| Sunday, June 07, 2009 |
| Are white conservatives suffering from 'discrimination envy?' |
//So I went and committed myself to taking part in this multi-part "conversation on race" over at Open Salon. (Had I known it was going to be this much work I might have thought better of it, but there you go...) Anyway, here's my entry. You can view previous parts the series here. //
I thought I'd heard it all when Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the first state to secede from the Union over slavery, demanded that Judge Sonia Sotomayor... an Hispanic woman ... apologize, presumably to all white men for saying, as we've now heard umpteen times on cable news (and never in context,) that she would "hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would make a better decision than a white man who hadn't lived that experience."
Never mind the context, Graham was offended "as a white guy," and he was just one part of the feeding frenzy on the right which followed the unveiling of that statement. It was almost as fascinating as listening to conservatives try to explain that, really really, the underwhelming Clarence Thomas wasn't nominated to the Supreme Court pretty much just because he's black and conservative. Sotomayor has been called everything from an "affirmative action baby" (never mind her honors graduation from Princeton and seat at the head of the Yale Law Review) and most pointedly, a "racist!..." including by Newt "Tweets" Gingrich (who soon took it back...) and right wing radio jock Rush Limbaugh, whose racial bona fides include once telling a black caller to "take that bone out of [her] nose" and call him back. The Sotomayor Derangement Syndrome sprang in part from her daring to join organiations while in college that celebrated her Puerto Rican heritage, and for associating herself with the National Council of La Raza, which the arguably insane Congressman Tom Tancredo (who once called Miami a "third world country" because there are too many Latinos down rehe for his taste,) likened to the Ku Klux Clan. Well beam me up, Scotty.
The charges of reverse racism were made with such zeal and relish -- you almost begin to wonder whether the loud mouths were blowing the dog whistle or hearing it; somehow following what they knew to be an underlying and very real anxiety, even a kind of "discrimination envy" -- among white men of a certain age; plus a frustration about being the only group that doesn't get to cry "ism" when their feelings are hurt.
Indeed, for white men in America, it's been one hell of a half century. From desegregation to affirmative action to the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of '64 and '65, the last 50 or so years have been a period of steady deterioration for the image of white man as America's boss and father figure. In America's collective theater of the mind, white men have traversed from Neil Armstrong and JFK to Al Bundy, Dick Nixon and Jimmy Carter. J.R. Ewing, Don Johnson and Ronald Reagan reinvigorated the brand for a while, but it didn't last.
On television in the 1970s, the fed up white guy was represented by Archie Bunker, who felt free to rail against blacks, foreigners, assertive women and all the rest of what was wrong with the Brave New multicultural world, but only inside his house. The Reagan era brought us a reinvented Archie named Rush Limbaugh -- far less lovable, louder and more blandly vicious than the Norman Lear character (and three times less capable of keeping a wife,) but still venting a real frustration at what seemed to be a world filled with teachers who want his kids to learn Spanish, Mexicans who are taking all the jobs (and not learning English), and Hollywierdos who fill his TV with blacks, browns and "queers", and who keep telling him, in ways large and small, that people like him -- meat and potatoes, Christian white men like the kind who "built this country" and who like their big cars, their cigarettes and their women in skirts -- aren't cool anymore. By the time Archie took its last Klieg lights in the late 70s, Title IX and affirmative action (whose dirty little secret is that it benefits white women more than any other group) had ripped June Cleaver from the kitchen and created a new generation of board room hustle-women who don't want to get married or have kids until they turned 40, or ever, and who don't like to be called "gal."
The 80s and 90s brought hip-hop, where a white guy pretty much has to muse about killing his mama to be taken seriously, and which stole a generation of young white college guys from good old rock and roll. Baseball was taken by the Latinos, basketball and football by the "brothas," hell even golf eventually fell to Tiger Woods (though he's not actually black according to him, he's "Coblanasian," which is black for "please don't call me black.") And there were the Cosbys, who forever replaced the Cleavers as the prototypical American TV family. (To add insult to injury, the show that for a long time was the lead in to Cosby was "Family Ties," in which the lone conservative white male character, Alex P. Keaton, was often the butt of the plot's jokes.)
In 2008, the real live Cosby family showed up. In a matter of months, as Barack Obama began to be taken seriously by the press, by voters, and by the Clintons, the cool white dude playing the sax and wearing shades on the "Arsenio Hall Show" was shoved aside by the even cooler Black/mixed dude with better shades, who was aiming to become the REAL "first black president." You could almost hear Bill Clinton's head exploding every day of the campaign. Clinton went from the guy who lamented the way politicians campaign among "all these insecure white folk" by scaring the hell out of them, to the guy trying desperately to scare the hell out of them on behalf of his wife's campaign.
