It's mid-January, which means that we're in the midst of America's newest annual tradition: everyone in public life distributes one of three MLK quotes, and then we all reaffirm our collective national commitment to ensuring that race relations don't regress any further than 1965, or 1954 at the absolute earliest. It's like a Thanksgiving where everyone sits around and quotes from Dances with Wolves and then asks what the deal with Native Americans is.

Martin Luther King Day is problematic. It's problematic because it's the leading edge of a bifurcation of King's legacy into what can charitably be called the Disney King and the Real King. The Disney King is the one whose predominant message was a race-ignorant society where recognizing "the content of one's character" was a command to ignore the entirety of America's history with race. That King's message was that a class of people, discriminated against on the basis of race, simply wanted the country to stop thinking about their race. Once that happened, discrimination would end, and the vicious psychological scars of slavery and Jim Crow and racial inequality would be healed. ...And scene.

The Real King was a tremendously complex political figure despised by many, who fought for racial justice, and against Vietnam, and who accepted the Margaret Sanger Award from Planned Parenthood. He wasn't a moderate pragmatist who just really wanted to be able to sit in the front of the bus - the man was, both by the standards of his day and of the present day, a leftist. 

America has coalesced around celebrating the works and legacy of a leftist. And it's a good thing.

At this point, it's nearly cliche to point out that Martin Luther King, Jr. didn't die to help white people feel less guilty about America's history, and didn't wear a suit to shame young black men in jeans. I no longer have patience with today as a shared reiteration that Civil Rights Act was a good thing, or that racism consists of solely of whatever was in Eyes on the Prize. 

Martin Luther King, Jr. was, in fact, a radical. He was a radical about war, about race, about class, about a whole host of issues. That part of his radicalism is now enshrined as unassailable convention doesn't reduce it - it simply provides a much-needed reminder that radicals are sometimes wiser than they ever get credit for.

Gene Marks's column got me thinking. I'm no smarter than your average rich white motivational speaker. I have it much easier than them, too - no traveling, no memorization, no having to constantly be "on". The world is not fair to them mainly because they had the misfortune of being able to package trite aphorisms into outline form. This is a fact. In 2011.

I am not a motivational speaker. I am a young black man who grew up a poor black kid. So life was easier for me. But that doesn't mean that the prospects are impossible for motivational speakers on their grind. Or that the 99% somehow can determine for themselves how to face the day and imagine that around every corner lies another opportunity. I don't believe that. Every rich white motivational speaker can succeed. Still. In 2011. 

It takes brains. It takes hard work. And a little national publication believing in you and your largely unfounded advice to a group of people you have no contact with except through reruns of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. It takes the ability to churn out a thousand words that seem right to your audience, which is a group that is exactly the opposite of the people you're supposedly advising. And technology. I have a Kindle.

If I were a rich white motivational speaker, I would first and most importantly make sure that I ignored all historical and social facts about the group of people I was addressing. I would make it my #1 priority to not know anything about them. I wouldn't care if I had a degree in African-American Studies. Even the most knowledgeable among us can think that Harriet Tubman is the mascot of a bath remodeling service. Not knowing things is the key to having options when you motivate. By not being constrained, you can choose different, nonsensical paths. If you know things about people, you often can't tell them what just occurred to you in the shower, or on the bus, or from someone's Facebook status.

And use the technology that's available to you as a rich white person. Use your Cisco telecommunications suite to talk to other rich white people about your target audience. You can set up optional 3G services on many devices using your American Express card. It's not difficult.

If I were a rich white motivational speaker, I would watch Netflix on Demand through my Roku and learn about poor black children watching such films as The Blind Side and The Help, or even by upgrading to the disc delivery service so that I could watch the DVD extras. 

Is this easy? Fuck no, it's not. You've already succeeded at motivating middle and upper-middle class people who look a lot like you and want to find the inspiration to write bad poetry or figure out how to get women to like them. But you haven't succeeded at convincing those people that you're sensitive and smart enough to talk to minorities. But it's not impossible. Forbes is there. Your new laptop is there. Sixteen-point font is there.

And if you think this is hard, and that you can't do it yourself, then the first person you should introduce yourself to is John Dickerson or Shelby Steele. These men, and others like them, are your key to telling minorities things you're about 75% sure they should be hearing. 

Yes, it's hard to pull things out of your ass, and even harder to shape those things into advice that makes cripping, systemic, race-based poverty into a problem that can be solved via Wikipedia and Google Books. But there is still opportunity in this country for those rich and white and motivated enough to do it.

Andrew Sullivan is back at it again, kindly reminding us that despite his support of Obama, who he really is never lurks far from the surface. Yep, he's defending The Bell Curve again, relying on the same tricks---mainly leaning on the assumption that the audience doesn't have time to do the background research, which is true enough and a reason why journalists really shouldn't promote pseudo-science---and Ta-Nehisis Coates is pushing back, albeit in a way that far more generous than I could ever feel towards Sullivan's intentions. It's really upsetting to see these redonkulous theories of race and IQ continue to be trotted out 30 years after biologist Stephen Jay Gould published The Mismeasure of Man, neatly outlining the history of these kinds of studies, the arguments for what kind of scientific proof would actually be required (hint: much higher than need-to-believe sorts like Sullivan accept), and the real-life results of putting a faux scientific veneer on old-fashioned racist and classist arguments about how oppressed people aren't oppressed but simply inferior. (Forced sterilization is a direct example, but basically all continued institutional racist oppression is rationalized by the "it's not the oppression, it's that they're not good enough" argument). There was even a 1996 reprint that kindly put to bed The Bell Curve's attempts to update the hoary old IQ studies of old. Ta-Nehisi addresses the ahistorical aspects of Sullivan's.....I hate to call the "arguments", so I'm going to say evidence-free whinings about the P.C. police preventing scientists from demonstrating what he clearly thinks they could, which is that black people are inferior as a group. 

With that said, Andrew's ahistorical approach to race and intelligence has always amazed. The contention, for instance, that "research is not about helping people; it's about finding out stuff," may well be true in some limited sense. But it's never been true, in any sense, of race and intelligence. In the 19th century helping out white people (however that is defined) was very much the point of intelligence research. Into the early 20th century, the rise of eugenics was equally linked the field to the advancement of "people." Even the intelligence theorists whom Andrew, himself, has advanced over the years are motivated by a desire to presumably help people, if only in the form of deciding how a society should expend its limited resources.

Advocates of the "p.c. egalitarianism" theory, such as Andrew, evidently believe that the notion that black people are dumber than whites is a cutting edge theory, as opposed to a long-held tenet of slave-holders and white supremacists. They present themselves as bold-truth tellers who will not bow to "liberal creationists." In fact they are espousing firmly established views that date back to the very founding of this country. These views did not emerge after decades of failure of social policy. Indeed they picked up right where their old advocates left off; within five years of the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Arthur Jensen was convinced that black people were intellectually addled.

