by hilzoy
I haven’t written anything about Jesse Helms’ death, since I don’t like speaking ill of the dead. However: every so often, conservatives wonder: why oh why do people think that the Republican party, and/or the conservative movement, is bigoted? I think that the conservative response to Helms’ death ought to settle that debate once and for all.
[UPDATE: I’m talking about about the Republican Party as an institution, not its individual members. Of course there are bigots and non-bigots in both parties. Ditto “the conservative movement”: I meant to refer to it as an organized force, not to all its members. Sorry not to have said this more clearly. END UPDATE.]
More below the fold. Note that I have largely restricted myself to conservatives’ own words (and not random bloggers, but people and magazines with some standing in conservative circles), and to Helms’ words and actions.
For my part, I’ll just echo Matt:
“Conservatives are taking a line that I might have regarded as an unfair smear just a week ago, and saying that Helms is a brilliant exemplar of the American conservative movement.
And if that’s what the Heritage Foundation and National Review and the other key pillars of American conservatism want me to believe, then I’m happy to believe it. But it reflects just absolutely horribly on them and their movement that this is how they want to be seen — as best exemplified by bigotry, lunatic notions about foreign policy, and tobacco subsidies.”
And Ezra:
“Some of my conservative friends often complain about the difficulty of constructing a “usable history” out of the movement’s recent past, and I sympathize with their plight. When leading exemplars of your political tradition were trying to preserve segregation less than four decades ago, it’s a bit hard to argue that your party, which is now electorally based in the American South, is really rooted in a cautious empiricism and an acute concern for the deadweight losses associated with taxation. That project would really benefit, however, if more of them would step forward and say that Helms marred the history of their movement and left decent people ashamed to call themselves conservative. The attempt to subsume his primary political legacy beneath a lot of pabulum about “limited government and individual liberty” (which did not apparently include the liberty of blacks to work amongst whites or mingle with other races) is embarrassing. But if it goes unchallenged, what are those of us outside the conservative movement to think?”
Some conservative reactions:
George W. Bush:
“Throughout his long public career, Senator Jesse Helms was a tireless advocate for the people of North Carolina, a stalwart defender of limited government and free enterprise, a fearless defender of a culture of life, and an unwavering champion of those struggling for liberty. Under his leadership, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was a powerful force for freedom. And today, from Central America to Central Europe and beyond, people remember: in the dark days when the forces of tyranny seemed on the rise, Jesse Helms took their side.
Jesse Helms was a kind, decent, and humble man and a passionate defender of what he called “the Miracle of America.” So it is fitting that this great patriot left us on the Fourth of July. He was once asked if he had any ambitions beyond the United States Senate. He replied: “The only thing I am running for is the Kingdom of Heaven.” Today, Jesse Helms has finished the race, and we pray he finds comfort in the arms of the loving God he strove to serve throughout his life.”
“At this time, let us remember a life dedicated to serving this nation.”
“Today we lost a Senator whose stature in Congress had few equals. Senator Jesse Helms was a leading voice and courageous champion for the many causes he believed in.”
“He was one of the giants of the ’80s and ’90s in the United States Senate”
“He was a conservative icon,” Bob Dole, the former senator and Republican presidential candidate, said in an interview on CNN. “He was a good, decent human being.”
“Death of a Conservative Great [Mark R. Levin]
I wish the Helms family peace, and I thank Jesse Helms for helping to ensure the election of Ronald Reagan, being a warrior against the Soviet Union and for the release of Soviet Jews and other abused minorities, and being a voice for millions of unborn babies.
I have noticed some of the smears lobbed at William Buckley in other places since his death; Jesse Helms is in for even more of it. Other prominent conservatives will face the same. Unfortunately, such is the nature of these things now.”
The Weekly Standard reposted this article in response to Helms’ death:
“Reagan, as candidate and president, was conservatism with a happy face. Helms is conservatism with a stiffened spine. Reagan’s success as a conservative leader, however, wouldn’t have happened without Helms’s bracing him. The Republican party needs another duo like that. What’s missing, obviously, is a new Reagan. Helms is still here, operating at full tilt.”
“Jesse Helms, U.S. Senator and Conservative Champion, Dies
Conservative Sen. Jesse Helms, 86, a truly great American and champion of freedom, died at 1:15 a.m. today. Helms, who gave our country three decades of service as a U.S. senator from North Carolina, was ill in recent years.
Heritage President Ed Feulner (pictured at right with Helms and his wife Dorothy) presented Helms in 2002 with the Clare Boothe Luce Award, Heritage’s highest honor, calling him a “dedicated, unflinching and articulate advocate of conservative policy and principle.””
“If Ronald Reagan was the sunny and optimistic face of modern conservatism, the uncompromisingly defiant exemplar of it was Jesse Helms, who died yesterday at age 86.”
The American Conservative’s blog cites, without comment, someone saying:
“On Capitol Hill, conservatives had no finer champion than Jesse Helms, the longtime Republican senator from North Carolina.”
Commentary’s blog reposts an old article (pdf), which says, among other things:
“Yet the “racism” of which Helms is accused turns out on inspection to consist of nothing more than an opposition to quotas and other forms of racial preferences.”
Commentary’s blogger adds:
“His controversial political career has been chronicled in numerous obituaries, but few recall the severity of the demonization to which Helms was subjected by many liberals–who accused him of being a one-man “pantheon of evil.””
See below to judge Helms’ racism, and whether he was just a “controversial figure” who was “demonized” by the left. The quotes below might also provide some useful background for judging this, from The Corner:
“The first sentence of the NYT obit:
Jesse Helms, the former North Carolina Senator whose courtly manner and mossy drawl barely masked a hard-edged conservatism that opposed civil rights, gay rights, foreign aid and modern art, died early Friday.
He “opposed civil rights”? Uh, no. He opposed a particular vision of them.”
And, of course, RedState:
“He was a warrior and a patriot. The date of his death is fitting indeed.”
***
Here are quotes by Jesse Helms himself. As you read them, bear in mind all those lovely quotes above, the ones about how he’s a conservative champion, a fighter for conservative ideals, etc. They said it, not me. Like Matt Yglesias, I would have thought it was a completely unjust smear against conservatism to have said any such thing. [UPDATE: To be clear, what I would have thought was unfair was not to take him as a part of the conservative movement, but to think of him as an exemplary figure or a champion. END UPDATE.]
“Just days after Mr. Helms, a Republican from North Carolina, created a furor by saying that President Clinton was not up to the job of Commander in Chief, he told The News and Observer, a newspaper in Raleigh: “Mr. Clinton better watch out if he comes down here. He’d better have a bodyguard.””
On race:
“From the beginning, Helms was schooled in the political device of using race to propel white conservatives to the polls. As news director for WRAL radio, Helms supported Willis Smith in his 1950 Senate campaign against Frank Porter Graham, the former president of the University of North Carolina. The campaign theme was that Graham favored interracial marriages. “White people, wake up before it is too late,” said one ad. “Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races.”
The campaign’s further contribution to political notoriety was a handbill that showed Graham’s wife dancing with a black man. (…)
But before long, Helms found his real calling as a nightly television commentator for WRAL in North Carolina, a post he held from 1960 to 1972. He blasted the “pinkos” and “Yankees” in Washington, and criticized King’s inner circle of civil rights leaders for “proven records of communism, socialism and sex perversion.” He railed against Social Security, calling it “nothing more than doles and handouts.” (…)
In the 1972 race, pitted against a Democratic congressman from Durham, Helms used code words that enraged liberals. The congressman’s name was Nick Galifianakis. Helms’ slogan: “Elect Jesse Helms — He’s One of Us.””
And:
“Helms warned that, “Crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are a fact of life which must be faced.”
He suggested that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a communist dupe and refused, even decades after King’s death, to honor the Nobel Peace Prize winner.
He dismissed the civil rights movement as a cabal of communists and “moral degenerates.”
As the movement gathered strength — and as murderous violence against activists in particular and African-Americans in general increased — Helms menacingly suggested to non-violent civil rights activists that, “The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that’s thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere with other men’s rights.””
A personal favorite, worth remembering when you read things about how courteous Helms was in person:
“When Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois became the first African-American woman to sit in the Senate, Helms followed Moseley-Braun into an elevator, announcing to Utah Senator Orrin Hatch: “Watch me make her cry. I’m going to make her cry. I’m going to sing ‘Dixie’ until she cries.”
Then, emphasizing the lines about how “good” things were before the Civil War ended slavery, Helms sang “Dixie.””
And another:
“His disdain for people of color (exemplified by his “humorous” habit, in private, of referring to any black person as “Fred”) continues to find ways of expressing itself. He is the Senate’s most reliable opponent of any measure aimed at securing the rights or improving the conditions of African-Americans. In 1994, when Nelson Mandela visited the Capitol, Helms ostentatiously turned his back on him.”
Humorous? Referring to any black person as “Fred”??
And (Helms himself, h/t Majikthise):
“No intelligent Negro citizen should be insulted by a reference to this very plain fact of life. It is time to face honestly and sincerely the purely scientific statistical evidence of natural racial distinction in group intellect. … There is no bigotry either implicit or intended in such a realistic confrontation with the facts of life. … Those who would undertake to solve the problem by merely spending more money, and by massive forced integration, may be doing the greatest injustice of all to the Negro.”
And:
“Crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are a fact of life which must be faced.”
And:
“To rob the Negro of his reputation of thinking through a problem in his own fashion is about the same as trying to pretend that he doesn’t have a natural instinct for rhythm and for singing and dancing.”
And:
“”Martin Luther King repeatedly refers to his ‘non-violent movement.’ It is about as non-violent as the Marines landing on Iwo Jima.””
And:
“I was a senior when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. Roughly 2,000 of us joined a vigil on the quad for several days. (…) Jesse Helms came on the television and said that all of the students sitting on the quad at Duke should ask their parents if it would be all right for their son or daughter to “marry a Negro” (Duke students were practically all white in those days). Unless the student’s parents approved of that prospect, Helms advised, he or she should go back to class.”
And:
“As a television commentator before running for the Senate, Helms said, “Dr. (Martin Luther) King’s outfit … is heavily laden at the top with leaders of proven records of communism, socialism and sex perversion, as well as other curious behavior.” He called the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “the single most dangerous piece of legislation ever introduced in the Congress.””
Later, his views had not changed. (This is a transcription of a video; it doesn’t say when the interview it shows is from, but I’d guess the late 80s or 90s, from his appearance. It’s the video linked under Martin Luther King.)
“I thought it [the Civil Rights Act] was very unwise. It was taking liberties away from one group of citizens and giving them to another. I thought it was bad legislation then, and I have had nothing to change my mind about it.”
Helms also “staged a filibuster against the establishment of a national holiday to mark the birthday of Martin Luther King, having called King a communist and a sex pervert”, and “was one of a small number of senators who opposed extending the Voting Rights Act in 1982, eventually giving up a filibuster when then-Majority Leader Sen. Howard Baker, a Tennessee Republican, said the Senate would not take up any other business until it acted on the extension.”
And:
“Appearing on “Larry King Live” in 1995, Jesse Helms, then the senior senator from North Carolina, fielded a call from an unusual admirer. Helms deserved the Nobel Peace Prize, the caller gushed, “for everything you’ve done to help keep down the niggers.” Given the rank ugliness of the sentiment — the guest host, Robert Novak, called it, with considerable understatement, “politically incorrect” — Helms could only pause before responding. But the hesitation couldn’t suppress his gut instincts. “Whoops, well, thank you, I think,” he said.”
One of his home state papers sums it up:
“Helms was an unceasing foe of the 20th century’s social movements — the drives for equality by blacks, women and gays. While others saw groups striving for a piece of the American dream, Helms saw threats to the social fabric.
Along with former gubernatorial candidate I. Beverly Lake Sr., Helms was a leading voice for segregation in North Carolina. Unlike other well-known segregationists, such as Alabama Gov. George Wallace and Thurmond, Helms never repudiated his views or reached out to black voters.
He portrayed the civil rights movement as being planned in Moscow, dismissed Martin Luther King Jr. as a Marxist and a pervert, and called racial integration a phony issue.”
On gays:
“He fought bitterly against federal financing for AIDS research and treatment, saying the disease resulted from “unnatural” and “disgusting” homosexual behavior.
“Nothing positive happened to Sodom and Gomorrah,” he said, “and nothing positive is likely to happen to America if our people succumb to the drumbeats of support for the homosexual lifestyle.””
And:
“Helms practically invented the modern conservative politics of sexuality, along with the electoral mobilization of white conservative evangelicals, starting back in the 1970s. In 1977, he seized on Anita Bryant’s successful campaign to overturn a gay rights ordinance in Miami and began building a national backlash against antidiscrimination laws. As early as 1979, he was making speeches about the terrible threat of “secular humanism” to Christianity, making the wonky Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies an unlikely villain. When the AIDS epidemic emerged in the 1980s, Helms began an extended and violently worded campaign to “protect” Americans from the “perverts” whose “disgusting” habits were responsible for AIDS, while attacking efforts to find effective treatments. (…)
But other aspects of Helms’s personality cannot be ignored, particularly his venomous assault on Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy and his virulent hatred of gays and lesbians. For years, as part of his campaign against the NEA, this “courtly” Christian carried around portfolios of homoerotic Mapplethorpe photos and showed them to reporters and (male) citizens with the question, “How do you like them apples?” And as late as 1995, when an old friend wrote him to recommend compassion for people like her gay son, who had died of AIDS, Helms wrote back to say, “I wish he had not played Russian roulette with his sexual activities.””
And:
“1993: On the nomination of a gay rights activist to a federal post: “She’s not your garden-variety lesbian. She’s a militant-activist-mean lesbian, working her whole career to advance the homosexual agenda. Now you think I’m going to sit still and let her be confirmed by the Senate? … If you want to call me a bigot, go ahead.””
And:
“As a senator, he explained that he voted against Roberta Achtenberg, President Clinton’s nominee for a Housing and Urban Development position, “because she’s a damn lesbian.” When Helms encountered protesters during a visit to Mexico in 1986, he remarked: “All Latins are volatile people. Hence, I was not surprised at the volatile reaction.” In 1990, Helms stayed away in protest when Nelson Mandela addressed a joint session of Congress.”
And:
“The Bible is unmistakably instructive on the sin of sodomy,” he declared in 1994. “I confess I regard it as an abomination.” Aids, he suggested, was acquired through “deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct” and he became an ardent opponent of government funding for Aids research and education. In 1987 he described Aids prevention literature as “so obscene, so revolting, I may throw up.”
In his own words:
“The government should spend less money on people with AIDS because they got sick as a result of deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct.”
And:
“Over the years Helms has declared homosexuality “degenerate,” and homosexuals “weak, morally sick wretches.” (Newsweek, 12/5/94) In a tirade highlighting his routine opposition to AIDS research funding, Helms lashed out at the Kennedy-Hatch AIDS bill in 1988: “There is not one single case of AIDS in this country that cannot be traced in origin to sodomy.” (States News Service, 5/17/88)”
(Take that, Ryan White!)
On foreign affairs, he was an almost wholly malign force:
“His obstinacy in foreign policy, where pragmatism often guides debate, was remarkable. Few administrations escaped his wrath. He condemned President Nixon’s historic 1972 trip to Beijing as “appeasing Red China.” He castigated President Carter, saying he “gave away the Panama Canal.” And after the newly elected President Clinton proposed that gays be allowed to serve openly in the military, Helms said that Clinton “better have a bodyguard” if he visited North Carolina. (…)
Because of Helms, several major treaties never became law: The Kyoto Protocol against global warming, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the proposed land mine treaty — all were stopped at his insistence.”
He also had a thing about governments with death squads, and the appallingly brutal South African-funded guerilla groups in Angola and Mozambique. He supported the apartheid regime in South Africa.
***
And here’s a random quote from 1966 (cited in the Boston Globe, 11/21/1994), just because I like it:
“The nation has been hypnotized by the swaying and the gesturing of the Watusi and the Frug.”
I used to think it was a made-up story that Helms, when a radio host, got someone fired from UNC for teaching Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” to undergraduates – but according to this article in Time from 1981, it appears to be pretty much true.
My own view: the world is a better place without him, and I regret that he didn’t die decades earlier.
The circle-the-wagons response is a natural one–one I bet tends to be even more natural for those who tend towards the kind of conservatism Helms loved–but it seems to me can’t help but being counterproductive in this case, in the long run. Not that that bothers me, at all. The more counterproductive, the better for the rest of us.
Thank you Hilzoy. Helms’s death tested my pledge not to trifle with death. I may hate someone, wish he’d go away, but I can’t wish or celebrate death. Even Helms’s. But there is no reason not to speak ill of those who are/were evil. This post is a grand successor to Billmon. High praise indeed.
I had a minor epiphany when Strom Thurmond said it would have been so much better for the country if Jesse Helms had won the Presidential election. I felt like a great weight lifted off my shoulders, as I said “OK, I’m officially done making excuses for the conservative movement. They keep sounding like mean, racist morons because so many of them ARE.”
To steal a line from Helms, “I have had nothing to change my mind about it” since then. To the contrary, the movement keeps confirming my impression.
To be clear, the conservatives I have met average as intelligent as the liberals, and are perfectly nice & tolerant to people they actually deal with personally. But LORD, they keep electing creeps, praising racists, and supporting cruelty. I keep trying to understand the apparent contradiction, but I no longer pretend I’m not seeing it or pretend that the pretty words of their intellectual apologists have much to do with the reality of the movement.
I’m against death, finding it inappropriately final, inconvenient, and deeply non-discriminating, so I wish it on no one.
I wish Helms a longer life — at least long enough for him to once again sing Dixie in an elevator so that Carol Moseley-Braun can turn around and knee him neatly in the gonads.
Helms was lucky to be born an American — though he certainly was NOT one of us — any other provenance would have had him running down streets, going door-to-door, begging for mercy from justice.
We don’t butcher our malign clowns, we elect them.
Helms also encouraged government subsidies for an addictive drug, merely because his state was a major producer of said drug.
Sometimes there’s a purely utilitarian calculation that makes wishing for somebody’s death morally acceptable: Helms supported murderous psychopaths like D’Aubuisson.
I find I need to qualify my comment a bit: I would have preferred it if Helms had come to a realization of the abominable nature of his views, repudiated them, and spent the rest of his life trying to do right. But since he didn’t . . . .
Sic Semper Tyrannis.
As others have said elsewhere, I wish he could have lived to suffer through the day that Barack Obama is sworn in as President.
I felt like a great weight lifted off my shoulders, as I said “OK, I’m officially done making excuses for the conservative movement.
Helms didn’t represent the conservative movement. He did not represent the libertarian conservative, he did not represent New England conservatism. He represented the racist white Southerner.
Those unrepresented conservatives still exist, left to wander in the desert, but for the greater part, racist white Southernism is all that is left of the Republican party.
America would be better off if it had simply let the South secede – the South is only part of the rest of the nation in the narrowest technical sense. So in a way, the date of his death *is* fitting.
I certainly had no love for the man, and I thought he was a blight on my party. OTOH, I really don’t know what to make of this post so I guess I had better sleep on it.
Helms didn’t represent the conservative movement.
OK, now_what, I’ll bite. Who do you think represents the conservative movement?
OCSteve: it just seemed to me that they could have said any number of things — “agree with him or disagree, he certainly fought for what he believed in”, etc. But instead all these people are saying: he was a champion of conservatism, an exemplar, etc.
I would never have said that. I would have thought it was grossly unfair to conservatism, like saying that Louis Farrakhan was a liberal champion. But for some reason they did.
