Comment O' Teh Day

On Huffpo's story about the Arizona elementary school principal who ordered that mural artists lighten the "controversial" faces of black and Hispanic students in response to racist taunting.

If we'd have known that electing a "different" looking President with a "funny" name was all it took to be able to easily identify the racists among us, we'd have done it earlier!

Obama's Race Speech

After a day of travel to and from Seattle to hear Nicholas Kristof and think about the 100 million missing women, I needed something hopeful to think about.
Andrew Sullivan picked it up at The Dish:

[L]ast March 13, when the incendiary sermons of Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, blew up all over the cable networks, Obama had spent the entire day and evening in the Senate. That Friday, after enduring a series of tough interviews, Obama informed Axelrod and campaign manager David Plouffe, “I want to do a speech on race.” And he added, “I want to make this speech no later than next Tuesday. I don’t think it can wait.” Axelrod and Plouffe tried to talk him into delaying it: He had a full day of campaigning on Saturday, a film shoot on Sunday, and then another hectic day campaigning in Pennsylvania on Monday. Obama was insistent. On the Saturday-morning campaign conference call, Favreau was told to get to work on a draft immediately. Favreau replied, “I’m not writing this until I talk to him.”
That evening, Saint Patrick’s Day, less than seventy-two hours before the speech would be delivered to a live audience, Favreau was sitting alone in an unfurnished group house in Chicago when the boss called. “I’m going to give you some stream of consciousness,” Obama told him. Then he spoke for about forty-five minutes, laying out his speech’s argumentative construction. Favreau thanked him, hung up, considered the enormity of the task and the looming deadline, and then decided he was “too freaked out by the whole thing” to write and went out with friends instead.

On Sunday morning at seven, the speechwriter took his laptop to a coffee shop and worked there for thirteen hours. Obama received Favreau’s draft at eight that evening and wrote until three in the morning. He hadn’t finished by Monday at 8 a.m., when he set the draft aside to spend the day barnstorming across Pennsylvania. At nine thirty that night, a little more than twelve hours before the speech was to be delivered, Obama returned to his hotel room to do more writing. At two in the morning, the various BlackBerrys of Axelrod, Favreau, Plouffe, and Jarrett sounded with a message from the candidate: Here it is. Favs, feel free to tweak the words. Everyone else, the content here is what I want to say. Axelrod stood in the dark reading the text: “The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made.… But what we know—what we have seen—is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope—the audacity to hope—for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.”
He e-mailed Obama: This is why you should be president.

The Bradley Effect

is about the continuing Republican meme that people lie to pollsters about whether they will vote for a black candidate, preferring to have some stranger calling you on the phone believe you are not racist.
Tom Bradley was the black man running for governor of California in 1982 who was expected to win and didn't. But his own pollster said the expecation was built upon faulty sampling and there was, actually, no Bradley effect.
Nate Silver at 538 has written about this, but apparently NPR hasn't heard about it becasue today they're pimping a story about it, which really pisses me off and I guess I'm going to have to listen and then blast a complaint.
Nate also responded to a right-wing critique of his analysis here, in case you want to get into the technicalities.

Stuff Educated Black People Like

like Stuff White People Like, satirical commentary on a state of mind. Or lifestyle. Or something.

...and He's Black!

Okay, so today Lieberputz called Obama  a "good young man." Is that anything like a good darkie?
And Stephanoffagus noted the racial dog whistle stuff may be McCain's only strategy.
Omigod, is the media starting to catch on?
Well, if Mr. Bipartisan David Gergen has his way, he'll be shoving it down their throats until they cry Uncle.

The McCain "Celebrity' Attack Ad

"Race Card" posts below are about this:



UPDATE: Obama in Iowa today:





Crikey, enough! I'm going for a walk and then, into the garden!

Eeew, the Race Card III

Over at Andrew Sullivan's Salon blog, (oops, I mean The Atlantic) a re-consideration. Of course, it should be noted that the named alternative celebrities don't stand out as empty and vacuous. On the other hand, they're not "sexually available white women" either.
Personally, I think this has the "Harold, call me" tactic written all over it. In case you forget, it's the blonde white floozy in the ad used to defeat black Harold Ford last fall in Tennessee. He's got a good gig now, though, head of the Democratic Leadership Council and vacuous black spokesperson for all things centrist and Republican Lite.