I'll add a couple other points. Sullivan also neglects to remember---despite his claims to have done his research, he doesn't seem to have read Gould's masterpiece on this topic---that in addition to trying to find IQ differences between established racial categories, IQ studies of old targeted ethnic groups such as Italians. I'm sure Sullivan wouldn't find it so scintillating and provocative if I argued that science demonstrating that his Irish heritage puts him in a group that is morally and intellectually inferior to the groups the compose my heritage (French, German, Welsh), but the kind of studies he's so enamored of would have, in the past, done exactly such a thing. That the supposedly agenda-free researchers have stopped bothering to measure white ethnic groups against each other tells you everything you need to know about Sullivan's silly claims that this is about pure science and not about manipulating research to prove a pre-determined conclusion about people the researchers feel racism towards. 

Or to put it more simply, since the Irish and Italians became white, interest in finding "scientific" evidence that they're inferior people has completely dried up. 

I'm not a scientist, so please take my thoughts on this with that knowledge in mind. But I do love science, and have spent my time making fun of the endless stream of research that purports to find that women are inferior---though often by different measures than IQ, though that's a new development that has arisen no doubt as women have gained educational opportunities and can easily equal or even beat men as a group on IQ tests---so I think I can offer a little advice to people reading claims that black people are stupider as a group and are skeptical that research really could prove such a thing. Here's some questions to keep in mind as you read these debates. 

*What are the researchers measuring? The claim here is that "intelligence" is being measured. But what's the definition of "intelligence"? The assumptions employed by Sullivan and the researchers he champions are that intelligence is a single, fixed entity that in innate at birth. Is there evidence to support this contention? There's other ways to think about intelligence that have more evidence for them in the real world. For instance, I tend to do very well on the kind of IQ tests that we're talking about. I'm also quick with a joke, perceptive when it comes to the psychology of complex human systems, and adept at manipulating my first and only language, English. I'm decent at basic math skills. But I'm bad at learning new languages, and dealing with complex but abstract systems such as anything running a computer beyond the most obvious level. So am I "intelligent"? Most people would say yes, but if thrown into a situation I don't understand, the answer is absolutely not. Nor are any of my intelligences fixed in time---I could be having a bad day and be unable to crack a joke. Or I could suddenly have a burst of inspiration/a lot of coffee and dedicate myself to understanding something that's usually beyond me. Nor are any of these intelligences innate. It's probably true that if I had been taught a second language from the cradle, I could be bilingual, for instance. If I'd been socialized as male, I may have had more confidence with computers, as well.

Now defenders of IQ tests would say that it's measuring potential, and would say that because I'm "intelligent", I could pick up say, computer programming, faster than someone who isn't. This I find hard to swallow, because I've met people who were, say, swift at picking up how to play musical instruments (which I can't do) who don't perform nearly as well as I do on standardized tests like the IQ test. Additionally, I've never really seen any evidence to suggest that the IQ test captures potential instead of one's current ability to take IQ tests, which is why my scores graduallly improved every time I took tests like it. What changed was the context and how much I'd learned. This has been demonstrated in labs, as well---the brain is not a fixed entity by any means, but is constantly moving stuff around depending on context.

Before we even begin to measure, innate, fixed intelligence, we need to prove that there is such a thing. Which would require being able to sort out the innate, fixed-ness of it from factors such as education, stimulation, and nutrition. We'd also have to account for the fact that some people are really good at some things and not so much at others, and explain what the scientific reasons are to say X is more "intelligent" than Y. If you assume it takes more intelligence to write for The Daily Beast than fix a car, are you absolutely sure that it's not simply classism that's driving your assumptions? Where's your evidence?

*What tools are they using to measure it? We assume IQ tests measure intelligence, because that's what they've always purported to do. Which is why I really recommend reading Gould's book, because he does a great job of showing how, no matter how test writers tried to rearrange the test, it never really got past measuring acquired skills and knowledge to measure some sort of deep-down intelligence that's unaffected by acquired skills and knowledge. This is important, because if the IQ test is measuring acquired skills and knowledge does absolutely nothing to support the racist contention that differing outcomes for social groups is about innate intelligence and not limited opportunities. 

In addition to demonstrating that an IQ test measures some deep-down innate intelligence---which they've never been able to do, since the very existence of innate intelligence hasn't been demonstrated---they would have to prove that what they're measuring has more impact on eventual life outcomes than socialization, opportunity and education. Since dumbasses like George W. Bush can become President by coasting on privilege, I think that's probably going to be beyond even the most strained rationalizations of the most devoted racists. 

I realize that the authors of The Bell Curve did try to hedge on this by suggesting socialization is part of intelligence, but they still grounded their argument in the belief that innate intelligence is a natural limitation, and that it is the primary factor in how well racial groups do against each other in the economic and educational marketplaces. That's something of a red herring. Even if you think "intelligence" is only say, 50% fixed, you're still arguing that there's a fixed, innate intelligence. You still have to prove that contention. 

To be fair, since I'm a fan of the idea that there's no single definition of intelligence, I'm going to guess that Bush is a pretty good golfer. 

*What categories are they comparing in their research? When IQ studies first came into vogue, assumptions about who and who wasn't in the category we now consider "white" were much different, with Italians and Jews being considered tremendously different than Anglos. Which is to say, race and ethnicity are social and legal categories, but they can't really be understood realistically as biological categories. (According to Wikipedia, the authors of The Bell Curve tried to skip over this problem by claiming that previous studies finding Jews and white ethnics were less intelligent were nothing but folklore, but in fact, there's a strong historical record to prove otherwise.) All the problems inherent to treating men and women as discrete categories who can be meaningfully compared on factors like "emotionalism" and "horniness", as if we didn't have more in common biologically than not? That goes quadruple for treating race categories that way. Because we put a lot of social worth into things like skin color doesn't mean that nature agrees. If we chose as a species to highlight foot length instead of skin color, we're probably be seeing IQ claims correlated with shoe size instead of race. 

I'm not pulling one of those irritating white liberal "race is just a color" things out of my pocket. I accept race as a category and am a firm believer that social categories matter as much, if not more, than biological categories. I'm just arguing that it's important to know the difference. If you're struggling to understand the difference, consider people who have parents of differing racial categories, such as Obama. If you assume race is a biologial category, he's uncategorizable. If you assume it's a social category---as I do, and as most of us do, if you really think about it---he's black. He identifies as black and is identified by others as black. Most of us have a more diverse ancestry than you'd initially realize, making the notion of biological race categories even shakier. In addition, applying the racial categories that have developed in the United States to the world at large, which has a wide variety of ideas about how to categorize people, reveals the limits of conflating social categories with biological ones. In the U.S., for instance, we identify as large and diverse group of people from a large part of the largest continent in the world as "Asian", but I don't imagine they see themselves as a racially homogenous group.

