar a day, they had exploited our soil, they had let our resources go to waste, they had taken everything out of the ground they could, and they had shipped it to other sections.
He was talking about the economy and what a great future we could have in the South, if we could just meet our economic problems, if we could just take a look at the resources of the South and develop them. And he said, “Sammy, I wish I felt a little better. I would like to go back to old”-and I won’t call the name of the State; it wasn’t Louisiana and it wasn’t Texas–“I would like to go back down there and make them one more Democratic speech. I just feel like I have one in me. The poor old State, they haven’t heard a Democratic speech in 30 years. All they ever hear at election time is Negro, Negro, Negro!”
The story presumably lacks identifying details because it’s apocryphal. But the point speaks to what I was saying about the role of morality in political action. Johnson is saying that while many Southern Democrats may have been hard-bitten white supremacists others knew perfectly well that they were doing the wrong thing and just did it anyway. Johnson argued that it was time to knock it out: “we have a Constitution and we have a Bill of Rights, and we have the law of the land, and two-thirds of the Democrats in the Senate voted for it and three-fourths of the Republicans. I signed it, and I am going to enforce it, and I am going to observe it, and I think any man that is worthy of the high office of President is going to do the same thing.”
It seems convincing to me, but of course it wasn’t convincing to the people of Louisiana or the Deep South, all of whom swung rather suddenly to GOP nominee Barry Goldwater whose libertarian rationale for opposing the Civil Rights Act united the economic and cultural strains of the American right and laid the foundation for the modern conservative movement.
Meanwhile, thinking about LBJ should help put any liberal disgruntlement with Barack Obama in perspective. Very few people in American history (Lincoln, FDR) accomplished more for progressive policy. And yet, Johnson left office despised by an American left that—not incorrectly!—believed his administration had made horrible mistakes and committed terrible crimes in other fields of policy.
The Other “Other”
I didn’t want to make too much out of District 9’s political message since “racism is bad” is really not the most challenging theme in the world, but David Sirota’s appreciation of the film did get me thinking about one thing that I thought was nicely done:
Even more important than the visuals, though, is the plot. By setting the movie in South Africa, the refugee camp/anti-alien racism is a powerful allegory about the universality of oppression. One of the film’s most powerful messages (and there are a number of messages in this movie) is that even groups that have been oppressed can themselves turn into oppressors. In the movie, South Africa’s black population is just as anti-alien as its white population. In real life, we have plenty of examples of the same kind of thing. As just one of many examples, in Israel, some (but certainly not all or most) Jews – despite their own history experiencing oppression – express extremely racist views about Arabs.
Something that I noticed watching the movie was that District 9’s version of South Africa seemed pretty free of racial tensions. There was a tendency, as in real-world South Africa, for whites to disproportionately occupy high-status social and economic roles. But class dynamics weren’t explicitly racialized, and nobody said anything related to black-white (or, for that matter, anglophone-afrikaaner) tensions. Instead, the introduction of Prawns and, to a lesser extent, Nigerians into the dynamic apparently helped build a greater sense of human and South African solidarity. That kind of thing isn’t the prettiest element of human nature, but it rings pretty true—broadening the circle of tolerance often entails identifying a new “other” against which the new, broader “we” can be defined.
The Limited Racial Imagination of the American Right
An African American man lynched from a tree, 1925 (wikimedia)
The Cato Institute’s Ilya Shapiro opines that Sonia Sotomayor’s selection “represents the very worst of racial politics” as “she is not a leading light of the judiciary and would not have been considered had she not been a Hispanic woman.”
I think this is a revealing moment. Sotomayor has the normal qualifications for a Supreme Court justice—she shares the president’s political views, she lacks a record of inflammatory legal writing that would prevent confirmation, the has experience as an appellate judge, she went to fancy schools. Insofar as her background was a consideration in selecting her, which it undoubtedly was, this is also totally normal. Presidents have always sought various kinds of regional, religious, and ethnic balance in the courts. Much was made out of Samuel Alito’s Italian American ancestry, and obviously Thurgood Marshall was initially put on the court in part to make a symbolic statement about civil rights and Clarence Thomas was appointed to replace him in part out of a desire to fill Marshall’s old seat with an African-American. There was a tradition of a “Jewish seat” at various times, etc.
But even more revealing is that even if Sotomayor’s selection were somehow out of the ordinary, the idea that picking one appellate judge rather than another for a promotion could possibly be the very worst of racial politics is ludicrous. At its very worst, racial politics in the United States involved the systematic disenfranchisement of millions of people, their subjection to pervasive social and economic discrimination, and the maintenance of the apartheid system via the threat and reality of state-sponsored terrorist violence. At its very worst, racial politics in the United States involved persistent filibustering to prevent the federal government from doing anything to curb widespread lynching. At its very worst, racial politics in the United States involved a violent rebellion that sought to dismantle the country in the name of chattel slavery and led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
But despite that long history, broad swathes of the American right remain persistently and willfully blind to the problem of discrimination against non-whites. Their view is, essentially, that racism emerged as a problem sometime in the year 1967 and that the problem consists of white people being unduly burdened by efforts to remediate something or other.
