Among the political rhetoric which has become obscenely overused by white conservatives (and all too often parroted by black conservatives), the "democratic plantation or slave" metaphor ranks right at the top of rhetoric which should be urgently retired. I'm like as not to find myself guilty of using this egregious analogy if I peruse my prior posts enough. But it should be banished from the rhetorical dictionary.
Let's get it straight here and now: Voluntarily casting a vote in support of Democratic Party candidates or policies is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING like living under a racist terror state where your labor is stolen from you by violence and your family can literally be sold to punish you. Choosing to vote for and support the liberal agenda of the democratic party DOES NOT REMOTELY resemble being owned by another person, brutalized at whim, forbidden to marry, bred like an animal, tortured, raped, being sold away from your family or forbidden to learn to read & write on pain of death or torture. Slavery was horrific. Comparing the free exercise of the franchise in support of democrats to it is beyond offensive and stupid.
This metaphor is moronic and ignorant in the extreme and it is beyond unfortunate that it has become a standard rhetorical trope of the right. If you are a white conservative and you use it, you immediately brand yourself as someone who is more interested in pummeling black folk with your political ideas than engaging them. If you are a black conservative and employ this metaphor, you show yourself to be not only ignorant of your history, but dismissive of it, for the sake of being provocative.
UPDATE: Because I have this debate repeatedly with white conservatives and too many black conservatives, I'm going to use some comparatives illustrations to help make my point. This isn't rocket science. Have you ever seen Pepsi market its product to Coke drinkers with a campaign that suggests they are stupid to buy Coke? No, for the obvious reason that you don't insult the customer you are trying to win.
Things you should not and would not say or do to sell the conservative political message to voters you were trying to persuade to support you with their votes:
Tell a woman who is a rape survivor that voting for democrats is like making herself a rape victim
Tell a Jew that voting for democrats is like voting to experience the Holocaust
If you can understand and agree that the two things above are really stupid, insensitive and more likely to repel the voter you are attempting to win a vote from than attract them, then it should be very easy to understand that likewise, you should not
Tell the actual descendants of slaves that exercising the voting rights the generation before them actually had to fight and die for in favor of a democrat is like voting to be a slave again.
If you don't get why this is really, really bad messaging, why its really offensive and insulting, then I would say you don't want to get it. I would say that if its the persuasive argument you insist on using with black voters, you're not actually interested in winning their votes, you are simply demonstrating that you have contempt for them because they don't agree with you politically. And if you spend a lot of time using this metaphor when talking to white voters, in my opinion, you are trading in racial stereotypes and endorsing and fostering contempt towards black voters to curry favor with white voters.
The day before the Iowa Caucus, Rick Santorum uses blacks to illustrate a point about government creating dependency in order to win votes. The statement is on video and its pretty clear at least to me that its what he said. Here is the "cleaned up" version of the CBS video posted at HotAir.com which Ed Morrissey reviews and declares Santorum didn't say black peoples lives:
Santorum has now also said that he didn't actually say that. I think he's lying to the public and I think he's lying to himself.
When people like me reacted to Santorum's statement, conservatives
rushed to his defense with the wildest of arguments: He didn't say it.
Its right there on the tape, but no, you didn't hear what you thought. Its
become the Rodney King video of presidential campaign politics. The
denial is unreal. Here's how a commenter at NPR on the story explained it all away:
I
worked on developing speech synthesis and speech recognition technology
for a number of years and learned a lot about speech articulation and
human perception. I am a Romney supporter but it is clear to me that
Senator Santorum stumbled when attempting to say the phrase "peoples
lives" so he paused after the first attempt and repeated the phrase
"peoples lives". If you read his lips you can see that he mangled the
first attempt to say the word 'people; and only the second half of the
word people came out with part of the word 'lives' which is why he
corrected himself. Since both the b sound and the p sound are made on
the lips (the only difference is that the vocal cords "hum" with a b
sound) the 'pl' sound when mangled sounded like a 'bl' sound. However if
you listen to the recording and watch his lips he was not attempting to
make an 'ack' sound but lots of listeners heard "black" because
mentally they associate "black people" with public assistance. It was
not Senator Santorum that was prejudicial, it was the listeners.
Got that? Its basically just in our minds. Our brains, all of our brains, are just playing mental auditory tricks on us, making us hear our own prejudiced thoughts. Look at the extraordinary mental gymnastics going on in the above statement to negate what you clearly see and hear in the video.
As an aside, and a tip for others who need to defend themselves against a charge of prejudicial speech, using as a defense all the great things you've done for black people is the wrong response. If you have to tell all the great things you've done, you've already lost. If Santorum were smart AND he truly had done some things in the black community that were beneficial, there would be a black person willing to say so. You let them say all the good stuff you've done. Just a little PR tip for free.
That Santorum would make a statement that suggests that blacks are largely on welfare and that welfare comes to us via money taken out of the pockets of white voters by government is not surprising, shocking or unusual. That is a persistent meme on the right. If I sat down with a Tea Party member or your average poster at Hot Air, they would would largely agree with that supposition.
What this episode really illustrates is how completely incapable of a principled discussion about race the GOP has become. Where does this denial come from? This refusal to face the issue and discuss it? Part of it is black folks fault. For years, we cried racism for so many things, sometimes deserved, sometimes not and we won the war. White people think being a racist is evil and they are horrified to even have it suggested about them. Herein lies the problem now. If you even suggest a critique of a policy or statement which alludes to a racial element, you are assumed to be making a charge of racism. But because the terminology has been used so indiscriminately, we no longer have any shared understanding of what that means. So now if you call someone a racist, or something milder such as suggesting that their behavior, words or opinion is motivated by race in some way, it is interpreted as an accusation that they are essentially akin to a Klansman and bear an irrational hatred to blacks. Its like calling someone an evil caricature or cartoon. And since most people are NOT Klansman, the accusation or critique is dismissed as though that's what you suggested.
