But but but…Abe Lincoln was a Republican!  So African Americans should be voting Republican.  [Please ignore all intervening history and politics.]

What a vile cartoon.  But Jesse, great analysis.

I’m dumbfounded every time I see conservative bloggers trying to take the word “racist” back.

And seriously just glancing at the post, what the hell.  Liberals are reducing blacks to animals, encouraging them to wallow, liberals see black people as animal-like.  How hard do you have to project before you have an out-of-body experience?

What’s amazing is that these conservatives, or teabaggers, or whatever you call them, keep essentially claiming that African American voters are too stupid to know their own interests when they vote 90% + Democratic.  Despite all policy evidence.

And yet, it’s lower and middle income whites who tend to vote for a party that specifically sets out policies that make their lives worse.  Projection - not just a job in the movie business.

And once again, it seems to be more offensive to call somebody racist than it is to actually be a racist. Gah.

Clone6, I was sooo gonna make that point. Yes, its the Black Community that’s deluded into voting against their interests, not working-class white people who always vote for policies that help to improve their economic and educational situation. Jesus!

Jesse ignores the truth that only white conservatives understand: the old racism is over. The only racism left is possessed by people who think that the old racism still exists—prime example, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who indoctrinated our President with hate on a weekly basis. (and because white people are The Real America, the Rev. JW was anti-American.) Steve Colbert correctly captured their attitude when he said he—in his role as white conservative—didn’t see race.

Black people will deserve their place next to white people once they start scoring better on standardized tests. Affirmative Action proponents are the real racists.

I can’t say I’ve ever heard any one of any race say all work is slavery.

Good points Jesse.  That cartoon is un-fucking-believable. Or wait, maybe it is.

OT: Why do I feel oddly compelled to apologize on behalf of Jewish people because of the potential Jewish-ness of this Cohen asswipe? Heck, I’ll apologize on behalf of all white and can-sometimes-pass-as-white people: sorry we’re so so so attached to racism that we insist on seeing it everywhere except, heavens forfend, in ourselves.

Let me be the first to condemn your racism, Jesse, for having the poor taste to point out that racism still exists, and is expressed by a whole lot of people who want to wish it all away as if racism wasn’t built into the DNA of America.

Just remember, when you rightly point out the racist and privileged attitudes you see, you’re breaking the agreement that we made with (the late, and very white) Tony Snow (and in the wake of B. Hussein’s election to POTUS): if we just pretend to never recognize the existence of racism — oh, for the next few thousand years or so — then it will magically disappear!  Clap louder!...

Amanda,

Well, other than this guy.  But yes, your point remains valid.

I thought the cartoon was sarcasm, observing what the conservatives say, as the second panel is obviously not racial, yet they often claim it on TV.

I’m sure its bad, but that cartoon strikes me as kinda funny. Something about the portrayal of the white guy, the way he’s exactly the same in the two panels. Does he go though life like that?

Crissa—

I thought the cartoon might me satirical at first, too, until I saw the site it came from. You know, like one is Obama in reality, and the other is Obama as racist conservatives imagine him.

If racism causes suffering, you get around it by blaming the suffering on the victims.

Why does the conservative approach to racism sound so much like the ‘ignore them and they’ll go away’ advice from last week’s Bullying thread?

As if it’s possible to ‘ignore’ people with the power to deny you business loans/mortgages, control what neighborhood you live in and what schools you attend.

Amanda @#8—I’d take it as an exaggeration of something many of us do say, which is that many jobs are wage-slavery: they don’t pay enough to provide any kind of security and workers scrabble for necessities; the supervisors are also underpaid and overworked and kick their misery downward; the bosses get angry if the workers think for themselves, much less consider collective action; workers are lied to in good times about the availability of other jobs and the pay scale at rival companies: etc, etc. We are no longer people (personnel), but resources that happen to be human.

Samantha Vimes, I couldn’t have said it better myself, though I wouldn’t go so far as to say that you or I examining the job market in that way is what’s responsible for low employment among the black population. Because, you know, that would be insane.