It's cold comfort, it seems, that white men still controll 85 percent of the nation's board rooms, hold 84 percent of the highest corporate titles (CEO, COO and the like,) and that "just 6 percent of corporate America's top money earners are women," and "only 3 percent of board members are women of color." There is exactly one black female CEO of a major corporation in the U.S. (her name is Ursula Burns, and she now runs Xerox.)
Blacks and Hispanics may dominate on the diamond, court and field, but white men still control 95% of professional NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball franchises.
In Hollywood, Will Smith may have replaced Tom Cruise as the modern era's top earner and box office king, and Shonda Rimes ("Grey's Anatomy" creator") and Oprah may be at the top of the money market, but the majority of films featuring black actors are rehashes of "Boys in the Hood" or slapstick comedies, as Spike Lee has wryly pointed out. On television, the buffoonery is even worse, with not a "Cosby Show" in sight. (If you don't believe me, try being a black Hollywood actress for a day who isn't Halle Berry ...) And across the entertainment spectrum, don't let Diddy and Jay Z fool you, the vast majority of entertainment industry executives are NOT African-American (and neither are the vast majority of its stars.)
In fact, if you look at any statistic, from poverty, to unemployment to high school graduation rates, and on and on, and you'll find that in reality, black and brown people haven't even come close to catching, let alone eclipsing, white men.
So why all the gnashing of teeth It's called politics. In 2008, Barack Obama became the first Democrat to win a majority of the popular vote (53%) since Jimmy Carter. And while he didn't win a majority of the white vote, he won enough of it (43%) to carry him to victory, because he swept every other demographic group, particularly minorities and young people. There was a particularly fixation with white voters and their relationship to Obama during the campaign, and for good reason. Prior to last year, the notion of a black U.S. president -- particularly one named Barack Hussein Obama -- seemed almost absurd, mainly because it was assumed that white people would never vote for such a person (remember how wrong people like Pat Buchanan and Chris Matthews were about white voters in Pennsylvania and Ohio?) But the 2008 election proved a point that Buchanan, Gingrich and other seasoned politicos, and even the portly Mr. Limbaugh understand. Namely, the country's population, and voters, are shifting steadily brownward.
Thus the panic that Limbaugh, Buchanan, Gingrich, Bill O'Reilly and others are exhibiting, about "racism," about Sotomayor, the Ricci case (and "Lou Dobbs" nightly jeremiads about illegal immigration,) is not the panic of people who really believe that minorities are outshining white men economically or even socially. It's the panic of men who hear the drumbeat of the next national election, one that will be held after all the damage that's been done to the GOP, by the GOP with Hispanic voters (and long since with blacks.) Meanwhile, the percentage of white voters in the 2008 voting population shrank precipitously:
"The overall message is total ballots cast by white Americans was down, while African Americans and Latinos cast way more ballots than they did in 2004," said Jody Herman, a researcher with Project
Vote. "And young voters, age 18-29, cast over 1.8 million more ballots than in 2005, which is a 9 percent increase. That increase was greater than any other age group." ... In contrast, 2.88 million more African Americans, 1.52 million more Latinos, 67,000 more Asian Americans and 1.32 million members of other minorities, voted this fall compared to four years ago. That is 1.18 million fewer white voters and 6.96 million more minority voters.
Moreover, precisely which white voters stayed home was telling:
"I think absolutely white Republicans did not show up," he said. "They were turned off, disillusioned. They did not turn out. Democratic voters did come out. They couldn't wait to vote." When Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980, his voters were 98 percent white. Had he received the same turnout of whites, blacks and Hispanics as we saw in 2008, he would have lost the election. Which brings us back to Lindsey Graham, Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan, Gingrich and others, (plus this guy) plus the right's favorite drum major: Fox News. Their two-week orgy of Sotomayor condemnation seems tailor made to target the white guys out there who really do feel like so many Frank Riccis -- victimized by "Jim Crow liberalism," having studying harder and overcoming more obstacles than the pampered Princetonians and birth certificate hiding Harvard grads living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, with their exotic childhoods and degreed pomposity, and yet, being denied opportunities at work, at colleges, in sports, and hell, in life ... wait for it ... because they're white. To those Archie Bunkers out there, who found their voices (and their pitchforks) at Sarah Palin rallies and who don't realize G. Gordon Liddy is an actual criminal (or that Limbaugh, Hannity and Beck are not actually delivering the "news,") and who wouldn't care anyway, because these people are speaking up for them, the leaders of the right -- such as they are -- are offering to lead a new civil rights movement, which shall consist mainly of voting Republican.