Take Santorum. He's obviously NOT a racist. But what he said in Iowa is clearly influenced by racially stereotypical ideas that are not grounded in the facts. That is something that should be called out and discussed. The issue isn't whether Santorum is a racist. The issue is that his thinking has been shaped by faulty racial stereotypes and we should talk about that so that its surfaced and he can correct his thinking.
Conservatives however can never reach a discussion of the merits, because they are too busy defending themselves and saying that they are not evil Klansman. They simply deny the charge, whatever it is, rather than engage the issue. Now, it is simply become routine to adopt a posture that says any charge that suggests I'm influenced by racial stereotypes is defacto an accusation that I'm an evil racist and since that's obviously not true, I don't even have to make a principled response to your charge, I can just dismiss it. Its become an easy way to avoid having a real discussion about the memes regarding black people that are commonplace in the minds of conservatives. That avoidance has rendered the GOP incapable of discussing the issue in any self critical way, to its detriment.
How you think the brother "working" the camera behind him liked that?
Rick Santorum has been riding a real surge in Iowa over the last few days, moving into striking distance of being in the top three finishers out there in the caucuses. He's been putting in work the old fashioned way, visiting every single county in the state, doing small group meetings one after the other and talking to the voters.
Campaigning isn't the only thing Santorum is apparently doing the old fashioned way. Using stereotypes of blacks as a convenient shorthand to illustrate the ills of America as white voters see it is another way that Rick is demonstrating his old school campaign chops. At a campaign stop in Sioux City Iowa, a voter asks Santorum: "how do we get off this crazy train? We've
got so much foreign influence in this country now," adding "where do we
go from here?"
Santorum's answer perhaps started with foreign influence but rambled over to the subject of government creating dependency and he apparently reached into his campaign communication bag of tricks for the most easily relatable and easy to understand illustration of that issue he could think of on the fly: black people:
Notice how he basically defaulted to this stereotyped racially based meme in trying to communicate with a room full of white folks? Check the pause as he was trying to find an illustration of his point about dependency. He needed that illustration right then, something that would resonate with a room full of white people and where did his brain go in that moment? Black people.
With his numbers surging in Iowa, Santorum is perhaps poised to be the next of the Not Romney's to rise in the polls and get a more serious look. I was certainly willing to pay him some more attention, as I've got real respect for a guy who hits the ground and pounds the pavement like he's been doing in Iowa. But unless Santorum gives a far more insightful, honest answer to the question of why he defaulted to "blacks" as the best illustration for his point regarding dependency on government, he's effectively blown any serious future look from me irregardless of what he says. When asked directly about why he talked about blacks, he ducked and dodged.
I'm sorry, but his response is not gonna cut it with me. We'll see if any other media ask him to speak to the issue. I think it would be an interesting exercise to ask the other candidates to assess those remarks as well. No one is gonna do it, but I'm already certain that one or more of them would likely double down on it if they were asked.
Here's what he said:
"It just keeps expanding - I was in Indianola a few months ago and I
was talking to someone who works in the department of public welfare
here, and she told me that the state of Iowa is going to get fined if
they don't sign up more people under the Medicaid program. They're just pushing harder and harder to get more and more of
you dependent upon them so they can get your vote. That's what the
bottom line is. 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 and provide for themselves and their families. The best way to do that is to get the manufacturing sector of
the economy rolling again."
There is a lot to object to in Santorum's statement;
Context: he's in Iowa, in a room full of white people, in a state in which about 3% of the population is black, using "blacks" to illustrate the problem of government dependency.
Implicit assumptions: To illustrate his point about government dependency, he plays to a stereotype that the majority of blacks are dependent on government welfare. He just says "blacks". He doesn't qualify it or limit it in anyway, presumably because he doesn't have to. Everyone in the room will immediately understand and agree with his implicit assumption that most blacks are on welfare.
This is a guy who's response to Howard Dean saying diversity was a strength of America was that talking about our diversity is divisive. Yet, here, he plays to racial resentment by implicitly suggesting that "blacks" are being given white people's money, money which the government took from hard working white people to give to lazy blacks. He wants to give us "blacks" the opportunity to go out and earn the money and provide for ourselves, I guess because all us shiftless lazy Negroes don't work to take care of ourselves. Those are the implicit assumptions behind his statement. Its offensive. Its untrue. We've been called lazy for hundreds of years. When we were forced to work for free as slaves in the fields on pain of death, they called us lazy. It was not true then. Its not true now.
His statements and the assumptions behind them are pretty offensive. "Blacks" are on welfare. All of us. Now of course, the out he and others will use to justify labeling blacks as welfare parasites, if he's even asked, is to say "what I was really referring to is that a larger percentage of blacks are on welfare relative to their share of the population compared to whites". Right? Wrong. What is welfare? I say welfare is any government financial assistance that is received but not earned, that taxes one group to support another group, meaning it's pay-as-you-go
and not a contributory scheme where people's own savings pay their benefits and lastly Congress can alter benefits to
reflect changing needs, economic conditions and politics. That being the case, welfare comes in many forms besides public assistance that goes to poor black people, like for example the subsidies we pay farmers NOT to farm or even better, Social Security, which is definitely welfare. Those programs are breaking the bank and even more interesting, the majority of those benefits go to people who are not the same color as me. But Santorum doesn't have a problem with welfare payments where the benefits go primarily to white people. If welfare and government dependence are really the big issues, lets talk about all of it; why do you get in a room with other white people, start talking about welfare and single out black recipients? How do you justify such divisive talk on the campaign trail, even as you claim to be all about our equality and our common citizenship? Its racebaiting, and what makes it really insidious and repugnant in this instance is the routine nature of it. That particular meme of black dependency on government is a standard staple of political discourse on the right, certainly within its more conservative wings, even though its not supported by the facts. Its a racial lie that has been perpetuated in just the way Santorum spreads it here.