Bias, Racism, Being a Jerk, and Abuse of Power
Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (wikimedia)
One of the biggest reasons why it’s extremely difficult to have a real conversation about race in the United States is that every imputation of a racial dynamic immediately becomes a defensive spat in which the white person in question starts denying that he “is” a “racist.” Now we see the Officer Crowley edition of the saga, as he explains that he once tried to save the life of a black man, so he must not be a racist. And of course the great thing about the contemporary United States is that the number of people who are so racist that they would willfully let a black man die rather than lift a finger to save him is extremely small. But that’s not at all the same as saying that African-Americans don’t suffer from negative implicit biases or explicit “profiling.”
Race, in other words, exists as a negative factor in people’s lives without there needing to be tons of cartoonish racists running around.
Meanwhile, note that racial motivations or there absence have really nothing to do with the nature of Officer Crowley’s misconduct. What happened basically is that Crowley accused Gates, whether for good reason or not, of breaking into his own home. Gates, pissed off, offended Crowley. At which point Crowley, even though he was now perfectly aware that Gates was not guilty of anything, decided to exact revenge by manipulating the situation to create a trumped-up disorderly conduct charge. That’s not professional policing, and it’s not a good use of the City of Cambridge’s law enforcement resources. That’s why the charges were dropped, and that’s why it’s fair to say that Crowley was acting stupidly racial issues aside.*
Meanwhile, we see here yet another instance of one of my favorite themes on this blog. The conservative movement, which never ever ever dedicates any time or energy to the problem of racial discrimination suffered by non-whites, thinks it’s very important to draw attention to the social crisis of white people burdened by accusations of racism.
Annals of the Predictable
Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (wikimedia)
I didn’t see the president’s press conference last night. But I understand he got a question about Skip Gates in which Obama observed that the officer in question acted stupidly. I would say that any time you wind up arresting a guy on charges stemming from an alleged break-in to his own house and then drop the charges, that by definition you’re acting stupidly. Anyways, Spencer Ackerman at the time of the incident tweeted:
GOD I can’t wait to read the white backlash against Obama’s Gates comment. To the Corner I go!
And the Corner delivered. You didn’t even need to wait for one of the really repugnant Corner writers either. Instead, the relatively reasonable Yuval Levin delivered the outrage on behalf of an aggrieved white America.
Buchanan: GOP Needs More Race-Baiting, Not Less
Pat Sees White People (wikimedia)
A provocative article by Pat Buchanan argues that contrary to conventional wisdom, Republicans shouldn’t worry about alienating Hispanic voters, they should just focus on getting white people to like them more:
In 2008, Hispanics, according to the latest figures, were 7.4 percent of the total vote. White folks were 74 percent, 10 times as large. Adding just 1 percent to the white vote is thus the same as adding 10 percent to the candidate’s Hispanic vote.
If John McCain, instead of getting 55 percent of the white vote, got the 58 percent George W. Bush got in 2004, that would have had the same impact as lifting his share of the Hispanic vote from 32 percent to 62 percent.
And he sees race-baiting attacks as the way to do it:
Had McCain been willing to drape Jeremiah Wright around the neck of Barack Obama, as Lee Atwater draped Willie Horton around the neck of Michael Dukakis, the mainstream media might have howled.
And McCain might be president.
His specific argument about Sonia Sotomayor is that Republicans need to get more explicit about the idea that, as a Latina, she will make rulings that disadvantage white people and that white America ought therefore band together to stop her. This is already the subtext of their arguments but I guess he feels it’s not close enough to the surface.
At any rate, while Buchanan is being repugnant, I do think this is something conservatives are going to want to think about. Consider the case of Jeff Sessions (R-AL). We’re talking about a guy who’s too racist to get confirmed as a judge, but just racist enough to win a Senate seat in Alabama. And it’s not because Alabama is a lilly white state. With 65 percent of its electorate white, and 29 percent of its electorate African-American, Alabama is much more demographically favorable to the Democrats than is the country at large. But while McCain pulled 55 percent of the white vote nationwide he scored 88 percent of white vote in Alabama. And this is what you tend to see in the Deep South, white Americans exhibiting the kind of high levels of racial solidarity in voting behavior that you normally associate with African-Americans in the US political context.
