The Democratic Party Wasn’t Ready for a Black President

There is something that has been tossing around in my head for now almost four years.  I think it crystalized tonight when I saw that liberals had created a hashtag on Twitter: #Negrospotting.

Words cannot express how infuriated I was (although I tried).

For those less embedded in the Twitter world, a hashtag is a way of marking a subject and aggregating comments on that subject.  So apparently liberals thought it would be funny to spot how many black people were in the audience at the Republican National Convention.  I tried to put my anger into words on twitter:

*facepalm* I can't believe that libs are so un-self-aware as to create a hashtag called #negrospotting cc @michellemalkin @twitchyteam (fix)
— Aaron Worthing (@AaronWorthing) August 29, 2012

Hey libs, can you hear THIS dog whistle? #negrospotting most racist hashtag ever.
— Aaron Worthing (@AaronWorthing) August 29, 2012

If twitter existed in the 1930's #jewspotting would have been a hashtag. Shame on libs who created #negrospotting cc @michellemalkin
— Aaron Worthing (@AaronWorthing) August 29, 2012

And of course Michelle Malkin, who has had more than a little experience with liberal racism, had her own thoughts.

SHAME SHAME SHAME on all you racist progs playing the #negrospotting game. Dear God, you people are sick. #gop2012 #rnc2012
— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) August 28, 2012

And I liked Stevie J. West’s commentary too.

.@wilbs999 Liberals are finding black people at the RNC and calling it #NegroSpotting. #BecauseActualRacism
— Stevie J. West (@StevieJWest) August 29, 2012

(Sometimes hashtags are also used as a way of making a side comment, often sarcastically, which is what she did when she said “#BecauseActualRacism”)

And there is more coverage of this vileness over at Twitchy.  But then I wrote out something that might seem like a non sequitur to most of you:

It is becoming increasingly clear to me that Democrats wereNOT ready for a black president.
— Aaron Worthing (@AaronWorthing) August 29, 2012

Well, twitter only allows 140 characters, so I will explain what I mean by that.

I Read “The Space Traders” by Derrick Bell So You Don’t Have To!

This isn’t a full on fisking (though it is close), but Derrick Bell’s famous story The Space Traders is in the news again because of Obama’s association with him.  I had actually seen that HBO short based on the story and found it to be racist crap at the time, and continue to hold that opinion.  But I admit I never got around to reading the original.  But you can and I did, here.

The basic set up is that aliens come here in the far-flung year of…  2000!

And admittedly some of the fun here is looking at what Bell thought the year 2000 would look like as he offered the set up:

Those mammoth vessels carried within their holds treasure of which the United States was in most desperate need: gold, to bail out the almost bankrupt federal, state, and local governments; special chemicals capable of unpolluting the environment, which was becoming daily more toxic, and restoring it to the pristine state it had been before Western explorers set foot on it; and a totally safe nuclear engine and fuel, to relieve the nation's all but-depleted supply of fossil fuel. In return, the visitors wanted only one thing-and that was to take back to their home star all the African Americans who lived in the United States.

Christina H. Vents on Anti-Asian American Racism

This Cracked article isn’t very funny, but I think for the most part it is pretty insightful: 4 Things the Jeremy Lin Story Reveals About Modern Racism.  Actually I think the title is pretty misleading.  It is really pretty focused on anti-Asian American racism, and I don’t think most of it is highlighted by the Lin story, but it’s still an interesting perspective from someone who grew up facing this crap.

Here’s one of my favorite paragraphs from it:

[I]f someone called me a "gook," for example, my immediate gut reaction, before even thinking "racism," would be "THAT'S NOT EVEN THE RIGHT RACE." I know that critiquing the accuracy of a racist joke seems sort of like criticizing the construction quality of a cross being burned on someone's lawn, but in a weird way, someone not even being informed enough about you to use the right slur is a sting in its own right.

