As a quick note, I just wanted to say that last Sunday’s post was not only to remember John Lennon on the anniversary of his murder but also to remind everybody of exactly what we are dabbling with when listening to the Beatles and their solo work. Like Jesus, John was most decidedly a leftist progressive. His work reflected that.

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and now:

THE STRANGE CASE OF THE RACIST SENATE MAJORITY LEADER

I’m starting to get a handle on this story and I think that studying how some of this is playing out can be very enlightening. For starters, I suggest that you check out www.thismodernworld.com for some cool observations and links (if you’re not checking out Tom Tomorrow’s extremely funny, extremely political weekly cartoon, you’re missing out…follow the link on his page in the upper left corner to check some of his stuff out). Second, here are some of my impressions:

Of Mullet-Heads and David Duke

I remember when I was in my early twenties back in the early 1990’s. I had boomeranged my way back to my parents’ house in disgusting suburbia for a short time; I found myself hanging out with an old friend from high school (actually when I say friend, I mean nemesis, kind of like Newman is to Seinfeld, but that’s another story). Mostly, we’d just drink in bars to while away our time in purgatory. One evening at a random Bennigan’s (which was a bit of a drive away; we thought another Bennigan’s might be a nice change of pace from the Bennigan’s we usually went to…ugh, suburbs!), we somehow got stuck in a pick-up lecture being delivered by a mullet-headed, mustachioed bartender from Louisiana. He was telling us why former KKK leader turned Republican politician David Duke was not racist. “No, he’s just for fairness. White people are being discriminated against and David Duke is the only politician out there telling the truth; he’s not really a racist at all, you see, and furthermore blaha blather blah bah….”

What do you say to a guy like that?

Of course, David Duke is a racist. He simply softened his cross-burning rhetoric and shifted his battle to save our precious white way of life to a more legitimate, subtler field. He no longer calls for a race war or anything so obviously stupid. Instead, he suggests and supports policy that quietly but clearly screws people of color in the keister.

Jack Kemp’s Hail Mary

This thought recently occurred to me: if we can solve social problems using the private sector solutions favored by many conservatives, we should do it as soon as possible. I may consider myself to be a progressive, but I’m no ideologue. To me, economic theory doesn’t really matter so much as the underlying principles and overall goals that direct the use of such theories. So if the right and the left can both fight poverty, sexism, racism and the usual host of social ills within a framework that won’t push the emotional buttons of the influential free market fundamentalist shamen, great things will be accomplished, right? Right?

This thought occurred to me right after that other thought: no, great things won’t be accomplished. The truth is that most conservatives don’t really care if social problems are solved (unless, of course, such social problems hurt business). Besides being the greatest oxymoron since “military intelligence” the phrase “compassionate conservatism” is quite clearly a simple rhetorical device used to deflect political criticism. Conservative rhetoric has placed the blame for poverty squarely on the shoulders of the impoverished for over twenty years now. King George II’s new sweet talk has barely dented the dominant discourse. The right wing’s real attitudes toward the poor are best represented by the popular 1980’s wall poster depicting a formally dressed wealthy couple raising a toast over the caption, “Poverty Sucks.”

Indeed, it does.

This is not to say, however, that all conservatives are Monty Burns (on the other hand, all men are Socrates…ah, never mind). Jack Kemp, for one, seems to be the real deal. He has spent much of his political career seriously looking at poverty issues from a conservative perspective—if I understand correctly, his time with HUD during the Reagan administration gave him a close look at poverty and it permanently altered his world view if not his politics. Kemp really does seem to be a near impossibility: a compassionate conservative. I think he really would like the Republican Party to pay more attention to these issues.

Kemp was a quarterback for the Buffalo Bills before he became a congressman. So I’ll put the situation in those terms. It’s fourth quarter. The Bills are on their own forty-yard line and down by a touchdown. Three seconds are all that’s left on the clock. Four wide receivers line up. He’s back in the shotgun. The center snaps the ball; Jack throws into a crowd of safeties and…

Jack’s actually got a chance in hell on the football field (especially against the Oilers). But the game is rigged on the field of politics. The Republican Party will never take social issues seriously because that’s not what they’re about. (Of course, when I say “social issues” I’m not talking about the bones thrown to the right-wing fundamentalists.) When Jack Kemp tries to push poverty issues in the GOP, he’s throwing a Hail Mary, but his arm just ain’t what it used to be.