I don’t know what was done in NC, but in Mississippi, July 4th was the day that Vicksburg fell and up until 1975, my university did not celebrate the holiday. So yeah, it’s appropriate.
trilobite: I had a minor epiphany when Strom Thurmond said it would have been so much better for the country if Jesse Helms had won the Presidential election.
When was this?
Or are you mixing up your Southern rightist Senators, and thinking of when Trent Lott said at Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday celebration that if ST had won the presidential election (as a Dixiecrat in 1948) “we wouldn’t have had all these problems”?
OK, now_what, I’ll bite. Who do you think represents the conservative movement?
Nobody does, that was kind of the point. The conservative movement was a marriage of convenience between several viewpoints, some of them with which I can sympathize to a certain extent (fiscal conservatism, distrust of big government, isolationism, separation of church and state, protection of private property), and some of them with which no moral person can (“You start out in 1954 by saying, Nigger, nigger, nigger”).
Who is left to represent the former in any meaningful way? Nobody, at the moment, as far as I can tell. Who is left to represent the descendants of the latter? The Republican Party.
Republican commenters: If you want everyone else besides (some) other Republicans to stop thinking of Republicans as bigoted, evil scum, it’s up to you to make sure that bigoted evil scum aren’t representing you in public office.
On the other hand, I do detect a whiff of “No True Scotsman” about your comments; no true conservative would act the way Helms did… At what point do people making that sort of argument realise that what they’re actually arguing is that conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed, and in so arguing are privileging an ideology to the point of willful blindness?
Are there any Republican commenters here?
I guess there’s OCSteve, but he took a pass…
Hilzoy: I think that the conservative response to Helms’ death ought to settle that debate once and for all.
That’s just a little sweeping I think. I don’t claim Helms any more than I expect you to answer for the extremists on your side. “conservative response” is a bit general, as is the title: “Conservatives And Jesse Helms”.
I’m a conservative – here is my response: Jesse Helms was a racist homophobe. I don’t have much of an opinion about God or heaven or hell – but if there is a hell I hope that a 250 pound black transvestite is Jesse’s roommate for all eternity.
Maybe it’s just the title that got me…
now_what: Are there any Republican commenters here?
Conservative, no longer Republican. 😉
Trilobyte:
I believe the reference you made in your post was actually Trent Lott’s ill-conceived comment that Strom Thurmond should have been elected when he ran as a Dixie-crat. That was the excuse used to dump Trent from the post of Senate Majority leader as I recall.
Hilzoy:
But instead all these people are saying: he was a champion of conservatism, an exemplar, etc.
Well, Helms was certainly representative of a particular brand of conservatism — no one could deny that. To say he was an “icon” or a “champion” of conservative causes is not to say that there’s some sort of identity between his views and those of modern conservatism in general.
I wonder if you could be more specific about what you object to in those excerpts — most of them seem to me to be well in line with what would be appropriate for a public statement without approving of Helms’ uglier side.
I especially don’t understand why you include Levin’s comment, as it specifically lists the causes that Helms fought for that Levin appreciates, and none of them seem particularly odious (though they’re certainly not causes that the average liberal would have supported).
OCSteve: I suppose it’s probably too late, but when I wrote “why oh why do people think that the Republican party, and/or the conservative movement is bigoted?”, I meant the party/movement as institutions, not individual conservatives or Republicans. I had meant to say that more clearly, and actually thought I had, but on rereading it, I see that I didn’t.
I’ll correct that now.
In any case, that was why I took all those people/magazines/etc. to be illustrative: they really do speak for the party (considered as an organization), or for the movement (ditto), I think. If it had been just one or two of them — say, the Heritage Foundation and Trent Lott, but no one else — I wouldn’t think that. But there are so many of them.
Off to correct. Thanks for making me realize that I hadn’t said what I thought I had. 😉
America would be better off if it had simply let the South secede – the South is only part of the rest of the nation in the narrowest technical sense
As a Southerner, I just can’t let that stand unchallenged. Yes, the South has been the source of a lot of evil people, including Jesse Helms; it’s also given you, to name a few examples, Mark Twain, Helen Keller, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, Martin Luther King, and John Edwards. Would you really have been better off without either the good or the bad?
I don’t claim Helms any more than I expect you to answer for the extremists on your side.
With respect, you don’t really matte much, do you? I mean, much as I wish it were otherwise, your influence is far less than that wielded by George Bush, John McCain, Mitch McConnell, Trent Lott, Bob Dole, National Review, The Weekly Standard or The Heritage Foundation. Your influence is certainly less than that wielded by all those groups combined.
If I said that as a liberal, I found legalized abortion to be unacceptable, that wouldn’t stop you from saying that liberals are against the criminalization of abortion. I’m not very important after all. To the extent that conservatism is an institution that has leaders and power centers, it can have beliefs (like “Jess Helms is awesome!”) that are not shared by all or even a majority of its adherents. You can’t really speak on behalf of the larger institution because you don’t have any power over it…
kenB: I have to go for a bit, so can’t compile an exhaustive list, but in Levin’s case, it was “a conservative great”, and the stuff about all the smears that were coming. In general, in anything that goes on about what a great conservative he was, it’s the ‘great conservative’ part that astonishes me.
They all omit the stuff about race. I can see doing that without the “great champion of conservative causes” stuff, but with it — it’s as though I said that Mao was a great champion of liberal causes, thinking of, oh, the barefoot doctors, and somehow neglecting either to mention the famine, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and all the rest, or to qualify my general praise because of it.
About Bush’s statement, in addition to “kind, decent” (see Moseley Braun incident), this: “tireless advocate for the people of North Carolina” makes me want to say: well, not all of them. Likewise, the idea of Helms as a champion of freedom is a bit much, given that we’re talking about someone who opposed basic voting and civil rights for his fellow citizens.
Hilzoy: In any case, that was why I took all those people/magazines/etc. to be illustrative: they really do speak for the party (considered as an organization), or for the movement (ditto), I think.
Yeah, you’re right. Don’t know why I got my hackles up.
Turb: You’re correct of course (as you usually are).
As a Southerner, I just can’t let that stand unchallenged. Yes, the South has been the source of a lot of evil people, including Jesse Helms; it’s also given you, to name a few examples, Mark Twain
Neither Hannibal, Missouri nor Florida, Missouri are, or ever were, in the South, by any reasonable definition of the South.
The rest of them you can have, they would have existed no matter where a border was drawn, but feel free to claim them as Southerners.
But a town 100 miles north of St. Louis is not “the South”.
hilzoy:
Well, I think the comparison to Mao is rather instructive — for liberals, Helms was an enemy, and so liberals naturally see very little good in him and will focus on his worst traits. Any praise of Helms will grate and will seem to paper over his faults.
But Helms’ record consists of more than just race-baiting and homosexual-hating (as Levin’s words suggest). He was an effective conservative warrior also for causes that are even now not considered to be obviously hateful. On the occasion of his death, it’s utterly unsurprising for leading Republican and conservative voices to speak well of him and not spend too much time looking at his less savory words and deeds. That doesn’t mean that they support everything he supported.
Norvin: … it [the South]‘s also given you, …
Jazz.
On the whole, I’d say preserving the Union was a good idea, despite the cost. Lately there’s cause to doubt, though, whether a nation so conceived can long endure (with its ideals intact).
I am for death… for the likes of myself as well as Jesse Helms. I make no excuses for dear old Jesse, and I hope none will make any excuses for me. I have done the best I could with my sons (I am sure Jesse, in what ever twisted world he lived in, thought the same)
But he is gone… the world is a better place without him.
Death awaits us all, as it always has, as it always will, as it always should….
I wonder… will the world be better off without me?
now_what — Take note of the Missouri Compromise. According to Wikipedia “The 15 slave states at the time of the Civil War were Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia (including West Virginia but West Virginia hadn’t separated from Virginia at that time). (The District of Columbia also had slavery prior to the Civil War.) Though not states, slavery was practiced in the Nebraska Territory and in the Indian Territory (Oklahoma) as early as the 1850s.”
The South may have “given us” Faulkner, etc–but the fact that I appreciate British authors doesn’t mean that I regret the Declaration of Independence. That is, the fact that the evil people like Helms took part in running my country cannot be offset by the fact that some Southerners produced art. Art can be exported.
kenB: He was anti-communist. Goody: so was I. But what anticommunism seemed to mean, to him, was supporting a lot of people whom it was hard to see as in any way better than their opponents. (Savimbi? Renamo?) It is very hard for me to see supporting Savimbi as striking a blow for liberty. It certainly wasn’t for the half million or so Angolans who died in that civil war.
He was pro-life; fine.
He was anti-NEA — is that the conservative big deal that accounts for all that praise?
But his big policies, along with anti-communism, were blocking anything to do with blacks or gays.
It wasn’t a minor bit of his career, outshone by a host of other glories.
Would you really have been better off without either the good or the bad?
I’m pretty sure that if the North had let the South secede, it would not have systematically killed of every living being in the South. I would expect that two nations sharing a long border and a common language would have a great deal of trade in goods, writings and ideas. We’d still have Faulkner.
Mr. Helms was popular with voters in his home state. They must have seen something beyond the racial component. I don’t know what was in his heart, but his voting record and political position on the issues of the times are unambiguous. It would be fair to say, he was the conservative’s conservative.
Conservatism, in its true form, is the true path to real civilization. Conservatism sometimes gets hijacked but that doesn’t lessen its appeal to me, nor should it be used by others to criticize it. No matter how popular the hijacking has become.
Now, replace conservatism with Islam, Christianity, liberalism, etc. Imagine, as a true believer of any of these, how you would probably accept the above notion. And then imagine how, as an outsider, you might not.
I used to have the same type of discussion with my fundamentalist brother, who couldn’t understand my objection to his elevation of Christianity to the highest level of human achievement. I’d mention Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and so on, and he’d claim they weren’t real Christians. Somehow their parishes, numbering in the thousands, were wrong, while his parish, often numbering one, was right. So to find the real Christianity I should ignore all the radio stations, all the mega-churches, all the Catholics and the Orthodox, and simply look to him.
We don’t discuss this any more.
Who is left to represent the former in any meaningful way? Nobody, at the moment, as far as I can tell. Who is left to represent the descendants of the latter? The Republican Party.
I feel your pain, sort of, but somebody voted for all of those creeps. It sure as hell wasn’t me.
America would be better off if it had simply let the South secede
Actually, I think America would have been better off had we continued a vigorous military occupation of the South for at least one full generation. Probably two.
We didn’t leave Germany until “Nazi” was a dirty word. We should have done the same with the South.
Thanks –
When I read the headline I thought about Clarence Darrow’s comment, which went something like this: “I never wanted to see anybody die, but there are a few obituary notices I have read with pleasure.”
On the occasion of his death, it’s utterly unsurprising for leading Republican and conservative voices to speak well of him and not spend too much time looking at his less savory words and deeds. That doesn’t mean that they support everything he supported.
Of course not. And it is absolutely, perfectly understandable that perfectly decent conservatives would focus on the good that he did for non-evil causes within conservatism.
I take Hilzoy’s point to be not that this makes them bad people, but that it makes them appear to be making common cause with someone who, whatever else they may have done, fought his entire life to preserve some of the nation’s greatest evils.
There are deeds a person can commit that are so malignant, they drown out whatever positives that person has achieved in their life. When that point is reached, any attempt to make a “positive sandwich,” to gloss over the negatives in order to call attention to the positives, comes across to other decent people as making excuses for evil. Adolf Hitler was a decent painter, a decorated veteran of WWI, a gifted orator, and a passionate patriot who led Germany to become an economic and military superpower, albeit briefly. But these are not the things for which he is remember, nor should they be. Hitler is remembered for the evils that he committed on this earth, for the millions of people whose lives were irrevocably and horribly changed or ended as a result of his actions.
Helms was not Hitler. His evils are several orders of magnitude less than that man’s. But that does not make them any less evil in their own right, and it does not minimize the harm inflicted upon millions of people’s lives as a result of Helms’s political career. Eulogizing Helms by praising his lifetime of accomplishments only makes the person so eulogizing seem like an apologist for evil. And when conservative luminaries, prominent pundits, and the President of the United States–Republicans all–demonstrate in one unified voice that they are apologists for evil, this sends a message to American blacks: The Republican Party embraces Jesse Helms and what he stood for. The Republican Party embraces racism. The Republican Party doesn’t care about you; indeed, we would prefer to go back to a time when you were second-class citizens, even property.
This may not be true. It’s certainly not true of vast numbers of perfectly decent Republicans.
But the next time someone smears you with that stereotype, remember that it’s not their fault you’re viewed that way. It’s the fault of those who represent you, those who are your party’s public face. And ultimately, some of you share that blame for continuing to elect them.
Think about it.
But what anticommunism seemed to mean, to him, was supporting a lot of people whom it was hard to see as in any way better than their opponents. (Savimbi? Renamo?) It is very hard for me to see supporting Savimbi as striking a blow for liberty.
OK, so you disagreed with him, as did I. But this is a typical political disagreement — why would you expect Republicans to repudiate him for this? They made a different evaluation of the pluses and minuses of Communist governments vs. other types of unsavory leaders. This doesn’t strike me as an obvious moral failure.
But his big policies, along with anti-communism, were blocking anything to do with blacks or gays.
I don’t want to push this much more, because I certainly had no love for the man, but I will point out that terms like “big policies” and “minor bit” are relative judgments. Just because they may be the most salient bits to you (and me) and you’re inclined to interpret them in their worst light doesn’t mean that all these mouthpieces of conservatism meant to endorse that particular reading of those particular policies when they praised him at his death.
“I had a minor epiphany when Strom Thurmond said it would have been so much better for the country if Jesse Helms had won the Presidential election.”
How’s that? When did Jesse Helms run for president?
Are you possibly thinking of Trent Lott saying this of Strom Thurmond’s 1948 Dixicrat run?
“I wish Helms a longer life — at least long enough for him to once again sing Dixie in an elevator so that Carol Moseley-Braun can turn around and knee him neatly in the gonads.”
Mosely-Braun was in the Senate from January 5, 1993 – January 3, 1999. And Helms left the Senate on January 3, 2003. It’s not a matter of their not having had time, but not having been in been in the same place for quite some time, and I rather doubt either would have wanted it otherwise.
So if someone praises Mao for his various good works, or praises Stalin for being our ally in WWII, and praises his efforts forwarding, say, women’s rights, and the equality of the races, and in making health care available, then you’d not raise an eyebrow, and not say a word, and not have any problem at all with that?
Really?
How about if someone writes about the virtues of Castro’s health care and work in spreading education, and in helping people throughout the Third World?
No problem? After all, the record of all three consists of more than just their negative side, right?
“I would expect that two nations sharing a long border and a common language would have a great deal of trade in goods, writings and ideas. We’d still have Faulkner.”
That’s not a falsifiable hypothesis; for all we know, any number of possible circumstances in that alternative history could have led to the death of his mother or father before he was born, and certainly would have, at least, led to him having a different life, producing different experiences and different ideas in his mind, and thus his producing different work, assuming he did live, and assuming he was in circumstances that led him to both desire to be a writer, and to be able to.
Quite a huge string of “ifs” involved.
“Mr. Helms was popular with voters in his home state. They must have seen something beyond the racial component.”
Why?
And: they must have, at least, been able to not care enough about the “racial component.” What does that say?
Similarly, not all voters for David Duke were for him solely on issues of race, and not all voters for [GODWIN] voted on issues of antisemitism; does that mean we should applaud those voters?
“I don’t know what was in his heart, but his voting record and political position on the issues of the times are unambiguous.”
True.
“It would be fair to say, he was the conservative’s conservative.”
I think you mean “It would be fair to say he was the conservative’s conservative.”
KenB: my initial impression is that your post reads like an exercise at the end of Chapter I in the Apologism 101 course: “never refer to detractors as repudiating but disagreeing” with the target, for instance. And my 2nd impression is that your concessions and modifiers (“I had no love for the man”) separate you from the true Helm apologists.
What Catsy said at 10:57 PM.
“But this is a typical political disagreement”
No, it’s vile racial hatred, and racism of one of the most powerful men in America, no less evil that straightforward Nazism.
If you regard that as within the bounds of decent political “disagreement,” something about which fairminded people of good will might reasonable disagree — that one set of people are “racially inferior” to another, and should be kept under — I disagree with you.
“This doesn’t strike me as an obvious moral failure.”
It strikes me as nothing but.
“Just because they may be the most salient bits to you (and me) and you’re inclined to interpret them in their worst light doesn’t mean that all these mouthpieces of conservatism meant to endorse that particular reading of those particular policies when they praised him at his death.”
And [GODWIN] led the [GODWIN] nation to greatness. High praise for [GODWIN] with no mention of any flaws certainly doesn’t endorse [GODWIN]’s less attractive policies, does it? Why should anyone look askance at speeches that praise [GODWIN]’s more attractive qualities on, say, the anniversary of his death, or birthday?
That’s your argument, right? Or what’s the difference in your argument that I’m not spotting?
Yeah, I think racial hatred and bigotry are kinda evil. No ifs, ands, or buts.
Perhaps a more current, and less fraught, example would be if Robert Mugabe dropped dead tomorrow, and I wrote a post/comment lauding Mugabe for his fine life and work in liberating Zimbabwe from white racism, and building his country one that was strongly independent, rebuilding the pride of his people in themselves. And that’s all I had to say about Mugabe. You wouldn’t object at all, ken? No problem with that?
Gary: something about your post makes me anticipate Jon Swift’s “tribute” to Helms with great delight. Leave it to him (her?) to take apologizing for the unapologizable to a heretofore unexperienced level of giddiness.
OR, put still another way: “but Helms also did some good things” is rather the ultimate case of “otherwise how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln,” isn’t it? That which cannot be excused, ignored, overcome, compensated for, or willed away.
“But this is a typical political disagreement”
No, it’s vile racial hatred,
Gary, perhaps you could read a bit more closely before you go on the attack — that bit was referring to hilzoy’s description of Helms’s anti-communism.
As for the rest — if you’re all determined to see Helms as not just wrong but eeeviiill, and to condemn all those who praise him as apologists for eeeviiill, do you include Joe Biden and John Edwards in that assessment? Or is it OK if you’re a Democrat?
I trust ole Jesse is in some goatfukkers heaven – where he’s the goat
As a native North Carolinian, I remember the days running up to the 1984 election, when Helms repeatedly warned about his opponent Jim Hunt’s plans to encourage the “bloc vote” to come out against him. He claimed that Hunt was going to send out schoolbuses to bring the “bloc vote” to the polls. Every one of his election campaigns prominently featured racist appeals.
Far from being universally popular, Helms was a divisive figure in North Carolina politics; he is the man who made this Southerner a lifelong Democrat.
Can speak for all, but letting Sens. (and you know Sens., they’re rather like ambassadors, engaging in that super-polite collegial speech) speak for me would be akin to saying mainstream pundits and hosts – like, say Matthews, or even the unabashedly liberal Olbermann – speak for me.
As for Ken – seems I owe you an apology. You are a true Helms apologist, if you do speak for yourself. Where DID you dig up that NY Observer article?
russell | July 06, 2008 at 10:54 PM
Russel – about Reconstruction history …
It took a good 20-25 years to institute the bulk of Jim Crow laws, and during much of that time, the North was at least as, and in many ways far more, overtly racist and oppressive as the South.
Getting rid of slavery was seen as a moral and Christian imperative. Getting rid of racism was not the sort of thing that crossed people’s minds a hell of a lot back then.
The Plessy decision (in 1896 – 30 years after the Civil War) did not arise unforseen out of whole cloth – it was a statement of the majority opinion and reasoning of the country of the time.
I’d like to take up a collection to send Fred Phelps’ inbred family to heckle Helms’ funeral. For once it’s justified.