Nobody in that room of good Iowa voters in there challenged that. Indeed, Santorum got applause for those remarks, so clearly there were a significant number of the voters in that room who completely agreed with those comments. Rick Santorum is a darling of the Tea Party, regarded as a consistent conservative after their own hearts. He's the darling of aTea Party that vehemently denies any allegation that it is racially biased in any way whatsoever. Well, here is an opportunity for the Tea Party to actually demonstrate its regard for African Americans as equal citizens worthy of the basic consideration of not being blanketly described as lazy, welfare parasites leeching the money of hard working white folks. Repudiate these statements of Santorum's. Publicly state that they are wrong and divisive. Demand that he apologize for them. I'm not gonna hold my breath. And if you're a Tea Party member and think these statements are okay, then I'm gonna tell you that you and the Tea Party do have racial bias when it comes to race if you buy into the stereotypes and assumptions implicit in Santorum's statements.
I'm betting that no one in the Tea Party movement will decry these statements or even criticize them in any but the most namby pamby of ways. I'm betting none of his fellow candidates will say squat about these comments or take the opportunity to hammer him with them in political attack ads (though well they should). On the contrary, to the extent anyone else in the party speaks to the comments, I'm betting they will either soft pedal their critique or more likely and worse, they will try to explain, using statistics, how blacks are heavily dependent on government welfare and that Santorum's comments are really accurate. But the facts are quite the opposite. Whites receive far more welfare benefits than blacks. Saying anything else is simply a divisive racially biased lie. Unless of course you're Rick Santorum on the campaign trail in Iowa looking to get nice white conservative voters on your team.
I've now had the opportunity to watch the entire debate video. You have no idea how maddening it was to find that CNN's Adobe Flash powered live streaming would not play on my Touchpad, especially since this was the first debate where the candidates really mixed it up. Here are my quick impressions on how folks did:
Perry: Clearly, he had to show some more energy and life in this debate and he did manage to do that. That's the positive. On the down side, he seems to be a bit of a one trick pony in terms of debate strategies. He hit Romney hard with the illegal alien issue and returned to it later in the debate, but I'm unsure what that gets him going forward. He got it off, but seems to me that's only good for one debate, at best two. You gotta have something more beyond that. Perhaps its useful if it serves to drive up Romney's negatives, but I'm actually not sure there is a lot of ground to be made there, since with Romney polling in the 25% range, his negatives seem to be already priced into his standing with the conservative electorate. He's going to have to do more than remind people that Romney is a squishy conservative, he's gotta show he's got some better ideas. Verdict: Potentially arrests his slide, but didn't gain any ground or seriously damage Romney.
Romney: It wasn't his smoothest performance. When challenged, he got a bit manic and stammery, but by and large managed to keep his composure and fire back. He backed Newt down and made him admit that he supported an individual mandate and managed to rhetorically answer Perry's charges with a nice soft on immigration hit of his own relative to the magnet effect of Perry's in state tuition subsidies for illegal aliens. There were some displays of chinks in the facade, but he recovered decently and you can bet the next debate in November he's going to be ready for those attacks both defensively and with offensive hits at the ready in response. UPDATE: Erikson at RedState points out a couple of slips I noted too but neglected to mention, namely, Romney saying he didn't get the job done in MA on bringing health care costs down and his not so flattering slip that when he confronted that mowing company about employing illegals, he was seemingly most concerned about how it would look, him being a public official and all. Erikson has another post up today noting the Obamaesque qualities of Mitt. If I was Perry, I'd start playing that card now, though he's got some Bushesque qualities of his own that may turn folks off. If Romney and Perry start effectively dealing each other body blows, Cain could be the beneficiary with a little game raising on his part. Verdict: Bled a little, showed some chinks that could be exploited, but no real damage to momentum and he can recover.
Cain: I expected to see some major action come his way on 999, and came it did. Cain did okay, but I think he lost a bit of the momentum that 999 has given him. You can tell people they don't understand the plan a time or two, but at some point when pressed with specific objections, you should come prepared to back up your assertion that they don't get it. Cain did some of this, but not nearly enough, for example when Romney challenged him on specifics about what people would pay. This was Cain's golden opportunity to illuminate the plan for voters and push back on his opponents, but he kept talking apples and oranges. Cain is a mathematician and has the intellectual chops to engage in an explanatory debate (see this video of him taking on Bill Clinton, wonk extraordinaire in the 80's on health care). He's got to display that again to make the case on 999. Its not as simple as he says, and he has not convincingly rebutted the assertions of his opponents that its not hideously regressive. Cain has also got some Obama type qualities of his own, namely lack of experience in the world of government. Its not the same as business. He's a decision maker from the business world. Maybe thats enough, maybe its not. Either way, he's got to raise his campaign game about 5 notches right now if he wants to maintain top tier candidate status. Fundraising, organization and get that brain/mouth filter problem fixed to control those negotiate with terrorists gaffes. Verdict: We still predict that Cain will NOT be the nominee and his performance under fire underscores one reason why: he's not doing enough to make the case for the date he brought to the party, 999.
Bachman: She's largely disappeared from relevance in the debate and she is rapidly losing mind share. The woman is not particularly imaginative and 5 debates in, she should be laying out more clearly what her vision for the country is beyond "Kill Obamacare". There is a lot more to the gig. While she's consistently hitting her themes, she doesn't sound like she knows more beyond the basic talking points she hits all the time. You can't keep going to that well every debate. She also blew another hole in her credibility by referencing anchor babies. Its a nice red meat topic and lends itself well to that audience, but its been looked into and its bunk.
Santorum: Raised his mindshare a bit this time around with a good challenge to Romney about health care and noting that his opponents supported TARP, including the "businessmen" Cain and Romney. Is there more to the guy than just being combative is what I want to know and so far, I have not seen it yet.