There is an element of truth to that comic, you just have to rejigger it a bit.

Get rid of Obama, he makes no sense being in there. Turn around the perspective, so it’s the businessman who is stealing money via raising monopoly rates or cutting wages or whatever.

THATS’S the proper analogy. Conservatives get all up in arms because they don’t want to admit the truth. That the problems they see in lower-income levels (It’s not race by and large. It’s income level), are a reflection of their own twisted ethos of greed, selfishness and short-sightedness. Just without the access and privilege.

I thought the cartoon was sarcasm, observing what the conservatives say, as the second panel is obviously not racial, yet they often claim it on TV.

Poe’s Law.

Anyways, once I understood that pretty much everything conservatives say ever is projection, my understanding of American politics improved.

Just a thought… I wonder if the phrase “soft bigotry of low expectations” was invented by a wingnut.

I wonder if the phrase “soft bigotry of low expectations” was invented by a wingnut.

You probably don’t need to wonder that. Like, I think you can just assume that one.

As compared, of course, to the hard bigotry of lynchings and segregation… because you know, IOKIYAW.

Thinking about this puts me awfully close to Godwin territory, by way of Alice Miller. Miller argued that abusive childrearing methods produced a generation of people ripe for committing atrocities because they had been taught to deny their basic understanding and emotional responses to abuse. As a result, when they felt horror or outrage at what their superiors ordered, they “knew” that those orders must be following a higher morality than their mere senses of decency and fairness.

Here we’re seeing a whole chunk of our society full of people training themselves to believe that reality is whatever their pundits tell them, even—or maybe especially—if it contradicts what they can see with their own eyes. And even if it’s the opposite of what the same pundits said last month.

I am not sure that the soft bigotry of low expectations is a strictly wingnut concept—there seems to be ample evidence that in mixed-race schools white kids are given the benefit of the doubt while black students are shipped off to special ed in a heart beat. It is also behind the mentality that white kids make mistakes and black kids are just rotten to the core. It is a valid concept, as long as you don’t view it through a conservative “the only real racists are those who acknowledge racism” type lens.

Point taken, Samantha, but I’ll also point out that the more you really consider the realities of slavery, the more uncomfortable those comparisons become.  Personally speaking, I try to be mindful of not comparing the cycle of poverty to slavery, though I’m sure I’ve not been 100% on this.  Not because I don’t think the cycle of poverty isn’t a grave injustice, but I think there’s a real danger of forgetting exactly how bad slavery was as it fades into our country’s historical memory.  There’s already a lot of erasing of the history of slavery.  I don’t want to contribute.

Wasn’t “soft bigotry” from St. Ronnie?

I didn’t feel the post in question was as elucidatingly racist as that one last year that claimed that “[Obama’s] sky-high ratings among African-Americans make some of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually are.”

Comment #24: alysia on 04/05 at 07:41 PM

I am not sure that the soft bigotry of low expectations is a strictly wingnut concept—there seems to be ample evidence that in mixed-race schools white kids are given the benefit of the doubt while black students are shipped off to special ed in a heart beat.

This sort of pattern is repeatedly demonstrated in studies about racial prejudice at all sorts of domains.  From memory: clearly qualified black applicants tend to do about or nearly as well as comparably qualified white ones, whereas unclearly qualified white applicants do a lot better than comparable blacks.

Vacuumslayer, it was the Shrub.  Or rather his speechwriter, Michael Gerson.

I’m a racist because I think liberals have sold blacks a bill of goods by convincing them that, because slavery was work, all work is slavery.

He can’t just come out and say that black people are lazy so he makes up this “liberals convinced them to hate work” thing.

But the cartoonist is David Cohen, and while I don’t appreciate all his cartoons, they’re not uniformly winger.

So many white people absolutely completely KNOW that they “bootstrapped” themselves to their present position; that their economic status is entirely due their own hard work and talent, and no help from anyone, no sir!

It isn’t true, in fact these people had plenty of help from birth, assistance is denied to minorities, equal opportunity laws or not.

