Let me introduce my reader to a new character. This will take some verbiage, but I promise you it is fun. And funny! And maybe insightful. Anyway, I know his real name, I even know his nickname, but out of some level of kindness, I will call him Stalker-boy. You see I first ran into him around 2002-2003 tangling with him on the message boards of Findlaw.com. Then later I went to a site called Freespeech and blogged there for a while. And suddenly who shows up? Stalker-boy. I quit Freespeech for a while, quit blogging entirely, got busy and then eventually started this blog. And guess who shows up in my email inbox? Yep, Stalker-boy. Indeed, it is apparently his endless desire to find me wherever I am on the internet that earns his nom de plume.
So Stalker-boy and I were arguing about Shirley Sherrod and he made an off-hand comment about Mark Williams being “disgraced.” Williams, you might know, wrote a piece satirizing the NAACP imagining a letter by their President Ben Jealous saying that “colored people” like them wanted slavery reestablished. It was satire of the variety Jonathan Swift would engage in, his point being to 1) mock the fact that the NAACP has the word “colored” in its name, and 2) to suggest that by following Obama they were establishing a form of slavery, albeit a race neutral one. The first joke is feeble, yes, and the second argument is extreme. But citing it for the proposition that the man is racist, is like citing A Modest Proposal for the proposition that Swift thought human flesh was delicious.
Or gee, its like taking Franken imagining a sexual encounter between Newt Gengrich and an Asian woman, employing many stereotypes of Asian woman, as racist. I mean if Williams is racist, then Franken is, too, right?
Now, I don’t know jack about Mark Williams, this supposed leader of the Tea Party movement. I never heard of the guy until the controversy over the letter blew up. So for all I know, there might be pages and pages of racist shit the guy said. But this is not the proof of it.
So I said to Stalker-boy that it was just a satire and he replied by saying that there was more evidence of William’s racism, than just the satire. Like what? Well, he explained: “Calling Allah, the deity of millions of peace-loving people, a ‘monkey-god’ (i.e., Allah's followers are monkeys) was particularly racist. Or was that ‘satire’ too?”
Now, for the really hilarious part. This claim that it was racist to say this, is itself racist. That is in claiming Williams is a racist, Stalker-boy outted himself as a racist.
Now, first, I am assuming Stalker-boy is being basically fair in his characterization. I have known him long enough to know that I have no business making that assumption, but life is short.
But first, let’s dispense with one thing. The most obvious interpretation of his “monkey god” comment is not that he was calling Muslims monkeys, but he was instead insulting their deity.
Second, he is denigrating a faith. A religion is not a racial trait. I am white and I could convert tomorrow. I mean, okay, it’s not fucking likely, but it’s not because of my skin color; its certain basic issues I have with the way Mohammed conducted his life. There are certain things that he did that I do not believe a just God would tolerate. And in fact I know a Pakistani Muslim who told me that when he learned about Mohammed and Aisha, it broke his faith.
But point is, Islam is not tied to skin color. Therefore it is not racist to criticize it, even harshly.
So anyway, I made these points to Stalker-boy, and what was his response?
Well first, to the point that Islam is not a racial trait, he replied: “Dude, it's indisputable that – in reality -- the majority of followers of Islam are dark/olive-skinned and come predominately from third-world countries.”
You get that? If you criticize a religion adopted by mostly dark-skinned people, you are a racist. I wonder if that applies to other voluntarily adopted traits? If you criticize Clitoridectomy are you a racist? How about stoning people to death for adultery? How about footbinding? Weren’t too many white people doing that, so I guess that is racist too.
I suppose every time I write a post, I will need to make sure that the attitudes I am criticizing is not held disproportionately by people who are a different color than me, lest I be racist. In fact, rather than getting us away from race, it would require us to be positively obsessed with race, lest we accidently criticize something that has a disproportionate effect of criticizing the attitudes more often held by people of a different race or ethnicity.
In other words it is sheer idiocy at best, destructive at worst.