*Is their hypothesis falsifiable? This is getting into the most science-y part of the scientific questions for laymen, and in most cases it might be more than the average reader can take on. But I do think there's one thing to consider for ordinary people looking at this debate: Do the people making the claims of intellectual inferiority back down when their claims are disproved? Or do they hedge, trying to throw up a lot of distracting complications to make their work impenetrable for ordinary people, and otherwise do anything but let go of their theory? I particularly think it's important to watch and see if someone with a racial inferiority theory tries to get you into the weeds by chasing down red herrings instead of dealing with the central arguments and the evidence for them. They're not interested in finding truth so much as defending their hypothesis. (Sullivan does this by saying, "No one is arguing that "that black people are dumber than white," just that the distribution of IQ is slightly different among different racial populations, and these differences also hold true for all broad racial groups..." Which is a way of saying, "If I say black people are dumber than white using bigger words, that will create a larger and more headache-inducing debate that will drive most of you off in frustration." That's not allowing your hypothesis could be falsified by any stretch.) 

In other words, if they're striving to make their claims as complex-sounding and headache-inducing as possible, instead of putting effort towards making their claims and their evidence clear and understandable, that's a giant red flag. They're not trying to invite criticism like proper scientists should, but trying to put a wall up around their ideas to protect them from it. 

Look out, too, for them putting you on the defensive. That's not how scientific theorizing works. It's like court: the burden of proof is on the prosecution. They are going to try to claim that the burden of proof is on those who think it's not obvious that black people are inherently inferior, but since we're not the ones making previously un-evidenced claims (that intelligence is fixed and innate, that IQ tests meaningfully measure it, that racial groups are distinct biological categories), it's not. If they try to shift the burden of proof or make their ideas harder and not easier to understand, that's about protecting the theory and not subjecting it to rigorous criticism. 

**************

Now, by bringing up these questions, I'm not trying to come up with a definitive answer, though I think it's utterly clear what my opinion is. I'm not interested in playing a game of concealing my point of view on these things, because that only contributes to an atmosphere of bad faith that has infected this debate from the beginning. For which I blame the pro-racism side, because they strike a bad faith pose of being merely interested in scientific discourse, even though there's no real reason to think that disinterested scientific research would move in a direction of using inadequate tools to measure ill-defined traits amongst groups that are genuinely hard to categorize using biological measures. But I think that their bad faith pose can cause people of good faith to engage on that level with them, and I hope keeping these four questions in mind will keep you grounded when dealing with an issue that has a whole lot of ill-intentioned hand-waving going on. 

Rush Limbaugh neatly and concisely lays out the conservative position on racism today: liberals are terrible.

The Politico and the mainstream media has launched an unconscionable, racially stereotypical attack on an independent, self-reliant conservative black because for him that behavior is not allowed. Now, if we had...

I want to look at a couple things today from a different perspective. What would the left be doing right now if, let's say, there were an assault on Obama of this nature. Let's say that some conservative publication ran a story exactly like this: Unnamed sources, 15 years ago, with every detail of Obama sexual harassment. What would the Democrat national committee and what would the media be doing? They would be going after the women. They would be targeting these women, and they would name names, and they would destroy them. That is what the Democrats and the media would do. They would set out to find out who these women are that talked to the conservative publication and they would destroy them.

They would call these women racists for trying to destroy a black politician. They would claim that they're working for the Republican National Committee. They would claim that these two women (or these women, whoever), had been hired by the Republican National Committee to engage in this smear and lie campaign against Obama. They would go after these women. They would destroy them. They would make the women the bad guys. They would dig into every minor thing in these women's lives that they have ever done. They would trash them, they would make them prove the unprovable -- because this is war, and that's how they fight it. Anything goes, as far as they're concerned, and they cannot allow a black or an Hispanic to rise to the top of a political establishment that is not Democrat.

I know, I know.  You're probably liberal, and therefore incapable of understanding this honest discussion on race unless it comes with mentions of imperialism and Dave Chappelle. This is a very simple argument.

1) This is a racist allegation against Herman Cain.

2) If the exact same allegation was launched against Barack Obama, the liberal media would call the people making the allegation racist, even thought it obviously wouldn't be.

3) Therefore, because the allegation wasn't made against Barack Obama, it is racist.

4) Marco Rubio, also.

The thought I've kept having today: the fact that conservatives keep calling this a "high-tech lynching" is really indicative of just how toxic an environment the GOP is for black people.  There haven't even been enough black Republicans of note in the past two decades to have another scandal. For a party obsessed with victimology, it's a rather stunning indictment of their complete incompetence on race that you can name every single prominent black Republican since Reagan was in office during the ad break before a YouTube video. 

Herman Cain has risen through the Republican ranks...well, not meteorically, but at least like something that's natural and rises and isn't racially problematic or in any way black. As he's become relevant in the race, there was a moment you knew was going to arrive. A moment where Cain would have to make a fateful decision pitting his identity against his aspirations. A moment where Cain would have to decide if he was a black Republican or a Republican who, incidentally, was of the negro persuasion.

That moment was Niggerhead.  You're likely familiar with the story, but the short version is that Rick Perry owns a ranch formerly named Niggerhead, and was at best lax about changing the name to something that didn't involve a racial slur.  As these things go, this is fairly low hanging fruit on the "that's racist" tree.  In general, [racial slur] plus [head] doesn't result in something that's not racist.  

While on Fox News and This Week, Herman Cain called the name Niggerhead "very insensitive" and "plain insensitive".  Al Sharpton, he is not.  But through the magic power of the race card, he actually pretty much is.  Except Cain is worse, because this is a betrayal of the very never-talking-about-race promise he held.  Instapundit:

I think that Herman Cain hurts himself by joining in on these attacks. His big appeal is that he’s not just another black race-card-playing politician. Climbing on board with the Post’s hit piece suggests that actually, he is.

Redstate's commenters decide to not just attack Cain but, yes, to defend Niggerhead, because we're apparently entering into a white supremacist fantasy novel. From "izoneguy":

 

As a technical term

“Ni**erhead” was, among others:
* a former British term for a black iron post for mooring ships, made from an old cannon partially buried muzzle upward, with a slightly oversize black cannonball covering the hole

* a former sailors’ term for an isolated coral head, notorious as navigation hazards

* among some American stonemasons, a term for a large smoothly rounded stone

* an antiquated term for a large round rock sticking up from the surface of a logging road, used by loggers and log truck drivers in the Pacific Northwest

* an old U.S. Navy term for a small winch, a Capstan

* a coal miner’s term for blackish iron disulfide nodular rock occurring at the top of the coal seams, often visible in coal mine roofs. Because of their density, they can fall from the roofs, injuring or killing the miners below

* an archaic term for the striking weight on a pile driver

* a term for a steam manifold, fountain, turret or header on a boiler, particularly that of a locomotive

------------

The rock in question at the Perry Hunting Camp was painted and turned over soon after Rick objected to it. That term goes back hundreds of years.
For Cain to pick up on a drive-ny media story and run with it shows the man likes to play fast & loose with the facts. Someone like this cannot be trusted with the Presidency or any position in Federal government. And that is the thanks Rick Perry gets from Herman Cain, the only candidate who was considering him for VP!