D’oh!
Yep, gettin’ my players mixed up w/out my scorecard. Sorry, I did indeed mean Trent Lott & Strom Thurmond, not Thurmond & Helms. Glad y’all figured out who I meant to say. I go sleep now, fix brain…
If now_what means ‘movement conservatism’ in its Buckley, Heritage, Bradley-Scaife-Olin & Human Events sense, that’s a fair point — though perhaps only because movementarians tended to dress Helms’s ideological tenets in abstract language and adorn it with a different accent.
“As for the rest — if you’re all determined to see Helms as not just wrong but eeeviiill, and to condemn all those who praise him as apologists for eeeviiill, do you include Joe Biden and John Edwards in that assessment?”
a) I don’t condemn all who praise him, but all who praise him unreservedly.
b) I don’t expect anyone to be denounced at their funeral, nor condemn anyone who doesn’t denounce someone at their funeral.
c) the topic was conservatives praising him as one of their own, unreservedly, and thus, as Hilzoy put it, giving grounds for “people [to] think that the Republican party, and/or the conservative movement, is bigoted?” The point is that this doesn’t seem to do the conservative movement any favors, any more than any of the rest of the lauding of conservative history that was inextricably racist (such as the history of National Review, and, gee, just about all conservative politicians of the era, during the era of Jim Crow, through the Sixties, if not later). As it happens, liberals were opposed to racism, and conservatives defended it. If that’s embarrassing, well, shucks, maybe it’s something to give some thought as to why that happened, rather than simply either being defensive about it, or ignoring it or denying it.
So: 1) Joe Biden didn’t praise Helms unreservedly, even in the few quoted words (“‘Jesse, I love you,’ said Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, one of three Democrats who took part. ‘I think you’re dead wrong on the issues, … but I’m going to miss you being here'”): so, in fact, Biden specifically denounced Helms’ views. But I guess that’s not ok if you’re a conservative.
Which was Hilzoy’s point.
I don’t see a transcript of Edwards’ full remarks, but the News-Observer in fact specifically states that he wasn’t unreserved: “Helms’ Democratic colleague from North Carolina, Sen. John Edwards, was more contained in his praise of Helms than some.”
Hope this answers your questions satisfactorily. Now that I’ve answered yours, perhaps you might do me the courtesy of responding to my specific questions? Thanks!
“Where DID you dig up that NY Observer article?”
That’s the Raleigh News-Observer, the paper of the capital of North Carolina, the town I now, rather to my surprise, find myself living in as of a handful of months ago.
If I’d realized Jesse Helms was living across town, and was about to die, I might have made a special trip last week to shake my fist outside his window, or something. Probably not, but the impulse would have been there.
And before you ask, Ken, yes, when Robert Byrd dies, I’ll condemn his long-past racism, too.
Before ending this comment, I’d like to pause to give the horselaugh to this typical bs: “During his remarks, Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott ticked off a laundry list of issues on which he said Helms’ views might have seemed out of step at first but are ‘now the mainstream in American political thought.’ Among them: smaller government, lower taxes, opposition to abortion and ‘an American-centered foreign policy.'”
First of all, “smaller government” has been in the mainstream of U.S. politics since the days of George Washington, as has “bigger government”: the tension between the two has always explicitly been there, and explicitly argued in every Congress and every Presidency.
Secondly, no one has ever run on the notion that higher taxes will be popular. The idea that it has ever been otherwise is so insane as to be yet another in the endless series of Republican Big Lies.
Lastly, the same must be said of the notion that the politics of American foreign policy has ever favored running against, you know, favoring America. The idea is so effing idiotic that it’s hard not to fall off one’s chair laughing, if only it was funny, and wasn’t another Big Lie, whose sole intent is to smear That Other Party as favoring these lunatic positions (“we’re for the foreign policy that hurts America, and we want to raise your taxes just because we like to!”).
That’s not honest politics: that’s just lying like a rug.
But I’ll give Trent Lott and his ilk this: they’re consistent.
trilobite: “Glad y’all figured out who I meant to say.”
No prob; sorry for the pile-on; thanks for the clarification.
Quite a lot of people managed to be anti-communist and opposed to death squads, on any continent. And as a special bonus, also opposed to fascist regimes whether Catholic or secular. That Helms, like a great many other prominent American conservatives, never managed the trick is one more mark to his discredit, as he had not just the theoretical knowledge but the practical demonstration that it was possible. As it is, he was in a position much like being anti-torture but pro-rape.
I think the comparison to Mao is rather instructive
Actually, what we would need would be some domestic elected politician from the left that has wrought as much damage as Helms was able to to make the comparison make sense. That I can think of no one who might qualify says something about the US political scene.
The best thing you Americans could to do honor the much lamented death of Mr. Helm is to repeal the Helms-Burton act.
And the travel ban for HIV positives.
— a foreigner
now_what: America would be better off if it had simply let the South secede
In the sense that millions of Americans would have remained slaves?
now_what: The conservative movement was a marriage of convenience between several viewpoints, some of them with which I can sympathize to a certain extent (fiscal conservatism, distrust of big government, isolationism, separation of church and state, protection of private property)
It is news to me that conservatives support the separation of church and state: isn’t that very much the liberal viewpoint? Aren’t the people who support banning gay civil marriage, posting the 10 Commandments in state buildings, “under God” in the pledge of allegience and other forms of public prayer in schools, state-supported Islamophobia, invariably conservatives – and the people who actively go out of their way oppose these kind of things equally invariably left-wingers?
(The rest of your list seems to be more part of the conservative self-image than anything else, but I wasn’t aware that “separation of church and state” was even on the self-image list.)
In the sense that millions of Americans would have remained slaves?
They did anyway.
It is news to me that conservatives support the separation of church and state
Which is sad, really. You could at least take the time to know your enemy.
>>As for the rest — if you’re all determined to see Helms as not just wrong but eeeviiill, and to condemn all those who praise him as apologists for eeeviiill, do you include Joe Biden and John Edwards in that assessment? Or is it OK if you’re a Democrat?
I think Gary has answered this more than satisfactorily, but it makes me wonder a few things:
Has Obama said a word about Helms’s death? (I couldn’t find anything through google news.)
If he doesn’t, will Fox and friends try to use it against him? Or would even those folks automatically give him a pass?
And, as a thought experiment, if Obama said something like, “He was a conservative icon,” would the kind of conservatives currently saying similar things go ballistic, assuming (as I would) a quietly snarky irony?
In short, kenB, it *is* different if a Democrat says it.
now_what: They did anyway.
You should study up your American history a bit.
Which is sad, really. You could at least take the time to know your enemy.
You should study up your contemporary American politics a bit, too, evidently, if you honestly believe that banning gay civil marriage, posting the 10 Commandments in state buildings, “under God” in the pledge of allegience and other forms of public prayer in schools, state-supported Islamophobia, are none of them conservative positions.
I held my nose and read through the RedState comment thread, and while there’s a tiny handful of “idiots” who stepped up and pointed out he was a racist, most of the commenters are wholehearted bigots who approve Helms’ racist opinions – and the “idiots” one and all got dumped on.
(And the intellectual dishonesty involved in linking to this news story simply as “Elizabeth Edwards said her husband was just like Helms” has to be read to be believed.)
Jes, not to give the slightest support to conservative propaganda, but the claim that a lot of blacks remained slaves, or were reenslaved, is basically true in faction. Slavery Under Another Name is a profoundly unsettling read, thoroughly documented and carefully put. It’s given me nightmares.
What now_what doesn’t say, of course, is that it would inevitably have been worse in an independent Confederacy.
liberal japonicus: Actually, what we would need would be some domestic elected politician from the left that has wrought as much damage as Helms was able to to make the comparison make sense.
I suppose if you allowed international comparisons, George Galloway might work as a comparator. I don’t in all honesty perceive him to be as bad as Helms in most respects – but he is undoubtedly a prominent figure on the left of British politics whom I would have a hard time writing a wholly positive obituary about: he’s been attacked on false grounds (financial corruption) but there is plenty of room to attack him on perfectly accurate grounds, too. (And I speak as someone who stood listening to him at multiple peace demos in 2003, and got to the point where I really, really wanted the organisers to just quit inviting him.)
Bruce: Jes, not to give the slightest support to conservative propaganda, but the claim that a lot of blacks remained slaves, or were reenslaved, is basically true in faction. Slavery Under Another Name is a profoundly unsettling read, thoroughly documented and carefully put. It’s given me nightmares.
I haven’t (yet) read “Slavery Under Another Name” but I had read multiple other sources about the status and treatment of black Americans in both Confederate and Union states, long after the Civil War. From black sharecroppers who were forced to both sell their output to their landowner and buy their supplies from their landowner, to Nichelle Nichols being denied a two-year contract to play Uhura because Paramount had never given a black actress anything but short-term paid-by-the-hour work: from the black men who were accused and lynched because a white man wanted their property, to a black female lawyer being routinely followed by store detectives because they assume if a black woman is in an expensive store it’s to shoplift.
But now_what’s assertion comes close to arguing that being legally free made no difference at all to the Americans who had been property to be bought and sold. And that, from all I’ve read, was not so.
Did anyone notice the quote from George Bush that Hilzoy posted? It appears that your president actually told the truth about Mr. Helms (possibly by accident):
I can certainly remember Helms taking the side of the forces of tyranny; more than once, in fact.
Which raises the question: does Mr. Bush now insist on writing his own tributes, in defiance of the rules of English grammar, and in ignorance of irony, or (at the end of his terms) has the truth started leaking out past the dark side of the force?
Hilzoy,
I agree with the majority of this post, but do you think you are a bit harsh to include John McCain. According to the source you link, the entirity of his remarks were:
That’s about as neutral a comment as could be made — sympathay for the family and remember a life. “Remember” not “praise” or “give thanks for ” or “applaud”. It’s hard to imagine anyone on the same side of the aisle giving a less positive remark; anything less starts becoming insulting (not that Helms wouldn’t deserve that, but you can’t fault McCain for not speaking ill of the dead)
I suppose if you allowed international comparisons, George Galloway might work as a comparator.
George Galloway (like Tony Benn and Arthur Scargill and other ‘loony lefties’) can be extraordinarily irritating and embarassing to leftwingers/liberals who may share some of their views, but in a less extreme form.
But none of them have been really influential in the UK. They’ve made speeches, but not laws or policies. Whereas Helms did have real influence in the US.
Jes: I was having a moment of charitable reading, probably unwarranted. 🙂
Realistically, the only thing that would have prevented the Jim Crow era is the equivalent of de-Nazification in Germany, an occupation long and forceful enough to truly shatter the old networks of power and protect alternatives as they got established. The work of two generations, likely, and one that would have had a high toll in executions of traitors and other criminals.
Still, the long-term gain might well have been worth it, trading 1-2 decades of greater hardship for 6 or so better ones since.
I note on the side that I find the unwillingness to admit defeat on the merits baffling. It seems odd to say “I wish the South were as pragmatic as post-Nazi Germany”, but there you go, I do. The German people were willing to say “we gave it a shot and it failed because it was just plain broken in some ways”, and to concede that the victors had actually organized and fought a better war. Whatever quality of soul it is that makes that recognition possible, I wish we could put it in the water supply.
Contrary to Hilzoy, I thought John McCain’s comment was neutral — even cool — on Helms’ passing: “At this time, let us remember a life dedicated to serving this nation.”
As for the subject itself: I’m no conservative, and folks like Jesse Helms are the reason. Helms embodied the worst aspects of the Republican party.
Yup, I suppose McCain’s words were the minimum, pretty much.
But I miss the mythical McCain of years past who might have declared: “Today, we are one less cracker dumbass closer to America’s founding ideals. My friends, remember this: Martin Luther King got a bullet and a begrudged holiday for his troubles. Helms was permitted a full life and a peaceful death in bed.”
“I’d like Bono to explain God’s mercy in THAT arrangement. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need three drinks to start killing the bug that crawled up the Republican Party’s exit poll all those years ago.”
I think that a conservative is a person who believes in providing equal opportunity to as many people as possible, given the intrinsic tribal wiring of the human mind, which we can deny all we want.
My first experience with the negative effects of nurturing idealism came six months after college, when my leadership chain chopped from a civilian-led branch of the military (DoD) to a demanding technical command.
The technical command had designed a system whereby a series of screens were established for graduates of good engineering schools: 70% were accepted for interviews (DoD controlled); 30% failure at college interviews (DoD controlled); 30% failure at initial academics (screening technically controlled here on out); 10% failure at prototype; 5% failure in practice; 10% failure at leadership qualification; 40% failure at final qualification. The process was designed to ensure that men were thoroughly screened for ability before they were allowed to assume an important position.
The DoD screenings produced 13 black candidates out of a class of one hundred, in proportion to national demographics. The technical screening failed out 12 of the 13 within the first few months, and sent the 13th home nine months later. I don’t know how the technical screening could be termed racist because it consisted of numerical analysis of math, physics, and chemistry.
The men who failed out were good guys who were probably permanently scarred from the social engineering experiment in which they were used as cannon fodder. You should have seen their faces when they were forced to empty their desks in front of the class and leave, just like their white counterparts.
I’d consider myself to be a conservative. If that becomes impossible, I’ll probably go NAMOLDI Muslim (hi katherine :P). My opinion is that hate is bad. But hate is no worse than segregating people based on the color of their skin, in order for well-meaning but ignorant people to practice social engineering for their own selfish purposes. We should be allowed to judge men on the content of their character.
I have commitments in twenty minutes and will not be able to respond after that.
Jesse Helms became known as a Conservative when Nixon was consolidating his strategy of converting southern whites from the Democratic Party to the Republicans under the banner of states rights and the silent majority. Knowing as Nixon did that no one was a stronger supporter of the military than the southern families who sent huge numbers of their sons into the military, these southerners were people who had grown up in a segregated racist society and nobody was happier or faster to fan the fires of racial and social discontent than Helms. There are few men, in the last fifty years of our nation’s history, who have caused this country more unnecessary pain, more ridicule or heartbreak than this unrepentant racist and his uninformed stupidity. And should you wonder about my background, about why I should take the time and trouble to write this note, I am an old white military veteran who watched Helms, for all the years of his mis-begotten political life, deny the humanity of his fellow citizens-the very people among whom he had been raised-simply in order to feel superior to someone. Helms was, in no respect, a man to be honored.
I think that a conservative is a person who believes in providing equal opportunity to as many people as possible, given the intrinsic tribal wiring of the human mind, which we can deny all we want.
Well, *I* think a conservative is a person who wants to conserve something, to keep something the same. There is no one core conservative value except stability.
The conservative problem is that our society is intrinsically unstable: technological change, if nothing else, means that major parts of our lives *will* change, like it or not. So conservatives have to pick what aspect of society/culture/politics they want to keep stable, realizing that “all of the above” is not an option.
“Providing equal opportunity” is not intrinsically conservative unless you think equality of opportunity already exists to be conserved. Even if it does, I don’t see how that is more truly conservative and stability-ensuring than efforts to maintain a status quo in any other area of life.
It took a good 20-25 years to institute the bulk of Jim Crow laws, and during much of that time, the North was at least as, and in many ways far more, overtly racist and oppressive as the South.
Still is, to my eye.
Back to the history.
From about 1866 until 1877, most of the former confederate states operated under martial law, as part of a handful of military districts. During that time, blacks increased in literacy, obtained the vote, and began to enjoy the basic benefits of citizenship.
This was, of course, resisted, both politically and by force. The latter is called an “insurrection”, and deserved a response in kind, that is, a military response. To some degree, it received one, but not enough to rub it out.
In 1877, a disputed Presidential election was resolved by a back-room agreement that Hayes would pull federal troops out of the south.
From then until the mid-20th century, blacks were, de facto, less than full citizens of this country. They were denied the vote, discriminated against both by law and in fact in every conceivable way, and were subject to campaigns of systematic, brutal terror. This was true throughout the country, but especially so in the former confederacy.
Continuing the military occupation of the south for another generation or more would not have eliminated people’s hatred of blacks. Nothing will do that, because humans are very often ignorant and stupid. Stubbornly so.
It would, however, have helped prevent the institutionalization of that hatred into law. And it would have stemmed the emergence of racist terrorism as a means of political control.
I call both of those things unalloyed goods. YMMV.
The cult of the confederacy should have been crushed like the foul bug that it was. It was not, and it’s still with us today. Helms was only one of its spokesmen.
Thanks –
But hate is no worse than segregating people based on the color of their skin, in order for well-meaning but ignorant people to practice social engineering for their own selfish purposes.
I think there is something to this. I’m not sure the “selfish” part is always deserved, but certainly well-meaning schemes gang often agley.
As an alternative to social programs that seek to mitigate the effects of racism, I’d be happy to see a concerted effort to address racism itself.
Here’s my simple proposal.
If it’s found that you denied someone a job because of their race, creed, color, etc., they get your job. If that’s not appropriate due to differences in skill set, etc., you keep your job, but they get your money.
If it’s found that you denied someone a mortgage for any of the above, you buy them a house, or they get your house.
If it’s found that you pay someone differently because of any of the above, you make up the difference out of your own pocket.
And so on. It’s a pretty simple program, it should be obvious how to roll this out for whatever case presents itself.
You should like this program, Bill, because it coddles neither the victim, nor the perpetrator, of racist discrimination. More liberal approaches can be accused of ‘coddling’ both.
Thanks –
Let’s not forget creationism and the various “academic freedom” bills that are creeping into several states’ laws…
I’ve heard a story that when the University of North Carolina admitted their first African-American student, a young and not yet famous Helms proclaimed UNC “The University of N______ and Communists.”
Rick Perlstein adds this, from the AP, March 29, 1973:
“I’m against death”
That’s like saying, “I’m against heat” or “I’m against Winter.” It makes absolutely no sense! Do you really think that, if enough people are “against” it, it will go away? This is the sort of sophomoric statement I would expect to hear from a spoiled-brat conservative. Get real!
Stephen, you’ve changed my mind, you realist, you!
O.K. o.k., Death is one of my favorite things, just ahead of heat, but not as bad as winter.
What about sex after Death? Can we agree on that, or am I again asking too much?
Russell, Hilzoy, Jes, someone, anyone, catch Stephen up on my modus operandi.
I’m heading out now to purchase a burial plot. Maybe I’ll just jump in the hole with my crackers and cheese.
“hate is no worse than segregating people based on the color of their skin”
How is it not the exact same thing? How is “hate” not that which is manifest in “segregation”?
kudos to the person who suggested that the WaPo reprint this Broder column
Russell, Hilzoy, Jes, someone, anyone, catch Stephen up on my modus operandi.
I dunno, I’m inclined to let him figure it out himself.
In my judgment college authorities ought to take all the naked students into custody and herd them into a football stadium under guard and then require them to spend the night naked
“Please don’t throw me into the brier patch”.
Russell, Hilzoy, Jes, someone, anyone, catch Stephen up on my modus operandi.
What to say?
Maybe Wisdom Of The Desert Fathers as delivered by Buster Keaton?
Stephen, welcome to the world of Thullen, zen master of the funnybone. Laugh, then understand. Then, laugh.
Thanks –
Jesse helms was an exemplar of the consevative movement!The pary of the greedy the bigots and wackos.Oliver North,G,Gordon Liddy and Carl Rove are also heros.What more does one need to know?
russell: From then until the mid-20th century, blacks were, de facto, less than full citizens of this country. They were denied the vote, discriminated against both by law and in fact in every conceivable way, and were subject to campaigns of systematic, brutal terror.
A new book documents the return of slavery by another name in the period from 1900-1940. At least 100,000 and probably twice that number of African-American men in the south were imprisoned for invented “crimes” like vagrancy and sold to farms and industries for years on end. Some Northern-owned companies profited handsomely from this system as well.