Gingrich: Not going to win, appreciate the intellectual gravitas he brings to the stage. People say veep potential, but I'm not sure Newt would take that job.
Ron Paul: Doesn't stand a chance, but is usually coming with interesting comments and its great to see somebody on the stage who seems genuinely passionate in their beliefs, not merely political, even if some of the stuff they go for seems nutty.
The advent of a black president has created a moment in which the GOP
is
twisting itself into knots trying to play the race card in a way that
makes it sound as though they are articulating an actual concern with
blacks as a political constituency, because they think it makes such a
nifty line of attack. Its a twofer; criticize the president and rub his
incompetence in black people's faces at the same time. Gingrich has his
foodstamp president line for example.
The FAMiLY Leader,
a public advocacy organization affiliated with the Iowa Family Policy
Center, is the latest conservative entity to indulge in this dig at
black political gullibility. They recently issued the Marriage Vow,
a declaration of principles adherence to marriage and family values and
have wasted no time asking GOP candidates to sign it. Several have,
with Michelle Bachman being the candidate who got called out for missing
the little racial bomblet in the pledge, to wit:
Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families,
yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised
by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an
African-American baby born after the election of the USA‟s first
African-American President.3
It's worth pointing out that the Family Leader actually
footnoted the above mentioned conclusion with a reference to the work of
a group of academics hailing from colleges including Morehouse and
Hampton, with a contribution from Lorraine Blackman hailing from right
here at the Indiana University School of Social Work. I've read through
the report, somewhat ominously titled The Consequences of Marriage for African Americans. Based on my read of it, the Family Leader drew the above conclusion from this statement on page 8.
But overall, family formation patterns were relatively similar
for Blacks and Whites, with marriage occupying a paramount place in
family life. For example, in 1880 and 1910 about 56.3 percent of Black
and 66.9 percent of White households were nuclear households,
Bachman caught flack for signing onto the pledge, on the
grounds that this passage in the pledge suggests that there was actually
something beneficial for blacks families in the institution of slavery. The Jack & Jill Politics blog bluntly called out this passage as using slavery as a cheap emotional hook to make a political point. I agree with that.
My take? I don't buy for a minute that
the Family Leader was attempting to put black families in the focus.
You know that is not the case when you consider the target audience of
the pledge, which is conservative base GOP voters. The candidates are
signing on to the pledge in order to curry favor with that portion of
the electorate. This is not a document that was intended to be spread
around in the black community, nor written with them in mind.
Ham handed invocations of slavery like this one are proof positive that
both the GOP leadership and rank and file still do not regard blacks as a
political constituency necessary or essential to their aspirations for
governance. If we did, we would figure out the right communication and
enforce some goddamn messaging discipline just like we do for all other
messaging we think is important. Its just not that hard. Because the
GOP doesn't really give a damn about blacks as a political constituency,
we continue to be subjected to unforced errors like this. Lazy, small
bore attacks that aspire to depress a portion of the black vote by
demoralizing attrition, all the while deriving what I can't help but
believe is a certain savage subconscious satisfaction at rubbing the
incompetence of the first African American president in the black
communities' collective face.
Palin has willingly and quite skillfully made herself more political celebrity than serious politico. Therefore, she gets the celebrity treatment from media, which is to shower its readers with lowest common denominator material like pawing through her emails. While the claims of liberal media bias have a ring of truth to them, spare me the outrage. Palin has cannily cashed in on her prominence with a rabid and vocal fan base and she shows no sign of stopping. She's milking it all for purposes of maintaining her political prominence. Aside from raising/making money and operating as a political celebrity cum gadfly, what is there to be so impressed with? Had she not been plucked from obscurity by a desperate and now failed McCain campaign, would anyone actually be talking about Sarah Palin on the national stage? I doubt it. I'll be impressed when she puts herself out there as a serious candidate, not before. Note that APS is on record as predicting she will not run.
I long for the day when conservatives/republicans will discontinue the rhetorical soft bigotry of low expectations where the voting allegiance of the black electorate is concerned. I got into a running debate on Facebook with other conservatives about how best to argue the conservative case to all sectors of the black electorate. While I blew my portion of the argument as to their characterization of the black electorate, I had a real point to make where the language they use is concerned. Way too many conservatives use rhetoric of this sort:
The enslavement of the African people of this nation by the Dumbacrat party has been weighting heavily on my heart for a few months now
There are those who do not have a reasoned basis for their behavior. They believe what they are told by other Democrats, whether it's true or false. In effect they are enslaved by misinformation.
I see now the some disenfranchisement of the African American Democrat voters as the party starts to chase the ever growing Hispanic vote. As I keep looking at this situation in our society I keep seeing very similar tactics being used now as was done to the slaves in the south. The brutality is not there but, the strategy is similar. For instance the education of inner city kids is horrible. The slaves were not allowed to read. Not the same, but similar having much of the same result.
This is not the rhetoric you use to win the black electorate. Attempting to reach blacks, poor or otherwise, with an argument that says "hey, you are being fooled, bamboozled and enslaved by a conspiracy of liberal democrats" is a LOSER approach. Why? Because you're telling them they are VICTIMS again! Its condescending and disempowering and the exact opposite of what conservatives have often complained was a culture of victimhood within the black community as it relates to racism. This is the argument we should use to persuade blacks to the conservative banner? That they should trade one ideology of victimization for another? America is a country that believes in the individual, in personal merit and being responsible for one's own self and one's own choices, but with this liberal democrat conspiracy argument, you take away all the responsibility and power of choice and place it in the hands of some vast left wing conspiracy.
I believe the black electorate to be completely and totally capable of CHOOSING more conservative policy prescriptions which are thoughtfully brought forward to our community and I submit that as conservatives/GOP, we do not attempt this in any serious way. It is not a serious approach to the deep and troubling issues in the black community to tell them the answer is to throw off the yoke of the vast left wing conspiracy. The answer is to bring forward policy prescriptions that address the issues and put them into action.
