The R-word fifteen years on

Here in New Zealand, a racially Chinese Kiwi family was subjected to an extended attack by a white man which included threatening with a pit-bull and running them off the road (during which children were thrown clear of the vehicle). All of this was accompanied by racist ranting, at both the victims and at bystanders.

When sentencing the racist, the NZ judge said ‘It would be quite wrong to call this a hate crime.’ What. The. Actual. Fuck.

So, at least here, the problem extends well past the media.

If we are talking about the recent Trump tweets about the ‘gang of four’, unless the word ‘racist’ has been completely redefined in the last couple of weeks, these tweets are not obviously racist, they’re xenophobic if anything – he’s clearly going on about ‘foreigners’ from countries with terrible regimes, not racial or ethnic groups. Mostly the tweets are just stupid in the usual witless way of Trump.

Who knows whether Trump really is a racist in the sense of believing that other races are innately inferior. My impression is that he cares no more for white people than people of colour, or African people or Indians or whoever he is supposed to hate, simply because he doesn’t appear to care about anyone at all, other than himself.

The firestorm about ‘racism’ here seems entirely misplaced, and will only serve to obscure possibly useful debates about real racism, by (along with CNN etc) helping to destroy any definitional clarity the word might have had.

On the one hand: yes, there does seem to be a taboo against calling out racism for what it is.

On the other hand: in journalism, there’s a lot to be said in favour of a reporting style that states the verifiable facts (such as something Trump has said in public) and leaves the reader to draw the obvious conclusion. The implied point of the story – why the journalist and their editor think it’s newsworthy – “that guy is a racist”, but what the story reports is the concrete evidence for drawing that conclusion.

Interesting. Hyphenation to non-hyphenation is one metric and perhaps a good one. I just watched Mark Schmidt, Bob Wright, and Sarah Posner discuss 2020. All three managed to be totally wrong about 2016 and only Bob Wright had the slightest sense that “race” means something different to different people and that the meaning of the word changes over time. “I’m not saying you’re racist (yet), but…” is how Kamala Harris attacked her Democratic rival Joe Biden on national TV in July, 2018 Biden, of course, is the, you know, “not racist” who served as 44’s vice-president for 8 years.

So, if a lifelong Democrat who served loyally, we assume, as vice-president to America’s first African-American president is on the receiving end of “I’m not saying you’re racist (yet), but…” my guess is that pretty much anyone who’s ever done anything to lift people up can expect a public admonition which begins with “I’m not saying you’re racist…”

I’m looking right now at a Google search 1980-2000 and the word “racist” and Clinton” and we find the Clinton administration accused of racism by Aristide, president of Haiti. Maxine Waters “branded” H. W. Bush a racist who had polarized the races in this country.” That’s from the LA times. The New Yorker has an article from 1994 in which Hillary Clinton’s efforts to improve teaching standards in Arkansas by supporting a teachers’ test: “According to a key member of Clinton’s staff, it was Hillary who proposed the idea. Kai Erickson told me, “There was a great schism. The idea of a teacher test was understood to have appeal to those white parents who felt that black teachers were not competent. The black teachers, though, felt that it was racist.”

And that’s just skimming the surface in the US. If we examine other societies, we discover racism of different sorts. The crisis in Libya prior to the “not racist-not a war of choice” waged by Canada, France, the UK, and America was one in which ethnicity played a major role. The losers in the that ‘shit-show’ are now being sold in slave markets thanks to the “not racist” indifference to outcomes of at least one self-described progressive administration.

Indeed, there’s a gigantic memory hole in liberal discourse, in which the un-personning of Geraldine Ferraro (first female VP candidate and lifelong Democrat) on spurious charges of “racism” for merely mentioning that some voters might be excited by the arrival of a young, attractive, articulate African-American candidate running for president. Her remark was repackaged as: old, white woman calls post-racial candidate “boy.” Bye-bye Geraldine. She’s still on the ash-heap of history.

So, from my point of view, what has happened is that a large number of people are extremely unhappy living in a pc world where anyone, including Joe Biden, must be ready at all time to have their lives turned upside down by the charge of “racist.” I’ve little doubt that many here would be mortified to be on the receiving end of the charge, but you’re no longer the voting majority.

UK citizens were routinely slimed as “racists” just for suggesting the nation hold a referendum on EU membership. Rather than back down, the “racists’ doubled down, GOTV, and is now in the process of removing the UK from the EU. Charges of “racist” were hurled at any and all Trump supporters throughout 2015 and after. Voters who voted for Obama twice ignored the charges and handed the “racist” candidate the presidency, which has been one long exercise in applied racism, which he seems to have bungled somehow by reducing Hispanic and African-American unemployment to record lows.

JQ raises a good question. I’m not at all sure many are going to like some of the possible answers. I’ve mentioned RCP. This weekend there are a number of articles addressing the same question as John. he difference is that these authors claim the term has lost its valency owing to over-use. I think they have a point.