You see, racism was actually so prevalent that we entered into a realm of post-racial racism, and to pretend that this racism was actually racial is so racist that fuck it I'm gonna go watch Do The Right Thing.  The common use of a racial slur to describe things that just happen to be the same color as the group of people being slurred is proof that nothing racial was meant at all.  Coal miners didn't play the race card with each other, so why should we?

Herman Cain will, ultimately, end up being the most tragic figure of this election cycle.  He has the burden of being the GOP's Great Black Hope, but failed his first major test.  He's black - dark black, even - and Southern, a little bit folksy and a little bit preachery.  And for months, he's been running without ever mentioning his race or the GOP's problems with minorities.  It was perfect, because not pointing out the problems is the equivalent of admitting they don't exist.  By entering, however tentatively, into the realm of race, Cain's broken the illusion that nothing's wrong.  That illusion, by and large, was the main expectation on him and the primary benefit he brought to this election cycle.

That Cain decided to state the obvious is, honestly, a credit to him.  The smart money was in attacking the Washington Post as a liberal smear rag and then going on to call two-thirds of black people "brainwashed" by Democratic slave masters (which he did anyway). By opening his mouth and speaking the truth, Cain likely destroyed any chance he had of winning the GOP nomination. But for a brief moment, someone in the Republican Party stopped lying about race. That's the boldest thing anyone has done in this field of candidates by far.

SIGH: that is usually my reaction anymore to seeing yet another dude whip out the "I'm pro-choice but Roe was wrongly decided/decided too soon" argument.  Scott Lemieux is the champion of shooting that one down, so I tend to leave it to him.  But I have to respond to Garrett Epps of The American Prospect ruining what was otherwise an interesting article by arguing that Brown v. the Board of Education was correctly timed and Roe v. Wade was too soon, because the latter had such an appalling backlash.  You hear variations of this argument a lot, and the sole evidence for them is that anti-choicers are such loud-mouthed assholes and they're willing to attack the decision directly, in a way that no one is willing to do with Brown.  But that's extremely limited evidence for the assertion, especially since it focuses more on what people say than what they do.  It's true that people are less likely to openly condemn desegregation than abortion rights, but does that mean the backlash to desegregation (and all it means) was less severe than the backlash to abortion rights (and all they mean)?  I think this deserves a look, from a number of angles. 

Structural differences in the decisions.  If you want to compare Brown and Roe, you should make sure you're comparing apples to apples.  Initially, it may seem that you are: both decisions granted rights to oppressed people that were expected to lead to their betterment and help them obtain political, social, and economic equality. Both had political movements behind them.  That's where the similarities end, however.  The big difference is that Brown addresses what is functionally a structural inequality---they forced schools who had previously closed their doors to non-white students to open them up.  Roe, however, addresses an individual right. An individual now has a right to choose to abort or provide abortion.  Abortion was a criminal matter, and segregation a matter of public accommodation.  This difference structures the backlash to it.  Opponents of Brown realized right away that they could re-establish desegregation by changing the systems so they seemed compliant, but with Roe, that's harder to do. When you're dealing with people making private choices, it's much harder to control without invoking law enforcement. In a sense, they don't have a choice but to oppose Roe directly, because without being able to use law enforcement, they're kind of fucked. They've finally figured out a way to get around Roe, but it really hasn't been easy.  The fact that Brown openly invoked equal protection and Roe didn't also makes Roe easier to criticize without going on the record as being hostile to the abstract principle of equality.

The backlash to Brown has been more severe than the backlash to Roe in many ways. The National Guard wasn't called to let women get abortions.  In fact, what was remarkable about Roe was that it was implemented with relatively little fuss. The violence agaisnt abortion providers didn't start up until the anti-choice movement had really developed into a hardline fundamentalist terrorist breeding camp. They have to work themselves into a frenzy to commit violence.  For civil rights activists, violence was a constant problem from the get-go, and it was more frequent, and it was often less tied to organized hate groups. In fact, it still goes on. Not to downplay the ugliness against abortion providers in the slightest, but it's important to understand that both decisions and the movements around them have resulted in a terrorist response.

In addition,  Roe was implemented without that much of a fuss in rapid order.  Law enforcement immediately stopped throwing abortion providers in jail, and doctors started hanging out a shingle without much concern of running into the authorities. Brown was basically rejected in many communities, however.  (My high school didn't desegregate until more than 20 years after the decision, if I recall correctly.)  And when the authorities forced schools to segregate, local governments moved in rapid response by redrawing district lines, changing tax structures, and implementing policies that basically reinstituted segregation. Private schools shot up in rapid response to take the white kids that were being yanked from school. Busing was basically abandoned.  White flight intensified. The result? American schools are more segregated now than they were in the late 60s.  You know, when people were still openly flouting the decision. And Brown has had huge chunks of it functionally overturned in a way that is just as, if not more severe than the restrictions that have been placed on Roe. 

Meanwhile, while it's been getting harder to get an abortion in this country than it used to be, women who want one are likelier than not to get it.  It's not as good as it should be, but I think abortion rights are still doing better than desegregation of the schools. 

The big picture.  Brown and Roe cannot be assessed in a vacuum. Both were decisions that were made in response to activist lawsuits from people who had a bigger picture in mind. I'd say it was the same picture, in fact.  Anti-racism and feminist activists wanted a world where the group they were advocating for were equal to white men in terms of education, career, personal freedom, personal stability, wealth, and access to those transcedent aspect of human life such as reputation, joy, creative freedom, role models for aspirational purposes, that sort of thing.  You know, equality. Both decisions were seen as major moves in that direction.  Brown addressed education inequalities that fed into economic and social inequalities.  Roe addressed the way that pregnancy and childbirth are used to constrain women's economic and social opportunities. 

Again, I have to look at the situation and think feminists have been allowed to go further in their goals. Women's status relative to men has improved more than black people's status relative to white people's.  It's a complex question, of course---after all, half of black people are also women, and racism is different than sexism, so it's really hard to measure.  One the measure of income, it's clear that race hurts more than gender: black people make 62% of what white people do, while women make 79% of what men do.  I believe this is a sign that desegregation has faced more backlash than reproductive rights.  Much of what made it hard for women in the past to get access to educational and employment opportunities was the assumption that they would get pregnant and be forced to drop out or downsize their careers in order to get married and have babies.  That expectation has been curtailed greatly, especially for average Americans.  Women can time their pregnancies and limit their family size, which gives them a great deal of control in the rest of their lives.  But black Americans continue to be pushed out of educational and employment opportunities that would help make that income number more equitable.  