The author is a Wall Street Journal reporter and southerner. From another interview:
A year and a half ago in an ObWi thread, Slartibartfast and I and others had a discussion about felon disenfranchisement laws, and whether they were racist in intent as well as effect. This kind of history puts the burden of proof on those arguing against racist intent.
Directly on the thread topic: I’m sorry Jesse Helms didn’t live to see Barack Obama become president of the United States. If there’s a hell, he’ll get to see the inauguration in HD, with The Battle Hymn of the Republic playing in surround sound.
Apologies for redundancy; I missed seeing that Slavery By Another Name had already been brought up on the thread. In my defense: additional links!
The priorities of the United States, after the Civil War was White unity. A great book on the subject:
Observing the drift of American culture during the 1880s, Albion Tourgee, an abolitionist and keen observer of southern life, grumbled that “our literature has become not only Southern in type but distinctly Confederate in sympathy.”(1) He understood sooner than many of his contemporaries that white southerners had lost the war but were winning the peace. He also knew what this development would mean for the nation’s future. Any prospects for racial justice in the United States were stillborn as long as the overwhelming majority of African Americans lived in the South and white southerners retained a de facto veto over the country’s racial policies. More broadly, campaigns for social justice had to either accommodate the reactionary politics that prevailed in the South or attempt to overcome them. National reconciliation on such terms effectively foreclosed many potentially progressive paths for American society for at least three-quarters of a century.
[…]
Edward J. Blum’s Reforging the White Republic is an ambitiously conceived book that does much more than explain how white southerners won the postbellum peace. Blum insists that the failure of Reconstruction should be traced to American religious institutions and values. Situating his work at the interstices of recent scholarship on historical memory, nationalism, and cultural history, he convincingly argues that an amalgam of “whiteness, godliness, and American nationalism” came to define not only postwar Protestantism but also the United States. With obvious regret, Blum traces “how whites claimed a new national solidarity at the expense of racial reform, how ministers and politicians marshaled religious and white supremacist rhetoric in order to wield social power, and how imperialism wrapped itself in sacred cloth”
More:
Book Review of Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898
…or “I’m against Winter.” It makes absolutely no sense! Do you really think that, if enough people are “against” it, it will go away?
Will these Global Warming deniers ever quit?
deitaliacto!
Well, what does a conservative say to defend a man like Helms? I liked the brevity with which McCain responded.
As a matter of fact I feel that his response displayed something that most on the left lack. What is that you might ask?…class!
Granted, I don’t believe that McCain shared the venom of Helms and may even be ashamed by him but he had the decency to let the family mourn and the body cool without besmirching the man.
I wonder how the right will act when a revered but flawed liberal icon passes.
Should Rev. Sharpton or Sen. Kennedy go to their final reward will there be teeth gnashing over their polite obituaries or will they handle it with the same tempered class as McCain’s response for Helms.
I suppose that time will tell…
otmar: The best thing you Americans could to do honor the much lamented death of Mr. Helm is to repeal the Helms-Burton act.
And the travel ban for HIV positives.
I’m pleased to say that the travel ban may be on its way to oblivion. Sens. Kerry and Smith have cosponsored a bill to end the ban that’s part of the reauthorization of AIDS relief funding, nominally favored by Bush and expected to pass (negotiations between Reid and Republican leaders ongoing to forestall histile amendments).
Sorry, that’s hostile amendments, from the likes of David Vitter (R-Shameless).
I will grant you that most (I didn’t read them all) of the Helms quotes don’t show a man who was very, ahem, enlightened. But this one:
“Crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are a fact of life which must be faced.”
What’s wrong with that, exactly – aside from the fact that it’s absolutely true? Blacks have impressively high crime rates. Black murder rates over the years have been anywhere from 7-10 times higher than the white murder rate. Black poverty and misery is largely a function of black behavior, including their 70%+ illegitimacy rates.
Helms is the sort of guy who did some things right, who took some bold stands that none of the cowards in Washington were taking, but often took them for the wrong reasons. In the process, with the language he used to justify his stands, he scared a few potential allies away. Why, after all, does Martin Luther King deserve his own holiday? Really? I can think of at least 20 Americans far more worthy and consequential than King. Is this affirmative action for federal holidays?
We don’t even celebrate George Washington’s Birthday, as such, anymore.
Realistically, the only thing that would have prevented the Jim Crow era is the equivalent of de-Nazification in Germany, an occupation long and forceful enough to truly shatter the old networks of power and protect alternatives as they got established. The work of two generations, likely, and one that would have had a high toll in executions of traitors and other criminals.
Yep, nothing like good old Marxist thought policing to really straighten things out. Nice to know you would support such policies. Now how much saliva comes out of your mouth when you denounce “McCarthyism”?
How is it not the exact same thing? How is “hate” not that which is manifest in “segregation”?
Segregation is not wanting to sit or live next to someone. Hate is wishing or doing that person harm. If segregation is hate, how do you defend all the organizations and societies that pop up that are racially/ethnically/religiously exclusive? So long, of course, as that exlcusivity is not for straight white Christian men?
As a NC native from farm country, Jesse simply WAS ‘The Senator’. I can tell you exactly why North Carolina continued to elect him time after time. (1) He was a champion of the farmer, with subsidies and price supports and trade deals. (2) You might not LIKE his position on an issue, but at least you knew what it was. (3) Helms’ brand of racism was pretty common among my father’s generation. And while it may have grown less vocal over the years, it was still there at the core of the older NC conservative – and everyone knew Jesse shared that position, even if no one spoke of it. As that generation fades away, NC is becoming more open, more accepting. But it’s still a VERY Red state.
Helms is the sort of guy who did some things right, who took some bold stands that none of the cowards in Washington were taking, but often took them for the wrong reasons
Helms is the sort of guy who demonstrated a life-long animus toward black people, for the simple reason that they were black people. Guys, and women, like that should not hold positions of responsibility in this country.
I can think of at least 20 Americans far more worthy and consequential than King.
Frankly, I doubt that you can.
King articulated a non-violent way to resolve racial conflict in this country. IMVHO, without his contribution we would have seen widespread insurrection, from a variety of directions, during the 60’s. The country would have been torn to shreds.
I can’t think of too many of whom that can be said.
Thanks –
Lots.
But I don’t think you’d care to learn why….
By the way, I’m not apologizing for Helms, just attempting to answer the question of how such an obvious bigot could still get re-elected in 1996.
Denazification in Germany did not twork that well. In my opinion it was shifting the blame to the already dead while the surviving generals wrote memoirs about how they would have won the war had this dumbdonkey Hitler not spoilt everything (similar to people now blaiming the less than stellar success of the Iraq war on Rummy and Shrubby and claiming that without them all would be roses and ponies).
One could say that a real denazification did not occur before the rebellious children of the war generation began to take over.
That there was no serious stab-in-the-back myth after WW2 was mainly owed to the fact that the loss of the war could not be denied by anybody and people had enough of war to not try any large-scale guerilla campaign.
One could say that German society fell back to an older era in the 50ies (late 19th century conservatism in democratic disguise) and then made the normal development (at a slightly higer speed) the non-totalitarian powers underwent before them (like a pupil who has failed a few grades).
OK, now_what, I’ll bite. Who do you think represents the conservative movement?
Ummm…the thousands of elected conservatives across the nation who don’t think, speak, or act like Helms?
Sometimes there’s a purely utilitarian calculation that makes wishing for somebody’s death morally acceptable: Helms supported murderous psychopaths like D’Aubuisson.
Dohrn? Ayers? Et tu, Obama?
As others have said elsewhere, I wish he could have lived to suffer through the day that Barack Obama is sworn in as President.
Conservatives, those racists and those not, will indeed soon get to suffer through Obama’s inauguration. Liberals will then get to suffer through his miserable presidency. What Bush has done to discredit the conservatism that he doesn’t even practice or believe in Obama will do to discredit the leftism that he does believe in. More than fair trade, I’d say.
Republican commenters: If you want everyone else besides (some) other Republicans to stop thinking of Republicans as bigoted, evil scum, it’s up to you to make sure that bigoted evil scum aren’t representing you in public office.
To which bigoted evil elected scum are you referring? Name names; provide quotes.
I believe the reference you made in your post was actually Trent Lott’s ill-conceived comment that Strom Thurmond should have been elected when he ran as a Dixie-crat. That was the excuse used to dump Trent from the post of Senate Majority leader as I recall.
Precisely. When Republicans find such people in their midst (or crooks or perverts) they are purged. Democrats promote them to committee chairs (Hastings, Murtha) or make them their presidential candidate. Name a single prominent Republican who attends a church as racist as Trinity United?
If it’s found that you denied someone a job because of their race, creed, color, etc., they get your job. If that’s not appropriate due to differences in skill set, etc., you keep your job, but they get your money. If it’s found that you denied someone a mortgage for any of the above, you buy them a house, or they get your house. – Russell
The problems, Russell, are twofold:
1) How do you “prove” that discrimination was the cause? How do you prove there were no other factors? Simple numbers? “13% of your city is black but only 5% of your employees are.” Does that prove it? Do somewhat vague comparisons of job qualifications satisfy? “He finished 10th in his class at Inner City High and he finished 10th in his class at Rich Kid Prep” – so they must be equally qualified?
2) Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that racism shall be disallowed. Nowhere. That does not stop Congress from outlawing it, but it doesn’t give them the right to skirt enumerated Constitutional rights in doing so. The freedom of speech is protected absolute; the freedom of assembly is absolute; the freedoms of religion and the press are absolute. The right not to have your property taken without just compensation is absolute. Yet we treat all of these rights as subservient to fighting racism. A bar owner can have his liquor license revoked if he says something politically correct. A restaurant can be sued for millions because one or two idiot employees refused to seat a couple of blacks. A business can be sued for tens of millions because a couple of employees were called “camel jockeys.” (If you wonder, these are actual cases I’m citing). No real damages but hurt feelings, but these people lose their shirts just the same.
I’d rather have a society where racism occasionally occurs but where people are secure in their freedoms and their livelihoods from a busybody, tyrannical government. I’m perfectly comfortable with the idea of getting turned down for a job because I’m not the right ethnicity or religion or skin color because I’m confident that my skills, knowledge and work ethic are worth something to somebody, somewhere.
Lots. But I don’t think you’d care to learn why….
No, I would, actually. So please explain. Or is your smartass response simply a result of the fact that you can’t explain what’s wrong with the fact?
King articulated a non-violent way to resolve racial conflict in this country. IMVHO, without his contribution we would have seen widespread insurrection, from a variety of directions, during the 60’s. The country would have been torn to shreds.
No, we were well on the way there long before latecomer King arrived on the scene – the Civil War (not non-violent but a necessary precursor), Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Eleanor Roosevelt, Brown v. Board of Education, etc. Lots of people were on the scene, fighting for civil rights, before King showed up. It was being resolved.
The right to own slaves was also written into the original version. It took the 13th Amendment to get rid of that and the 14th Amendment to address specifically your desire to permit discrimination in commercial transactions.
“racism occasionally occurs” … when was the last lynching? when was the most recent race riots? yeah, this country is doing a fine job of addressing the legacy of slavery/Jim Crow.
By the way, I’m not apologizing for Helms, just attempting to answer the question of how such an obvious bigot could still get re-elected in 1996.
Because the excesses of the civil rights movement – quotas, set asides, affirmative action, “desegregation,” busing – still existed in 1996, and still exist today. And as long as they do exist, some voters will even tolerate open racists in exchange for the rare bird who’s willing to take on the MSM and revealed dogma and fight for what’s right.
What’s more, too many liberals deny the obvious: blacks as a group can sometimes be a serious pain in the butt. They have higher crime rates, higher dropout rates, and tend to prefer redsitributionist political schemes that take from the productive and give to the non-productive. Call the white response to that racism if you wish, or call it “dealing with the realities of life.”
Let’s start with the statement that correlation does not causation. At the time, how much can you filter out due to income level? Next, go on to selective enforcement of laws on a racial basis. Third is the social phenomena of ghettoization, where anti-social behavior and aggression goes up when a selected population is artificially constrained.
Those are three, rather obvious factors anyone could have thought of with a little bit of thought.
The right to own slaves was also written into the original version. It took the 13th Amendment to get rid of that and the 14th Amendment to address specifically your desire to permit discrimination in commercial transactions.
Francis, I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about. The 14th A. invokes equal treatment under the law (i.e., government). It says nothing about commercial transactions and certainly does not revoke the other enumerated rights.
The freedom of speech is protected absolute; the freedom of assembly is absolute; the freedoms of religion and the press are absolute. The right not to have your property taken without just compensation is absolute.
it’s trivially easy to name multiple exceptions to each of those. so, no: not absolute.
Let’s start with the statement that correlation does not causation. At the time, how much can you filter out due to income level? Next, go on to selective enforcement of laws on a racial basis. Third is the social phenomena of ghettoization, where anti-social behavior and aggression goes up when a selected population is artificially constrained.
Ah, of course! Why didn’t I think of that? Blacks are just dumb, innanimate computer programs and whites are the gods who program them! Input: oppression. Output: crime, illegitimacy and mayhem. I forgot that blacks have no free will of their own.
Tell me then, Tex, how that explains the fact that black crime rates soared after desegregation? How is it that black illegitmacy rates went from around 16% during Jim Crow to over 70% today? If “oppression” causes these miseries then perhaps Jim Crow wasn’t oppression?
How does your explanation explain the fact that blacks have higher crime rates, lower incomes, lower life expectancies, and lower levels of education even in places where whites aren’t around to persecute them? Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Somalia, Rwanda? In fact, the fewer whites are around, the worse things seem to get.
it’s trivially easy to name multiple exceptions to each of those. so, no: not absolute.
But the trivially easy exceptions are, well, trivial. The cases I mentioned are not.
The problems, Russell, are twofold
Here’s the deal, Mark.
More than fifty years after Brown vs Board of Education of Topeka, black people still get treated differently from other people, just because they’re black. They get paid less, live in crappier places, have crummier schools, die of more preventable diseases, go to jail more often, you name it.
One way of looking at this is that black people are congenital screw-ups, are inherently deficient, and the things I’ve described above are just the way those inherent deficiencies play out in society. I think that’s crap. I think it’s crap because I have eyes in my head, and I can look and see that the black people I know are, plainly, not deficient. Maybe I only know wonderful black people, but I doubt that’s true.
So, there must be another reason.
The fact that for, what, 300 or 400 years black folks were treated as either property or dirt might have something to do with it.
The fact that lots and lots and lots of people just plain out, a priori, dislike if not hate black people might also be a factor.
You can do the math.
As a nation, we’ve decided that one way to address this legacy, and reality, of abuse of blacks is to give them a leg up.
Many people point out that this is race-based discrimination, and that it can actually be harmful in that it can put folks who are less qualified in positions of responsibility, where they will not do well.
There’s something to both of these objections.
So, if we don’t like the nice, kinder, gentler approach, my vote is for a swift kick in the legal balls for folks who can’t get it through their damned heads that black people should be treated the same as everyone else.
Maybe that seems unfair to you, but then again, perhaps noone in your family tree ever swung from a tree just for being the color they are.
Of course, we could just let things remain the way they are, and do nothing at all, but personally I think that sucks too.
I can’t believe that we are still talking about this crap.
I’m perfectly comfortable with the idea of getting turned down for a job because I’m not the right ethnicity or religion or skin color because I’m confident that my skills, knowledge and work ethic are worth something to somebody, somewhere.
I’m guessing you’re a white man.
Thanks –
The problems, Russell, are twofold
Here’s the deal, Mark.
More than fifty years after Brown vs Board of Education of Topeka, black people still get treated differently from other people, just because they’re black. They get paid less, live in crappier places, have crummier schools, die of more preventable diseases, go to jail more often, you name it.
One way of looking at this is that black people are congenital screw-ups, are inherently deficient, and the things I’ve described above are just the way those inherent deficiencies play out in society. I think that’s crap. I think it’s crap because I have eyes in my head, and I can look and see that the black people I know are, plainly, not deficient. Maybe I only know wonderful black people, but I doubt that’s true.
So, there must be another reason.
The fact that for, what, 300 or 400 years black folks were treated as either property or dirt might have something to do with it.
The fact that lots and lots and lots of people just plain out, a priori, dislike if not hate black people might also be a factor.
You can do the math.
As a nation, we’ve decided that one way to address this legacy, and reality, of abuse of blacks is to give them a leg up.
Many people point out that this is race-based discrimination, and that it can actually be harmful in that it can put folks who are less qualified in positions of responsibility, where they will not do well.
There’s something to both of these objections.
So, if we don’t like the nice, kinder, gentler approach, my vote is for a swift kick in the legal balls for folks who can’t get it through their damned heads that black people should be treated the same as everyone else.
Maybe that seems unfair to you, but then again, perhaps noone in your family tree ever swung from a tree just for being the color they are.
Of course, we could just let things remain the way they are, and do nothing at all, but personally I think that sucks too.
I can’t believe that we are still talking about this crap.
I’m perfectly comfortable with the idea of getting turned down for a job because I’m not the right ethnicity or religion or skin color because I’m confident that my skills, knowledge and work ethic are worth something to somebody, somewhere.
I’m guessing you’re a white man.
Thanks –
Bubba,
“Crime rates and irresponsibility among Whites are a fact of life which must be faced.”
What’s wrong with that, exactly – aside from the fact that it’s absolutely true? History seems to suggest that white men have a penchant for mass death, destruction of families, genocide, pedophilia, and a whole slew of degenerate and depraved acts upon whites and non-whites.
We should teach children to beware.
No, we were well on the way there long before latecomer King arrived on the scene – the Civil War (not non-violent but a necessary precursor), Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Eleanor Roosevelt, Brown v. Board of Education, etc. Lots of people were on the scene, fighting for civil rights, before King showed up. It was being resolved.
All good points. Noted.
What’s more, too many liberals deny the obvious: blacks as a group can sometimes be a serious pain in the butt.
Dude, EVERYBODY can sometimes, if not often, be a pain in the butt.
Everybody has their issues. If you think white people are exempt, or southerners, or worthy heartland small towners, or whoever the hell you think it is that is being inconvenienced by the unreasonable demands of those annoying blacks, believe you me that those folks can be every bit as large a PITA and a general burr in the hide of the body politic as any group of black folks.
Don’t make me go there.
Thanks –
The fact that for, what, 300 or 400 years black folks were treated as either property or dirt might have something to do with it.
Are Jewish boys born circumcised?
One does not inherit a “history of oppression.” One does inherit genes that may lead to some behaviors. You say you’ve had experience with blacks. I’ve had experience living near, going to school with, and working with blacks. In the South and outside of it. I would not suggest for even a second that all, or even most, blacks are bad. Never. Because it’s not even remotely true. I have never seen them oppressed or mistreated. But they do have a higher prevalence of behaviors that lead to the miseries you describe. I whites screw up at school or work at rate X, blacks do so at rate 2 or 3 or 8 times X.
The fact is the studies that have been done are pretty definite in their conclusions. Blacks raised away from “white racism” (in Africa, for example) don’t do any better than blacks in the US (in fact, worse). Blacks adopted and raised in white families tend to perform more like their biological families – in work, in school, on IQ tests – than their adopted families.
The fact that lots and lots and lots of people just plain out, a priori, dislike if not hate black people might also be a factor.
So black misery is caused by white racism. Why do whites choose specifically to pick on blacks? Why not Asians? Apparently we actually favor them over our very own, because they do better than whites in the USA.
I can’t believe that we are still talking about this crap.