by Chris Bodenner
I'm the last person to buy into the so-called "racist" intentions of mainstream Republicans.  And I think Democrats usually cry wolf on the matter, to the detriment of race relations.  But reading John Riley's post gave me pause:

We just got off a conference call with Camp McCain, defending their new ad comparing Barack Obama to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. They said they thought the ad was legitimate because Obama is a big celebrity..., and Britney and Paris were Number 2 and 3. The problem: Anyone with even a vague sense of pop culture knows that Britney and Paris are yesterday's news. Here's a link to Forbes' Celebrity 100. Paris and Britney don't even make the list any more. Instead, the top 10, in order: Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods, Angelina Jolie, Beyonce Knowles, David Beckham, Johnny Depp, Jay-Z, The Police, JK Rowling, Brad Pitt. So, they didn't pick other big celebrities, who were either men, or black, or married. What they picked was two sexually available white women.

Eeew, the Race Card II

They talk about the "dog whistle" in politics, the one only bigots can hear.
The best summary I've seen so far of the pro-Obama talking points and the "dog whistle" is in a comments secion of TPM today.

So are all of y'all from up North such that you don't recognize that this denunciation is the inevitable follow up of the candidate who's blown the the racial dogwhistle?

I blogged about this back during the meanest, most overheated, part of the the primaries. I'm not going to link to that post, becuase the last damn thing I want to do is stir up old fights with my fellow travellers.

But I will quote myself, (albeit while shamelessly taking the opportunity to correct a few typos in the original):

I've lived in the South, or the border South, my whole life and I'm old enough to remember the bad old days when white supremacy was mainstream political thought. I've lived through the days when racial politics transitioned from fire hoses and bullets and George Wallace screaming "Segregation Now, Segregation Forever" to Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy," Ronald Reagan's speechifying about "states rights" in Philedelphia, Mississippi and Jesse Helms "white hands" ad. (God, I'll never forget how utterly appalled I was by that ad and that whole campaign. In the waning days of the Bush I Administration, I thought the country was past that sort of thing. Now that was naïve.)

I'm a white guy, but I know the politics of racial dog whistling when I see it.

The racial dog whistle isn't directed to the people who have swastika tattoos and Klan robes in their closet. It is directed to the angry blue collar white guy who starts all his pronouncements with "I'm no racist, but . . ." and then goes on and on and on about "them" and how "they" act. People who know they're getting a raw deal and need a scapegoat. People who genuinely think it would be profoundly foul and offensive to call a black person "nigger" to his or her face but see nothing wrong with using the word in private conversations with other white people.

I've seen that tune oh-so-skillfully played in a wistful minor key by Jesse Helms and the other Republicans in North Carolina for more than two decades. Mostly, its all about a wink and a nod, a codeword here and a subtle image there and all to convey a simple message: "those blacks are privileged and getting special treatment and stealing your tax money and it just ain't fair." And you quickly learn that when its time to get blunt and say something really foul, they always trot out a black man to say it for them.

The inevitable protestation of complete innocence is the most sickening part of the act. In every case, when someone calls bullshit, the candidate pulls his halo and his best wounded expression out of his desk and sorrowfully bemoans the way his opponent makes everything about race (but, you know, that's how those people are, idn't it? Everything's always a racial thing with them).

And yes, in that same post, I noted how the "empty suit" meme is, in itself, a racial dog whistle--

At another level, however, it is a far fouler, appeal to the prejudices of, say people in a state where the demographics trend white, blue collar and older than just about anywhere else in the nation, than anyone seems to have appreciated, one narrowly targeted to get them to apply their prejudices specifically to Obama.

Barack Obama is a staggeringly accomplished man. Merely to describe his accomplishments makes one sound like a drooling star-struck Kool Aid drinker with a Chris Matthews style man crush. Obama got his B.A. from Columbia, majoring in political science with an emphasis in international relations. He was a community organizer in his twenties who, among other things, was behind a remarkably successful voter registration drive in Chicago. He received his J.D. From Harvard Law, Magna Cum Laude. He was research assistant to Lawrence Tribe, who called him "the most all-around impressive student I had seen in decades." While working for Tribe “Obama analyzed and integrated Einstein's theory of relativity, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, as well as the concept of curved space as an alternative to gravity, for a Law Review article that Tribe wrote titled, 'The Curvature of Constitutional Space.'” In his third year, Obama was elected president of the Harvard Law Review. After law school, he eschewed the incredibly lucrative job offers that await presidents of the HLR, and, instead, went to work with a respected, but small and not very remunerative, civil rights firm in Chicago. He also taught Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago and, it is said, could have had been full professor any time he wanted, had he not chosen to also pursue a political career. He had a meteoric rise from state senator to U.S. Senator to Presidential candidate. He is the author, the actual author, not some pol claiming credit for the work of a ghost author, of of two best selling books. Both of his books are extremely well written, the first a remarkably insightful memoir, the latter a cogent synthesis of recent events and our political and economic history that lucidly explains where we are, how we got here and what we can do about it. Chock full of policy precriptions, wonky yet readable and remarkably self-reflective.