It's true people are more willing to say grossly sexist things in public than grossly racist things (though the election of Obama has shifted that), but I think a larger look beyond what people say and what they do will indicate that the situation is more complicated than that. 

What does this all mean?  Well, it sure as hell doesn't mean that Brown was wrongly decided. What it does mean is that we can't judge a court decision granting human beings their full rights based on our fears of a backlash. Often, the only way to change the status quo is to force a confrontation, and courts granting rights are a good way to do that. Just quit pissing on Roe. It was a good decision and it came at a time that the country was actually supportive of abortion rights.  The backlash against is shaped by the trajectory of women's gains differing from the tragectory of African-American gains, but reading the tea leaves of specific court decisions isn't really all that illuminating as to why. 

Dennis Prager is of the opinion that the government has supplanted the man in the black community as the suitable husband figure, and a woman would rather get pregnant and raise children by herself on welfare than have a man there to help at all.  

And you know what?  Thank God that Prager pulled back the curtain on this.  You can barely even talk up a black woman these days without her asking you about your fertilty and then waxing poetic for hours on end about how she's going to take her WIC and her four kids to Red Robin for the endless fries.  

It's a painful phenomenon, this glut of well-employed men yearning to take care of their children but barred by the overwhelming appeal of several hundred dollars a month in temporary benefits.  It's almost enough to turn all of them gay, which I'm sure is the topic of tomorrow's episode.  

Someone's Twitter stream had a link to this mess up.  You see, some nutjobs have decided to make a film called "Gates of Hell" where abortion drives black people crazy and then they kill all of us, because they are dark angels of our souls, or something:

Black power. Abortion. Terrorism. "Prophetic fiction". Three years in the making, "Gates of Hell" is a documentary from the year 2016 that chronicles the crimes of a band of domestic terrorists known as the Zulu 9. Finnish filmmaker Ani Juva travels to the United States to better understand the mysterious black power assassins, the bizarre eugenics conspiracy theory that drove them to commit extreme acts of violence and how America's political landscape was transformed forever. Blending real history and real public figures with a fictitious (yet plausible) future, it is safe to say that you have never seen a film like "Gates of Hell".

Watching the trailer/sales pitch for the film (they're only $99,680 away from the $100,000 they need to do something something with this), the crux of this is clear: evil big government liberals use abortion as a secret method to commit mass genocide against blacks.  Blacks who are also the most reliable group of voters for evil big government liberals.   And are also a part of another conspiracy to have public money funneled to them so that they have more kids.  

It's like a completely useless cycle where you earn money to buy matches to burn money, but it involves black people, so the soundtrack is by Young Money.

One might argue, if one were painfully naive in a manner that bordered on certfiable brain damage, that this is simply an effort for "pro-lifers" to get their message out using the corollary of violent black people uprising against a system of oppression.  Of course, one might not have Googled the creatively named director, Molotov Mitchell (also known by the nickname on his birth certificate, "Jason").  You see, ol' Mol (or is it "Tov"?  I never know when people have ridiculously stupid nicknames) makes a lot of videos.  Some of them involve black people.

Some of them involve advocating for the murder of black people.  Bet you didn't see that one coming, eh?

Molotov...okay, buddy, I'm gonna call you Jason, because it's a lot hipper than "Molotov", which is basically a tool for winos who are done with their wino rags and ran out of money to burn.  Jason here advocated for the Ugandan anti-gay bill that would have allowed the government to kill gay Ugandans.  For being gay, not for having abortions, which is a totally different thing.

Now, you might wonder what makes a policy of murdering actual human beings better than a policy of allowing voluntary abortion, but that, ladies and gentlemen, is a gotcha question.  We don't think about the relative moral efficacy of comparative actions involving the same group of people.  Duh.  We care about the right people dying, and preferably white people not having to get their hands dirty doing it!

Incidentally, a sitting elected official is in this film, Representative Bobby Franklin of Georgia.  Now, do keep in mind that we just saw a married Congressman get shamed on national television for using the internet to have dirty chats and send pictures of his junk; surely a state Representative who's taking to the internet to make race-laden murder fantasies deserves some scrutiny, too?

Ah, well, probably not.  Let's tune in for the low-budget sequel to this, Gates of Crack-Addicted Black People Making Your GM Car.

Alex Pareene at Salon has an excellent report on how Matt Drudge has spent the past few years concocting a picture of America as one torn apart by a crime-based race war, where random black people are "rising up" and attacking and killing white people.  If you, like me, find this image strange (including going to your window to make sure that so far, it's mostly birds chirping and moms pushing strollers, and not in fact mob violence), then you're not wrong!  Crime levels, especially violent crime, continue to cascade downwards in the U.S.  Overall, the nation has become a gentler one, at least within its borders. (The argument about our imperial adventures is outside the bounds of this discussion.)  I would even argue that the one area where crime is going up---domestic terrorism---is partially a response to the other trends in the U.S.  A lot of right wing extremists look at the growing emphasis on non-violence in the U.S. and feel like it's emasculating and turn more violent and gun-loving in response. 

Even though crime is going down, there's a perception in the American public that crime is going up. There's a number of theories about why there's such a disconnect, but I would argue that Matt Drudge is a large part of the problem.  In the past few years, Drudge has been steadily building up this image of a de facto race war, and since Drudge, as Atrios always notes, rules the world of the mainstream media, these local stories he trumpets become national stories.  And he's fucking relentless, as John Cook reports.  Alex summarized:

It all came to a head, as John Cook noted, this Memorial Day weekend when Drudge posted 10 separate headlines -- including the massive, above-the-logo one -- related to violent incidents involving "urban" people at venues like "Black Bike Week" in Miami and "Rib Fest" in Rochester, N.Y. There was an "Urban Melee in Charlotte," for example. Do you know what makes an "urban melee" different from a regular "melee"? It's not that it takes place within the city limits of a major metropolitan area. It's that it involves the world's most obvious code term for "scary black people."

As John at Gawker points out, the number of local news stories about crime invariably rise during Memorial Day weekend because holidays create crime peaks. it's the combination of time off and alcohol, basically. It goes up for all races. Drudge's choice of what stories to highlight is about creating a narrative, and the insinuation is now that we have a black President, all hell is breaking loose.  One of the weirdest, most long-standing conservative myths is that black people are aching to "rise up" and take the nation by force.  The argument is then that they have to, more in sorrow than in glee, argue against equal rights for black people.  They'd want to share, but you know, violence!  The notion that black America is revenge-minded is something that is surprisingly powerful for wingnuts.  That's why there's non-stop chatter on right wing radio about slavery reparations, even though the subject has no traction in real world discourse, and even if it did, said reparations would look much different than right wingers imagine it would like.  (They're picturing jack-booted thugs stealing your grandmother's pearls and giving it to some family you don't know to pawn, but it would more likely be a check that resembles a Social Security check or a tax refund.)  And that's why Andrew Breitbart thinks that some court settlement to black farmers who were systemically discriminated against for decades is the biggest problem our nation faces.  It's really a level of paranoia that's hard for me to wrap my mind around. 