You want to annoy a Chinese-American? Make some sushi jokes, or kimchi jokes, or maybe even some sweet and sour pork jokes. Apparently not a lot of people know this, but there's a number of dishes that Chinese people really don't eat a lot of, and they're mainly for appeasing the mostly white clientele of many Chinese restaurants. Sweet and sour pork is one of them.

If you want to do a "This is what Chinese people be like" joke, you probably want to talk about how they can't get enough of the tapioca tea or something. That'll hit a little closer to home.

There is some nits to pick.  For instance in modern taxonomy, the Vietnamese are not a separate race from other Asians, but only a separate ethnicity—although it is worth noting that about a hundred years ago, what we call ethnicities they called “races.”  So they believed there was a “French” race, an “English” race and so on.

And talking about the piece as a whole one of the big things she leaves out is the “perpetual foreigner” stereotype, that somehow Asian-Americans, however long they live in America, are assumed to be FOB (Fresh Off the Boat).  And it’s a really big oversight in her article.  For instance, she talks about how sentiment against Asian countries often bleeds into sentiment against Asian Americans.  Which is obviously true, but you can’t really convince people to stop disliking China or something like that.  I mean it is a dictatorship after all, so while this is really pretty clumsy...

…you can’t exactly take criticism of China off the table.  What really has to be done is an uncoupling in our minds between an American and their “mother country.”  I mean I am almost 50% German, and none of my family spent a day in an internment camp.  If memory serves a few Germans and Italians were rounded up, but it was extremely selective, based on things like individualized suspicion and evidence.  You know as opposed to our policy with the Japanese, which was to say “frak it” and round up every man, woman and child.  With Germans and Italians it was generally assumed that they had broken ties with the “mother country” that indeed now America was their “mother country.”  On the other hand, it was assumed that Japanese Americans were still ready to go all kamikaze for their Emperor-God.

Observations on Jeremy Lin and Anti-Asian-American Prejudice (and False Alarms)

So apparently this is the theme of the day, bigotry towards Asian Americans.  Indeed, when I was watching last weekend’s Saturday Night Live, it was the subject of the opening sketch:

And yes, that NY Post headline, “Amasian!” is real:

And it’s pretty repugnant.  What does his race have to do with anything?

Well, then again this story suggests a certain relevance, from Cheaper Than Therapy:

So, How is this NOT a Dog Whistle?

Of course Legal Insurrection takes on the latest thin, lame, charge of bigotry against Sharon Angle in Nevada because she made an ad against illegal immigration.  I guess the illegal immigrants should have been depicted as a multicultural group, like the “TV gangs” that Family Guy correctly sent up.  Sigh.

But meanwhile we have something that happened in New Mexico.  There Democrat Diane Denish is running against Republican Susana Martinez in the race for governor.  And now suddenly they are all saying “No Tejana Susana.”  A Tejana is literally a “Texan woman” in Spanish.  See the truth is that in Spanish, the X is supposed to be pronounced more like an H.  As I joke (with affection) Texans don’t even pronounce the name of their state correctly.  And if you are calling her that in Spanish, then that is all it means: Texas woman.

But if you are otherwise speaking in English, such as, “You should not vote for that Tejana” then there is a secondary meaning.  A Tejano/Tejana also means a Hispanic Texan.  Now its lame enough that they are resorting to this silly regionalism.  But what possible relevance is it to highlight that she is Hispanic, too?

And a quick google search reveals that this is getting very common on the left.

I mean imagine if during the 2008 campaign, McCain said, “Do not vote for the black man, Obama.”  Everyone would rightly denounce that as racist, because it was unnecessarily dragging his race into the issue.

And mind you this is not a subtle code that a lot of people might miss and innocently invoke.  I have said we have a whole generation of children who don’t understand why it is racially offensive to depict Obama as a monkey, or eating fried chicken and watermelons; they are so beyond race, they don’t even understand these stereotypes.  But everyone in that region knows what Tejano/Tejana means.  Everyone.