– and after @8 has written what @8 has written –
y’all might understand how important it has become – to comment on every possible comment section in reach –

Against ”Racism” and all efforts to redefine that t –
(after Von Clownstick was so successful redefining what ”grabbing” means)
– as let’s quote from another thread:

We can’t wait to wake up and smell the ”Racists” when some lunatic kills Ilhan Omar…

Given that we are talking about what Trump thinks about #TheSquad it might be wise to look at what he actually said, which is mysteriously difficult amidst all the pearl clutching in the ‘liberal’ media.

Here’s what Trump actually said, with what I see as being the key points (almost universally not noted in the ‘liberal’ media) in bold.

‘When will the Radical Left Congresswomen apologize to our Country, the people of Israel and even to the Office of the President, for the foul language they have used, and the terrible things they have said. So many people are angry at them & their horrible & disgusting actions!’

‘If Democrats want to unite around the foul language & racist hatred spewed from the mouths and actions of these very unpopular & unrepresentative Congresswomen, it will be interesting to see how it plays out. I can tell you that they have made Israel feel abandoned by the U.S.’

‘So sad to see the Democrats sticking up for people who speak so badly of our Country and who, in addition, hate Israel with a true and unbridled passion. Whenever confronted, they call their adversaries, including Nancy Pelosi, “RACIST.” Their disgusting language…..’

Also, Mike Pence (retweeted by Trump)

‘When our President stands up to radical Democrats who accuse Border Patrol of running concentration camps, use anti-Semitic slurs to denounce support for Israel, and continually attack America, we stand with the President. ‘

Trump is a simple soul and always states very clearly what he means. It’s strange the liberal media seem to be unable to parse the meaning of these simple (and simplistic) screeds.

hac@3 endorses Trump. This is not just one commenter’s opinion. “The black voter turnout rate declined for the first time in 20 years in a presidential election, falling to 59.6% in 2016 after reaching a record-high 66.6% in 2012.”https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/05/12/black-voter-turnout-fell-in-2016-even-as-a-record-number-of-americans-cast-ballots/

Quite clearly, millions of black voters thought there was no difference between Trump and Clinton. It is hard to justify ever using the R-word when the R-word means spiritual defects, rather than concrete political actions, since to a first approximation every white person has unconscious biases. It is unlikely that the assumption it’s only white people who suffer from this can be solidly supported but fortunately it need not be supported at all, which means there is no point to going into boring details about policy. Plus almost all people deny structural racism for exactly the same reasons they deny the existence of Marxian social classes, a commitment to individual psychology as the cause of pretty much everything.

The use of the R-word is fairly irrelevant, because the R-word applies to everyone but black candidates, as it is used now.

The difference between saying that a person is racist and saying that a statement is racist is that the former requires knowledge of state of mind. Trump doesn’t explicitly say “I believe white people are superior”, indeed he specifically claims not to be racist, so any given statement by him can be defended, dismissed, talked around.

There is a left-identitarian tactic of condemnation of people as monsters, via uncharitable interpretation of isolated statements, mind-reading, and healthy doses of bigotry. This enables a defense of people at times: claims against them are just one more instance of this tactic.

But Trump’s record of racist statements and actions is extensive and decades-long: there can be no doubt, he is a racist. His recent attacks on four members of the House are only the most recent appalling example of his racism. The most charitable interpretation of this recent stuff is that it is *only* demagoguery, yet another case where Trump chooses petty personal vindictiveness and political expediency over facts and principles. But even in the unlikely case that this interpretation is the right one, it’s a bitter consolation, of the same sort as the observation that Trump’s laziness, stupidity, and incompetence give us some protection from his traitorous corruption, cronyism, and brutality.

45%
In 2008 the Republicans were as deep in the septic tank as it’s possible for a US political party to be. Iraq, political ethics, New Orleans, the entire economy. You name it, they destroyed it. Then their presidential candidate named a running joke as running mate. They still got 45%.

Gallup just came out with a poll that has Trump’s favorability at 45%.

So assuming we all start using the R-word correctly I wonder what you all think the next step is. Seems like 45% of the voting population being irredeemable and immovable is a wee bit of a bigger problem than the words we use to describe them.

I guess much is possible. It might just be that the black people of equal economic status and references to a control sample of white people who got apartments, were all turned down for apartments in Trump properties (several years ago when the Civil Rights Commission was testing such things) because of unknown but legitimate concerns; and that if a group of white teen-agers were wrongly convicted of a horrible crime, he would have bought a full-page newspaper add calling for their death penalty and refused to change his position after they were found innocent; and that the predominant skin color of Sweden has nothing to do with his preference for only admitting immigrants from that country; and so on. However, personally, at this point I think the burden has shifted to him to show by words and action that he is not a racist.

We all have tribal instincts, but some of us try to restrain them for the sake of fairness and from the desire to be part of a peaceful civilization. Restraint is not something Trump does voluntarily.