Joan Walsh has an interesting article at Salon, where she grapples with the surge in white resentment that was recorded in a recent study as white people believing they experience "racism".  In fact, they seem to think white people experience more racism than black people. Joan says it's hard to guess at what's compelling this demonstrably false belief, but starts a thought experiment where maybe there's some rationale for this thinking outside of just being delusional.

Is it possible that some whites might experience more anti-white "racism" now than they did 30 years ago? Well, not if you're trapped in the boundaries of discourse mostly defined in academia, where people of all races can be bigots or prejudiced, but they can only be "racist" if they are a member of the socially, politically and economically dominant group.  But in our kaleidoscopic multiracial society, "racism" is a term that, like it or not, has come to be used by every group, to cover slights ranging from a peer in one group not liking your group, someone consistently disrespecting your group, to actual discrimination in education and employment. The idea that whites can't face racism seems silly: In the San Francisco Bay Area, where we have leaders of every race, whites disproportionately hold political and economic power, although political power is more diffused. But your chances of having a non-white teacher, boss, co-worker, firefighter, beat cop, prosecutor or judge are pretty high. Grievances can be misunderstood as racial; they may in fact be racial.

To start with, I don't think it's really true to say that distinguishing between "prejudice" and "racism" is beyond the scope of people who aren't familiar with academic theorizing on race. I'll use my own white self as an example.  People have made prejudiced---i.e., snap judgments---based on me because of my race, and their prejudices were disconcerting because they aren't true.  But the key here is that those snap judgments are largely positive.  For instance, people tend to assume, in part because I'm white, that I come from a more educated background than I do, instead of the public-high-school-in-West-Texas-born-to-parents-without-college-degrees reality.  This can be irritating, but it's usually to my favor. Everyone experiences prejudice, since snap judgments are basically a cognitive trick the brain uses to sort through the world and it's honestly never going to happen that we get to know every person's soul before we interact with them.  But it's the content of the prejudice that determines if it's racist.  I think most people can get this. In fact, most of us put a lot of effort into managing our image so that people's snap judgments of us align with what we think of ourselves.  In fact, if you read sites like Microaggressions, you'll see that one of the most common forms of everyday racism is for people to overlook all the work you've put into crafting a certain image of yourself and replace that with some gross assumptions. 

So I'm genuinely skeptical that most white people have really experienced the sort of racism that we're talking about here. 

Joan suggests that cultural emphasis on multiculturalism and diversity might be making white people feel left out, and I think some of her thoughts on this are interesting.  It tends to be more true of people who are emotionally demanding, which I think is a trait that's probably more common in this instance amongst white people, as they're accustomed to never being left out.  (For instance, consider how obsessed some white people are with the who and who doesn't get to say the N-word, as it were.)  I think she makes some valid points about some easy fixes to quell this resentment if you're, say, putting together a corporate policy on diversity.  But I'm unclear on how any of these fixes (such as making sure to include white people explicitly in the definition of "diversity" instead of just assuming that everyone gets that) could be applied to the larger body politic, where control is basically not going to happen.

I think part of the problem is that Joan is overly sympathetic to the fear of being left out that some white people are experiencing.  I would argue it's complete paranoia, and I base that in a lifetime of both being white and having grown up in areas where blatant racism is a lot more acceptable than it is in my current social circles. For instance, she writes:

That makes sense to me. As long as I've been writing about the changing demography of California, I've wondered about rhetoric that seems to leave whites out of the future. I've never been a huge fan of the "people of color" umbrella when wielded politically. It can be useful descriptively; it can also provide (false) confidence that "minority" issues can gain "majority" support without whites, as long as African-American lawyers, Cuban teachers, Laotian refugees, Caribbean entrepreneurs, Salvadoran doctors, fourth-generation Chinese real estate moguls, refugees from Mexican drug wars, and third-generation welfare recipients of any non-white race can all stick together in a grand coalition. Good luck with that.

She lives in San Francisco and I do not, so maybe she's experiencing something completely different.  But my feeling isn't that the term "people of color" has ever insinuated this kind of extreme band-together-ness she's talking about, especially when she sympathetically portrays people who've convinced themselves that "diversity" is leaving them out because they're white. The ugly truth of the matter is that white people are still more likely to band together to the exclusion of others.  For instance, look at the statistics on interracial dating, both the instances of and the approval of. Black people and Hispanic people are more likely to approve of interracial dating and to have engaged in interracial dating than white people.  Not by like huge margins, but still significant differences.  

The truth of the matter is that white people crying about "racism" are most likely to be people who believe that their privileges over people of color are deserved and they don't want to share.  It is true that they often go off in to La La Land to rationalize their selfishness by convincing themselves that it's a zero sum game.  It's the same thing as straight people claiming that marriage means less if gay people get to get married.  They're just plain bigoted.  

Roy Edroso recently posted an illuminating set of examples of white people whining about how much "racism" they experience.  It's a good reminder of how completely ridiculous they're being. One example, from a site called Urban Grounds:

That’s because in Black Run America, there are no rules of civility or decency. Only a “gonna get mine” attitude born from generation-after-generation of blacks in America being given handouts after handouts.

There's layers of assholery to unpack there, but what sticks out to me is that he's convinced himself that we're living in "Black Run America".  He's convinced himself that any amount of power held by black people, even if white people still have the majority of it, is too much and signals the end of days or something.  This is what I think this research is picking up when white people claim they're victims of "racism". They have the objectively racist belief that white people deserve all the cookies, and when someone who isn't white gets a cookie, they feel like something that belongs to them has been taken from them.  They are, in other words, deluding themselves.  And I don't know if there's a quick fix for that. 

An incredibly obnoxious woman did something incredibly obnoxious on an Amtrak train: she talked on her cell phone, apparently, for sixteen straight hours.  Now, besides having the best cell phone battery on the face of the planet, there's not a lot remarkable about this story - she did something legendarily assholish, was kicked off the train, life went on for all involved.  I'm sure by this point, everyone on the car is regaling their friends with increasingly ridiculous stories about things they overheard from the conversation, while getting on with important things like trying to figure out all the words to "Jack Sparrow".  

(FYI: It's "Cubano flame" and "got a basehead wife".)