Well your side has had pretty much free rein on the matter for the last 40 years. The “racist Republican” juggernaut has done nothing to change that. AA and set asides still exist. Liberals have vast control in many states but the problem hasn’t been fixed.
Perhaps the reason we’re still talking about “this crap” is because you’re so-called “solutions” have failed because you’re explanations are inadequate. You need to understand the problem first before you can fix it. You can’t get to the moon with pre-Newtonian physics or a pre-Copernican map. If the liberals solutions have failed perhaps it’s because their understanding is wrong.
I can’t claim any special knowledge of the bunking arrangements in Hell, but why would a 250 pound black transvestite be condemned to have Helms as a roommate? That seems unfair to someone who was Helms’ victim all his life.
I suggest that the best thing would be for Helms to be strapped to a bed and compelled to watch Barack Obama’s inauguration on endless replay. Surely that would be the best corrective therapy for all concerned. And of course, in four years time, we can switch the tape to the second inauguration….
Mark Childers, might I ask for my own clarity, are you suggesting that blacks are genetically inferior to whites, at least in terms of intellect, criminality and morality? I just want to be sure what your understanding of the problem is.
My dear Mark Childers,
Of course people inherit a history of oppression – on both sides of the equation. Have you never stopped to ask why reconstruction largely failed? There is also abundant evidence for communities passing down their history – as the 4th of July might have taught you. Please, do think before posting this sort of obvious idiocy.
As for the old canard about inherent mental capacities in racial groups, the vast majority of serious educationalists would point to poverty and social environment as being much more determinative of educational achievement. The fact that historically more black kids lived in bad neighborhoods, with poor parents and mediocre schooling has much more to do with differing levels of success on tests or exams than any genetic factor you care to name.
Equally, your assessment of the political situation leaves much to be desired. I seem to have missed liberal control of the deep South, where much of the black population is concentrated. Or perhaps the GOP was merely an illusion?
I don’t see you offering anything in the way of solutions, but I am sure that people who begin by fundamentally mistaking the dynamics of history, social community and genetics are not about to produce anything constructive. Cordially hoping for your own educational achievement to progress from its current abyssmal state, I remain,
M.
If one definition of racism is blaming a race for problem X, then doesn’t that make blacks who blame whites for all/most of their troubles…racists?
If you think white people are exempt, or southerners, or worthy heartland small towners, or whoever the hell you think it is that is being inconvenienced by the unreasonable demands of those annoying blacks, believe you me that those folks can be every bit as large a PITA and a general burr in the hide of the body politic as any group of black folks.
So a high crime rate- violent crime, especially – is the same as some farmer demanding an ethanol subsidy?
Everybody can be a PITA sometimes, including our kids and parents – especially our parents; not everyone earns the PITA label, however.
Mark Childers, by your logic, black people would have had to blame themselves for slavery and life on the plantation. Doesn’t that worry you, just a trifle? And the definition of racism is considering another person inferior in any way because of their race, not “blaming a race for a given problem”. After all, I think it’s fair to say that white people were responsible for slavery as an institution in the USA, and for the perpetuation of its legacy in the form of Jim Crow, and denial of civil rights. Which is why your attempt to twist the discussion onto “genetic” grounds leaves me with the overwhelming impression that your inner racist is at the controls.
One does not inherit a “history of oppression.”
The f*ck they do not.
I get to trot this crappy little story out now and then.
I have a family member, now deceased, who kept a black man’s knucklebones in his dresser drawer. They were some kind of sick trophy.
Somewhere that black man’s grandson is walking around. If you don’t think that knowing that your grandfather was killed and mutilated by white men, and his body parts kept as a trophy, will f*ck with your head, you don’t know human beings very well.
Damned straight you can inherit a “history of oppression”.
I have never seen them oppressed or mistreated.
Lucky you.
I live in the bluest corner of the bluest state in the union. I freelance as a drummer.
There’s a regular at one place I work at who’s a good dancer. He’s an older guy, had a heart transplant recently.
He’s under the impression that his heart came from a black guy, and that’s why he’s a good dancer. He says at the hospital they say he’s like a song, because he’s an “Irish jig”. Get it?
Boating is very popular around where I live. The common term for laborers in the boatyards is “boat n****r”. Of course, there are no real “boat n****rs”, because the boat yard owners don’t hire blacks. Not their kind of people, dear.
I see and hear crap like this every damned day, and do not think that I don’t.
The capacity of the human heart for stupidity and ignorance is bottomless. Can’t make people *be* better by law, but you can require them to *act* better.
Dig?
Thanks –
So a high crime rate- violent crime, especially – is the same as some farmer demanding an ethanol subsidy?
No.
The equivalent to, for instance, your inner city black gang-banger smoking crack would be, for instance, your rural cracker knucklehead cooking meth in his double-wide.
How far do you want to take this?
Thanks –
As for the old canard about inherent mental capacities in racial groups, the vast majority of serious educationalists would point to poverty and social environment as being much more determinative of educational achievement.
Society stands here waiting for that solution. I’d welcome it. Show me the solution that “serious educationalists” have discovered? Blacks certainly do tend to live in bad neighborhoods. But who makes them bad?
I don’t see you offering anything in the way of solutions, but I am sure that people who begin by fundamentally mistaking the dynamics of history, social community and genetics are not about to produce anything constructive..
Sorry – liberals are the ones who have been imposing all of the “solutions” for the last 40+ years. Their solutions have consistently failed.
Equally, your assessment of the political situation leaves much to be desired. I seem to have missed liberal control of the deep South, where much of the black population is concentrated. Or perhaps the GOP was merely an illusion?
I’m searching all over my map, but can’t find “Detroit” or “Compton” anywhere in the South. My point is that even in solidly liberal states with governments more than willing to adopt proposed liberal strategies, the strategies have not succeeded.
How, pray tell do you explain “white racism” and its mythical effect on the black condition? What is its mechanism of existence? How does it get passed from one group of whites, in the South, to those in LA, Detroit, New York, Paris, London, whereever? How is it that it effects blacks and, to a lesser degree, Hispanics, but is curiously inoperative on Jews and Asians? Is it passed on through the DNA? Is it passed on through secret societies with secret handshakes? What is its method of transmission and survival?
You posit an explanation with no explanatory power, via a method that somehow seems to leap across mountain ranges, deserts, and oceans; that seems to have its effect on its target (blacks) even in places where its carrier (whites) do not appear. Seems like an absolutely amazing gene. Or is it a virus?
The world may never know…
The equivalent to, for instance, your inner city black gang-banger smoking crack would be, for instance, your rural cracker knucklehead cooking meth in his double-wide.
Yes, and we all know the two occur at exactly the same rates!
Perhaps the reason we’re still talking about “this crap” is because you’re so-called “solutions” have failed because you’re explanations are inadequate.
Actually, my solution has not been tried.
My explanation for why blacks are disadvantaged is that lots of other folks are stupid, ignorant bigots, and treat them poorly.
My solution is the give those folks a swift kick in the ass in the form of making them pay, personally, directly, and in kind, for whatever harm they cause folks they discriminate against.
Doesn’t have to just be blacks, either. Could be any skin color, any religion, gays, whatever you like.
You discriminate, you pay.
I think it’s an excellent solution. Only the malefactor is harmed, the victim is made whole, and the punishment fits the crime to the nickel.
I’d love to see it enacted as law. I’m not holding my breath.
thanks –
Gentlemen, I regret to inform you that I must leave you to your asylum. I’ll be sure to lock the padded door behind me. But as I go, I leave you with a development inthe United Kingdom I’m sure you’ll all be pleased with:
The National Children’s Bureau, which receives £12 million a year, mainly from Government funded organisations, has issued guidance to play leaders and nursery teachers advising them to be alert for racist incidents among youngsters in their care. This could include a child of as young as three who says “yuk” in response to being served unfamiliar foreign food. The guidance by the NCB is designed to draw attention to potentially-racist attitudes in youngsters from a young age.
Mark, the point is that no community is free of crime, and that trying to assess that community by its crime rate is an exercise in futility. Would you assume that members of a white gated community in Florida were somehow genetically/racially different to thieving junkies from a white trailer park in Arkansas? Of course not. Likewise, a black college professor in Maryland is no different genetically to the black gangbanger from the Bronx.
The point about crime rates is first that crime tends to be higher among poor communities and to be committed by people from them. You will agree that there is a disproportionate rate of poverty in the black and latino communities, I assume?
Equally, it is reasonably well-documented that a largely white police force and judiciary are more likely to arrest and sentence black people, which again distorts the real crime rate in different ethnic communities. Talking about different crime rates to hide a racist agenda is a well-known tactic, and is older even than Jesse Helms. It is also a way of evading the facts about who holds power within a given police and judicial system. Again, what counts is poverty rate, social community, and the constitutive elements of the police force and judiciary. Genetics and ethnic affiliation are simply not relevant.
ashes to ashes,
dust to dust,
scum to scum.
“Helms warned that, “Crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are a fact of life which must be faced.”
This issue has already been hashed out and while Helms may have been an ignorant bigot, this one statement we do have to give him credit for. It is a statistical fact if you look at crime rates and illegitimacy rates.
Yes, and we all know the two occur at exactly the same rates!
Wanna play this game? Do you really think that blacks are uniquely criminally inclined?
Should we count the Asian and Russian gangs, too, or just the blacks and the crackers?
Lemme do some homework and I’ll get back to you.
Thanks –
There really ought to be a “Childers award”: multiple posts and not a single coherent argument among them. Impressive, in a sad way.
According to Mark’s logic, white men should be kept away from children. I mean, since rates of pedophilia are highest among this racial group.
I hope your children are safe, Mark.
Frankly I’d say that irresponsibility and crime rates occur among all communities. Of course, I might have overlooked the perfection that characterized some mythical white community known to Helms and Helms alone….
Forgive this “scum” for peaking through the door after I left:
Frankly I’d say that irresponsibility and crime rates occur among all communities. Of course, I might have overlooked the perfection that characterized some mythical white community known to Helms and Helms alone….
So all groups commit crimes therefore allcrime rates are equal?
Nice.
Then I guess since everyone can be poor that poverty rates must be equal. Ipso facto, blacks are not poorer than whites (or more likely to be unemployed, live in bad housing, etc., etc.). So then racism doesn’t exist!
I repeat here my final argument:
How, pray tell do you explain “white racism” and its mythical effect on the black condition? What is its mechanism of existence? How does it get passed from one group of whites, in the South, to those in LA, Detroit, New York, Paris, London, wherever? How is it that it effects blacks and, to a lesser degree, Hispanics, but is curiously inoperative on Jews and Asians? Is it passed on through the DNA? Is it passed on through secret societies with secret handshakes? What is its method of transmission and survival?
You posit an explanation with no explanatory power, via a method that somehow seems to leap across mountain ranges, deserts, and oceans; that seems to have its effect on its target (blacks) even in places where its carrier (whites) do not appear. Seems like an absolutely amazing gene. Or is it a virus?
The world may never know…
But one thing is for sure: you are perfectly willing to blame the black condition entirely on people of another race – which is in itself racism; yet give them no credit for their own condition.
Amazing.
I see why liberals have been busy destroying the schools left and right – so idiots like you would believe anything you’re told.
I’m perfectly comfortable with the idea of getting turned down for a job because I’m not the right ethnicity or religion or skin color because I’m confident that my skills, knowledge and work ethic are worth something to somebody, somewhere.
Well, that’s mighty white of you!!!
hilzoy, it would appear to me that Mr. Childers is EXACTLY what the posting rules changes were talking about. A brand-new poster with multiple “lol them darkies sure are dumb and criminals to boot!” posts, not a single actual argument, and not a single external cite.
Also amusing that Mr. Childers seems to be dancing around saying explicitly that blacks are genetically stupid and criminal, even though he clearly believes so, but finds the idea of genetic racism patently absurd. I guess only black people get bad genes.
“What more does one need to know?”
How to use the space bar.
“Granted, I don’t believe that McCain shared the venom of Helms and may even be ashamed by him but he had the decency to let the family mourn and the body cool without besmirching the man.”
I’m doubtful that the family is reading this thread, or that anyone here is warming Jesse Helms’ body.
But if you have evidence otherwise, please do present it.
“I wonder how the right will act when a revered but flawed liberal icon passes.”
A shame that has never happened, so the proposition couldn’t be tested.
“As that generation fades away, NC is becoming more open, more accepting. But it’s still a VERY Red state.”
With a Democratic Governor, Democratic Lt. Governor (who is leading in the polls in the race for governor), 6 Democratic U.S. Representatives (out of 13), a Democratic House, and a Democratic Senate. Oh, yes, very Red. I’m sure the Democratic Governor, Democratic Senate Majority Leader, and Democratic House Speaker of North Carolina all cluck with alarm about how Democrats can’t get elected in NC, when they meet.
The Cook Report:
The rural areas are still very Republican; the urban areas aren’t. It’s hardly an uncommon pattern. NC might very well vote its electoral votes for Obama this year.
So, Childers, white racism only affects blacks and hispanics? Not Jews and Asians? Oy veh! Did you miss the Holocaust? Ever heard of how the Chinese were treated in California, or how the Japanese were interned? Dear God, I’ve encountered some illiterate scum, but you are the most bigoted, historically ignorant headbanger I’ve seen in years. You don’t know a thing about US history or world history, yet you bleat on about racism and claim others lack explanatory power. When I look at you, with your bigoted cowardly dishonesty and small-town racism, I see a living definition of what it is not to be American, let alone a decent human being.
Mark Childers asks:
How is it that it effects blacks and, to a lesser degree, Hispanics, but is curiously inoperative on Jews and Asians?
Yes, we Asians are completely impervious to being racist. That’s what gave rise to the Great East Asian Empire.
btw, the last line of your last comment does move you on the other side of posting rules, even before they were revised.
Yes, and we all know the two occur at exactly the same rates!
The results are in:
As seen in Figure 1, the frequency of methamphetamine use is
similar to crack cocaine, near the lowest levels of regular drug abuse.5
Both crack and meth clock in at about 0.2% of the population above age 12. At a national scale, both are tiny problems: in most parts of the country, both meth and crack are noise. In certain, selected, different cities, each is a plague.
Both are epidemic in communities where there really is not much for anyone to look forward to.
My point upthread was not to pick on rural whites. My point is that blacks are not uniquely prone to criminal behavior.
How, pray tell do you explain “white racism” and its mythical effect on the black condition? What is its mechanism of existence? How does it get passed from one group of whites, in the South, to those in LA, Detroit, New York, Paris, London, wherever?
How do you explain racism at all? It’s not just whites who don’t like other people.
It gets spread around the same way all other cultural artifacts get spread around. People teach it to their kids. People reinforce it in their peer groups. There is no freaking mystery here.
How is it that it effects blacks and, to a lesser degree, Hispanics, but is curiously inoperative on Jews and Asians?
It hasn’t always been inoperative on Jews and Asians. Actually, still isn’t.
You posit an explanation with no explanatory power
Au contraire. The explanation is simple: people are prone to cultivating an animus to other people who aren’t like them.
If they have some other tangible advantage, for instance really good guns, they can turn that animus into domination. Happens all the time, and has since the beginning of the world.
Again, no mystery. I’m kind of surprised at your question.
Black people get treated differently from other people because folks choose to treat them differently. This persists because people are stupid, and they cultivate their ill will toward blacks like it was some precious rare flower, rather than the rancid cognitive turd that it is. It’s not particular to blacks, it’s just worse for them than for most.
The solution is for people to knock it off. If they won’t do it on their own initiative, I have no problem putting the force of law behind it.
so idiots like you would believe anything you’re told.
Posting rules, dude.
thanks –
God proved today that he has a sick sense of humor. Jesse Helms, whose intolerance shamed the better angels of our nature and, sadly, reflected much of the American experience, died this July 4.
This is the day we remember a document that famously says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness . . .” Helms, who served in the United States Senate representing North Carolina from 1972 until 2002, resisted virtually every political movement fighting to make that ringing declaration of equality apply to African Americans, women, and gays.
Watching TV coverage of his death one would think that Helms was a lovable curmudgeon, tagged “Senator No” because of his principled resistance to federal spending programs. The stories showed clips of Helms’ gay-bashing rants, such as the time he defended his opposition to providing economic assistance to families of AIDS casualties. “”It’s their deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct that is responsible for the disease,” he once declared. Helms loved to talk about his Christian faith and to deliver stern warnings to those who failed to measure up to his Olympian moral standards. In all his Bible-quoting, though, he never mentioned this passage from Matthew 7:1-5:
“Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? . . . Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast the mote out of thy brother’s eye.”
Helms had a continent-sized beam in his eye. It was amazing to watch the broadcast eulogies. We heard about how late in his career he worked with Bono of U2 to increase funding for researched aimed at reducing mother-to-baby transmission of AIDS in Africa, though he repeatedly said that American victims of the disease got what they deserved. The Associated Press mentioned how he adopted a nine-year-old boy with cerebral palsy after Helms read a quote from the child in a newspaper saying that he wanted parents. A genuinely touching anecdote until you remember that Hitler spoiled his dogs. Former Kansas Senator and perennial presidential candidate Bob Dole declared that Helms would be remembered as a “considerate and compassionate person.” Except for gays, of course. Then we got this nauseating quote from soon-to-be-ex-President Bush:
“Jesse Helms was a kind, decent, and humble man and a passionate defender of what he called ‘the Miracle of America.’ So it is fitting that this great patriot left us on the Fourth of July. He was once asked if he had any ambitions beyond the United States Senate. He replied: ‘The only thing I am running for is the Kingdom of Heaven.’ Today, Jesse Helms has finished the race, and we pray he finds comfort in the arms of the loving God he strove to serve throughout his life.’
Will Helms want to be in heaven if it is racially integrated? In the news stories I watched, CNN only mentioned one racial controversy in Helms’ too-long political career: his 1984 re-election campaign against former Charlotte mayor Harvey Gantt, during which he ran an ad where the audience saw a pair of white hands crumpling a rejection letter while the narrator grimly said, “You needed that job … but they had to give it to a minority.” CNN’s political analyst Bill Schneider treated this as an exception and a two-minute segment on Fox News never referred to Helms’ rancid racial demagoguery.
It is curious that the media focused more on Helms’ homophobic moments while lightly skipping over the repeated anti-black bigotry that benighted his public life. It reminds me of the criticism the great historian Dan Carter made in response to an otherwise great 1997 John Frankenheimer TV film, “George Wallace.” Carter, author of “The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics,’ took issue with the film’s conclusion. Wallace (played dead-on by Gary Sinise) deeply repents of his role in Alabama’s violent transition to desegregation. Towards the end of his life, Wallace reached out to black voters, but as Carter points out that is only because by the 1970s black people were allowed to vote. Wallace could not get elected without African American support. Wallace, Carter suggests, was motivated by selfish political ambition and not a Road-to-Damascus moment. Americans, however, love stories of redemption.
I think this past Friday’s narrative on Helms reflects that same need for a happy ending. Virulent racists don’t fit into American mythology. The bits painted Helms as a independent-minded, blunt man who redeemed himself by standing for a photo op with U2. Why did the stories refer more extensively to Helms’ anti-gay politics? I suspect that homophobia has remained a more acceptable form of intolerance while racism can be accepted only if its on the down-low. Yet, we do disservice to July 4th as a time of historical reflection and a celebration of freedom if we ignore the power and influence that can be wielded by an out-of-the-closet hatemonger like Jesse Helms.
I’d like to see the media ask McCain to reject and denounce Helms. Of course, they won’t, but given the way they used the Jeeremiah Wright story to pummel Obama, you’d think it was time to see where McCain stands on the GOP history of racism and homophobia. What would McFlop say? Or would he just be outraged at the question, as he usually is when there’s no soft answer?