Thomas Beale – How is it xenophobic to attack Americans born in the United States? If it’s xenophobia, it’s only because he assumes they’re immigrants. But why would you assume someone born and raised in the Bronx (AOC), or born and raised in Boston (Pressley), or born and raised in Detroit (Tlaib), is an immigrant? Unless it’s because there’s some unspoken inference from skin color to national status. Which sounds like r—-m to me.

Viewing this from the UK, it would be a mistake to call Trump a racist now, even if his behaviour can reasonably be described as racist.

Most of the people the Democrats need to win over to win are working class whites (so I believe). Trump knows if he can get the gang of four to be the face of the Democrats and make race the dividing line, he wins the next presidential election.

What the Democrats need to do is say these four women are part of the Democratic family just as labourers in agricultural areas are part of the democratic family and workers in industries in rust-belt states are part of the Democratic family. We represent them all and will work to get the best outcomes for each and every one of our broad Democratic family.

– and somehow – silly me? – I thought the entire comment section of CT is/was a ”echo chamber” for the fight against ”racism”?
And then such surprises…
@14
”The use of the R-word is fairly irrelevant, because the R-word applies to everyone but black candidates, as it is used now”.
and –
@21
”it means nothing now and to be accused of being a racist has come to mean on the right side of an issue”.

Really?

Is that the reason why America elected such an obvious ”racist”? as Trump? –
and why the NYT never posted any comments about the ”fact” that Trump ”IS A RACIST” – from the moment Von Clownstick came out as a ”Racist Birther”?

And what does it mean that where I#m in Europe right now it has become ”common knowledge” – that the US President is – indeed ”a Racist” –
and that such… how should we call it?… ”political analysis”? – made me think from the beginning that (racism) should be ”good” enough to disqualified any candidate for the US Presidency… until… until somebody – who (used) to know Von Clownstick pretty well – told us:

”Well – it was just this put-down by somebody of Obamas Race – which made Trump President of the US of A. -(in order – trying to reverse every single ”thing” somebody of ”Obamas Race” ever made)

And if this is true – don’t y’all accept that ”Racism” means a lot now??!

Hi John, your criticisms are entirely fair. I’ll reply with more later in the day, if I may.

“It seems obvious that what progress has been made on ending the Drug War depended very much on the understanding (driven by the opioids crisis) that the anti-drug extremism of the 1980s and 1990s had been largely driven by racism.”

Progress in ending it has certainly been driven by a myth based understanding of the drug war as fueled by racism. The myth has certainly been unifying and motivating.

Progress in understanding a fear of crime and a desire for punitive and police based responses that transcended party and race? The opposite. The myth has required erasing a lot of real history and the opinions of a lot of real people, and has left us in a position where we can’t truthfully discuss a lot of the politics of the past because doing so truthfully is treated as betraying the myth.

It’s sad. In theory, the idea of “systemic racism” was supposed to free of us this. It was supposed to be a tool with which we could discuss racially disparate outcomes driven by processes that didn’t necessarily result from racist motivations, but which did result from the effect of otherwise neutral policies on racial groups beginning in different places. But academia utterly failed at this, because, like I said, you can’t have a word be an epithet and a source of dispassionate analysis at the same time, because the dispassionate analysis will always lose.

“As for busing, I have no idea how else it could be discussed other than in terms of race and racism.”

There is a difference between “some white people opposed busing because they didn’t want their kids going to school with black kids” and “opposition to busing was driven by racism.” The latter erases all the other reasons people might oppose busing, as well as all the black voters who didn’t support it. The public conversation closer to the latter than the former, and eagerness to obtain the power of the “racism” epithet is exactly why we’ve lost that clarity.

Same for the crime bill.

Have you ever, even once, heard someone say, “Well, it is systemic racism, but it’s fine.”? In theory, that should be an entirely plausible, cogent, and moral position. There’s a black/white computer access gap, and you’re writing on a blog! But no one says that, because “racism” is an epithet.

AND to illustrate further what I mean –
my grandparents grew up in Hancock Park LA and when the first ”Black Person” – Nat King Cole – moved in – they really were happy that such a musician moved into their neighbourhood – and even that they knew he was from Alabama – they never asked him to ”go back where he came from” and that’s why I probably like London so much – and not so much Tokyo – because in London there are so many ”brown” and even ”black” faces that I right away feel at home –
dipper and ph!

“ph – you prove the point you are arguing against about the taboo on “racist”. Almost every instance you cite is in scare quotes, attributed to some unspecified person, used in reference to unspecified people etc. AFAICT, you have to go back thirty years to find a single instance of an (obscure/fringe) elected official using the term to describe another.”

Thanks, John. I apologize for the confusing use of quotations and for referring in general terms to the practice of branding others as racist in various arenas.