The church provides a good analogy for what conservatives ought to be doing. In the church, there are missions, where people go out to the lost and live among them, addressing the very real issues they deal with and by making a difference in their lives, their communities, create a heart receptive to the Word and thereby an opportunity to win the lost. In that same fashion, conservatives must go into the black community as political and policy missionaries, making a difference and thereby creating the opportunity to win this portion of the electorate. Trying to convince them they are merely victims of a liberal conspiracy is not a winning argument; showing them a better policy approach that solves the political and policy challenges in their lives t is.
Race Baiting: implying that there is an underlying race-based motive in the actions of others towards the group baited, where none in fact exists.
GOP messaging fails just go on and on and on. Rush, the GOP's race baiter in chief is at it again. Rush is no longer bothering to slyly couch his race baiting. Now, he just issues an overt rhetorical attack on the President and since 90% + blacks supported Obama, by extension, he's talking about the rest of us too. He's most recent race baiting goodness from the July 2nd show:
Why aren't we growing jobs in this country like we used to? Why aren't we? It's not hard to do. There's all kinds of textbook evidence, real-life historical evidence of how to do it. We're not doing it; we're not doing it on purpose. It's payback time. All the people who are unemployed? It's time for you to find out what it's like to be an American all these 200 years. "Yeah, greatest country on earth, superpower? Right. Well, might have been for some people, but you're going to find out what it's been like for 200 years for some of us to be an American. It's payback time." That's what's going on here.
For his massive audience, he ascribes to the President of the United States a racial revenge motive. He basically argues that the black president and the black DOJ head have it in for white people. Its naked racebaiting....and no one in the GOP will object to it.
Hat Tip Racialicious for spotlighting "Yup, I'm a Racist" T-shirts for sale at a Lexington KY 4th of July Festival. An Examiner writer moseyed over with his video cam to take a look at the merchandise and engage the sellers in some dialogue about them.
Its a very obvious satire that these Tea Party folks are engaging in with these T-shirts. A very in your face politically incorrect satire. The person who made the video wanted to pretend not to understand that and try to really leave the impression that these people were actively supporting the idea of being a racist. Its disingenuous.
I don't think that the satire they are engaged in is particularly effective or subversive in a way that makes people think or be persuaded to their cause. In fact, the nature of the satire highlights the insular, highly interior conversation Tea Party activists are having amongst themselves. This is not a rhetorical approach that will attract people who don't already share their views. Its indicative of the tone deaf, tin ear messaging approach that plagues the GOP, from its rank and file all the way up to leadership in Congress, the recent attack on Kagan via Thurgood Marshal, an excellent case in point.
So I think it fails on the messaging score. Its an inside joke. But it is a very obvious satire which the Examiner simply didn't want to acknowledge. Had he been more interested in examining and reporting what they thought instead of trying to insinuate with snark and contemptuousness what he believed they thought, this could have been an interesting exposition of their views. Instead, the video represents a wasted opportunity.
Dale Peterson scores points for breaking through the clutter. Only misstep in the ad is the end. He needed a more dramatic exit. Its an attention getter though.
Mike, writing at the Big Stick, makes the argument that conservatives ought to support socio-economic integration as a strategy for producing better educational outcomes by poor students. His argument for this?
exposure to students from higher income backgrounds has a profound effect on achievement.
He continues, quoting a Democracy Now article:
And it’s not just money that matters; it’s the people in and around a school. Every school community has three sets of actors: children; teachers and administrators; and parents. Middle-class schools tend to provide positive, well-disciplined peer role models, good teachers, and an active parent volunteer community, which benefit all the students in a school. This is an important key feature of integration. In districts where busing creates more socio-economically integrated schools, parents from middle and upper class incomes become advocates not just for their own children but for their childrens’ low-income classmates.
This is where his analysis goes off the rails. Parental involvement is the single biggest determinant of what happens with a child's learning. I'm willing to bet money that poor kids attending more affluent schools are doing so because they have more engaged parents who took action to get them into those schools. For example, in the suburb where I live, there are a significant number of families living in subsidized housing (Section 8 recipients). Those families made conscious decisions to get housing in an area where the school system is better performing to give their kids a better chance. Those kids underperform the district, but it would not surprise me to learn that they outperform the public school city kids. Its not the exposure to kids with a higher socio-economic status, its the decisions parents make about where their kids go to school and how they support their academics at home that is the key. Socio-economic status is merely a proxy for parental engagement or the lack thereof and that's why its predictive. I don't for one second believe that the people who carried out the civil rights battles that resulted in busing for the purpose of integration were actually seeking integration as a goal. Those people were simply trying to bust black kids out of the educational ghetto and get them into the better equipped and resourced schools whites attended. They made the best arguments they could using the law to accomplish that result. You would find few blacks today who would argue for busing for integration purposes, racial or socio-economic, as a method for creating better educational outcomes. They simply want to get their kids into a better school. Integration was the proxy that got black kids into better resourced white school systems and people fought to maintain that rationale in order to maintain the access of black kids to those schools. Over time, the real purpose of the effort, getting a better education for black kids, has gotten lost.
The social engineering exercise proposed by this blogger focuses on the wrong issue. If you want to improve the quality of education poor children receive, improving the quality of the school they attend is the answer, not shuffling kids around based on their socio-economic status (a status which is variable and can be changed by any number of factors). Before we embark on wide scale social engineering based on socio-economic status, why don't we try getting the basic stuff right, like making sure schools and teachers are calling students to perform to high standards. Lets make sure kids in poor areas have outstanding school facilities. Let's make sure we have an educational system in which the incentives for school performance are properly aligned, as opposed to the current system where teachers fight against measurement based on student outcomes and accountability for parents has to be mediated through unresponsive school bureaucracies.