Yep, it Was a Circus; and Yep it Distracted from the Real Story

So Stephen Colbert testified, not as Colbert the regular guy who has a few thoughts on illegal immigrant workers and just wants to share them but as “Stephen Colbert” who is so buried in parody it’s sometimes hard to figure out where the joke ends and the man begins.  And it was as bad as I suspected it would be.

Going by the Daily Caller’s rush transcript “highlights” we get this string of thoughts:

America’s farms are presently far too dependent on immigrant labor to pick our fruits and vegetables. Now the obvious answer is for all of us to stop eating fruits and vegetables....

Unfortunately, my gastroenterologist Dr. Ikener has informed me in no uncertain terms that there are [consequences]....

As evidence, I would like to insert a video of my colonoscopy into the congressional record.

Now I admit that last line is kind of funny.  But its wildly inappropriate.

Stephen Colbert should have had enough class and respect for the institution of Congress to drop his act and speak in serious tones.  I am not saying there is no room for joking, but this display was just disrespectful.  But then the committee disrespected itself first by calling him.

And of course all of this distracted us from the real story, which was the testimony about the Black Panther voting rights case.  I already linked to the apparent prepared remarks.  You will see an Ike Brown case being mentioned, here is a link to that.  Having read it, my big takeaway, besides the direct contradiction of prior testimony, is that this problem of the voting rights act being enforced in a racially discriminatory fashion predates the obama administration and often the career officials are as much a part of the problem as political appointees.  I joked the other day that “the Democrats do not judge whether you are a racist by the content of your character, but by the color of your skin.”  The Civil Rights Division judges whether racial discrimination has occurred by a similar standard.  The ideas that any of our laws should be enforced according to race is an anathema.

The irony is that by doing so, they threaten the very law they wish to enforce.  If it is found that the Voting Rights Act has the effect of violating the 15th Amendment, then that presents a very real danger that the law will be actually struck down.  So if only out of self-interest, organizations like the NAACP should insist on colorblind enforcement of that law.

Another Liberal who Calls Tea Partiers Racist, Proves to be a Racist

Of course this time we are talking about Bill Maher.  Yeah, color me shocked that this professional asshole is a racist.  I mean I admit sometimes he is a funny asshole, but still an asshole.

First mediaite gives us this charming commentary:

But the biggest fireworks came when Maher was asked if there are racist overtones to Obama hate. His answer (“Yes, Larry, it’s extremely racist”) should surprise no one, and his follow-up zing was classic Maher:

“It’s funny, ’cause the teabaggers – the one thing they hate: when you call them racist. The other thing they hate is black people.

And actually they hate massive debt and democratic totalitarianism.  But you wouldn’t understand that.  So, let me explain it in terms you can understand, Bill.  If Obamacare is upheld then the government would have every right to ban the orgies you allegedly* have at the playboy mansion on a regular basis because it would drive up health care costs for the rest of us when you and the playmates catch the clap.

WTF?! Middle School Designates That Certain Class Officer Positions are Only Available to Members of... One Race [Update: The School Responds!]

There is so much wrong with this, I don’t know where to begin.  So at Nettleton Middle School, in Nettleton, Mississippi, they say that if you want to be Class President you have to be white and if you want to be Vice President, you have to be black.  And on down the line.  They also segregate in other areas.

Yes, really.

Oh, and if you are Asian, or a Native American, you are shit out of luck, I guess.  I would go on pointing out the many contradictions, but sheesh, I think most of ya’ll get it.

By the way, that sound you are hearing right now is the rest of the entire state of Mississippi simultaneously smacking itself in the face to do a facepalm.

You know these things boggle the mind.  How did things get so completely wrong there?  I mean you think racism is dead, or on its death bed, but then one day you are fishing and you draw in a Coelacanth of segregation.  And you look at it in astonishment and say, “how do you even exist in 2010?”