You and others are free to brand large segments of the population as racist. (I’ll forego all use of quotes except to refer to specific quotations.) Calling others racist is an entirely acceptable discourse mode and is presented routinely as objective observation and/or speaking a form of truth. That appears to be how you use the term racist and please correct me if I’m wrong.

Proof that any individual is racist varies according to those making the assessment. You and others argue that the balance of evidence confirms that 45 is racist. Fair enough. That his supporters all 40 million plus are racist is a much more problematic question, and one the most sober-minded might approach with some measure of caution, which I think you recognize. That’s one part of what I see as the current discussion.

The assertion that charges of racism are objective and grounded in fact, however, is complicated by other observable phenomena. Namely, Kamala Harris’s “I’m not saying you’re a racist, but…” tactical deployment of the term racist in a televised debate.

You may or may not believe Biden is racist, but very few Democratic party politicians will be happy to accept such a charge. No university academic can easily survive such a charge. Few corporations will employ an individual deemed racist by colleagues or customers.

The charge of racism carries a heavy penalty, but making the charge can be made relatively freely against anyone to the political right of Bernie Sanders, and even Bernie has problems avoiding the old white guy stigma. There is no reputational or career penalty for making the charge within an increasingly small community of the like-minded.

I find the charge extremely offensive and believe that some/many deploy the charge as a mode of discourse control, and/or for virtue signalling. I’m certain I’m not alone. We even have a term for the phenomena “playing the race-card.”

I contend there are two factors at work in 2019-20 1. Overuse of the term racist means the term is losing its valency with some audiences. That’s claim in the RCP articles 2. A number of people believe the term is used cynically to avoid dealing with legitimate criticism and arguments. The number of people in community 2 is likely growing in my view, although I’ve no evidence to support this belief. There’s little doubt that group 2 exists. I contend that the two phenomena have both causal and coincidental relationships depending on the individuals involved.

My position is that convincing economic arguments and clear messaging are the most effective way to win elections. Had ‘more of the same’ looked better to voters in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania the current president would be a different person.

Hope this is clearer.

@
How is it that the media only get exercised when left wing people call right-wing people racist, and not the other way round? Whyever could that be?

Because – everybody is used to – that racists tend to be ”right-wing” and not ”the left”?

@34
”My position is that convincing economic arguments and clear messaging are the most effective way to win elections”.

How… strange?
That is my position too… but about:
”Had ‘more of the same’ looked better to voters in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania the current president would be a different person”

The current President ALSO would be a different person – if there would have been a lot less voters who liked Trump so much because HE like Obama so little because of Obamas Race!

Hope this is clearer.

When Trump tells American Jews that Netanyahu is their prime minister, how is this not racist? You can’t object that Jews aren’t a race, since the very notion of race is discredited. The distinction, however, is well understood: us and them. The president clearly considers Jews as others, just as he does Africans, Asians and Latin Americans.

There’s a time to call a spade a gardening implement, and a time to call it a fucking shovel.

@9 John Quiggin:

“ccc “Does it really matter”. If it doesn’t, why does it raise such concern? Why do you bother to comment?”

Huh? What raises what concern? I commented since I don’t immediately accept your claim that clear political analysis is difficult without using the term racism (because I think the psychological states and behaviours involved, and ways to change them, can also be clearly described using other terms) and I’m therefore curious if you have argument for your claim that I have missed.

Kenny Easwaran@22
is it xenophobic to attack Americans born in the United States? If it’s xenophobia, it’s only because he assumes they’re immigrants.

Exactly. He sees them as not-white, and for him that equals not-from-here.

But why would you assume someone born and raised in the Bronx (AOC), or born and raised in Boston (Pressley), or born and raised in Detroit (Tlaib), is an immigrant? Unless it’s because there’s some unspoken inference from skin color to national status.

You meant to say ‘why would Trump assume …’ (a question that answers itself). Of course he doesn’t know where they were born. He regularly calls John Bolton ‘Mike’ because he mixes him up with Michael Bolton. He hardly knows what he’s saying.

Which sounds like r—-m to me.

Not to those for whom ‘race’ and ‘racism’ retain their original meanings. From your point of view, the common English abuse of Irish workers in the UK over the last 100+ years (epithets + go home) are instances of racism. Or even the institutional bias in Northern Ireland against Catholics holding government jobs etc. Normally understood these are instances of xenophobia and/or ethnic/religious bigotry.

This appears to be the point of view of novakant@19 as well; and of Etienne Balibar / “racism without race” he refers to – an intentional redefinition of ‘race’.

There’s a big difference between denigrating someone because they belong to an identifiable group you think is biologically inferior, and because (you assume) they come from somewhere else or practice the wrong religion etc (which would make the situation of Muslims in India one of racism).

I don’t personally mind if people want to smear all these definitions together. Much of the press does this already, so expectations for clarity are low. But then, what term will you use to talk about specifically about what was going on in the US South, or South Africa during apartheid, or the basis for eugenics?

