James Baldwin Explains 400 Years of US History in One Minute

Via Corey Robin, one of the most amazing 60 seconds you'll ever hear in regards to the state of racism in America:



Are we really that surprised that all these years later, James Baldwin would still be the victim of racism? An Associated Press poll released last year showed that 69% of Republicans and 32% of Democrats are racist toward blacks. But just try putting that little fact in some smug right wing faces and watch them run away.

The Long Arc of the Moral Universe

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”--MLK

The older I get, the more I wonder about this. Yes, things are much better for many people. Poor people are still poor, but hey, according to uber-right Heritage Foundation, it's not so bad because they have refrigerators now! Way to bend that arc, boys!

Remember this King of Ironies: the motel where MLK was assassinated (while in Memphis fighting for union garbage collectors) is just blocks from the Peabody hotel where a bunch of ducks live in the Penthouse.

The GOP has all hands on deck trying to bend that arc back in the direction of rich white people. They stick their pry bar of fact-denial under the big arc, rest it on the fulcrum of hate and bigotry, hook up their elephants, and pull with all their might.

When faced with the fact that 45,000 people per year die because they don't have health insurance, they send out Senator 1% from Arizona, or former Senator Shitlube, to claim that it's not a lack of health care that kills them, but something else. Maybe they died because they chose to be poor. Or, in Santorum's case, maybe he thinks they're all gay and deserve to die for choosing that lifestyle. Or something.

"Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think."--MLK

I can only imagine the headache Santorum gave himself when he tried to explain that he really said "blah people" instead of "black people." (So much for the Blah vote.) But then, Republicans, and apparently some Democrats and Independents, don't give a damn about the black vote. In fact, the southern strategy dictates that they get out there and blow those dog whistles just as loudly as they can if they want to get the vote that matters down south. Their continued battle against the Civil Rights Act might not get much traction outside the Paul campaign, but the GOP's war against the 1965 Voting Rights Act continues to this day, because their winning strategy is made up of two parts: get racist whites out to vote, and keep black people home. LBJ had some great things to say about this when he was getting the Voting Rights Act passed, as Charles P. Pierce pointed out in this awesome piece: On Our National Holiday, America's Everlasting War.

Race has popped up in the campaign this year. Newt Gingrich tripped over it while talking about food stamps and let's not even deal with the preposterous lie that Rick Santorum told about how he really said "blah people." Both of them were talking in gussied-up code, and they professed to be mystified as to how anyone could possibly think such a thing. And, of course, race has been a central theme (never a subtext; don't even try to make that case) in the irrational hatred directed at the current occupant of the White House. And it's not possible to read Lyndon's great speech — in which he called out  "every device of which human ingenuity is capable, has been used to deny this right" — and not think of all the smart little clerks all over the country with their smart little voter-ID laws who are so damned mystified as to why people are so upset.

Nobody is trying to bend that arc back more than Ron "Hate Whitey Day" Paul. The fact that a major candidate for President can get a large chunk of primary votes based on a philosophy that would allow states to return to Jim Crow and force women to give birth should be a shock, but it is not. A huge chunk of Republicans want to return to the 1950's, when women stayed home, even New Yorkers hated a black football hero (until he proved how well he could play), fire-hoses and dogs kept black people in their place, and wire clothes-hangers doubled as surgical tools. The only difference between Ron Paul and the whitest man to run for President in a long time is that Romney's religion was officially racist until 1978, while Paul maintains that just because he would let states return to their racist days doesn't mean he's a bigot.

On this point, I wonder what President Paul would do when Mississippi passes a law outlawing interracial marriage again, or when Texas passed a new anti-sodomy law despite the Supreme Court's ruling on Lawrence v. Texas...

Meanwhile, our extremely successful President faces a desertion from a bunch of lefties who, despite having handed GW Bush his "victory" in 2000 by voting for Ralph Nader in Florida and New Hampshire, apparently think there's no difference between Obama and Mitt Romney (who's foreign policy team is a who's who of Dick Cheney's war mongering friends).

Exactly how does one bend the long moral arc of the universe toward justice when a bunch of people who don't know what Strategic Voting means just stop pushing on our own lever, and let the GOP win?

Bachmann's Dog Whistle Politics: Concern Trolling Black People

Michele Bachmann jumped at the chance to sign Bob Vander Plaats's Marriage Vow, which includes this ear piercing statement:

Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA's first African-American President.

Any time a Republican talks about slavery, you should pay close attention. And, what's up with singling out Obama for the time frame reference? Has the rate of single parent black families gone up since Obama became president? According to the Annie E Casey foundation's Kid's Count, 67% of African American children lived in a single parent household in 2009.  In 2008, under President Bush, it was 65%. Not a really big difference, so why mention Obama? Maybe Vander Plaats has some of these suddenly politically involved people working for him:

Some Neo-Nazis have also quietly been joining national campaigns and offices to start sharpening their political teeth, he claims.  “We have people working with the most recent incoming class of freshmen in the House,” says Culpepper. “And they don’t even know it.”