Which is not to say that it is impossible for denunciations on certain issues to turn racist. It’s not automatically racist, for instance, to be opposed to illegal immigration. But you can be sure that some of the people wanting tighter border control feel that way because they hate Hispanics or something like that. And I say that agreeing that we need to get control of our border. And likewise, you can take a culture being wrong on one topic leads people to hate according to race. You can hate Islam, for instance, and that would lead you to hate Arabs. But you can’t assume that just because a person like Mark Williams hates Islam, that he also hates Arabs and other darker skinned people.
As for the point that the comment seemed more directed at Allah, than his followers, Stalker-boy wrote I might be right... “but that's just as racist.”
Now let me stop there. That would be racist, toward a deity. So be ready for the civil rights lawsuit: Allah v. Williams. Of course there are problems with that. For one, only a person can sue. So does Allah count as a person? And how can you say Williams is discriminating against dark skinned people, when its my understanding that Allah doesn’t even have skin or color. Although I suppose the theory could be that Williams mistakenly believes that Allah has skin and that this skin is dark in color. And of course if Allah gets on the stand, it could get ugly for him. I mean if I was the lawyer in question this is how the cross examination would go:
Q: So, Mr. Allah, you claim to be a benevolent God, is that correct?
A: Yes.
Q: And you are of course omnipotent and omniscient, right?
A: Yes.
Q: So you can see the future right?
A: Yes. (grumbling) Look, I know what you are going to ask, let me explain...
Judge: Let the attorney ask the questions. I understand you can anticipate his questions, but that is not how we do it here. You have to answer the questions as they presented to you.
A: Okay, your honor.
Q: So you picked Mohammed as your prophet, right? yes or no.
A: Yes.
Q: And you knew everything that Mohammed would do, right? Again, yes or no.
A: Yes.
Q: So it wasn’t a surprise when Mohammed began to be interested in marrying Aisha, right?
A: No, it wasn’t.
Q: And so he married Aisha, when she was six years old. (murmur in the jury) But he didn’t have sex with a six year old girl right? yes or no.
A: No.
Q: That’s right. He waited. He didn’t have sex with her until she was older. At the age of nine. Isn’t that right, Allah?
A: No, no, it’s a mistranslation. She wasn’t nine.
Q: Then how old was she when they first started having sex?
A: Um, ten.
And it just gets harder from there. “Why did you pick a prophet who you knew or should have know would be a pedophile?” “Did you at least talk to Mohammed and tell him to leave Aisha alone?” "Couldn't you have just made Mohammed impotent?" and so on. I don’t think Allah (pedophilia be upon him) wants to deal with all of that. Us lawyers know that if you make the process of discovery sufficiently painful people will not sue in the first place. I expect Williams will get some cease and desist terrorist death threats over this, but Allah himself will not have the balls to sue.
(By the way, for the slow, that part is called satire, where I am taking the implications of something and teasing it out until it is utterly ridiculous. Which is not exactly hard, you know when I have such great material to work with.)
But, no, you see there is something invidious about all this Allah mockery. Stalker-boy explains: “Why did he choose ‘monkey’ -- a common epithet for dark-skinned people (or, I suppose, dark-skinned gods) -- and not ‘giraffe?’ What was ‘monkey’ supposed to mean if not in a racist sense?”
Now the stupidity of assuming that every mention of monkeys is racist has already been done to death, but let me pause and give a public service announcement.
For everyone the media paints as conservative—which of course includes actual conservatives; people who are not actually socialists; people who occasionally criticize unions, or criticize racists who are not white (even if they also criticize racists who are white); are opposed to abortion on demand and at taxpayer expense; people who think it is ever wise to go to war with anyone, ever; people who think that our presidents should be competent and gee, maybe have a little executive experience before taking on the most challenging executive position in America; who think maybe some of our income should not be taxed into oblivion; and gee maybe we should stop running up this massive debt—such “conservatives” as defined above must never, ever, ever talk about any member of the primate family again, lest some liberal call you a racist. I mean I don’t care what the context was. “You see scientists believe that we evolved from monkeys.” OMG, you are such a racist. “Did you see that special with Jane Goodall last night. Wow, she has really devoted herself to those chimps.” Black people, you mean! Because lord knows, no one ever talks about primates except to denigrate black people...