The issue for me is that the real problems with Trump and his recent tweets are much more to do with immigrants/immigration, normalising xenophobia etc – just as Brexit has done here in the UK where the witless now feel free on the street to tell any Asian (i.e. Indian sub-continent) looking person to ‘go home’. Trying to examine all that in terms of ‘racism’ is a real error in my view. (Real instances of Trump-racism should of course be examined on that basis).

@41
”The coming election will make 2015-16 seem positively pastoral by comparison, and this time Dems best be ready to absorb some serious punishment”.

– and if the (European) Non-Profit I’m working for is allowed to ask this here?
As ph was such a ”Sure Predictor” at the last election – would he –
would YOU ph be willing to bet?

As we have offered now so many Fans of von Clownstick 3 -(in words ”three) nights in a ”Non-Trump First Class Manhattan Hotel” if Von Clownstick will win –
BUT whoever bets with us has to pay us three nights if Trump is ”the loser”.
-(and we don’t mean ”losing by winning”)

AND mysteriously we haven’t found a single Fan of Von Clownstick yet who would be willing to take the bet -(even with the promise that ”he will be on Teevee”)

And just think – if we can report (to the Press?) that on CT there was ”somebody” -(without any value judgement attached) – who was wiling to take such a bet – from a Group of European Racist Researcher?

hac@35 expresses approval for Trump’s refreshing honesty but denies that is an endorsement. I disagree. Nor does hac find any differences worth remarking in policies. hac’s authoritative opinion is that all whites are racist. This does make singling out any white person a case of pot/kettle, hence entirely irrelevant.

Approving of Trump’s honesty seems to be about the satisfying proof that all white people are racist, apparently on the grounds that Trump won the election. The facts that Trump didn’t win the election but won the Electoral College and that millions of black repudiated the Democratic Party is deemed irrelevant. Racism defined as an incurable psychic perversion means there is no possible common ground between races. Inasmuch as blacks are not a majority it still seems impractical to commit to a politics of the convenient disappearance of the hopelessly racist whites. In the meantime, it appears that the really nice thing about Trump is that it’s largely Muslims and Latinos actually suffering at the moment. (And I think antisemitism is really ramping up under Trump, as Christian- Zionism-means-Jews-have-their-country-somewhere-else is a form of antisemitism.)

The quote cited is a piece of nonsense: Netanyahu is not weakening the Zionist state and the almost certain outcome of an impending collapse will be open resort to mass ethnic cleansing and/or nuclear holocaust of Arabs. It is often claimed that the Communist Party brought Hitler to power with a crazy policy of “After Hitler, us!” I don’t think this is true at all. For a start, it takes only one to make a quarrel and it takes two to make an alliance. The Social Democrats were not eager for a united front, to say the least. (Fire up the Netflix for Babylon Berlin and see a dramatization of how much the Social Democrats wanted to ally with Communists.)

The thing about using the R-word is not whether it is true. After all, racism as a mental disposition is inaccessible to anyone, not even the racist, given the limited power of introspection. The thing about using the R-word is that it commits to absolute total rejection of the target, who is the enemy, and not really human, like all enemies.

@45 ‘ But surely consistent past behaviour, the established meaning of code phrases, and who the code phrases are and are not used against also matter when arriving at a conclusion about what is going on?’

The only ‘code phrase’ that Trump uses is the standard extreme right wing trope (to coin a phrase) of ‘anti-semitism’ meaning ‘hostility to the Netanyahu regime’. Apart from that: he’s thick as pig shit. He says what he means, because he lacks the intellect to do otherwise. If he says it’s all about Israel (and he does, although white American liberals are desperate to deny this)….it’s all about Israel.

Does this mean I’m saying it’s not all about race?

Au contraire.

There is an old cliche about men who have sex with other men but insist they are not homosexual. Because in their minds, they don’t conform to the image of gay men, so they mentally cancel out every instance of their homosexual acts with some excuse or another.

Racism in America is a bit like that, where polite people go to absurd lengths to ascribe their hostility to other racial groups as anything other than hostility to other racial groups.
Xenophobia, economic insecurity, cultural Marxism, populism…these all get trotted out to describe the phenomenon.

But the game is given away by the mad twists and turns that their policies take.
Sometimes they want heavy government intervention reminiscent of New Deal, other times draconian free market policies, sometimes appeals to hearth and home, sometimes appeals to free swinging libertinism, sometimes ruthless Law and Order, sometimes Due Process.

There is only one straight line that connects all the policies of the Trumpists, and that is whatever protects and comforts the white herrenvolk, while disadvantaging the brown skinned outgroup.

Trump’s supporters are largely Romney’s supporters or so I have read. To the extent this includes the white working class, I don’t see what the big mystery is— rich conservatives want to destroy any possibility of a unified working class movement by using race to divide the working class. Poor whites get the consolation prize of having someone they can look down on. This goes back to Civil War days and before. Use anything and everything to distract people from noticing that they are being screwed by the rich. I thought this was Something Everyone Knew, at least until 2016, but now one commonly sees people claiming that it has to be racism behind much of Trump’s support and never ever any trace of economic insecurity. Why can’t it be both, at least with some of the voters in Rust Belt states? And sure, this does not apply to affluent middle class bigots.