The conservative policy answer isn't social engineering. Charter schools is the superior conservative policy answer here, but its not pushed as it should be because the GOP, the party of conservatives, doesn't view the major political constituency that benefits from charters (blacks) as necessary or essential to their aspirations for governance.
If you needed some visual proof that the criticism of Bush from the left during his term was every bit as rabid and unhinged as that directed at Obama now, here's some for you. Those of you on the left that scream the Tea Party movement is made entirely of racially motivated Obama Derangement Syndrome zombies, look at this. Look at it and OWN IT. If the signs and the language and the Hitler, fascism, socialism, dictator, freedom destroying comparisons are the measure of irrationality, then you were every bit as unhinged as the Tea Party members you criticize now.
If you call yourself a member of the Tea Party movement or a conservative and are among the group of people who are quick to point out that the left was crazy in their protests, you can rightly feel vindicated, but you shouldn't feel particularly superior. Essentially, the standard of political behavior coming out of the GOP right isn't any better. We keep saying "they did it too". It seems to me we are setting the standard for the quality of political discourse way too low.
This is just really funny to me. I could not help but chuckle when I listened to it. I can't even get mad at the caller. He wasn't raving and I don't think you can read his comments as anti-black necessarily with the exception of that "blackspan" bit (still kinda funny). That was a little on the edge of being racially nasty. But basically, he was mad because black people are calling in on the GOP and independent line, crowding out the white folks, when 90% of black folks support Obama, which he accurately points out with the Jesus reference. So this guy calls in to appeal to the C-SPAN moderators to fix this problem of these black folks calling in on the wrong lines, so he can get a word in edgewise. Fair is fair black people.
Stop frontin on the wrong lines. Don't call in on the GOP and independent lines if you ain't one, so your fellow GOP citizens can have their say too.
Thats the answer that Vladimir posits a question to in a post at Redstate (the conservative blog that would swiftly ban me for this point of view...if they hadn't already). Vladimir asks a question that really should be examined by the GOP as a party and conservatives as a movement, namely why don't we make any headway with this issue with blacks? He points out....
The conservative solution is demonstrably the better solution. And it doesn’t take a generation to prove it. Republicans do a lot of hand wringing, trying to figure out how to make the Republican Party and conservative governance relevant to the minority community. Charter schools are a way to do it without pandering.
I completely agree with the above statement. Nonetheless, conservatives get nowhere with the black community on this. Commenters on the issue at Redstate respond with a variety of excuses: its because the constituency that benefits most (poor and working class urban blacks) are not swing voters, or the GOP is made up of moderates with no passion for the issue and some other equally lame ideas.
As is depressingly the case when talking about the GOP and blacks, everybody keeps ducking the real issue and consequently, it never gets addressed. Republicans make no traction with minority communities with charter school initiatives because as a party, the GOP has not made a decision that it considers blacks a necessary or essential political constituency to its aspirations for governance.
The political constituency that most benefits from pushing charter schools as a political strategy are urban, black voters and the GOP has demonstrated no true interest in making inroads with this group. The GOP would be hard pressed to reconcile its manifest disinterest in this group politically with an agressive effort to advance a charter school education agenda, because it would mean championing the interests of blacks.
The GOP certainly has the conservative platform from which to do this, with education and charter schools being an excellent launch point. But we get no value or traction from this excellent advantage we have because as a party, we have yet to decide that we are serious about engaging blacks as a political constituency. Its like fighting with one hand behind your back and its stupid.
Dave G's NY-23 post mortem nails the broad political lesson:
What this shows is that neither running as Democrats-lite nor as talk-radio-style anarcho-conservatives will win the future for the GOP. What will yield a Republican comeback in 2010 and beyond is the McDonnell/Christie model, where Republican candidates ideologically appropriate for their states and districts run as pragmatic conservatives who are solutions-oriented and who are running to apply their conservatism to public problems. This is the type of Republicanism that can win, and it did win in purple Virginia and blue New Jersey. It did so by contrasting a GOP that was optimistic and problem-solving yet distinctly conservative with a corrupt, interest-group-friendly, tax-and-spend leftist establishment. This is the model that Republicans should emulate, not the Rockefeller-esque model of Dede nor the Palin/Beck model of Hoffman.
The above is completely on point and totally tracks with my attitude about the purpose of being a conservative in the first instance (superior problem solving to address the needs of our respective communities and country). It also tracks almost perfectly with what is required of the GOP to win blacks and latinos to its banner and the conservative cause, namely, ideologically and operationally superior solution sets and optimistic problem solving conservatism applied to the public problems of black and latino political constituencies.
I've blogged before about the racial chip that seems to exist on the shoulders of Michael Steele. You know, the one that manifests itself in the repeated use of "in da hood" slang in what I used to think was a half witted attempt to simultaneously keep it real with blacks and reassure whites that his election to RNC chair makes them hip and with it, but what I now believe is a manifestation of Steele's anger at the way the GOP dismisses blacks as an unnecessary political constituency for engagement.
It began on the very day of his election, when asked what message he had for the president and he replied "how do you like me now?" It continued through a disappointing early Esquire magazine interview laced with profanity and reached a new low when he came to Indiana for the Young Republican election and encouraged minorities "ya'll come. I got the fried chicken".
You've heard me on this before: why in God's name is a sixty something year old grown black man with a law degree from Georgetown finding it so hard to use the Queen's English on the regular? I'd like to say Steele has eased off this really annoying bad habit, but alas, I cannot.
Steele and company at the RNC just rolled out the new GOP. com website, complete with video of a miniature talking Michael Steele welcoming you in. Among other things, the new site sports a blog written by Steele himself. What does he title it: WHAT UP. Yes, I kid you not.