It makes me think of a great line from Jonah Goldberg when discussing silly claims of racism in The Lord of the Rings:
One is tempted to ask who is the real racist here? On the one hand we have people — like me — who see horrific, flesh-eating, dull-witted creatures with jagged feral teeth, venomous mouths, pointed devilish ears, and reptilian skin, and say, "Cool, Orcs!" On the other hand we have people, like Mr. Yatt, who see the same repugnant creatures and righteously exclaim "black people!" Maybe he should spend less time vetting movies for signs of racism and more time vetting himself if, that is, he free-associates black people with these subhuman monsters.
Ditto for our Stalker-boy. Who is the real racist? I see a guy mocking a deity and you see a cut against dark-skinned people. Who is the real racist?
But then finally he did manage to find a racist statement from Williams. Let me quote it for you, in full. He was telling about how he used to help disabled veterans move from into the workforce, and find housing and the like. And one day he had a black man come in, in a wheelchair, saying his landlord was about to evict him because he was handicapped. And this is how Mr. Williams describes this encounter:
So I took him to a black lawyer that we had -- that had...attended some of the training that we had provided, because the Americans with Disabilities Act had just been enacted. So I figured if I take him to one of them that his own kind would take care of him.”
Pretty racist, huh? I mean sure, later when it became clear that this black lawyer was not doing the job, he realized he had to intervene and made sure the man got the help he deserved. And he said that it showed that black people and white people must work together. But still to say today, in 2010, that black people are not “his own kind” was pretty racist.
Oh, except Mark Williams never said that. Shirley Sherrod did. Or rather, I switched the colors and changed Chapter 12 to the Americans with Disabilities Act. These are her actual words:
“So I took him to a white lawyer that we had -- that had...attended some of the training that we had provided, 'cause Chapter 12 bankruptcy had just been enacted for the family farmer. So I figured if I take him to one of them that his own kind would take care of him.”
Now I didn’t do that head fake to our Stalker-boy. Nope, I presented it straight, and said that even a child could see “that she doesn’t think white people are her kind.”
He replied: “And you do?”
Yes, as a matter of fact I do. I remember a story President Bush told after 9-11, when the Afghanistan war was new and Iraq was a while off. I am going by memory, so forgive me if I am a little wrong, but I think I am getting the main beats right. Bush had visited an aircraft carrier, and he saw two bombs on one bomber. One said FDNY. The other said, NYPD. So Bush approached the pilot and asked, “did you have any connection to any of the people who died on 9-11?”
The pilot’s reply was powerful. “Yes. They were Americans.”
Yes, she is one of my kind. She is an American. Even racist and all that, she is still an American. I consider African Americans as much my kind as any one of any other color.
And you, Stalker-boy, don't?
I mean to discriminate means literally to classify. To classify according to race, therefore, is racial discrimination. But she classified those who were black as “her kind” and those who were white as “his kind” and our little Stalker-boy can’t see any racism, there, despite the fact she classified people, she discriminated among them, by race.
And isn’t that a perfect example of the modern left’s hypocrisy on the subject? They have no trouble finding dog whistles and racial coding in the most innocent-sounding thing. But a person says that a person of another race is not her kind because of his race, and they can’t see the bigotry. At least not if noticing it would harm the liberal cause, I guess.
And the final question is, are people like this really oblivious to their hypocrisy? Or are they just full of shit? Are they blind to their double standards, or merely hoping we will be?
Sidebar: Okay so what did he say to the point that if Williams’ satire is racist, so is Al Franken’s? The answer, he said, was that “he was, at the time, a paid comedian.”
You know, because when you are a comedian, you get a government issued “license to satire” that then allows you to say really racist things and get away with it. But only licensed satirists can do that. If you do it on your own, well, you are not allowed to disavow your words however clearly satirical they are.
In short, I am fucked.
(note: the last two paragraphs were satire. But not government licensed satire.)