I happen to be friends of two Trump supporters, neither of them poor. One accepts climate science, has no trace of bigotry visible to my admittedly white middle class eyes, supports gay marriage, but she is also a devout Catholic, has conservative economic views and is very anti- abortion. Trump was the lesser evil to her. She is middle class but has a huge college debt to pay off. My point is that knowing people in real life should make one suspicious of stereotypes.

The other one has been a close friend for decades and still is like a brother to me if I want to be corny about it, but his mind has been turned to jello by Fox News and various rightwing internet sites. He really is close to the stereotype of a Trump supporter. Fanatical Islamophobe. I find it difficult to talk to him about current events without yelling. He is the calm one. And segueing to a point Hidari made, he is very very pro Israel.

Israel is that subject American liberals ( not sure about things in Britain) don’t like to talk
about much and when they do they like to act like Netanyahu is the only problem there, but it’s not some accident that people on the far right, Christian and Jewish, unite over Israel. It’s not a Faustian bargain as Michelle Goldberg tried to claim in a recent NYT column. It’s a match made in heaven, or maybe the other place, but it just isn’t that much of a stretch to see ethno- nationalists in the US siding with ethno nationalists in Israel.

Hidari— Liberals don’t like to talk about it because they want Trump’s comments to be solely about the Squad’s skin color. The liberal trope is that Omar said something anti-Semitic when she criticized the Lobby and the legislative efforts to condemn the BDS movement, and they don’t want that issue brought up again because it is divisive. In a way, and no sarcasm intended, I can see the point of trying to unify all decent people against Trump’s racism and not letting it be about BDS. So yes, unify against Trump. I can’t quarrel with that.

But once again the Palestinian issue gets thrown under the bus.

Since we are talking about the racist implications of “Send them home”, I think it is also pertinent to comment on expressions such as “brown voices” and “women of color”. Who’s the brown voice here, members of the US congress with certain physical characteristics who, following the Democratic leadership, supported the US backed coup attempt in Venezuela or Mexican president López Obrador who, following the Mexican constitution, opposed an intervention in a sovereign country by a foreign power?

Do foreign populations represent themselves or are they represented by Americans of a similar phenotype who are members of Congress? Regarding foreign policy, many Americans who believe in races, brown and black voices, and people of color, that is, practically all, think that having a congress that is visually representative of the global population is the equivalent global democracy and thus serves to legitimize US supremacism just like 19th century race theories served to legitimize the Atlantic slave trade.

I agree completely with Belle Waring. Wow, this thread is awful. Truly awful.

p.s. Individual racism and structural racism are . . . very much related. People on the “white” side of the color line rarely consider themselves to be racist. Take, for example, my uncle, a “heartland” farmer who died a few years ago. Back in the 1990s, he had no clue that it was racist to use a variant of the n-word (the one that begins with “d”). He thought that was what black people were called. And, sadly, he was kinda right about that!

Anyway, people are likely to feel defensive if/when someone brings up the racist implications (or worse) of something they said or did or sang or whatever. That is human nature. What happens after that? It depends. Sometimes people rethink — and sometimes, but not always, this rethinking leads to a change of views. A lot of the time, however, the people using the r-word are said to be pretty much equivalent to the people who use the n-word because they are having a chilling effect, silencing people who don’t have a racist bone in their bodies.

Personally, I think a little more silence — that is, a little more listening and a lot less dismissiveness — would be nice. But in our public discourse, it seems like the need to listen and understand only goes one way — I keep reading about how challenges to white supremacy (some of them more relevant than others, IMHO, but pretty much all of them squarely within the bounds of so-called civil discourse) are driving people into the arms of the Republican Party. Even when this pearl clutching is done in a “realpolitik” kind of way, it’s BS.

@55
”Liberals”
and
@
59
It might be time to not focus on the past anymore?

Aardvark Cheeselog

As Confucius observed, nothing can be accomplished until you start calling things by their right names.

Is ‘Confucius’ a ‘right name’?

Let’s assume, just as an armchair exercise, that some people really don’t like people with brown skin, think they’re dangerous outsiders, and like attacking them, and enjoy it when they’re attacked.

Let’s also assume that ‘racist’ is a word that no-one wants applied to them.

Let’s also assume that there’s a group of nice, reasonable people who just want to maintain some important definitions and give people the benefit of the doubt.

Let’s also assume that some of the brown-peope-haters are prepared to be less than honest.

What do you suppose would be a good strategy to continue attacking brown people, yet not have to accept the slur of being a ‘racist’?