This frosts my cookies on two fronts: #1. I can't understand why he feels the need to remind people that he is black in this specific way, i.e., the use of slang and vernacular. It doesn't contribute to him being better understood or to putting people at ease or anything like that in my view. I've concluded that he continues to do this for the psychic benefit of thumbing his blackness in the party's eye, because he is angry (as he should be) at the way the GOP ignores blacks as a political constituency. This is the sort of passive aggressive way that he expresses that, since I guess he is simply not going to press his party to grow in this area. To be fair, he really can't.
Its worth noting (and to his credit) that even a stalwart, solid conservative commentator like Ed Morrisey at Hot Air acknowledges this reality, even if he doesn't acknowledge the scope of the fail. "the GOP has not put out much effort in talking sense to black voters and explaining conservative principles in the context of their lives. They should be focused on effective outreach, not slang-titled blogs that sound more patronizing than welcoming."
#2. It makes my head want to explode because in addition to using annoying slang like this, its like half the slang. If you gonna title the blog this way, then you need to go all the way and call it "Was Up", not "What Up". I mean it sounds like a preppie nerd from an uppercrust private boarding school trying to emulate gangster behavior to say it like that. Just annoying, especially out of the mouth of an over 60, balding black man with a law degree from Georgetown.
After a mountain of justly deserved ridicule, Steele and company have renamed the blog "Change the Game". Thats better
If you have not learned this lesson yet, learn it now. Cut the signifying Steele. Engage your party on the issue thats bugging you and stop this passive aggressive behavior. If you're not going to make the party grapple with it and confront it, then just accept it and move on.
Its easy to see how Limbaugh could compare it with a Nazi swastika. If you are politically opposed to the Obama administration, this imagery is easily perceived as sinister and big brotherish. Its a little too much like a visual representation of the phrase "Hi, I'm from the government and I'm here to help".
Michael Steele was on hand here in Indianapolis for the auspicious election of Audra Shay to the presidency of the young republicans. Besides the funky optics of Audra Shay's election, after she co-signed the racially inflammatory remarks of Eric Piker, I didn't think there was anything else particularly remarkable that occurred at the event. I was mistaken.
Michael Steele had the opportunity to speak with bloggers during his visit and was asked a question about achieving greater diversity in the GOP. Watch below for his answer:
This is an EPIC FAIL moment for Steele personally and the GOP as a party in terms of messaging to blacks and minorities in general. Steele has repeatedly been described as an articulate man, and I have no doubt that he has a command of the English language and that is why this is EPIC FAIL material. "Y'all Come"? "I've got the fried chicken and potato salad?".
For the love of God, why does Steele trade in this stereotypical language? If anybody ought to be paying attention to the language they use as they try to create a better relationship between blacks and the GOP, its the RNC Chairman. However, Steele, because he is black, clearly believes he gets a pass to play with these types of stereotypes. Didn't we just get get treated to Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor getting lectured by Cong. Grassely about how his career would be over if he had made a comment akin to her "wise Latina" statement? How is this any different? A white RNC chair would be excoriated for a comment like that, but Steele gets a pass because he's black? Steele clearly thinks so, because he uses this kind of language frequently.
The other EPIC FAIL here is that there is no plan on diversifying the party. Steele goes into this geriatric spiel about how republicans opposed slavery and if you believe in markets, freedom, blah, blah, blah, the GOP wants you and we don't care about how you want to live. All of that is really just an elaborate dodge of the question. He articulated no plan and that's because there isn't one. All there is is the same old tired rhetoric about how the GOP is really the party that supports black people and minorities in general, doled out with a generous helping of the same old stereotypes straight from the mouth of the RNC Chairman himself. I can hardly blame GOP rank and file folks like Eric Piker, or leadership such as Audry Shay or Councilman Fraggo in California for co-signing and passing on racially inflammatory material; they take their cues from Chairman Steele himself.
On a sadly periodic and almost predictably routine basis, the GOP give me reason to question why I bother to call myself a republican, albeit a reluctant one. Perhaps its simply my way of being contrarian, to provoke a conversation in my one man crusade to talk sense to black folk.
I think conservative principles are better as an underlying ideology for policy making. The GOP however are a sorry set of representatives for those principles. Especially when it comes to the party's messaging to blacks. Party leadership and rank and file often posit the problem as one of communication, that the GOP message is just not getting properly received. I'm sorry, its more fundamental than that. The GOP , from rank and file to its leadership, seems increasingly, almost inexorably, drawn to political appeals crafted in a ways that are covertly and overtly hostile to blacks and other minorities.
A lot of folks are calling Shay a racist. I've argued many times that the term has become useless for political discourse as its been so carelessly overused. I'm prepared to eschew tagging Shay with the racist label. In fact, its more instructive if we don't. Because then the issue becomes more interesting to me, namely that I want to understand Ms. Shay's behavior. Lets take her explanation at face value, that she was responding to his earlier comment, not the coon thing. At some point though, she saw it. Why did it take other people pointing it out before she said anything? Why did she boot the people who called it out instead of the author? In short, if no one had said anything, she would have been cool with that conversation. Why is that? What made any of it okay? Thats what I want an explanation about. Thats the explanation I want to hear from a person who is now leadership for the young republicans nationwide. Why are GOP rank and file so oblivious and tone deaf to this sort of thing? This incident was not subtle nor nuanced and Shay could not manage the right response.
The other case in point that to me is indicative of the attitude towards blacks within a significant portion of the GOP's vocal and ascendant far right rank and file is the hot mess of despicable and derogatory commentary aimed at Malia Obama by posters at the blog Free Republic because she wore a shirt with a peace symbol on it during the trip to Russia. My fellow blogger in arms, Shay of Booker Rising took them to task"for calling the 11-year-old things like "a typical street whore" and "ghetto street trash" after she wore a peace sign T-shirt in Italy (they also said U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama was doing "monkey chants" when she had a fun moment with Malia)"
The Freepers are decrying the criticism as planted comments from liberals, but thats a joke and its really pathetic of them to make the claim. Free Republic, like Redstate, also practices banning people who don't share their point of view, a practice that would be defensible to the charge of cowardice but for the fact that both sites will ban you for the mildest of divergence from their particular brand of conservative orthodoxy as evidenced by the continuing string of Redstate refugees washing up on our shores here.