One small problem, though: the woman on the train was overweight and black.  So, of course, it's an excuse to go ass out racist in comment sections.  My favorite comment (from Gateway Pundit):

See, when you point out the obvious fact that violence, misogyny, rudeness and entitlement are rampant in the black ‘culture’ you’re a racist and need to just shut up. I guess that charge keeps them from having to take a good look at themselves in the mirror. Too bad because black peoples lives will never improve until they do. When will they learn that playing the race card endlessly is only hurting them?

Some days, I think the best part about the Klan is that they were honest about being racists.

On Sunday, my mom and I went to go see Jumping the Broom, which is nominally a comedy and which is, more importantly, a movie starring a predominantly black cast that's not directed by Tyler Perry.  The discussion we had beforehand revolved around rewarding Hollywood for actually making the thing, regardless of quality; seeing a mediocre romantic comedy became a chance to send a message that there are audiences willing to see movies starring largely minority casts.  It outdid the similarly programmed Something Borrowed, so in some ways, it may have worked.

Unfortunately, it also required us to sit through a treacherously terrible movie.  The movie was produced by megachurch pastor T.D. Jakes, which means that it's not a bad comedy.  It's a bad sermon with some poorly timed jokes thrown in.  The core plot of the movie focuses on the relationship between Sabrina (Paula Patton) and Jason (Laz Alonso).  Sabrina begins the movie by asking God not to let her "give away her cookies" anymore after waking up in the apartment of an otherwise committed man following a one-night stand - and  yes, by "cookies", she does mean her vagina.  She takes a vow of abstinence until marriage, and then almost immediately meets Jason by hitting him with her car.  Because he's her soulmate, he tends not to mind the fact that she just rammed an Audi into his ass, and six months later, they're engaged.  

Despite the inability of either lead to deliver a line in a way that isn't either annoying or focused on the absolute intensity of their injury-based love, we proceed to their wedding and meet their families.  It's a standard premise: her family is a bunch of snooty elites, and his family is a bunch of working-class commoners.  Culture clashes ensue, and things generally turn out okay, I suppose.

The hard part here isn't the banal plot.  It's how the movie treats these competing models of blackness, and ends up coming to a determination that both are flawed.  Sabrina's family and friends are a broad stereotype of bougie blackness, impossibly attractive, needlessly materialistic, and consumed with melodrama.  Her parents are in a loveless marriage, and her friends are snobbish jerks; they've rejected the slave tradition referenced in the movie's title (and at one point, her mother even declares that the family used to own slaves, because it was in no way necessary to the plot).  

Jason's family, on the other hand, is a walking pastiche of hoodness, from the uncle who's been married four times to the mother that doesn't know what various foods are; it's the mother's incessant meddling (after praying on it, of course) that ends up nearly destroying the wedding.  The movie is supposed to serve as an endorsement of abstinent commitment and faith in a Christian God, but what it becomes is a broad critique of How Black People Live.  

Sabrina and Jason are both upwardly mobile young people who have well-paying jobs doing things in large buildings, but they rush into a marriage based on her self-esteem issues and career path (she's moving to China in two months, so they have to get married).  Jason is a confused, bland man whose main contribution to the plot is proving that people who come from little means can gain success.  The rest of the cast is a group of jealous, horny, possessive assholes of various stripes who all cling fiercely to the things that give them a specific cultural identity.  The only person who seems happy and healthy is, of course, T.D. Jakes in his cameo as the wedding pastor.  

It's hard enough to find positive, normal portrayals of black families, even if the families have flaws.  It becomes that much harder when we fall into the Perry/Jakes trap of portraying all black people as irrevocably flawed until some sage reminds them of the true path, whether it be Jesus or a cross-dressing narcissist who's richer than God.  There are two undercurrents here: the first is a wait for another black leader, another Martin or Malcolm; the second is a fundamental discomfort with the lives of black folk.  There's an image of socioeconomic normalization in the white community, where everyone can aspire to an uncontroversial middle-classness, but that doesn't exist with nearly the same certainty in the black community.  

What comes out of that uncertainty are movies like Jumping the Broom, where a discomfort with the ability to remain authentically black at any level results in a critique of blackness at every level.  The disturbing undercurrent of this is that it turns Perry into Jakes into something more than entertainers; depending on your viewpoint, they either become prophets of the banal or predators feasting on the uncertainty of black adaptation.  Neither are particularly beneficial to black people, but following them makes you feel like you're doing something, even if it's just outdoing a terrible John Kraczynski romcom.

And by "person", I obviously mean "white guy":

From the outset, I have been very critical of Trump on the birther questions and have repeatedly called him a buffoon. Yet calling Trump a racial provocateur is a sure sign of intellectual laziness and descends the depths of disingenuousness. Trump has been a prominent public figure for decades. If he bore racial animus it would showed itself long ago. As misguided as Trump was to focus his attention on Obama's birth certificate, liberals are making the mistake of assuming that his criticism of President Obama is motivated solely by race.

Nobody is saying that Donald Trump is motivated solely by race.  He's also motivated by being an overly ambitious, attention-seeking bastard, by the body of slavering lunatics that make up a significant portion of the Republican base, and by the fact that he keeps getting nuzzled behind the ears and told to do the trick over again by reporters.  

But yeah, a huge part of the motivation behind Trump's birtherism is race.  If you're being charitable, you could potentially argue that Trump's birtherism is something akin to his anti-choice views: a position he's taken out of total ignorance of what the position actually entails.  He's not racist, he's just so blisteringly stupid that he's just saying things because they're popular, like a first grader who goes around saying curse words because older kids do.

What makes me think that Trump is either directly racist or presuming racism on the part of his audience are his demands for Obama's college records.  He claims he just wants to make sure Obama got good enough grades to get into Harvard, which seems like a bizarre demand - it's not clear who Obama would have known that would have gotten him into the second most prestigious law school in the nation with terrible grades.  However, the basis for the birther inquiry into Obama's college records isn't the belief that he's stupid, it's the belief that he claimed to be a foreign student to get into the Ivies (and, presumably, gain preferential admissions treatment).  

Coupled with his belief that Bill Ayers wrote Dreams From My Father, the Trump narrative becomes clear: not only is Barack Obama not one of us, but he's not even wily enough to infiltrate America on his own.  It took some misguided and fooled white liberals at Obama's colleges to let him in, it took a white radical to write his book for him, Obama was only on Harvard Law Review because of white liberals (and apparently didn't have to do any work while on the Law Review, which, having done the work of a Managing Editor and Editor-in-Chief this year, makes me wonder how that thing got published).  