As a senator, he has sponsored some very serious signature pieces of legislation and gotten them passed while he was a member of the minority. And, oh yes, the guy happens to be the most outstanding political orator of his generation, and may be one of the four or five best in the history of the party. He has created and run a tight, well-run and remarkable harmonious campaign organization that has upended the carefully laid plans of the Mighty and Inevitable Hillary Clinton Machine and run up huge margins against her in, what, fifteen out of the last seventeen states now?

Was he fast tracked by the powers that be in the Illinois legislature and by the Democratic Senate leadership? You bet he was. That's what organizations do with prodigies. Businesses do it, universities do it, the military does it and, yes, they do it in politics.

And yet . . . over and over again, you see him dismissed as “an empty suit.” . . . Empty suit. Pretty speeches and no content. Just a vacuous, content-free pretty boy.

Do you really think anyone would buy that drivel if he were white? . . . “Accomplishments? C'mon, he's a moulie. Columbia? Affirmative action. Harvard? Quota baby. President of the Harvard Law Review? Just a bunch of northeastern liberals exorcising their white guilt. University of Chicago? Reverse racism. Illinois legislature? Blacks takin' care of their own. Senate? Affirmative action. You know how it is today. Those blacks get everything, and us whites get the short end, know what I'm sayin'?”

The MSM can, and will, pretend not to get it. And, indeed, given that most of them seem to have a form of brain damage that causes them to forget anything that happened more than two weeks ago, some of them actually might not get it. They're sheep who are endlessly startled by things they see every day of their banal lives.

Regardless of whether you believed it was happening then, it is unmistakably happening now, and that fact that its happening was almost pathetic in its predicability once the Rovelettes took over McCain's campaign.
Posted by The Commenter Formerly Known as NCSteve.

Eeew, the Race Card!

April 8, 2008, from McCain pro-war rally.
Today, the McCain camp accuses Obama of playing the race card when he said he doesn't look like the rest of the presidents on the dollar bill. All kinds of speculation in the 'spere about this, I reserve judgment. Hell, we already went through this in the primary, we knew it was coming again.

1968 — 2008

With Miss Nina Simone.

'C' Word the New 'N' Word?

Ran across this odd bit of politically incorrect trivia from Canada's National Post a while back and still don't know what to make of it.
Of course, I lead a sheltered life these days.
In short, the new way to note a black person's race without coming right out and saying it is to call him or her Canadian.
It showed up in an email referring to the unlikely presence of "Canadians" on a Texas jury which included several black people.
It was reported by Fox News.
It shows up in an online directory of racial slurs. It's a matter of discussion among black people in the Southeast.
And linguists have taken note.

A University of Kansas linguist said that a waitress friend reported that "fellow workers used to use a name for inner-city families that were known to not leave a tip: Canadians. ‘Hey, we have a table of Canadians.... They're all yours.' "

Stefan Dollinger, a postdoctoral fellow in linguistics at University of British Columbia and director of the university's Canadian English lab, speculated that the slur reflects a sense of Canadians as the other.

"This ‘code' word, is the replacement of a no-longer tolerated label for one outsider group, with, from the U.S. view, another outsider group: Canadians. It could have been terms for Mexicans, Latinos etc. but this would have been too obvious," he said. "What's left? Right, the guys to the north."

The Angry Black Past

"The past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past."

A lot of commentators were impressed when Barack Obama used this William Faulkner quote in his history-making speech on racial unity earlier this week.

Obama was careful not to make it too raw, as raw as this memory of Mary Ellen Noone broadcast today on NPR's Morning Edition.
You can read it at the link, but listen to the podcast in her own soft voice. It only takes three minutes. We need to own up to these things, not turn away if there is going to be healing.

"Every time I look at enamel red finger polish, I have a flashback, and I see red," Noone says. "I still have that anger inside of me that someone would have that control over one person just because they wanted to feel like a woman."