I see that I hastily credited Rev. Wright with one too many “e”s in his first name, which is, of course, Jeremiah. Apologies for the misspelling. Even distant association with Childers has clearly had a damaging effect on brain function.
Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939
Some of the most startling quotes, in this book, are the observations by social workers who were convinced that Japanese immigrants could never assimilate and were, racially, a step above Blacks, when it came to “evolving from a primitive state.” However, Mexican immigrants were the most capable of assimilation, because they had less “primitive blood” a great work ethic and, though not Protestant, they were Roman Catholic, thus they were Christian enough.
It’s funny, how certain prejudices follow certain trends.
OT: No open thread to place this, but I thought Gary (assuming he hasn’t already heard) and other SF fans would want to know. writer/critic/playwright Tom Disch committed suicide on July 4th.
Locus obituary.
The historical record shows that whites can’t be trusted with decisions about black people’s employment and property. We are likely to hire less qualified whites over better qualified blacks, to deny blacks the amounts and terms of mortgages that we give to white loan seekers, and so on. This is why the government intervenes: so that we don’t do unnecessary harm to our own interests, through stupid discrimination. Every day, right now, in this country, white people harm the well-being of the US through bigoted decisions about work and money. Over the centuries we have cost the nation untold trillions of dollars this way. Unfortunately, too few white people are willing to take up the burden of more competent decision-making, and there’s only so long the rest of America can wait for us to get a clue.
(Which is one way of looking at the way racism works: discrimination is dumb, and the rest of us shouldn’t have to suffer for bigots’ folly.)
Mark Childers: I didn’t engage with you earlier. However: a few of your comments violate our rule against incivility. I am thinking particularly of these:
“Now how much saliva comes out of your mouth when you denounce “McCarthyism”?”
and “so idiots like you would believe anything you’re told.”
Your arguments about blacks more or less defy belief. You provide no cites for any of your alleged facts, so there’s no way we can assess them. Actually, you state them sufficiently vaguely tat there’s no way any of us can even try, though on one of your rare forays into concreteness — meth v. crack — you turn out to have been wrong.
But this is frankly incredible:
“How, pray tell do you explain “white racism” and its mythical effect on the black condition? What is its mechanism of existence? How does it get passed from one group of whites, in the South, to those in LA, Detroit, New York, Paris, London, wherever? How is it that it effects blacks and, to a lesser degree, Hispanics, but is curiously inoperative on Jews and Asians? Is it passed on through the DNA? Is it passed on through secret societies with secret handshakes? What is its method of transmission and survival?
You posit an explanation with no explanatory power, via a method that somehow seems to leap across mountain ranges, deserts, and oceans; that seems to have its effect on its target (blacks) even in places where its carrier (whites) do not appear. Seems like an absolutely amazing gene. Or is it a virus?”
Is there any serious argument about the existence of white racism directed at blacks, and the role that it played in establishing American slavery? Or in keeping blacks subjugated throughout the south after the civil war, through Jim Crow laws, lynching, and the kind of de facto reenslavement described here (see also here?)
Does your skepticism about the mode of transmission of racism extend to all features of cultures, or only this one? If the latter, what makes racism so special in this regard? If the former — well, you can’t be serious. (I can see the argument now: “what is this “Baroque style” of which you speak? How is it transmitted? By a gene or a virus?”)
The forced labor system in the south ended in World War II. Jim Crow ended during my lifetime. No one needs to inherit this; they just lived through it. But of course people can be affected by what has happened to their parents — if you don’t like examples involving blacks, just consider the children of Holocaust survivors or people who escaped the killing fields in Cambodia.
Why, exactly, the fact that a group of people has been brutalized for centuries — their social institutions destroyed, their children and spouses and parents sold away from them, any chance of actually succeeding through hard work nonexistent — should have effects that last for at least forty years is not a mystery, at least to me. Why is it a mystery to you?
In any case: this is a warning. Our rules require civility. They also say that if people want to disrespect large groups of people, they should be prepared to argue for their positions. If you abide by these rules, fine. If not, I will ban you.
“I wonder how the right will act when a revered but flawed liberal icon passes.”
Do the Paul Wellstone or Corretta King count? The Right went bat-stuff crazy over his memorial and her funeral.
Don’t waste your breath talking about how Jesse Helms was a mar to decent conservatism. Helms’s racist lunacy is not a flaw in conservatism; it’s a feature. It has never been not found in any conservative movement. Do you seriously think McCain dreads the Helms albatross being hung around his neck? He’s doing his level best to leverage it into place himself.
matttbastard,
Disch is one of my favorites when I had time to read science fiction. His LiveJournal makes for painful and sad reading. From his last two entries:
Short of succumbing to the madness of anorexia, I doubt I am likely to experience actual starvation before I die. Nor, I’d bet, will most of those who visit this site.
and
I’ve tried writing such letters to real-life good writers but they are too busy trying to grab the brass ring or otherwise advance up the ladder, or else simply think me pushy or wicked or dumb and don’t write back or just say thank you, goodbye. Maybe it would be different now in the era of blogs and email, but back then my epistolary charms had no effect on the likes of Louise Erdrich et al. As indeed, they shouldn’t have. There are too many possible venal reasons why we don’t write to our favorite celebreties.
I’m thinking who I should write letters to, just to say thank you for letting me read what they wrote.
Ban me, hilzoy. Tear my heart out.
Do the Paul Wellstone or Corretta King count? The Right went bat-stuff crazy over his memorial and her funeral.
WTF??? I remember the Wellstone “memorial rally.” The liberals went freakin’ nuts. When a few Republican congressmen entered to pay their respects, the audience openly booed them – at a “memorial service.”
But this is frankly incredible:
First, explain to me what was incredible about what I said. Did you even read it? I did not suggest that white racism against blacks does not exist. I did not deny the historical reality of slavery and the slave trade (a slave trade promoted and sustained by Africans in Africa, I would note).
What I denied was that the slavery which ended 143 years ago (in the USA) does not, can not explain the black condition in the USA today. Historical oppression does not travel through DNA (“Jewish boys aren’t born circumcised”) and has little explanatory for conditions which exist today – conditions (illegitimacy, relative crime rates) that have only gotten worse as the oppression has receeded in fact and in memory.
1) How do you explain the poor relative performance of blacks in every nation where they reside – places most of which have no “legacy of Jim Crow”?
2) How do you explain that the same social problems of blacks in the US are the same problems that plague them all over the world: high illegitimacy, high levels of STD transmission, high levels of crime, high levels of poverty, low levels of educational attainment?
3) You “caught me” on the meth vs. crack crime rates. Yippee. Those are two minor subsets of overall criminal activity. That blacks have higher overall violent crime and property crime rates is so well known as to not require citiation.
Also, the person alleging that white men molest children at higher rates than black men provided no proof, but you did not say “gotcha” there. I didn’t see any proof that white men molest kids at higher rates than blacks.
Does your skepticism about the mode of transmission of racism extend to all features of cultures, or only this one? If the latter, what makes racism so special in this regard?
In what way is the racism of white culture transmitted? Explain it. It’s certainly not done openly or consciously. How is it done in secret or subconsciously?
Once again, to blame one whole race – whites (or large numbers of them) for the misery of another (blacks) sounds pretty Goddamned racist to me.
In any case: this is a warning. Our rules require civility. They also say that if people want to disrespect large groups of people, they should be prepared to argue for their positions. If you abide by these rules, fine. If not, I will ban you
I see. People here can say all the nasty things they want about Republican politicians and voters; can say they wish certain people dead; can blame all of black misery on another race (hmmm, kinda like the way some people scapegoat Jews?) Nope, that’s not mean or incivil. But I say a few things with actual data behind them, and…
Ban me. Tear my heart out.
Do the Paul Wellstone or Corretta King count? The Right went bat-stuff crazy over his memorial and her funeral.
Ummm:
From Slate:
But the solemnity of death and the grace of Midwestern humor are overshadowed tonight by the angry piety of populism. Most of the event feels like a rally. The touching recollections are followed by sharply political speeches urging Wellstone’s supporters to channel their grief into electoral victory.
When Republican senators alked in to pay their respects, the audience jeered.
Dying during your campaign usually doesn’t hurt whoever replaces you on the ticket. It wins some portion of the sympathy vote. An in Minnesota Wellstone was reasonably popular. But who won the showdown that fall? The Republican, in large part thanks to the reaction to the misbehavior of Democrats at the memorial service.
Republicans went “bat-stuff” crazy at Wellstone’s funeral? Wow – clearly I’ve entered an alternate universe where the facts are turned upside down
DNFTT
Mark —
Two things, briefly.
First, can you provide a cite of any kind for this:
1) How do you explain the poor relative performance of blacks in every nation where they reside
Second, do you believe that blacks are inherently inferior to whites? Whether through genetics, acculturation, whatever. Do you think they are inherently inferior?
It’s a simple question, the possible answers are “yes” and “no”.
Thanks –
Sorry, LJ, cross posted.
Thanks –
“Ban me. Tear my heart out.”
Well, since you asked so nicely…
I’m trying to be all “nil nisi bonum” on this, but that litany of quotations is just jaw-dropping.
russell, Mark’s answer to your question is pretty obvious. Of course he believes black people are inferior. He’s been saying it all thread.
I have no proof that white men brutally rape children at higher rates than other racial groups.
I withdraw my comment.
I am truly sorry and please forgive me for peddling in ignorance.
(this whole exchange seems a bit surreal.)
Oh, and he managed to do quite well what trolls do, sidetrack the conversation.
It was interesting.
Welcome to ObWi, Mark Childers. I guarantee you that there will be a post on racism once a week until after the election. Also, the rules here are, you can say anything you want about Republicans and conservatives RACIST! RACIST! RACIST!, I HATE CONEOSERVATIVES AND I WANT THEM TO DIE!!! but don’t ever, ever paint with such a broad brush complaints against liberals. Except it’s OK to call Geraldine Ferraro racist, and Clinton supporters racist, as well, so it’s not just the Republicans.
Ah, he’s gone, but for those few supporters of his who might still be reading, he did use one of my favorite conservative dishonest tropes:
“What I denied was that the slavery which ended 143 years ago (in the USA) does not, can not explain the black condition in the USA today.”
And… you don’t think the fact that African-Americans, innocent of any crime, were lynched IN LARGE NUMBERS throughout the 1930s could qualify as oppression? What about the number of “sundown towns” in the 20s, 30s, and 40s, identified by James van Loewen, in which African-Americans could not be safe after sundown? Or the fact that African-Americans couldn’t even safely, legally vote until 1965?
The key date is 1965, not 1865. And racism was still pretty virulent then.
Smarter trolls, please!
Hilzoy, I’m glad you let him talk as long as he did–a nice reminder of the number and amount of outright racists remaining in the Republican party–and I’m glad you banned him when you did. Well done on both.
Oh yeah, and Childers is totally lying about the Wellstone memorial–Republicans went apeshit *after* the memorial (small clarification), because one of the memorial speakers decided to actually mention that Wellstone was a progressive interested in progressive politics. Horrors! For details about the right’s disgraceful behavior, consult Al Franken’s “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them”–he’s got a whole chapter on Wellstone.
Helms’s racist lunacy is not a flaw in conservatism; it’s a feature. It has never been not found in any conservative movement
I think this is largely true, but it’s worth noting that this has not always corresponded to the Democratic/Republican partisan boundary.
It’s interesting to note that the party breakdown on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 shows a 69% D yea vote in the House and 63% D yea in the Senate, while the Republican votes in those houses were 82% yea and 80% yea, respectively.
The vote broke down on ideological and regional lines, but not really partisan ones. The Republicans of that day were not afraid to espouse liberal causes when they thought they were correct.
IMO it’s only after Goldwater that the R’s started smoking the racialist crack as a way to gin up a majority.
Thanks –
DaveC: “don’t ever, ever paint with such a broad brush complaints against liberals.”
The fact that you are still here, and have been for years, disproves this claim.
Cripes, Dave, as I have explained, I’m against Death. I don’t want any conservatives to die.
The flu, maybe.
Goiter, perhaps.
Chafing, certainly.
Your grenade lobs are becoming too easy.
Hilzoy, call in air support. I know the coordinates.
I wish I had a tooth for every defense of conservatives like kenB did. Then I wouldn’t have to consider expensive bridgework.
Root canal seems fitting. 😉
I think liberals thought up flossing. We put out a government pamphlet.
Conservatives wouldn’t listen, natch.
I wish I had a tooth for every defense of conservatives like kenB did
Yeah, kenB was pretty good. NO CAPS, EITHER.
I liked Chredon also. Just laid out the facts, did not engage in the tournament of micturation.
Childers, though, was a different story. Confound his knavish tricks!
Thanks –
If we did follow the nil nisi bonum principle, the obituaries for Helms might easily take haiku form. It would make an interesting contest….
“OT: No open thread to place this, but I thought Gary (assuming he hasn’t already heard) and other SF fans would want to know.”
I noticed earlier this evening, Matttbastard; thanks.
Any lover of poetry, criticism, or, oddly, Disney, should find Tom Disch of interest; he stood as much or more outside the sf field as in, though he was also always, like it or not, One Of Us.
“What about the number of ‘sundown towns’ in the 20s, 30s, and 40s, identified by James van Loewen, in which African-Americans could not be safe after sundown?”
Sundown towns.
I try not to answer trolls, but…
The question about the cultural transmission of racism requires an answer. Racism, as we understand it, differs from what we call tribalism, or the tendency to fear and suspect people with different languages and customs than ourselves. Nineteenth century figures promoted “white” supremacy, or what we call racism, as a tool to unify disparate peoples dispersed from Europe by colonialism. To do this, they devised an ideology that defined “white” people (actually an arbitrarily chosen and shifting group) as inherently superior to “Black” and Asian peoples.
The advocates of this system of oppression transmitted it culturally and ideologically through law, custom, family tradition, pseudo-science, and of course through outright terrorism.
The inclusion of a people within the “white” fold, in practice, closely resembled a gang initiation, in which groups such as the Irish (the first people referred to as “savages” in the racist sense) gained acceptance as “white” in the 19th century United States. The “white” supremacist system would accept the Irish as “white” only if they betrayed and attacked their Black neighbours.
Of course, it should go without saying that the promotion of “white” supremacy has required outrageous distortions of history. In fact, the nineteenth century system of “white” supremacy has had effects that have hobbled indigenous people and people of colour up to the present, and will continue to do so for some time.
A Wink was as good as a Nod between Obama and Rev Wright for many years. Not so many people complaining about that here, all is forgiven. But those hillbilly Kentuckians, Ohioans, Pennsylvanians, and West Virginians, there is something wrong with them. Maybe not enough PBS and NPR exposure?
The watusi and the frug?
A Wink was as good as a Nod between Obama and Rev Wright for many years.
Yawn, yawn, yawn. Unless you seriously mean to argue that Helms and Wright were even remotely of a kind in reach, influence, hate, racism, toxicity, or overall damage to the country, this is just a trollish attempt to change the subject. Worse, it’s an incredibly offensive equivalence to try to make for reasons too obvious to belabor, and the fact that I even have to point this out really does not reflect well on the amount of thought you put into this gem before hitting the Post button.
How is it that it effects blacks and, to a lesser degree, Hispanics, but is curiously inoperative on Jews and Asians?
Question: Who served as Secretary of State, Secretary of War and Attorney General of the Confederacy?
Answer: Judah P. Benjamin
Dumbass cracker.
Mark Childers: Sorry – liberals are the ones who have been imposing all of the “solutions” for the last 40+ years. Their solutions have consistently failed.
Well, there you have it how Helms would have coped if Barack Obama had become President: he just wouldn’t have noticed it, because all those “liberal solutions” applied over the past 40 years have in fact failed, so there’s no way a black man could be President.
Perhaps Helms would have tried the Oedipus solution and put his own eyes out rather than see what he could not cope with? If he couldn’t see Obama, how would he know he was black?
Perhaps we should suggest the Oedipus solution to the conservatives on this thread who have shown up to defend their hero?
“A Wink was as good as a Nod between Obama and Rev Wright for many years. Not so many people complaining about that here, all is forgiven. But those hillbilly Kentuckians, Ohioans, Pennsylvanians, and West Virginians, there is something wrong with them.”
Dave, if you have a specific comment you object to, cite it. If you have a specific fact to cite about liberals or Democrats, cite it.
If you can’t, then all you’re doing is the same old lying by innuendo crap that earns you contempt, and, yes, it’s “personal,” because again you aren’t making any kind of factual argument, but are personally smearing people here in a really offensive way.
Make a defensible factual case, or STFU, I suggest.
If you’re mad at someone in your personal life, take it up with them, and quit dumping your personal anxieties and dysfunctions on us.
Thanks.
“But those hillbilly Kentuckians, Ohioans, Pennsylvanians, and West Virginians, there is something wrong with them.”
Either support this claim that with a cite, or apologize for lying about “people… here.”
Because, you know, it’s not nice to lie about other people, and what they allegedly say and believe. Would you like us to start making up similar lies about you, in turn? No objection? That work for your Golden Rule?
Yes? No? If you think it’s okay, people might actually take to replying to you with equivalent lies about you, you know. So I’d suggest speaking up now if you actually object to this practice, and then I’d suggest not engaging in a double standard.
Or you might enjoy the other way; I wouldn’t know.
Thanks.
Gary, not that it really takes much away from the fact that DaveC was being profoundly offensive, but I took his line about hillbillies to be sarcasm, intended to imply that this is how all liberals view hicks and that it’s hypocritical. Of course, his entire argument–if you want to glorify it by calling it that–rests on the false equivalence he’s drawn between Wright and Helms, and between the attitudes of Obama and conservatives towards them, respectively.
By the way, I don’t know if you’re still paying attention to any old threads, but I owe you a significant apology. I regularly have moments of irritation with the way you write and argue, but my behavior towards you in the posting rules thread was completely uncalled-for.
One thing Helms was right about:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/memphis-crime
One thing Helms was right about
Care to explain what you mean by this, or are you just indulging in a drive-by?
Thanks –
Uh, why are you asking us? You’d obviously know better than most of us, given your evident personal experience with this transmission. I can’t imagine that you’ll deny being a racist after all this, so please tell us all how you came to be one. That’ll at least be a start to answering that question.
Uh, why are you asking us? You’d obviously know better than most of us, given your evident personal experience with this transmission. I can’t imagine that you’ll deny being a racist after all this, so please tell us all how you came to be one. That’ll at least be a start to answering that question.
I personally with Mark, Childers weren’t banned. I don’t write this to criticize the decision to ban him, but to state my own (selfish) desire to continue the discussion with him. Maybe I’m not very troll-savvy, but would have liked at least to try either to get through to him in some way or get him to state explicitly his understanding of the problems blacks are experiencing today. Several questions were put to him, none of which he answered. I would have liked to have sees answers to at least the following:
Me: Mark Childers, might I ask for my own clarity, are you suggesting that blacks are genetically inferior to whites, at least in terms of intellect, criminality and morality?
Hilzoy: Why, exactly, the fact that a group of people has been brutalized for centuries — their social institutions destroyed, their children and spouses and parents sold away from them, any chance of actually succeeding through hard work nonexistent — should have effects that last for at least forty years is not a mystery, at least to me. Why is it a mystery to you?
Russell: First, can you provide a cite of any kind for this:
1) How do you explain the poor relative performance of blacks in every nation where they reside
Second, do you believe that blacks are inherently inferior to whites? Whether through genetics, acculturation, whatever. Do you think they are inherently inferior?