The narrative that the birther brigade has adopted is simple: Barack Obama is alien.  Because he is alien, both in terms of his nationality and his race, his accomplishments cannot be his, and must be the result of a vast conspiracy of white Americans who wanted to use him (in the most contrived scheme of all time) to do...something.  At some point.  The reason this smacks of racism to so many minorities is because it's the same thing that every minority goes through when they succeed.  If you're young and black, you're sent the message that you have to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps and succeed, and stop whining about how you're such a victim.  If you do succeed, however, you've inherently victimized some cohort of white person, probably because someone gave you a leg up that they didn't have.  You can never win and never succeed on your own merits, unless you happen to pull a Bill Cosby and savage your brethren for not having your success.  Merit, particularly for blacks, is not a matter of what you've done, but a matter of what you're willing to let your success say about the unwashed hordes who trail behind you.

Barack Obama is suspect in the eyes of birthers because he is a prominent minority who refuses to burn the bridge behind him.  Whatever his failures as a President and as a leader, he is not willing to turn his race into a badge of shame in order to curry favor.  And because of that, we'll be talking about the Photoshop layers on his birth certificate until January of 2017.

As I expected, I was chastised in comments by a drive-by commenter who claimed paying attention to this birther thing is a waste of time, because important things are going on. It was the "ignore it and it'll go away" argument in another form, and I was happy at least that it seems so far only one person is trying to pull it.  Nonetheless, I think it's important to understand that this is about way more than a bunch of conservatives getting a crackpot idea in their head.  For that reason, I recommend watching Baratunde Thurston's video on what has transpired.

Like I said yesterday, one of the things that has happened is that Obama, by forcing this issue, has stripped the plausible deniability away from birthers that they are "just asking questions".  The fact that they're not satisfied as they claimed they would be demonstrates that this was never about a legitimate concern about his citizenship, but that they were groping around for a way to say that they will never accept black Americans as full Americans.  That Trump immediately switched to questioning Obama's education is telling, and if anything, it's more stark than questioning his birth certificate in demonstrating the racism of this whole fiasco.  This is because when Donald Trump talks, you get a strong feeling he has to pay someone to wipe his ass for him, because he's too stupid to figure it out for himself.  For him---a man stupid enough to claim that the right to privacy has nothing to do with abortion, a man who probably thinks that combover looks good---to suggest that Barack Obama isn't smart is pure, unadulterated racism. Baratunde is right to compare this birther thing to literacy tests and other Jim Crow laws that prevented black people from voting.  (And which Republicans are bringing back in places like Kansas and Florida.)  No matter what the cursory justifications for this are, the underlying reason for these kinds of "tests" on black Americans is to say over and over again that the people issuing the "tests" and demanding the "proof" don't agree that black Americans are American. And, in the case of Arizona with their "papers, please" law, saying that Hispanic Americans aren't American.  Or, as Sarah Palin puts it, Real Americans.

This right wing obsession with trying to kick large segments of our population out of the category Real Americans has immediate effects on the people being discriminated against, and it has effects far beyond that.  I'd argue that this culture war is why our country's screwed in so many ways.  Culture war got Bush into office, where he promptly started two unwinnable wars to bankrupt the country.  Culture war is why our Supreme Court nominations are so contentious, and why the court is now far to the right and cheerfully ripping up the legal rights of anyone who isn't a billionaire or a corporation.  it's why our economy is going down the drain, because large segments of the population are more concerned about making sure people they don't like don't get a piece of the pie that they are willing to stand by while a handful of rich people take it all from all of us.  The line-drawing of who is and isn't a Real American is complicated, but the biggest, most consistent aspect of it has been racism against black Americans.

The culture wars really got started with the battle over civil rights.  That's how domestic terrorism was born.  That's how Bible-thumping as a cover for reactionary politics was developed.  That's how Jerry Falwell got his start, as a segregationist.  That's how the modern Republican party formed, in response to federal laws banning discrimination and harassing voters at the polls.  There's a tendency in our country to pretend we've put all that behind us, but as the birther movement shows, that isn't so.  I'm not saying that progress hasn't been made, of course, but these culture wars over identity still shape our politics in disgusting ways.  The people who voted for Richard Nixon are still around, and they vote in larger numbers than the rest of the population, and so they and their Real American obsessions have an outsized influence on  this country. 

That's why I don't think the proper response to birtherism is to look away or minimize what's going on, because it makes everyone deeply uncomfortable. Culture warriors and racists benefit if everyone politely pretends they're not as vile as they are, and Trump is just the latest example of this.  Confrontation is how you fight this kind of bigoted bullshit. People who promote it are the lowest of the low, and people who coddle it should not get away with it.

From the heartland, a tale that perfectly illustrates the workaday dumbass resentments that Republicans rely on to get votes.  Kansas state legislator Connie O’Brien, Republican of course, was in a hearing on the subject of in-state tuition being granted to illegal immigrants who had Kansas state residency requirements.  She decided to go off on a rant that is similar to what’s going on around dining room tables and on Facebook every day:

  REP. O’BRIEN: My son who’s a Kansas resident, born here, raised here, didn’t qualify for any financial aid. Yet this girl was going to get financial aid. My son was kinda upset about it because he works and pays for his own schooling and his books and everything and he didn’t think that was fair. We didn’t ask the girl what nationality she was, we didn’t think that was proper. But we could tell by looking at her that she was not originally from this country. [...]

  REP. GATEWOOD: Can you expand on how you could tell that they were illegal?

  REP. O’BRIEN: Well she wasn’t black, she wasn’t Asian, and she had the olive complexion.

A lot of attention is rightly being paid to the “olive complexion” bit.  That’s kicking it old school style, going straight for the skin color when being racist, instead of trying to find ways to allude to skin color without actually saying anything about skin color.  (My favorite so far is to say you can totally tell by someone’s shoes that they’re an undocumented immigrant.)  And rightly so, though the reaction from right wingers to the outrage this sort of thing is to just look for more euphemisms they can use, instead of doing something as quaint as giving up their hobby of scanning the world, looking for non-white people having things and whipping yourself into an outrage. 

But I have to point out that this was far from the only stupid thing the woman said.  There’s also the fact that this was about in-state tuition, and she was complaining that her son didn’t get federal financial aid.  I would bet a lot of money that he did get in-state tuition, though. 

I think we should start calling this sort of thing “everyday birtherism”.  After all, both birtherism and this particular rant come from the same place, which is to say a belief that certain things—-financial aid, college degrees, the Presidency—-are only obtained by non-white people through fraud, or that there’s something illegitimate going on.  It’s interesting to me that Republicans who rail against federal spending then will turn around and claim they’re entitled to money from all federal programs, even those that were set up to aid people that aren’t as wealthy as they are.  Which is basically the heart of the “small government” claim.  It’s not that they want small government.  They just don’t want to share the public wealth with everyone, but just to keep it all for themselves. Thus, the “get government hands off my Medicare!”  That, translated from wingnut to English, means, “I don’t want other people to have the same privileges I have!” 

This is the same mentality behind Andrew Breitbart’s Pigford obsession, though he is slightly more sophisticated than this woman at creating plausible deniability.