But let me take a moment and express a deeper thought than just, “what the fuck?”  I mean every now and then these “living fossils” turn up.  A few years back I remember where a principal segregated the prom.  When a biracial girl asked him, presumably sarcastically, what prom she was supposed to go to, he told her that her parents made a mistake in creating her.  And I remember watching news footage of one black woman crying at the thought that her children would have to go to that same school the next year—she had no other options.  She was too poor to have other options.

In the linked article, the woman, Brandy Springer, decided to move to take herself out of the system.  That is great.  Seriously that is wonderful.  She has withdrawn both her children and her tax dollars from that Jim Crowe district and I applaud her for it.

But most people can’t do that.  Most people are stuck with what they got.

I have alluded to the fact that I am learning disabled.  I don’t remember if I have shared with you that when I was living in Charlotte, North Carolina, that I made the “mistake” of seeking the most reasonable accommodations.  They not only refused to do so, but they engaged in active forms of discrimination until I gave up and dropped out.

Now the story ends alright.  I later got my GED, went to a mid-level University and then on to a one of the best law schools in America.  And in business and in life I do pretty well for myself.  But in that time when my dreams were broken, when I believed I had no future, the most bitter thought was that these bastards took away my right to an education, but my parents still had to pay for it.

Our current “free” education system is wrong.  It is wrong to create a set of economics that make it easy for the richest students to escape the public schools, that makes it hard for the middle class to afford that, and positively traps the poorest in them.  I know about the founding of the current free school system and I know it was motivated by the best egalitarian ideal: that every person deserved a square chance at success in life.  But like most government programs, it is losing sight of its original purpose.

And when the only game in town is the government, as it is for most people seeking to educate their children, then when that government entity is taken over by bigots, it can be devastating.  Most people can’t move.  Most people can’t afford to send their children to private school.  So their children will face discrimination in their education, even denial of their right to an education, and have nowhere else to go.

What we need is a radical privatization of our school system.  What I propose is this.  it balances the need to give everyone a square chance at life, while also introducing some market competition.

First, every parent would receive a voucher.  Now it is often argued that vouchers never pay for much.  I agree.  So let’s make it pay for a lot.  For instance, I once heard it said that in America we spend an average of $6,600 per student per year.  So let’s get them a voucher for that amount.

Second, every public school would be converted to a tuition basis for funding.

And of course measures would be adopted to make sure that the states still offered a viable alternative, just in case every private school refuses to admit black students, or more reasonably they all become religious schools leaving no secular alternative.

It is often objected that many private schools are religions and this would raise establishment clause concerns.  First, it is illogical to assume that if private schools are now overwhelmingly religious that they will remain so if most children go to private schools.  Second, even if most of the money goes to religious schools, it is at the direction of the parents, not the government.  In that sense it is no different than a state employee receiving a paycheck and giving the majority of it to his church.  It is his money and his right.  Same with the parents; it becomes effectively their money.

And that is not just my opinion.  That is the opinion of the supreme court.  There have been cases where states would offer to, say, deaf children free sign interpreters to help them go to school wherever they chose to go to school.  Believe it or not, someone had a problem with that, claiming that if a deaf child used a state-sponsored interpreter, that this amounted to aiding religion and the court reasoned exactly as I did: that is it no different than a state employee putting his own earned salary into the coffers of a church.

Right now, our schools are socialist institutions.  That is the reality of it all.  And they are inflicted with the classic failings of socialism: prices go up, salaries go down, and quality goes down the tubes.  What I am proposing is a radical injection of capitalism into that system.  It won’t eliminate bigotry like we saw in this story or what I personally faced.  But it will limit its effects.  And most importantly it will fundamentally change the relationship between schools and parents.  Rather than being people seeking their benefits from the state, they will be customers.  They can say, you will educate my child, or by God, I will take that money somewhere else.