Greg: And… you don’t think the fact that African-Americans, innocent of any crime, were lynched IN LARGE NUMBERS throughout the 1930s could qualify as oppression? What about the number of “sundown towns” in the 20s, 30s, and 40s, identified by James van Loewen, in which African-Americans could not be safe after sundown? Or the fact that African-Americans couldn’t even safely, legally vote until 1965?
I get the sense that Mark thinks that blacks as a group are subject to the same set of initial and continuing conditions in life as everyone else, and the disparities in income, education, criminality, family cohesion, health and such are entirely explained by some combination of personal responsibility or inherent biological deficiency. I hope this doesn’t come off as mind-reading. I base this on what he wrote, though he never came out and explicitly stated what I think was either his premise or conclusion. (I’m not sure which.)
A simplistic analogy that occurs to me is a comparison between two weight lifters, A and B, trying to do as many bench-press repetitions as possible. Say A does 24 repetitions and B does 18 repetitions. One might conclude that B was weaker than A, assuming that the two were lifting the same weight. But what would you conclude if A was lifting 150 pounds, while B was lifting 200? Mark seems to think that blacks and whites are lifting the same weight, but they’re not. Not even close. He might even think blacks are lifting less because Affirmative Action is so pervasive that a black guy would have a better chance at, say, getting a job at a gas station than an equally qualified white guy.
Mark states, “Blacks certainly do tend to live in bad neighborhoods.” He then asks, “But who makes them bad?” Let’s grant that some percentage of the blacks in bad neighborhoods is at least partly responsible for the badness of those neighborhoods. The question is “Why?” And, if you’re born into a bad neighborhood, does that neighborhood increase your chances of somehow failing in life, thereby perpetuating the badness of the neighborhood? If you are subject to disadvantages and roadblocks to success in many, many facets of life, are you less likely to succeed?
I do believe that individual human beings are responsible for their own actions. But, if we’re to compare groups of people, such as blacks and whites, with each other, we must take into account the circumstances under which they live. The question in my mind is, if the roles were reversed and history turned upon its head, would whites be doing any better than blacks now are? There is not way to answer this, but that uncertainty places the onus, in my opinion, on anyone asserting that blacks, as a group, are their own problem – because history very strongly suggests otherwise. (See Hilzoy’s and Greg’s questions above.)
I think it’s hard for people with insufficient experience or a lack of willingness or ability to see what’s before them to understand that the probabilities for success versus failure at almost every turn are much better for the average white person than the average black person. Whites have disproportionate power, and that fact seeps into almost every corner of the mainstream of society.
If you’re white and you make some bad decisions in youth, get into trouble with drugs or engage in some petty crime, you’re much more likely than a black kid to have a family that has some connections with the police, can afford decent legal representation, and maybe has some lawyer friends who know a few judges. Even if you do some time, when you get out, your uncle might be able to get you into the union so you can make a decent living, despite your criminal record. If you’re a black kid, not so much.
The point is that the favorable choices the average white person has are generally not available to the average black person. And the average black person will be forced to make some potentially bad choices that the average white person won’t. Whose fault is that? Well, regardless of whose fault it is, IT IS.
I’m kind of running out of steam at this point, and I should really get back to work. So let me end somewhat abruptly by heading off what I think might be the next line of questioning from anyone in the “blacks are inferior” camp, requiring an explanation of why whites have the power. My answer is “Go read Guns, Germs and Steel.”
“But those hillbilly Kentuckians, Ohioans, Pennsylvanians, and West Virginians, there’s something wrong with them.”
Bad dentistry?
Undercooked squirrel?
Deep-fried squirrel?
Dave, how come your hillbilly’s are always so far north, hugging the Mason-Dixon?
This: I personally with Mark, Childers weren’t banned.
should be: I personally wish Mark Childers weren’t banned.
The “with” is an obvious typo, but I have no idea where the commma came from.
Russell,
Read the article in its entirety, then get back to me if you have the same question and I will answer you.
The “with” is an obvious typo, but I have no idea where the commma came from.
Bad neighborhoods.
Commas come from nice neighborhoods. The extra m makes them bad.
Pat Califa notes in one of his short stories that “when white people call a place a bad neighborhood they mean that mostly black people live there”.
I pass this on for what it’s worth…
But isn’t Pat Califa right? Whether he intends that to be a put down to those white people or not, isn’t it an accurate assessment that a bad (i.e. unsafe) neighborhood usually means a black neighborhood?
Read the article in its entirety, then get back to me if you have the same question and I will answer you.
Read it. Same question. Fire away.
Also:
isn’t it an accurate assessment that a bad (i.e. unsafe) neighborhood usually means a black neighborhood?
Not in my experience. I’ve been in good and bad neighborhoods of all prevailing colors.
Thanks –
Actually, maybe I’ll save us all a lot of time.
obsidian thighs, if the insight you’re leading up to is that black people are just inherent screw ups, and the social issues described in the article are all their own doing, you can save it.
If you have something more interesting or insightful to bring to the table, I’m all ears.
Not trying to stifle your contribution here, by all means fire away, I’ll just absent myself if the direction you plan to take is what I’ve described. I’ve had that conversation 10,000 times and nobody’s mind gets changed. I’ve got work to do.
Thanks –
obsidian thighs: But isn’t Pat Califa right?
The first night of a vacation in San Francisco, I set off for a walk through the city before supper, and discovered afterwards from my guidebook (after an hour’s pleasant hiking mostly either uphill or downhill) that the guidebook said the part of SF I had walked through was a “bad neighborhood”. I thought this was a bit odd: I’d not noticed anything particularly bad about it.
Then I recollected Pat Califa’s story, and that line from it, and thought “Right: and I was one of the few white people walking through it.”
So, in my limited experience of US English, yes: Califa made an acute socio-linguistic observation. White Americans call places “bad neighborhoods” if a lot of black Americans live there.
Further, from the reaction of white Americans to the desperate people trapped in the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans, the mere presence of a lot of black Americans – even if they are refugees from a hurricane – is sufficient in and of itself to claim that the location is a “bad (i.e. unsafe)” neighborhood. Regardless of whether it is actually “bad” – i.e., unsafe.
The question of how people “transmit” racism came up here, and I wrote a comprehensive answer that typepad flagged as spam (if a moderator can free it up, I’d appreciate it). But I’ll try it again, minus the supporting cast of links.
The modern system of racism (actually “white” supremacy) developed as a byproduct of European expansion. Imperialists needed a narrative that would justify their theft of resources and labour, as well as the misery they inflicted on their victims. In doing so, they promoted the concept of “race”, not as ethnicity and culture, but as a unifying principle. The idea of a “white race” to which all peoples of European origin would belong appeared in the nineteenth century. The “white race” had and has fluid boundaries. The Irish, for example, long derided in anglophone culture (Richard II coined the word “savage” in its racist sense to refer to the Irish) came to America as despised refugees. In a generation, by adapting to American culture, they had joined the fold of people identified as “white”. Google “how the Irish became white” for references.
A number of elite intellectuals tried to give this system coherence. Many of these intellectuals considered themselves “progressive”; they sought a way to produce a unified modern society populated by the “fit”. In doing so, they invented the genocidal system of modern “scientific” racism and eugenics.
This form of racism enjoyed considerable respect in society. Admired presidents (google “woodrow wilson”) gave it their backing. The emerging medium of the movies (google “birth of a nation”) endorsed it with one of the first great movie “classics”. Academics promoted it (google “madison grant”), and of course it had the support of the longest lasting and most successful domestic terrorist group in American history (google “ku klux klan”).
Laws and customs also enshrined racism up until forty years ago (google “jim crow”, “civil rights”) when barriers prevented African Americans from voting and restricted their economic advancement via onerous restrictions on their live and routine assaults on their persons and dignity.
None of these influences has disappeared; you can find Madison Grant’s books on line, Woodrow Wilson remains perversely respected by many, and critics still refer to birth of a nation as a classic. Pseudo-scientific attempts to connect “race” with genetics, and genetics with “intelligence” continue to this day.
So in answer to the question of how “western” society transmits and reproduces racism, I would say they do it in a huge number of ways, through bias in literature, education, law enforcement and media. In historical terms, the overt oppression of racism has ended for only a generation. People of European descent rarely ask why our ancestors took half a millennium to recover from the effects of Roman domination, but we expect Africans and other peoples of colour to recover from ther oppression by colonialism and slavery in a mere forty years.
Dave C said – “As others have said elsewhere, I wish he could have lived to suffer through the day that Barack Obama is sworn in as President.”
No, instead you will have to suffer through it, maybe not on the day but in time, in time…
Dave C said – “As others have said elsewhere, I wish he could have lived to suffer through the day that Barack Obama is sworn in as President.”
No, instead you will have to suffer through it, maybe not on the day but in time, in time…
Mark Childers said – “How does it [racism] get passed from one group of whites, in the South, to those in LA, Detroit, New York, Paris, London”
Now thats an interesting point.
I believe that the relative crime rates for Asians, Blacks & Whites are about the same in the US as in the UK.
How does that work then? How do the racist white judges, juries, lawyers and cops in for example London and LA collude to disproportionately punish blacks to the same degree and what is more they manage it year after year. Is it according to a prearranged plan? Monthly conference calls, what exactly?
If its not collusion then are we not asking a huge amount of the racist virus that it guarantee that cops in two different countries/jurisdictions are all bigoted to the same statistically significant degree?
And how does it guarantee that these same racists are letting asians off the hook. If high black arrest/prosecution/incarceration rates are proof of white racism how does one explain that asians have lower arrest/prosecution/incarceration rates than whites.
Are white racists discriminating against whites then?
Again why are asians under represented to the same degree in the UK as they are in the US, is it those racist conference calls?
All sounds a bit unlikely doesnt it, when you actually think about it.
Or is it just possible that the similar patterns of asian/black/white arrest/prosecution/incarceration rates across many countries and jurisdictions are actually saying something about the real world rather than evidence of a vast white racist conspiracy.
A conspiracy with that sort of pull would of course never have allowed these ethnic minorities to establish themselves in the first place and would certainly expedite their journey home again. But thats obvious isnt it.
These “real world” cats are wearing me down. I’m going to put some Willie Colon on the stereo, have a couple of pops, and try to cheer myself up.
Later –
It’d be nice if the “real world cats” would put their own cards on the table. Are they proposing inherent black inferiority, or, as well-meaning decent conservatives , are they just proposing that liberal paternalism and/or culture and other non-genetic factors are the explanation for black poverty?
If they’re proposing inherent inferiority, then there’s no reason to pay attention to them. But there are black and white conservatives who blame liberal policies and that’s a viewpoint worth debating, IMO.
Though not by me. Too little knowledge.
White Americans call places “bad neighborhoods” if a lot of black Americans live there.
There was a column that I am trying unsuccessfully trying to find that I remember as someone with no experience with the African-American community being amazed went to some event that was a black event that was attended by the upper class. There is also a similar reaction when people visit a Native American reservation and find subdivisions that would be not out of place anywhere in the US. It’s a natural human trait to assume that people who you think are different from you live differently. Unfortunately, that trait, when mixed with the idea that people who are different from you are inferior to you leads to the kind of argumentation that Mark Childers trafficked in.
It is instructive to realize that the word ghetto comes from Italian and simply meant foundary, which was where the Jewish quarters were in Venice. The way that word has changed in meaning underlines how people can view a place where a minority is gathered as a place that is somehow problematic.
lj: not the time Bill O’Reilly went to some restaurant in Harlem and was amazed to find that they used silverware, or something? (I’ll find it if you want; can’t vouch for the silverware off the top of my head, but it was O’Reilly, I think.)
Aha!
It wasn’t silverware. But:
“O’REILLY: That’s right. That’s right. There wasn’t one person in Sylvia’s who was screaming, “M-Fer, I want more iced tea.”
WILLIAMS: Please —
O’REILLY: You know, I mean, everybody was — it was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there, and they were ordering and having fun. And there wasn’t any kind of craziness at all.”
It’d be nice if the “real world cats” would put their own cards on the table. Are they proposing inherent black inferiority, or, as well-meaning decent conservatives , are they just proposing that liberal paternalism and/or culture and other non-genetic factors are the explanation for black poverty?
Agreed.
Ball’s in your court, Cronulla, or obsidian thighs, or Childers.
I’m actually open to the claim that black Americans own some responsibility for the dysfunction they experience. The question of what, and why, and how that came about is, of course, the very next question to ask.
Well meaning liberal programs also own a piece of it, IMO. Again, the very next question has to be how that all gets addressed. It’s really not enough to say “policy X was ineffective” without also trying to understand what a better solution looks like.
And, IMO, any discussion that doesn’t recognize the continuing, persistent crap that forms the daily reality that black people, whether poor, working class, middle class, or wealthy, live with in this country, is likewise not rooted in the real world.
That’s just my point of view.
But I don’t know where to go with these weird hypothetical white-man illuminati puzzles that keep cropping up in this thread.
There’s no mystery about white animus toward blacks. It shows up in the US and the UK because the relative histories of whites and blacks in those two countries are quite similar. No conspiracy theory is needed.
OK, the build I’ve been baby-sitting is done, so I’m going home now, putting some Willie Colon on the stereo, having a couple of pops, and I’m gonna try to cheer myself up. This stuff depresses the hell out of me.
Black people are just people, like everybody else. They react to the environment they’re in just the same as anyone else would. In fact, I think they put up with it more gracefully than most non-black folks I know would.
None of this seems remotely obscure or controversial to me. I don’t get why it’s so hard to grasp.
Gotta go –
hairshirthedonist said – My answer is “Go read Guns, Germs and Steel.”
Ah yes those white folkse aint nothing special they just got lucky, damn lucky. Lucky with their diseases, lucky with resources, lucky with the weather, lucky with well…er…inventing stuff. Other groups coulda been contenders only they just didn’t catch the breaks.
Horses – gave those lucky Europeans a big advantage over other folks did they not? Lets try to push thoughts of the Mongol hordes to one side for now. As we all know white folks with their
trick knowledgeluck got to tame nice tractable horses (though didn’t they start of as wild animals? OK lets push that thought to one side for now as well)Those unlucky Africans had access to the zebra but, curse their luck a hundred times, the wild zebra isnt like the other wild horses and it cannot be tamed and ridden.
Which is why one can’t go to a search engine and find sites like this or this, because we all know that zebras cant be tamed and ridden and bred through successive generations to end up with a tractable beast of burden/warhorse, equestrian expert Jared Diamond tells us so. Which is why Africans never got around to it and anyone clicking on those links is hallucinating.
My answer is “Go read IQ and the Wealth of Nations.”
No, it was a little more subtle than that, though the O’Reilly line is another excellent example.
However, the thing I was thinking of was a column, which to me is more problematic, because the person had the chance to press the delete button. For a lot of O’Reilly and others antics, they generate from the need to fill up air time, and so they keep talking and their own knee jerk reflexes betray them. This is what makes something like Goldberg’s slavery piece you mentioned in the other thread so particularly idiotic, he had the chance to rewrite it.
Ohh that pesky ‘real world’! Come on you must of heard of it, its an outdated concept but every now and again it has its uses.
The ‘real world’ tends to inform me that men of the stature of Vern Troyer will perform at basketball somewhat less effectively than Wilt the Stilt. I know its an odd outcome because, once you factor out height, Vern is probably a better player than Wilt!
Horses – gave those lucky Europeans a big advantage over other folks did they not? Lets try to push thoughts of the Mongol hordes to one side for now.
Actually, if you had read the book, it’s not the use of horses as such, it is the raising of livestock in close proximity to human habitation that gave rise to diseases that gave rise to resistance, which then allowed them to be transported to other places. As Diamond notes, the Vikings were unable to gain an advantage because the transportation technology they had extended the period of the travel past the time of incubation. Of course, that was just one part of the puzzle, but a vital one.
As for zebras, here are some of the reasons why they are different from the horses that were domesticated by humans and why no large animals from Africa have ever been domesticated on a large scale.
Well, Cronulla has clarified where he stands. Nothing to see here. Kinda funny the sort of people this post has attracted.
Since this thread is spiralling down into the sewer inhabited by white people with some (no doubt genetically determined) predisposition to argue that blacks are dumb, this might be worth reading.
Early in this discussion, I said that the important question to ask conservatives is, “what are you trying to conserve?” You’re not a conservative unless there’s *something* you’re trying to keep stable, some status quo you support.
It is obvious that there is a racial hierarchy in the US, with good things concentrated in one direction and bad things in the other. It seems to me, then, that to be a conservative about race *must* mean that you want to keep that racial status quo, and I don’t see how that’s not racist.
Now, the other thing I said about conservatism is that it’s not possible to be conservative about everything. It’s perfectly possible to be conservative along some other axis and *not* be a racist — because you’re not conservative about race, because you want to see the racial hierarchies of this country *change*.
In any event, I find the current trollish infestation useful specimens.
And speaking of useful specimens, some social scientist should devise a Racist Quotient test, if it hasn’t already been done. Then we could start looking for correlations between RQ scores and various other factors. We could be having nature/nurture debates about all the people who are so obsessed with the alleged inferiority of group X. This seems at least as interesting and relevant as the ones people have about IQ.
“By the way, I don’t know if you’re still paying attention to any old threads, but I owe you a significant apology. I regularly have moments of irritation with the way you write and argue, but my behavior towards you in the posting rules thread was completely uncalled-for.”
Thanks muchly. Forget about it. I write enough that at times I’ve written jerky things, and I certainly don’t sugar-coat stuff, and my abrupt style often is easily misread.
I do like to think that my ratio of worthwhile contributions, to dumbass irritating stuff, is sufficiently high as to make me worth reading overall, but that’s a judgement everyone has to make for themselves, and if someone either leaps to a conclusion, or decides after careful evaluation that my ratio goes the other way, so be it. All I can do is try to continue to improve my ratio. Thanks for your apology, since I do, as I said, very much value your contributions, and highly respect your opinion, as a rule.
“…but I took his line about hillbillies to be sarcasm, intended to imply that this is how all liberals view hicks and that it’s hypocritical.”
I took it that way, too, but unless DaveC is prepared to cite whom, exactly, he is responding to and accusing of such attitudes, I have no respect for that sort of generic smear on all the liberals here. But DaveC apparently more or less never has anything to say other than that sort of abuse.
And then he whines about why doesn’t anyone like him. Funny, that.
DaveC certainly does not get this kind of response because he’s some kind of conservative (though I think it’s an insult to conservatives to claim such); certainly no one regards OCSteve that way, or regarded Andy that way. I’m pretty sure conservatism doesn’t involve or require being abusive, making dishonest arguments, and only making baseless personal attacks. I’ve read plenty of conservative theory and history, and, honest, that’s just not in Edmund Burke, or Milton Friedman, or Russell Kirk, or Winston Churchill, or Friederich Hayek, or Albert Jay Nock, or Whitaker Chambers, or any of their ilk.
No, the baseless abuse thing is DaveC’s personal approach, and it can be done by someone of any ideological ilk; all you have to do is act like a despicable jerk.
And he can stop any time. Be nice if he did.
Cronulla, had you considered that the Internet and television and movies and even.. oh, books cross national boundaries? Might that explain how racist mentalities are not isolated in certain locales? Surely you’ve trolled enough websites by now to realize that people.. communicate? Or is it hard for you to get your head round them persnickety tubes and stuff? Somehow I get the sense that the Gutenberg revolution passed you by, never mind that troublesome electrickery.
You know, if people like Mark “obsidian Cronulla” Childers didn’t write with the apparent literacy level of a fifth-grader, I might be inclined to take them a teeny, tiny bit more seriously. More’s the pity.
However, to throw him a bone, since he once again dismisses out-of-hand the idea of racist police conspiracies in both the US and the UK as patently absurd, I suggest he practice a little Google-fu on the phrase “Lawrence Report.”