Another belief of white folks is that *There isn’t Enough to Go Around”.  They are convinced that opportunities and resources are *limited*, when in fact they are being hoarded by the 2%ers at the top, and doled out stingily, mostly to whites, but sometimes to a minority, just for yuks, I think.

Liberals know that there IS plenty of opportunity, there are lots of resources, enough for everyone, black, female, handicapped and so on, to benefit; but it must be wrested from the hands of the greedy few.

I expect this is an obvious idea, hope I’m not being sophomoric.  I want to think about it a bit.

Sometimes i think there are people who HOPE the pie is limited because what is the fun of success if you can’t sneer at those who are less well off.

This also doesn’t take into account the fact that minorities, women, and the poor are penalized much more harshly for any missteps they make in life.  In our society, some people are given a wide margin for error while other people get next to none.

Kwillow:

“There Isn’t Enough To Go Around” is the bedrock of US conservatism. The funny thing is, someone with even a slight understanding of macroeconomics (*especially* the conservative crowd that’s obsessed with economic growth) should be able to realize in an instant that the zero sum game is complete and utter horseshit.

“There Isn’t Enough To Go Around” is the bedrock of US conservatism. The funny thing is, someone with even a slight understanding of macroeconomics (*especially* the conservative crowd that’s obsessed with economic growth) should be able to realize in an instant that the zero sum game is complete and utter horseshit.

And then anyone with a basic knowledge of physics will wonder what the hell the economists were smoking…

(Note that the pie is still pretty big and unfairly distributed, though, even with physical limits to growth, so there’s still plenty of room for improvement. And if you make the right decisions, some of those limits will be rather plastic)

I find it interesting nobody took the obvious point that SLAVERY WAS NOT WORK.  I can’t explain this enough, but slavery was not and cannot be work.  As a slave you can DO work, but it is not work.  The issue with slavery is owning other people, splitting up families, and raping people as they saw fit.  I could go into further detail but really it is obvious.  This is the perfect description of why republicans are still racist, they can’t accept that slavery was fundamentally bad and shouldn’t be used in comparisons but they still make the subtle remarks and intonations that blacks are fundamentally lazy.

The argument that there isn’t enough and yet small businesses are the growth engine of America are in direct contradiction with each other in the right.  They never want to explain real economics because then they would have to admit Ron Paul knows nothing beyond the woman’s neither regions and shouldn’t be writing books on these theorems.

On a semi-related note, did anybody else read the latest column from Mike Adams?

http://townhall.com/columnists/MikeAdams/2010/04/05/the_wall_of_hate

It’s bad even for his standards.

truth is life:

Well, yes, there are real world limits, the same way as a computer is a finite approximation of a Turing machine. But as long as there’s room for growth, it’s not zero sum, and the use of fiat currency (among other things) pushes that flexibility a bit further.

#31

the cartoonist is David Cohen, and while I don’t appreciate all his cartoons, they’re not uniformly winger.

What were we saying about low expectations? I forget.

#25

I think there’s a real danger of forgetting exactly how bad slavery was as it fades into our country’s historical memory.  There’s already a lot of erasing of the history of slavery.

This worries me too. One of my relatives recently claimed that the Irish were treated “worse than slaves” in the late 19th century USA. I should have destroyed that argument right there but did not.

Wasn’t the “soft bigotry” thing first said by Daniel Patrick Moynihan?  I believe it was part of his thoughtful critique of the direction that the welfare state was taking.  However, it has since been perverted into a hammer with which the haves pound on the have-nots.  As if they didn’t already have enough bludgeoning tools to use on the poor and brown.

No, I am wrong.  Moynihan never said it.  It was Dubya, which is laugh-out-loud ironic.

God damn it, I know I’ve stopped blogging in the last year or so, and don’t have any kind of right to the word, but if you’re gonna be a ridiculous racist, “bookworm,” could ya please find your own nom de plume?

I think the “not enough stuff” argument is a symptom of conservative thinking, not a basis. For people who think like conservatives, no matter how much the “haves” collect, it’s still not enough.