To be kind to Vander Plaats, I suppose his group is simply trying to state, in stark terms, how bad it is that so many black children have to grow up with only one parent these days. It's so bad, in fact, that it should be compared to the "disasterous impact" of slavery. Sure, it's hyperbole, but they're trying to use "facts" to make a point. Since Republicans aren't used to working with real facts, I will try to help them out.

First of all, the footnote to that dog whistle sends one off to an Institute for American Values publication, The Consequences of Marriage for African Americans. Since no page number is given, I looked at all references to slavery and could only find data referring to 1880. So, right off the bat, it seems Vander Plaat has done what Republicans love to do: he made shit up.

Also, consider the source. The Institute for American Values was founded by David Blankenhorn, who made the news just the other day with this gem that many Mormons will just love:

David Blankenhorn, founder of the Institute for American Values in New York, said polygamy was more in line with core values than same-sex marriage. At least polygamists, he said, were faithful to the concept of a union between man and woman.

How is marrying many women faithful to the concept of a union between a man and a woman (singular)? Maybe because regular sex with different women is less icky to him than gay sex. Of course, the Bible has all kinds of fun marriage types that are approved by God, and polygamy is one of them.

Next, it seems that Vander Plaats completely ignored the question of mixed race children of slaves, of which there were many.

The Southern author Mary Chesnut wrote in her famous A Diary from Dixie of the Civil War-era about the hypocrisy of a woman's recognizing white men's children among the slaves in every household but her own. Fanny Kemble, the British actress who married an American slaveholder, wrote about her observations of slavery as well, including the way white men used slave women and left their mixed-race children enslaved.

It's obvious that, since the master and father of this slave didn't live in the slave housing with the mother, this child was not living with both parents.

Actual facts about slavery put the Vander Plaats quote in some context. Since it seems that what he and Presidential candidates Bachmann and Rick Santorum believe is that children are better off with two parents in the house: so much better off, in fact, that a child born a slave in 1860 would be better off (because she had two parents) than a child born today who is living with only one parent. So, here are a few facts about slave children that will make it obvious to anyone what a huge dog whistle this is (note that just a few days ago, I predicted Bachmann would start blowing the dog whistles):

Most infants were weaned within three or four months.

Half of all slave babies died in the first year of life--twice the rate for white babies.

The average birth weight of slave infants was less than 5.5 pounds.

Children entered the labor force as early as 3 or 4. Some were taken into the master's house to be servants while others were assigned to special children's gangs called "trash gangs," which swept yards, cleared drying cornstalks from fields, chopped cotton, carried water to field hands, weeded, picked cotton, fed work animals, and drove cows to pasture.

By age 7, over 40 percent of the boys and half the girls had entered the work force. At about 11, boys began to transfer to adult field jobs.

Nearly a third of slave laborers were children...

Diarrhea, dysentery, whooping cough, and respiratory diseases as well as worms pushed the infant and early childhood death rate of slaves to twice that experienced by white infants and children.

So, things really sucked for slave children in 1860, but, hey, they were living with both parents! Yay! Ponies and glitter! On a side note, the current Republican Governor of Maine might like the child labor practices of that day, and Bachmann's dislike of the minimum wage law certainly seems like a hearkening back to the day when the job creators weren't hampered by pesky regulations regarding the welfare of the workers.

Anyone aware of the southern strategy will know damn well what Vander Plaats and Bachmann are up to here. Remember what Lee Attwater said:

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968, you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

Lee Attwater's boss in the Reagan administration, Ed Rollins, is Michele Bachmann's campaign manager. So, it's not much of a stretch to realize that when they "sit around saying" black children had a better chance of having two parents when they were slaves, they're not being very abstract at all.

The Confederate Party is Busy Rewriting History

"Our new government is founded upon … the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition."— Alexander Stephens, "vice president" of the Confederacy, March 21, 1861

Seems the majority of people "remembering" the Civil War for its 150th anniversary are really rewriting history. 

The South would change its view as well. It would begin to spin grand, romantic fables of a "Lost Cause" that had been fought for 'state's rights" or constitutional principle, or any other reason it could invent, so long as it was not slavery. Jefferson Davis, who before the war had flatly declared "the labor of African slaves" the cause of the rebellion, would write after the war that slavery had nothing to do with it.

Like Davis before them, the current Confederates want people to think that the Civil War was about state's rights. Well, yeah. State's rights to keep slavery legal, and to expand slavery into the territories (see Bleeding Kansas). They want you to think the south fought a valiant effort to restrain an out-of-control federal government, with, of course, parallels to today's socialist Muslim Kenyan's government.