In Nettleton, Mississippi, Brandy Springer as so offended by the racism in her school she moved her whole family to withhold her child and the money associated with her child, from that school.  Every parent, rich or poor should be able to do that.

Update: The school tries to explain itself in a press release:

After being notified of a grievance regarding upcoming student elections at Nettleton Middle School, research was conducted that evidenced that the current practices and procedures for student elections have existed for over 30 years. It is the belief of the current administration that these procedures were implemented to help ensure minority representation and involvement in the student body. It is felt the intent of these election procedures was to ensure African-American representation in each student office category through an annual rotation basis.

So in short, this started as affirmative action.  Which goes to show something else: how often affirmative action can end up looking like just plain racism.

Further they explain:

Therefore, beginning immediately, student elections at Nettleton School District will no longer have a classification of ethnicity. It is our intent that each student has equal opportunity to seek election for any student office.

Oh well, that is good.  Apparently they have learned their lesson, right?  Right?

Future student elections will be monitored to help ensure that this change in process and procedure does not adversely affect minority representation in student elections.

Ah, crap.

Another Liberal Accuses Others of Racism, Proves to be Racist in the Attempt

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.

The Shirley Sherrod Story Gets More Hilarious

First, the NAACP purports to release the “full” speech by Shirley Sherrod.  Oh, except watch it.  There are edits there.  So its not the full speech, it’s the NAACP cut.  And even that cut doesn’t exonerate her or the NAACP.  She never condemned her own racism.  And the audience, contrary to my stalker’s opinion, showed approval of the discrimination without knowing she would go back and fix it.

Second, now Ben Jealous is claiming that the video is out of context, that in context it exonerates her.  He then gets all indignant:

“We were snookered by Fox News and Tea Party Activist Andrew Breitbart into believing she had harmed white farmers because of racial bias,” said NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous. “Having reviewed the full tape, spoken to Ms. Sherrod, and most importantly heard the testimony of the white farmers mentioned in this story, we now believe the organization that edited the documents did so with the intention of deceiving millions of Americans.”

But as Gateway Pundit points out, there is one problem with that story (I mean besides the fact that it doesn’t actually exonerate her or the NAACP):

Mr. Jealous was there.

The Jackie Robinson Theory of the Obama Presidency

Ever since Obama has become president there has been a hyperracialization of every issue of mere politics.  The climax came for me when I went to the Tea Party protest down at the Capital.  I’ll post more on it later, but when I got home I started hearing claims of some kind of racial incident.  You can recognize intellectually that politicians are liars, but to hear them lying about you is another matter, a real baptism.  And it made me try to understand where this was all coming from.

Now some of it is pure hucksterism.  There is no two ways about it.

But there is also an honest, albeit mistaken, belief that this is a racial issue.  And I think I figured out why so many liberals have been seeing it that way.  I call it the Jackie Robinson Theory of the Obama presidency.

The Fallacy of Assuming Everyone Thinks Like You (or “Fisking Keith Olbermann”)

Yeah, several posts ago I wondered if it was necessary to fisk Olbermann, but I am compelled to, here.

But first let me tell you a story.  Now I have said that I support affirmative action in a limited sort of way, based on the present reality of racism and other forms of bigotry.  And I remember saying that once in a Constitutional History class back when I was an undergraduate and a man vehemently disagreed with me that racism was a real problem.  He said something like this:

I don’t think racism is so bad.  At my fraternity, a black guy wanted to join.  And one guy said we shouldn’t let him join because he was black.  So I stood up and said that the fact he was black didn’t matter.  And we voted to let him in.

That’s a paraphrase, of course.  And this is what I said in response.

Racial Coding at NBC?

Time to do some petard hoisting.  Apparently at NBC they decided to set up a menu to “In Honor of Black History Month.”  And what, pray tell, was on the menu?

Fried chicken, Collard Greens, white rice and black eyed pees.

Yes, really.