Ed Norton Loses His Cherry

I really like the movie “American History X.” It’s way over the top in terms of just about everything, one of those “extreme” cultural artifacts that get so much hype these days. Ed Norton is utterly charismatic; it’s really hard to not watch him—actually, the acting is pretty great all the way around. And, of course, I totally agree with the film’s anti-racist sentiment.

The film’s one great drawback, however, is that pretty much everybody already hates neo-nazis. (I remember protesting a KKK rally at the state capitol in Austin some years back and observing that there were about twenty Klansmen and about five thousand anti-racist protesters…I held up a sign that said “I hate Illinois Nazis.”) The racist as constructed by mainstream white American culture is a monstrous boogeyman on the fringes of society: the face of racism to many, perhaps most whites is of Simon Legree, but most real racism has become subtle and abstract. Sadly, it seems that the most lasting and significant changes wrought by the civil rights era are that most white Americans don’t want to think of themselves as racist and that if you don’t use the n-word, you’re not a racist--such a simple understanding of the issue has resulted in a lot of white people believing that the problems of the past have been solved for the most part. It’s pretty damned easy under these circumstances to manipulate a general audience’s emotions with a film portraying evil in such a removed, cut and dried way. “American History X” is an anti-racist film, yes, but it is a melodrama without any real ideological relevance in this day and age. Maybe if it had been released in the 1960’s…

Racism is very real and damaging in 2002. It’s just not as obvious as were separate drinking fountains. Try this: go to an upscale department store and make note of the racial composition of the customers. Observe how the store’s staff reacts to the entrance of white people; observe how they react to the entrance of black people. I bet there’s a pretty good chance that you see no reaction to the white people. Sometimes you will see no reaction to the black people; sometimes you will see a slight increase in tension—store employee eyes will shift to the black intruder and watch him or her just to make sure nothing is stolen. When this experiment was first suggested to me in the mid 1990’s, I was skeptical; then I noticed myself doing it on my job as a waiter.

But I’m not a racist. Am I?

Well, no I’m not. But I did learn that even my own liberal self has deeply ingrained and socialized negative attitudes about race that went unquestioned, unnoticed. I learned to be on the lookout within myself for flare-ups of stupid impulses. The story doesn’t end with subconscious, individualized racism, either. Numerous pieces of legislation are passed every year that serve to whack people of color. This may very well be an inadvertent result, but the net effect is the same: racist government policy.

A Judicial Department study started during the Clinton administration and finished during the Bush administration found some great disparities in how African-Americans and whites are treated in American courts. Ashcroft’s take was that it was okay because the discrimination was unintentional.

So…I guess that means that racism is okay if you didn’t really mean it that way.

That’s just bullshit.

I changed my ways because, as a progressive, I was somewhat open to the idea to begin with. Ed Norton’s skinhead character changed his ways because his white racist prison buddies raped him in the shower. Is that what it’s going to take to get rank and file whites in America to reexamine the issue of race?

I sure hope not.

"And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years either."

So is Trent Lott a racist or what? Sure, yeah, of course he is, but not in the Simon Legree way. I really think that he was not intentionally advocating a return to Jim Crow and segregation. After all, to say such a thing is political suicide, as is becoming all too apparent. I think he was just sucking up to Strom (which is suspect in and of itself, but that’s another story). He really did misspeak and the Democrats are closing in for the kill.

The really sad thing is that racism is seen so completely in superficial terms that absolutely no one is criticizing Lott for his real racism, that is to say, his consistent, career long support of policies that have a racist net result. In his apologetic press conference on December 13th, he repeated the conservative cliché, “human dignity can be found not in a hand out but a hand up.” That’s great and all, but where’s the hand up? Job creation? I don’t really think that ten thousand more fast food jobs really constitute a hand up. If Lott is keen on helping impoverished African-Americans by creating jobs, he’d better concentrate on creating jobs that can actually offer some of hope of advancement. But, of course, he won’t and he never has. Lott has always favored capital at the expense of labor. Non-whites are hit the hardest by his policies.

By this standard, most of the Republican Party is racist despite the black gospel choirs paraded on the convention stage in 2000, despite Clarence Thomas, despite Ward Connerly, despite Alan Keyes, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, Rod Paige. But do the Democrats say this? No, of course not. The Democrats back most of these racist policies as well, while at the same time enjoying the lion’s share of African-American political support. Only in America.

So for the time being, it seems that we are doomed to see the politics of race played out in terms of word games. That is, one can only raise the cry of racism if somebody says the wrong thing, not if people of color continue to get the shaft.

You know what? I think that right now maybe America needs people that are less concerned with saying the right thing and more concerned with doing the right thing.

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