Consequently states with small white populations like Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi can be solid GOP territory. Under the circumstances, it’s not entirely crazy for Republicans to believe that the right way to respond to shifting American demographics is by just trying to amp-up the level of racial anxiety in the shrinking white majority. An analogy might be to religion. When the country was overwhelmingly Christian, Christianity didn’t play much of a role in our politics. But as the Christian majority shrank it became more and more viable to explicitly mobilize Christian identity for political purposes.
The Conservative Discovery of Racial Discrimination
Via Ed Kilgore, George Will on the Ricci case:
The nation shall slog on, litigating through a fog of euphemisms and blurry categories (e.g., “race-conscious” actions that somehow are not racial discrimination because they “remedy” discrimination that no one has intended). This is the predictable price of failing to simply insist that government cannot take cognizance of race.
Obviously, this kind of sentiment from a leading light of the conservative movement would be more credible had the conservative movement taken the side of racial justice during the civil rights era. Instead, we got things like National Review’s memorable denunciation of the weak-tea 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.
Dwight Eisenhower could see that this was wrong and backed the ‘57 bill. But Ike was a RINO, the kind of person George Will would despise.
But that’s the past, of course, and we can’t hold Will personally responsible for the things his predecessors were saying fifty years ago. But here’s the question—how is it that I can’t recall an instance of Will waxing indignant about some instance of racism directed against an African-American or Latino in the United States? I don’t believe it’s my faulty memory. Instead, I believe it’s that the new “color blind” American right is not dramatically different from the old “black people shouldn’t be allowed to vote” American right from fifty years ago. It’s a movement that’s basically indifferent to the interests of non-whites and totally uninterested in the question of whether or not there’s unfair discrimination against minority groups in the United States.
The Ricci Case
As expected, the Supreme Court handed down a 5-4 decision reversing the Second Circuit’s decision on the Ricci firefighter case. As Ian Millhiser explains:
For 25 years, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has given employers broad discretion to reconsider a promotion test whose results favor one race over another. Judge Sonia Sotomayor followed this binding precedent when she rejected several firefighters’ claim of reverse discrimination in the now-famous Ricci v. Destefano case, as she is obliged to do as a lower-court judge. Yet, as the Justices showed in today’s 5-4 decision in Ricci, they are not bound by the same constraints that bound Judge Sotomayor. Today’s ruling creates a new standard which says that an employer’s decision to toss out a hiring test must have a “strong basis in evidence” showing that the test preferred one race over another. The Supreme Court has powers that Judge Sotomayor does not, and it used that power today.
This seems like a good time to link to Ramesh Ponnuru’s smart New York Times op-ed on this case. Ponnuru makes the eminently sensible point that whether or not you like the conservative justices’ new rule, there’s nothing “originalist” about legal conservatism’s hostility toward policies designed to provide assistance to non-whites. It’s pretty abundantly clear from the historical record that the congresses that framed the Civil War amendments were not opposed to remedial measures designed to advance the interests of African-Americans. The view that the constitutional guarantee of equal treatment exists to protect the whites from unfair efforts to help non-whites is perhaps legitimate, but unquestionably an ahistorical take on the issue developed by conservatives relatively recently. I would also add that there’s a common sense difference between courts stepping in to protect a minority group from the depredations enacted by majority-controlled elected branches of government, and the idea of courts stepping in to protect the majority group from the political process.
All Nonwhite Converging on Hypernegative View of GOP
A new poll from DailyKos/Research 2000 shows Latino support for the Republican Party dropping like a stone, perhaps due to the racist attacks on Sonia Sotomayor from many prominent conservative commentators:
You essentially see Hispanics and “others” converging with African-Americans’ dim view of the Republicans. An interesting question here is whether this is a genuine meeting of the minds, or else just an artifact of the reality that black support for Republicans is pushing up against the zero bound, so that as a sinking tide drowns the GOP boat among all racial groups, the black/non-black gap necessarily gets smaller.
Soi-Disant “Responsible White Separatist Community” Concerned About Image Problem
An amusing find from my colleague Matt Corley, who finds moderate white supremacist John de Nugent telling the Washington Post that he’s worried James von Brunn will give the movement a bad name:
De Nugent called von Brunn a genius but described the shooting as the act of “a loner and a hothead.”
“The responsible white separatist community condemns this,” he said. “It makes us look bad.”
In the real world, of course, racism and violence go hand-in-hand. Integration-oriented movements often operate with an ethos of non-violence, as seen in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, Gandhi’s movement in India, or the main current of thinking in the African National Congress’ struggle against apartheid. By contrast, though you sometimes see mass movements in favor of racist violence (lynchings in the US, or the Hitler’s Willing Executioners phenomenon) I’m not familiar with any examples of mass non-violent action in favor of racist ideology.
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