Another sign of the times in this regard is simply the quite casual way in which rank and file conservatives on the right will engage in commentary that is clearly rich with racially inflammatory language and feel as though its perfectly okay and justified I guess by the First Amendment and their general anger over the Obama administration's outrages. Here's an example from blogger and Twitter user Conservative Gal:
ConservativeGal I received my stimulus package yesterday. It contained watermelon seeds, cornbread mix, & 10 coupons 2 KFC. The directions were in Spanish. 2 days ago from web
I responded to her about this tweet and said I thought it was foul and did not communicate goodwill and that got me hit with some name calling and plain old hostility, which is okay, this is the internet. But this sort of thing is again indicative of my broader point, that the GOP from rank and file on up, has not made a decision that blacks are a political constituency it is actually interested in having be a part of its coalition (or latinos for that matter). Conservative Gal's response to me when I said this was foul was hostility. She didn't stop and think about what she had said, whether or not it was cool, whether or not it would be considered racially offensive or inflammatory. Think of it in terms of the concept of Christian witness. If you're a Christian, you are expected to witness Christ with your life and behavior, such that people who observe you will be drawn to Christ because they see Christ's principles at work in your life. Well, likewise the GOP needs to consider its political witness. Would a person observing this behavior and rhetoric be drawn to your cause? This comment is a bad witness and worse, it was retweeted like mad all over the place.
Members of the GOP like Conservative Gal would do well to keep this idea of witness in mind. When leadership and rank and file GOP members use or cosign this kind of rhetoric so casually and attack people who call them on it, it communicates nothing but hostility and worse to blacks. I'm NOT saying Conservative Gal is a racist. She may have black friends (hell, even family), she may have nothing but wonderful interactions with blacks that she comes in contact with personally, I don't know. But this kind of comment she made is not funny. Its not helpful to the cause of political dialogue except among those who think this is funny. It does not help in winning the hearts and minds of blacks and latinos to the GOP and a comment like that causes blacks and latinos to wonder if the members of the GOP care if they come at all (much dap to her on her 8,000+ Twitter followers though, she rocks there).
The GOP's "witness" to blacks and latinos is consistently really poor (my examples above case in point), enough so that one can reasonably question whether or not they have any true interest in minorities as political constituencies at all.
UPDATE I: Routine and predictable, I swear. Weak GOP political witness in action. Republicans figure the way to win hearts and minds is to talk about the President's momma? To talk about a Supreme Court Justice's momma?
There is also a crappy little racial subtext assumption here that poor black women are just waiting for a government program that will finance killing their babies. Can we pick a stereotype for pete's sake. Either we are sexually promiscuous irresponsible baby killers, or welfare mother baby making economic leeches. This kind of stuff is simply continuing proof that the GOP has no real interest in blacks as a political constituency. Dollars to donuts, you won't hear a mumbling word from Michael Steele.
UPDATE II: Hat tip Electronic Village. Another conservative official has been busted sending racist e-mails. This time, the culprit is Atwater, CA Councilman Gary Frago, who sent at least half-a-dozen racist, anti-Obama e-mails to Atwater staff and community members:
Some compared Obama to O.J. Simpson while others suggested that “n[*****] rigs” should now be called “presidential solutions.”
Perhaps the most overboard e-mail was sent on Jan. 15. It read: “Breaking News Playboy just offered Sarah Palin $1 million to pose nude in the January issue. Michelle Obama got the same offer from National Geographic.”
Frago admitted sending the e-mails, but showed no regret. “If they’re from me, then I sent them,” he said. “I have no disrespect for the president or anybody, they weren’t meant in any bad way or harm.”
When given an opportunity to explain himself, Frago somehow managed to dig himself a deeper hole by saying: “I don’t see where there’s a story, I’m not the only one that does it. … I didn’t originate them, they came to me and I just passed them on.”
On some days, it is hard to find counter arguments to the idea that the GOP is destined to become a regional party largely the province of a core of white conservatives espousing a far right ideology. I've often made the point that the GOP's lousy relationship with blacks is due to the fact that the party has not made a decision that blacks are a political constituency necessary or essential to the GOP's aspirations for governance. In practice, this means they pay little to no attention to the affect of their messaging on blacks or indeed operate without regard to it. Why bother to be careful about how you communicate to this particular group since you are not interested in their votes?
The party's ideological commander in chief Rush Limbaugh, has once again brought home this point with stunning clarity with comments on his show earlier this week.
LIMBAUGH: As the economy performs worse than expected, the deficit for the 2010 budget year beginning in October will worsen by $87 billion to $1.3 trillion. The deterioration reflects lower tax revenues and higher costs for bank failures, unemployment benefits and food stamps. But in the Oval Office of the White House none of this is a problem. This is the objective. The objective is unemployment. The objective is more food stamp benefits. The objective is more unemployment benefits. The objective is an expanding welfare state. And the objective is to take the nation’s wealth and return to it to the nation’s quote, “rightful owners.” Think reparations. Think forced reparations here if you want to understand what actually is going on.
Its race baiting. Its intentional and deliberate pitting of a white political base against blacks to advance a political point. From the rank and file up to leadership, few will even bother to distance themselves from a comment like this. This kind of commentary is threatening both because its being put forward in political speech in this way and because its being eagerly lapped up by its audience. Will Michael Steele even have the guts to repudiate a comment like this? Just recently, he's gutsy enough to call Obama an affirmative action President, but is he willing to call out Rush on crap messaging like this to blacks, a political constituency he claims he wants the GOP to do a better job with? Probably not. The funky messaging continues.