Cross-posted at OpenSalon.Labels: affirmative action, angry white men, Barack Obama, first Black president, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, Lindsey Graham, Newt Gingrich, race and politics, race in America, Rush Limbaugh |
posted by JReid @ 3:19 PM   |
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| Sunday, May 31, 2009 |
| Lindsey Graham: Sotomayor should apologize to white people |
We have truly entered the Bizarro World of right wing politics. Senator Lindsey Graham, who represents South Carolina, the first state to secede from the Union, and a former bastion of slavery and Jim Crow, has now officially demanded that Sonia Sotomayor... an Hispanic woman ... apologize to all white men for making them feel bad.
Yep. That's it. I've now heard it all.
 BTW, I wonder if that nut-bag Tom Tancredo will now call Miss Lindsey a quasi member of the KKK for having addressed La Raza on the subject of immigration reform back in 2007...?
Labels: civil war, Hispanics, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, Lindsey Graham, race and politics, Republicans in the wilderness, Supreme Court, the Confederacy, U.S. history |
| posted by JReid @ 10:45 PM |
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| Sunday, April 26, 2009 |
| The CNN torture echo chamber |
Has CNN adopted an editorial policy of ignoring altogether, the finding reported last week by McClatchy, that the serial torture of "high value detainees" Khalid Sheikh Muhammad and Abu Zubaydah was done not to prevent another terrorist attack, but rather to try and extract false confessions that would tie Saddam Hussain to 9/11?
John King this morning (Sunday) had on Diane Feinstein, Lindsey Graham and the treacherous Mr. Lieberman to discuss, among other things, the release of the torture memos. Lieberman and Graham were allowed, unimpeded by King, to repeat the meme that "enhanced interrogation techniques" (torture) was used, in Graham's words, "not to commit a crime against individual people, but to save us all from another attack."
At that point, King might have interjected that a senior U.S. inteligence official and a former Army psychiatrist have stated that the Bush administration's desire to invade Iraq was central to the torture program (a desire that was shared by Mr. Lieberman for many years, by the way...) and asked his guests for comment.
He interjected no such thing. In fact, I don't recall hearing the McClatchy story repeated on CNN in any daypart since the news broke last week. Has anyone else noticed what seems like an editorial decision to stick to the official (Bush-Cheney) narrative about torture being necessary to prevent another attack? Perhaps CNN simply doesn't believe McClatchy's sources, or maybe they don't want to open up this line of inquiry against the prior administration for reasons unknown.
(Not that NBC has been exactly aggressive, other than Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow's shows about making this point, either, but CNN seems to be particularly determined to hew to the Cheney line.)
Meanwhile, what will Howie Kurtz do...?
Cross-posted at TPM Cafe.Labels: CNN, Diane Feinstein, Iraq war, Joe Lieberman, John King, Lindsey Graham, Senate, torture, torture memos |
| posted by JReid @ 10:03 AM |
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| Sunday, June 22, 2008 |
| Meet the Press disappointment |
What a letdown.
I was all prepared to give Brian Williams a chance as the temporary moderator of MTP, which has been part of the Sunday staple in our house for a decade, any my life for long before that. The guests promised to be interesting: Miss Lindsey Graham vs. one of my favorite presidential contenders, Joe Biden. Well ... in two words... it sucked.
Perhaps Biden wasn't properly prepared, but he seemed completely unable to coherently defend Barack Obama's decision to opt out of public financing, even conceding that Obama's decision probably contributes to breaking the system. Putting aside, if I can, the fact that Williams spent at least 20 minutes on this subject, much more time than it deserves, why didn't Biden simply turn to McCain's smirkly little defedress, and tell her the following:
"First of all, Lindsey, I can guarantee you that the moms and dads watching us today who are worrying about how they'll aford the mortgage or where they're gonna get $100 to fill up their gas tanks next week aren't too worried about the fact that Barack Obama isn't gonna use their tax money to run his campaign."
"Second, John McCain is hardly in a position to lecture Barack Obama about keeping his word when he has flip-flopped on everything he used to say he believed in, whether it's tax breaks for the rich, torture, or offshore oil drilling."