What a crock of shit.


These people who want you to think the Civil War was about states rights are, quite simply, racists. To forget that slavery was the cause of the civil war is to paper over this country's racist past. Why would anyone want to do that? To perpetuate the practice of racism. Ask any Teabagger/Republican/Confederate party member of today why they want to gut government spending on social programs, they'll tell you we're broke, and that welfare is for parasites--mainly lazy minorities. 


There will be no mention of corporate welfare. No mention that Michelle Bachman's family farm got over a quarter million in farm subsidies in between 19995 and 2006. No mention of George Bush's idiotic war in Iraq. No mention of Bush's unfunded Medicare prescription drug benefit (corporate welfare to big pharma). Complete ignorance that the TARP bailout was Bush's. If you do manage to corner them on GW's drunken-chicken-hawk-spending ways, they'll be happy to tell you that they didn't approve of Bush's spending either.


Liars.


It's what they do. During the Bush administration, those same people would have told you that Bush's tax cuts for the rich were going to spur the economy to new Galtian heights. We all saw how that worked out. Some of us actually remember the Clinton Surplus that Bush stole from our children in typical reverse-Robin-Hood fashion.


It's one thing to listen to them rewrite the history of Bush. It's another thing to listen to them claim that the Civil War was not about slavery.  Those fighting for the south were racist traitors (and the modern Confederates still want to aid and abet the theft of labor). Those fighting for the north were heroes. And we should never forget, or allow others to obfuscate, why.

Lil' Help on Byrd for Josh Marshall

In his excellent look into racism in the US Senate following the passing of Robert Byrd, Josh Marshall wonders if you can ever really know what someone feels in their heart in regard to racism. I think Josh isn't giving himself credit for having just estimated quite accurately, I would wager.

People change over the course of their lives. This we know. Whether they change out of conviction or opportunism is very difficult to judge. Indeed, it's often a false dichotomy because overtime we come to believe what we find it convenient and expedient to believe. I think the operative question is what they do. 

People eventually do what's in their hearts. I'm from Arkansas, which was a lot like West Virginia (mining, union jobs, middle class, religious).  I knew older men Byrd's age, some relatives. They were kind, gentle, intelligent, and ambitious. They won WWII. They grew up in a different age. They told racist jokes. They treated other races like a novelty, an oddity, almost like a afliction--like the handicapped. They grew up apart from other races, and as they realized (as they were being forced together by the Civil Rights laws) that other people were just that: people.

I think they were embarrassed by their former selves, and many went on to make great strides for the people they had ignored and ridiculed for so long. People do change. Some for the better. Others, like Trent Lott, don't. They just occasionally say something that tips you off to what they think, but long ago learned to not say in public.

Viral Email Hatred - the Muslim "Christmas" Stamp Crap

An otherwise regular person I know, someone with no obvious racial hatred of bigotry, forwarded an email calling for a "boycott" of a Muslim "Christmas" stamp. The mail itself, one of many we've all gotten, didn't really surprise me. The person who sent it did.

Here's my reply:

First of all, this is not a "Christmas" stamp, and it's not new. You can read the history of this "controversy" here.

Interesting that even "president" Bush promotes this stamp on the White House web site.

Now, if I were to go back in history, say, to the Panama invasion where American forces killed 3000 innocent civilians, and then I said that was a "Christian firebombing" of an entire city block, that wouldn't really be fair to the Christian religion, now would it? Or, what if we said that the 1,000,000 Iraqi Civilians killed in Iraq were the result of a "Christian" invasion? That wouldn't be fair.

I try to remember that when I see religious nuts like Muslim Bombers or the Reverend Fred Phelps (who shows up at soldiers' funerals saying they died because we condone homosexuality), that they do not represent their whole religion. That's why this email is obviously from a bigot, recirculated now from a probable Giuliani supporter who knows the Republicans are going to lose unless they scare everyone with the big bad Muslim bogey man.

About a year ago, the Muslim woman who lives around here was trying to get someone to give her car a jump. No one would help her. When I stopped, she was crying. Her kids were in the back seat crying. I felt so bad for her. She couldn't stop thanking me. She never bombed anyone. She was just grocery shopping.

Turns out that in this Mormon neighborhood, I--a devout agnostic--did the most "Christian" thing.

Furthermore, this email goes on to suggest that I'm not patriotic because I won't boycott this stamp. I'm so sick of these right wing nut cases saying that because I don't buy into their particular line of racist crap that I'm not patriotic. Please tell me who wrote this, or just send this mail back to them. I'd like to let them know that there are plenty of patriotic Americans who think it is people like them who are ruining this country. I'd like them to call me unpatriotic to my face.

Please keep sending me these things so I can point out how crazy and bigoted they are.