Well, just make sure you don’t say anything that indicates you fall into some textbook definition of being a racist! Just practice avoiding universal quantification might even be enough. Or be marginally inventive with your confabulations, and suggest different reasons for hating on brown people: it’s not that they’re brown, it’s that they’re not ‘from here’. It’s not that they’re brown, it’s that the ‘ones we get’ are the bad ones. It’s not that they’re brown, it’s that they adhere to a fundamentalist religion! So long as everyone you deal with is reasonable and charitable, no-one will think you’re racist at all, and in fact will defend your lack of racism to the hilt!

If they are reasonable and charitable enough, you could perhaps attack brown people as much as you like, and be quite blatantly inconsistent with how you treat white people (if they’re an immigrant or a member of a fundamentalist religion – great! we need more people like that).

Obviously this is absurd. I mean, no reasonable person would fall for this for very long. You’d only get the benefit of the doubt for a while before they’ve worked out your trick… I mean, there’s absolutely no way they’d continue to hem and haw for very long after they’ve seen you consistently attack brown people, after all they are reasonable people…

Plus it’s not like anyone would actually do anything like this.

I mean, people are always so very honest about their motivations , and it wouldn’t advantage them much, because they’d have to also consistently behave in a non-racist way.

Also, obviously we are living in a post-racial society where racism is extremely rare, it practically doesn’t exist these days. After all, every time it kind of looks like someone might be racist, there always seems to be some other explanation for it, it’s just like UFOs really.

So because the number of people who would need or be able to pursue such a strategy is so very low, and it wouldn’t work anyway, I have to conclude that no-one is actually following it, ergo Trump isn’t racist.

thank you @61
”and anyone who even pretends to defend such a thing, as opposed to wishing to squash the perpetrators into neutronium, is a racist”.

which could bring US to the ”Let’s assume” comment @64

No – let’s NOT assume and especially NOT a sjust as an armchair exercise, that some people really don’t like people with brown skin, think they’re dangerous outsiders, and like attacking them, and enjoy it when they’re attacked.

Let’s take it as the undeniable fact it is:
that ‘racist’ is a word that no-one wants applied to them.

Let’s also take it as an undeniable fact that there’s a group of nice, reasonable people who just want to maintain some important definitions and give people the benefit of the doubt.

Let’s also take it as a fact that some of the brown-peope-haters are prepared to be less than honest.

What do you suppose would be a good strategy to continue attacking brown people, yet not have to accept the slur of being a ‘racist’?

Everything else what is being mentioned @64
and thank you too!

I am working with an interesting woman at Boston College who uses the phrase “White Fragility,” which I have found illuminating. The first 2 paragraphs of the New Yorker review of Robert diAngelo’s book on that topic are appended below. This thread has persuaded me to read the book….

” In more than twenty years of running diversity-training and cultural-competency workshops for American companies, the academic and educator Robin DiAngelo has noticed that white people are sensationally, histrionically bad at discussing racism. Like waves on sand, their reactions form predictable patterns: they will insist that they “were taught to treat everyone the same,” that they are “color-blind,” that they “don’t care if you are pink, purple, or polka-dotted.” They will point to friends and family members of color, a history of civil-rights activism, or a more “salient” issue, such as class or gender. They will shout and bluster. They will cry. In 2011, DiAngelo coined the term “white fragility” to describe the disbelieving defensiveness that white people exhibit when their ideas about race and racism are challenged—and particularly when they feel implicated in white supremacy. Why, she wondered, did her feedback prompt such resistance, as if the mention of racism were more offensive than the fact or practice of it?

In a new book, “White Fragility,” DiAngelo attempts to explicate the phenomenon of white people’s paper-thin skin. She argues that our largely segregated society is set up to insulate whites from racial discomfort, so that they fall to pieces at the first application of stress—such as, for instance, when someone suggests that “flesh-toned” may not be an appropriate name for a beige crayon. Unused to unpleasantness (more than unused to it—racial hierarchies tell white people that they are entitled to peace and deference), they lack the “racial stamina” to engage in difficult conversations. This leads them to respond to “racial triggers”—the show “Dear White People,” the term “wypipo”—with “emotions such as anger, fear and guilt,” DiAngelo writes, “and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and withdrawal from the stress-inducing situation…”

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-sociologist-examines-the-white-fragility-that-prevents-white-americans-from-confronting-racism

I know that my childhood in South Carolina may give me beliefs about racism that are mildly unreasonable, such as a conviction that all Republicans are racist to the damn bone, to the last man, and Democrats may be whited sepulchres. I’m willing to extend a charitable deference to the rest of the country and say that only 80% of Republicans in, like, Minnesota or something if that’s a real state, are racist. (Not West Virginia, though, I’ve spent time there are boo howdy are things rough, especially considering the state’s official motto, “Not a Lot of Active Military Support For Chattel Slavery.” OK I made that up, but still.) Why? Because the explanatory power of attributing things to racism is very strong. Poor whites are willing to vote for cuts to programs that benefit them, and benefit more whites than blacks, just because it would hurt black people. This is the ‘pretty soon you’re getting abstract and talking about tax cuts’ that Lee Atwater explained would transmute bald racism to bland economic concerns.