"And third, Brian, wasn't it David Shuster at your network who reported that John McCain has jumped in and out of the campaign finance system himself, first using a promise to stay in the system to get a loan, then trying to wriggle out of public financing when he thought he'd raise more money? Brian and Lindsey, you both know that the Democratic National Committee even filed a lawsuit against my friend John McCain's campaign, precisely because he has broken his word repeatedly on this issue." See how easy that was? Three simple freaking talking points, none of which was uttered by Joe Biden, who has been so spectacular in responding to everything from Rudy "noun, verb and 9/11" Giuliani, to the McCain stance on Iraq.
It was an unfortunate miss by Biden, but an even greater one by the once crack researchers of "Meet the Press," who apparently spent the week digging only for quotes that would make Obama look like a flip-flopper, rather than information about the public financing stances of both sides.
Luckily, as I have been hoping, Tom Brokaw will take over hosting duties on MTP, at least through election day. Brokaw is clearly the only person at NBC with the stature to assume Russert's seat. Temporarily suspending his retirement, he starts his new gig next week.
Labels: 2008 election, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, mainstream media, Meet the Press, NBC News, presidential candidates, Sunday talk shows |
| posted by JReid @ 1:09 PM |
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| Sunday, June 08, 2008 |
| Things that are ... unhelpful ... |
Forgetting what you just said like, three days ago, when age is an issue in your campaign... From Balloon Juice:
McCain, in Louisiana on Tuesday, in front of a lime-green banner:
I commend both Senators Obama and Clinton for the long, hard race they have run. Senator Obama has impressed many Americans with his eloquence and his spirited campaign. Senator Clinton has earned great respect for her tenacity and courage. The media often overlooked how compassionately she spoke to the concerns and dreams of millions of Americans, and she deserves a lot more appreciation than she sometimes received. John McCain, talking to reporters on Friday:
Holly Bailey and Jon Meacham: Want to back up a little bit and talk about press coverage. One of the things that you mentioned in your speech in New Orleans was that you felt that the media hadn’t recognized or had overlooked some of the attributes that Hillary Clinton had brought to the race. And I wondered—
John McCain:I did not [say that]—that was in prepared remarks, and I did not [say it]—I’m not in the business of commenting on the press and their coverage or not coverage … My supporters and friends can comment all they want about the press coverage, and that’s their right. They’re American citizens. I will not because I believe it’s not a profitable enterprise for me to do so. I can’t change any of the coverage that I know of except to just campaign as hard as I can and try to seek the approval of the majority of my fellow citizens. John McCain. Straight talk you can believe in. Indeed.
More "things that are unhelpful":
Campaign surrogates who say the opposite of what you want your message to be, thereby verifying the charge, made by your opponent, which you most want to refute ... From ThinkP:
In a widely-ridiculed speech last Tuesday, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) noted that “you will hear from my opponent’s campaign in every speech, every interview, every press release that I’m running for President Bush’s third term. You will hear every policy of the President described as the Bush-McCain policy.” He added that he believes those comparisons are “false.” But it seems that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), McCain’s chief surrogate and attack dog, disagrees. Today on ABC’s This Week, Graham stated unequivocally that McCain’s tax and health care policies were not only an extension of Bush’s polices but also an “enhancement”: STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me bring Senator Graham back in on this because you brought up two. You said the tax policy and the health care policy were essentially, Senator Graham, John McCain is calling for an extension or maybe enhancement of the Bush policies. GRAHAM: Yeah, absolutely.
No, Miss Lindsey, absolutely NOT what your man friend wanted you to say.
And finally, one more "thing that is unhelpful": Scott McClellan ...
On NBC’s The Chris Matthews Show today, Time magazine assistant managing editor Michael Duffy said that the renewed attention to the scandal is causing White House lawyers to be “very concerned”: DUFFY: White House lawyers are concerned, very concerned, now that Scott McClellan’s book has led Henry Waxman and John Conyers to take another look at the Valerie Plame business. There may be hearings. Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald may be called. Just another way in which a Democratic Congress might make a difference during the fall.
Watch the video here.
| Labels: 2008 election, George W. McCain, Joe Lieberman; John McCain, Lindsey Graham, presidential candidates, straight talk express |
| posted by JReid @ 9:43 PM |
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| Sunday, April 01, 2007 |
| The adventures of Baghdad John (and his good friend, Baghdad Lindsey!) |
John McCain finally gets to take his Baghdad stroll, 3 minutes from the Green Zone in a crowded market, surrounded by “100 American soldiers, with three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships overhead.” ... and all the sweet, tasty dates his little John McCain heart could want! Goody! It's all waiting for you, RedState!!!
Oooh, and look at the bargains Lindsey got! Five rugs ... just five bucks...!Labels: Baghdad John, Iraq, Iraq war, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, war |
| posted by JReid @ 9:04 PM |
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