And the racial aspect of the War on Drugs is very real. The 90s were a time when the crack epidemic was addressed by throwing black citizens into the maw of prison and never letting them out. Babies were torn from their mothers, possession of crack cocaine was penalized at stupidly higher rates than cocaine–and why, other than because more black people would end up in prison? The opiate crisis, by contrast, is being addressed with treatment facilities, comparatively negligible prison terms, etc. etc. Can we all think of an obvious difference between the victims of these two crises?

And bussing wasn’t about race? This is so wrong that I don’t even know what to say other than think about it a little harder and get back to me. Maybe look at that picture of the white man stabbing a black man with an American flag during a demonstration over bussing? Maybe think of what happened in the south when integration was…honestly ‘tried’ is too strong a word. ‘Threatened,’ maybe. Private “Christian” schools were opened and all the white kids in the district went there, leaving the public schools all black. I attended a whites-only (in practical terms) school in Georgetown, S.C. because the all-black public school, being starved of resources, wasn’t good. In short, you’ve heard the Belle Waring spiel about how everyone is racist, but I’m still right from before. When people do or say racist things you should say, “hey that was racist.” Clarity in discourse is a good thing, and fearful quailing before how people will faint when they are correctly called racist is stupid.

PS I knew Lee Atwater irl when I was a kid since he was a friend of my step-father and I always want everyone to know that he was the kind of person who perved on 13-year-olds when drunk at parties.

Seeing the title of this, I asked myself, “Which R-word?”

There are two Wheel-Of-Fortune-style messages which may illustrate my dilemma, if I can get the HTML right:

DONALD TRUMP
IS A RA_IST

-or is it-

DONALD TRUM_
IS A RA_IST

Hi John, thanks for posting my penultimate. I apologize for my approach. I thought my point would be easier to grasp and more pristine if I allowed famed American lefty blogger and editor Kevin Drum to collect the names. There are lots of links in the original piece, if you cared to click through. Your point regarding pairing Clinton and racist is spot-on, and effectively meaningless. What was heard was heard, as Drum concretely describes. You may believe that bell isn’t still ringing. Fair enough. Marc above makes basically the same point.

Accusing people of racism by implication or innuendo is too often a double-fail. Branding someone a racist no longer carries the weight to sway those fundamentally indifferent to political rhetoric. Yet, the term is still plenty offensive enough to cause real long-lasting pain. I believe everything I’ve posted is on topic, but I’ve said my piece. Cheers.

Hi John, I’m winding the day down, but came across this:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/06/10/oberlin-college-gibsons-bakery-libel-million-racist/?utm_term=.f5a7119c0dbc

I don’t know if the link will work, or if you think this is of interest, but the Gibsons’ Bakery case illustrates the risks of buying into accusations of racism, often made too freely, and then re-cycled without thought or investigation.

bw@70:

Clarity in discourse is a good thing, and fearful quailing before how people will faint when they are correctly called racist is stupid.

So for the sake of clarity… if Kamala Harris blitzes the Democratic primaries with a supermajority, and the day after she clinches holds a press conference where she declares she’s reviewed Roe v. Wade and DC v. Heller at length, and concluded that the former was the worst SCOTUS decision in history and needs overturned ASAP while the latter was the best decision ever to come out of SCOTUS (except that it wasn’t expansive enough) and pledges to nominate judges that would work towards those judicial goals while simultaneously vetoing any and all legislation and budgets that don’t likewise support those ends… you’re suggesting that Trump would not lose GOP voters because she’s a brown-skinned daughter of immigrants?

[blockquote]But the modal comment above seems to be “we mustn’t tell the truth about Trump or (a large body of) his supporters, because they might be offended”. How does this work?[/block quote]

I think it’s logically consistent for a Trump opponent to suppose that Trump and his supporters are both (a) hyper-sensitive to taking offense; and (b) deliberately offend other people. E.g., they’re narcissists… The Trumpists doing this aren’t themselves being consistent, but their opponents can note that this is the situation we’re dealing with, and stratgeize accordingly.

@83
”I know you’re stupid”,

and wouldn’t it be much better to call ph ”confused” – as everything points to the… let’s call it ”possibility” that he is not ”stupid” -(at least not as ”stupid” as his ”leader” Baron von Clownstick.

And as we know that ph resides in Japan – and I have found out that WE -(people who are not Japanese) – can get really REALLY ”confused” in Japan – especially how to find ”the way” – couldn’t we settle for:

Really Confused?-
(especially as gets distracted so easily and constantly comes up with all kind of ”other stuff”) and pn – do you know that in a lot of ”Japanese Benihana – Restaurants there are NOT even real ”Japanese” anymore…
and what’s about our bet?