Funny how making general observations is a personal approach, and name-calling, using names or at least “handles” is not.
Rubber Ducky is vile and hateful!
10-4, good buddy.
“Funny how making general observations is a personal approach, and name-calling, using names or at least ‘handles’ is not.”
The difference, Dave, is that I’m responding to your specific comments, with specific complaints, and I will factually back them up with innumerable cites, if asked.
If you do that, then, hey, no problem.
I don’t dislike you, DaveC; I don’t know you. I only dislike the behavior you’ve consistently engaged in for years.
So: change your behavior.
Try it. Be responsible, act decently, and people will respond in turn.
Eventually, once folks — me, anyway — start believing that you’ve consistently changed your behavior, and aren’t going to simply revert whenever someone at home annoys you, or you get intoxicated, or whatever, we, or at least I, will treat you as the respectably decent person you’ll be behaving as.
Go for it: it’s all I’ve ever urged you or asked you to do. It’s all up to you.
Meanwhile, if you don’t want to be called a jerk, don’t act like a jerk. It’s simple, really.
“had you considered that the Internet and television and movies and even.. oh, books cross national boundaries?”
Oh thats priceless! And relentless multicultural propaganda is common across the English speaking world.
Ill wager that most of those writing and directing TV & movies share many of the values of the obsidianwings community. Guess they have to work for The Man though and get that white racist agenda in somehow.
Of course culture is everything and genes are nothing.
So….point me to all those books, movies, TV shows that support the white racist agenda. I mean stuff made in the last year not Birth of a Nation or something. Just point me to a kids TV show where non-whites are not shoe horned into every positive role model niche.
Yet somehow the secret racist message gets through. It surely is a mystery.
You know, this just isn’t fun anymore. Would someone drop me e-mail when the current infestation of racists is cleared out?
Hi Phil who wrote:
“However, to throw him a bone, since he once again dismisses out-of-hand the idea of racist police conspiracies in both the US and the UK as patently absurd, I suggest he practice a little Google-fu on the phrase “Lawrence Report.”
First I’d like to congratulate you on your use of the conflation gambit. Clearly Mark Childers and I must be the same person as there couldn’t be more than one person on earth who disagreed with you – ever.
If you had read what I wrote you would see that Im positing the need for conspiracies between police forces in different countries and jurisdictions. The Met police in London and the LAPD would have to conspire with each other, not just amongst themselves. Otherwise one force might turn out to be more (or less) racist than the other and then the whole delicate mechanism would fall apart.
The trick clearly is in making both police organizations as racist as the other despite the problems of differing cultures, legal, systems, procedures, laws, demographics, politics. I presume that each force has a whole department tasked with this, coordinating dictating policy and so on.
This pales into the background though when one remembers that its not just two cities and two countries. There all those other American cities, British cities, Canadian, French and so on. The mind baulks at the bureaucratic complexities of it all. Keeping blacks victimised at a higher rate than whites, who in turn are victimised at a higher rate than asians.
(It still intrigues me how they get all these white racists to lay off asians and stick it to whites in all these countries. We will find the truth one day I suppose)
Or maybe its not strictly a conspiracy, maybe its all those books, movies and the internet telling cops to arrest more blacks than whites (but fewer asians than whites) all at the same rate across the western world. (And Im waiting for that exhaustive list of blatant racist media that informs the law enforcement community).
What it cannot ever, ever be of course is an indication just possibly that comparative arrest/prosecution/incarceration rates may actually reflect, however crudely, some aspect of the criminal propensities of different ethnic groups relative to each other.
So….point me to all those books, movies, TV shows that support the white racist agenda.
Start with this.
Dude, you’re a racist.
You bring nothing useful to the table. I got nothing more to say to you.
Thanks –
“You know, this just isn’t fun anymore. Would someone drop me e-mail when the current infestation of racists is cleared out?”
Oooh poor you Bruce, go and drink some warm milk and have a nap perhaps. Whatever you do dont stop sneering and dont argue about anything.
No Russell, whats happened is that you seem merely to have linked back to this blog itself, need to work on your HTML skills.
See what you meant to do was link to parts of Amazon.com or imdb.com and give me a list of popular TV shows, movies books that reinforce unpleasant racist stereotypes. By popular I mean these need to be media that we can reasonably assume that cops, lawyers, jury members, judges, prison staff, witnesses, victims of crime would be exposed to regularly enough to warp their world view in accordance with said racist stereotyping.
So much for my HTML skills, forgot to close a italic tag! Ah well.
fixed?
Now.
“No Russell, whats happened is that you seem merely to have linked back to this blog itself”
Specifically, to comments here. Specifically, to your comments. HTH. HAND.
Actually, I’m going to change my mind. Since my departure would apparently make Cronulla happy, I’m quite willing to deny them the satisfaction. I’ll work around the infestation one way or another.
In some ways I feel sorry for white racists for much the reason I feel sorry for solipsists: they’ve sentenced themselves to live in a world so much duller and simplified than the one I get to experience. I can read the bitter yearning for reform of Lu Xun (or the songs of Cui Jian about looking for individual purpose in the midst of a society bent on generalizations) without having to hedge my appreciation with any qualifying remarks about what exceptional little yellow brothers they are. Ditto with the music of Manu Katche, the Marsalis Brothers, and Awadagin Pratt with no more reservation or marvel than for Alicia De Larrocha or Stewart Copeland. I need waste no time being surprised at an outburst of talent like Jorge Luis Borges’ or Felipe Fernandez-Armesto’s. And I need waste no effort downplaying the talent and worth of any non-white creator if they happen to impinge on my comfort, because nobody else’s genius is a threat to my place in the world.
Nor do I have to be tense and suspicious around non-white friends, neighbors, or colleagues, waiting to see how their inferiority is going to mess up everything. Instead I can just do whatever it is we’re doing. Life without fear and distrust is more efficient and productive as well as more fun.
Random thought: Ironically, racism is, among other things, unsound in economic terms. The costs in lost opportunity can be made up only by government intervention to keep non-racist competition from reaping the benefit, whether that intervention comes formally (Jim Crow laws) or informally (KKK lynchings which go uninvestigated, the known perpetrators free to flourish). Believers in classical economics can sustain racist views only by admitting that economic efficiency is in fact less important to them than suppressing other human beings.
Cronulla: the posting rules require civility.
To your argument: best I can tell, it all turns on this: “I believe that the relative crime rates for Asians, Blacks & Whites are about the same in the US as in the UK.”
There is no cite for that. Personally, I believe it’s false. Care to provide a cite?
Cronulla: I believe that the relative crime rates for Asians, Blacks & Whites are about the same in the US as in the UK.
I know of no way in which you could collect that data, as the Home Office data does not record it: in the UK it is not regarded as useful information.
Seriously. I’m British. I have google-fu. I do searches for government-collected data a lot. I don’t know how you’d find that out.
Hilzoy: I have a cite, which as you surmised doesn’t back up the claims of “Cronulla”. Why anyone even considered taking them at face value, rather than checking them out, I don’t know. According to this UK home office report, people classified as “mixed race” offended at the highest rates, followed by people identified as “white”, followed by Blacks and then by Asians. According to the same source, roughly the same patterns seem to obtain in the UK when it comes to minor anti-social behaviour. According to the Telegraph (hat tip Hugo Schwyzer), and young working class men identified as “white” in the UK go on to higher education at lower rates than their counterparts in other ethnic groups.
*egg on face*
Oh well, at least it’s breakfast time. 😉
In fairness, Jes, you can’t be expected to waste too much of your time making racists feel silly. It’s fun at first, but one tires of it quickly.
It would retain some amusement if these twits would at least make coherent arguments that weren’t so easily refuted. For example, here are the top-grossing US films of 2007. See if you can spot the ones with multi-cultural costs full of positive minority role models (hint: there aren’t any):
1 Spider-Man 3 (To my recollection there are no non-white people in the credited cast of this movie.)
2 Shrek the Third (Cartoon. Starring a black man as a donkey.)
3 Transformers (Has Anthony Andrews as a computer hacker. But his relatives are all kinda ghetto and gangsta! Wacky!)
4 Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (Major nonwhite person in the cast is a patois-spouting black woman who turns out to be an angry, vengeful goddess.)
5 Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Didn’t see, but it’s my understanding that pretty much everyone in these movies is white.)
6 I Am Legend (Stars a black guy! That’s one!)
7 The Bourne Ultimatum (No black people in the main cast of this, except for the one Vespa-riding assassin who Matt Damon strangles to death.)
8 National Treasure: Book of Secrets (Didn’t see. IMDB page doesn’t show a multicultural cast.
9 Alvin and the Chipmunks (Didn’t see. Stars Jason Lee and cartoon chipmunks, none of whom are black.)
10 300 (Widely derided for its racial politics, in which the bad guys are like gay black S&M freaks.)
So . . . yeah.
In fact, one has to go down to #13 to find a movie, Rush Hour 3, whose above-the-title stars are nonwhite. The next one, American Gangster, is #19, and I don’t really think Denzel’s character there is supposed to be a positive role model. After that, unless you count Don Cheadle in Ocean’s 13 at #26, you have to go all the way to Norbit at #30 to find any movies starring black people in the top-grossing films.
“(To my recollection there are no non-white people in the credited cast of this movie.)”
Robbie Robertson is a huge person in the Spider-Man comic cast, but a smaller role in all three movies.
Yikes! Thanks, Gary — I completely forgot. Much to my chagrin, since he’s played by the great Bill Nunn.
As a female child growing up in Asia I was able to see and experience slavery and human suffering firsthand. I dreamed of living in the US and having the freedom to discuss issues and make choices. It’s disappointing to see so many angry, disenchanted people on this site. All with the same point of view. I suspect posts with views different from the moderators are removed. Whether this one is posted is doubtful, but it’s out there in cyberspace somewhere. As for the topic under discussion. Well, I didn’t know Mr. Helms, but I was taught to respect the dead. Speaking evil of people who have died is inefficient and can be hurtful to innocent persons.
You suspect wrong.
I suspect you won’t hang around or engage
Prove me wrong. Because I’d think you’d be angry, too, if you lived under Helms.
My last post should be amended. There are indeed a few brave souls contibuting to this discussion.
Rose – care to specify your experience of slavery? And who, exactly, are these brave souls? What qualifies them for the bravery award?
Cronulla, have you ever stopped to think that a mainly white police force infected with racism would be more likely to arrest and charge non-whites? Of course, you can’t show and never try to show that different groups offend at the same rate across national boundaries.
As for the idea which seems stuck in your head that all “Asians” (or blacks, or whites etc) are the same – bear in mind that in the UK Asian has generally meant Indian or Pakistani, while in the USA it tends to be more associated with Chinese/Japanese/Vietnamese. The cultures are rather different. That’s only one example, of course. And no, I am not saying that there are no Chinese in Britain, or Indians in the USA.
Rose: not proving me wrong.
I’m glad Cronulla responded to my suggestion intended for the “blacks are inferior” crowd. Maybe we’re one step closer to an explicit statement from (one of) our new guest(s) of black inferiority. I’m also glad the entire course of human history can be reduced to the failure to domesticate zebras.
It was not my intention to anger those who are already angry. I am simply concerned that so many people who enjoy so much freedom and wealth are so negative. The enthusiasm of those who find satisfaction in the death of an old man is disturbing.
It was not my intention to anger those who are already angry. I am simply concerned that so many people who enjoy so much freedom and wealth are so negative. The enthusiasm of those who find satisfaction in the death of an old man is disturbing.
No offense intended, but did you actually bother to read any of the comments by these so-called “angry” people? I can’t imagine that you did, because if you had, you’d gain an appreciation of the reason so many people might speak badly of an “old man”.
Among those reasons are the fact that he wasn’t just an “old man”. He’s not your father, your grandfather, your great uncle or the nice old man down the street. He wasn’t even any ordinary public figure or celebrity. He was a man who spent his entire life putting all of his energy and passion into the subjugation of black and gay people. He was an evil man who unrepentantly advocated for a malignant, hurtful agenda.
I’m sure that to those friends and family who loved him, he was something else. We are frequently blind to the faults of our loved ones. But when you tally up the karmic balance of his life, his is a record so malignant and damaging to so many people that one of the few things I can regret about his passing is that it didn’t happen sooner.
The fact that I am wealthy, healthy and free gives me more compassion for Helms’ victims, not less, and consequently more contempt for his life’s work, not less. To feel this way isn’t disturbed or angry. To feel this way is to face the whole of what Helms was with open eyes and a functioning conscience.
One thing I continue to see from the “I am not a racist but” crowd is that we’ve had 40 years of liberal policy and there’s still crime in the ghettos. As if 40 years of half-hearted (or, in many cases, no-hearted) correction is supposed to make for 300+ years of slavery, subjectation, torture, etc. I think the fact that we’ve seen any change speaks for the value of these Eeeeeeevil programs.
No offense taken. You are obviously very passionate about this man. With his passing may you find the peace you seek.
rose: Speaking evil of people who have died is inefficient and can be hurtful to innocent persons.
No one here has “spoken evil” of Jesse Helms. They’ve just recalled his life accurately. That so much of his life was evil is his problem, not ours.
Jesurgislac: I believe our posts partly crossed.
Cronulla: I find it interesting that since I have posted a link which calls one of your main points seriously into question, we haven’t heard from you. Do you want to engage these issues, or should we class you with the people that hiss and slink away when confronted with actual data, like a vampire driven back by a cross?
Now here is a man of principle:
RALEIGH – L.F. Eason III gave up the only job he’d ever had rather than lower a flag to honor former U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms.
Eason, a 29-year veteran of the state Department of Agriculture, instructed his staff at a small Raleigh lab not to fly the U.S. or North Carolina flags at half-staff Monday, as called for in a directive to all state agencies by Gov. Mike Easley.
When a superior ordered the lab to follow the directive, Eason decided to retire rather than pay tribute to Helms. After several hours’ delay, one of Eason’s employees hung the flags at half-staff.
The brouhaha began late Sunday night, when Eason e-mailed eight of his employees in the state standards lab, which calibrates measuring equipment used on things as widely varied as gasoline and hamburgers.
“Regardless of any executive proclamation, I do not want the flags at the North Carolina Standards Laboratory flown at half staff to honor Jesse Helms any time this week,” Eason wrote just after midnight, according to e-mail messages released in response to a public records request.
He told his staff that he did not think it was appropriate to honor Helms because of his “doctrine of negativity, hate, and prejudice” and his opposition to civil rights bills and the federal Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.
Could you do that? Wow.
Oops. That last via
http://www.memeorandum.com/
That guy really knew how to weigh the issues and provide a measured response, OCSteve. I mean, wouldn’t you say that was an accurate and balanced assessment?
What blows me away is the idea that the government would fire someone for that. I mean, this was a symbolic act regarding a purely symbolic issue; even if I totally disagreed with this guy, it doesn’t have much to do with his job performance as a lab manager. Reprimand him, dock his pay, whatever, but firing him seems incredibly wasteful.
“Now here is a man of principle”
This seems strangely familiar.
“I suspect posts with views different from the moderators are removed.”
Hope your other suspicions in life are more founded in reality.
“Speaking evil of people who have died is inefficient”
At accomplishing what?
“and can be hurtful to innocent persons.”
Anything can be “hurtful to innocent persons,” but what exactly do you have in mind, and are you suggesting that no one dead should ever be criticized, or what, exactly, are the parameters of what you are suggesting as to how dead people be spoken of?
I’m mystified that someone can come into the middle of an argument between straight-up racists, who clearly don’t represent the views of the blog owners, and mostly regular commenters denouncing the racism and announce “I suspect posts with views different from the moderators are removed.” This thread hasn’t exactly been an echo chamber, so how could all the comments correspond to the moderators’ views?
“This thread hasn’t exactly been an echo chamber, so how could all the comments correspond to the moderators’ views?”
You only say that because you agree with everyone.
Having gotten caught in the spam queue so many times, I can easily see that happening to a newcomer who might then naturally assume that a moderator had blocked or removed their comment. Not that I know that’s what happened here.
So I can assume you will all be supporting a challenger to Byrd in W. Virgina, right? right? right?
I didn’t even know much about Helms, and what I have read here doesn’t make me want to like him, but I also don’t like what Byrd has done in his lifetime, and yet, he’s okie dokie.
“So I can assume you will all be supporting a challenger to Byrd in W. Virgina, right?”
Absolutely.
“…and yet, he’s okie dokie.”
Sorry, could you link to which specific comments here saying that Robert Byrd’s past racism is “okie dokie” you have in mind? Or are you just, you know, making that up?
Aaron, I find it perpetually odd that people who are ready and eager to forgive men like Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, and Jerry Falwell for holding to their racist views throughout their lives, find it unforgiveable that Robert Byrd rejected those views and has apologized for them.
Gosh, Jes. It’s almost as though they feel more comfortable thinking about people who don’t make them think racism is something to regret.
I am a Republican, and pretty ultra-conservative socially – primarily based in my religious beliefs. But I’ve always had a problem with a lot of my fellow Republicans indulging in the “demonize the other side” tactics. Not that, that is unique to Republicans, but I guess I’ve always tried to listen to the other side with an open mind. I end up reading a lot of the left-leaning blogs and sites.
As a relatively young guy – in my mid-20s – I always accepted the generally bandied around cliche that the Republican Party has been historically racist, while the Democratic Party has been the champion of racial equality. So I was a little stunned when I read these comments on the Ezra Klein blog referenced above:
Can somebody here help explain this?
“””I am proud that my party has moved beyond that chapter in our history”””
That’s funny, because the whole world just witnessed the most racist anti-black primary and it all happened inside the Democrat party.
How soon we forget that it was just the Democrats arguing how Bill and Hillary have been race baiting for the last 5 months and how small town white Democrats are still a bunch of racists, just like they were in the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s.
You really need to check your history.
— It was Bill Clinton that attacked Sister Soulja.
— It was Bill Clinton that fly home to execute Ricky Rector to show how tough he was on blacks.
— It was Clinton the NAACP sued in 1989 under the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965. “Plaintiffs offered plenty of proof of monolithic voting along racial lines, intimidation of black voters and candidates and other official acts that made voting harder for blacks,” the Arkansas Gazette reported December 6, 1989. It added: “the evidence at the trial was indeed overwhelming that the Voting Rights Act had been violated.”
A three-judge federal panel ordered Clinton to end the bigotry in his state.
— Its was Clinton during his 12-year tenure as Governor never approved a state civil-rights law. However, he did issue birthday proclamations honoring Confederate leaders Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee.
— Clinton signed Act 116 in 1987. That statute reconfirmed that the star directly above the word “Arkansas” in the state flag “is to commemorate the Confederate States of America.”
— Clintons’ Arkansas also observed Confederate Flag Day every year Clinton served. The governor’s silence was consent.
— Arkansas’ former governor, the late Orval Eugene Faubus, attended Bill Clinton’s 1979 gubernatorial inauguration, where the two pols hugged, as Arkansas Democrat-Gazette editorial page editor Paul Greenberg recalls. Faubus, of course, resisted the integration of Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957. He actually deployed National Guard soldiers to bar nine black students from entering. Republican President Dwight Eisenhower dispatched soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division to break that logjam and give the black teens a fighting chance to learn. Clinton once lauded that same Faubus as a “man of significant ability.”
— Clinton praised Arkansas’ late Democratic senator J. William Fulbright, a notorious segregationist who opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. He also signed the Southern Manifesto, which denounced the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown vs. Board of Education school desegregation decision in 1954. Clinton called Fulbright “My mentor, a visionary, a humanitarian.”
Yeah, ancient history for those Democrats who still think Clinton is a rock star. Clearly Clintons career is marked by far more racist acts then Helms or any other Republican for that matter.
Democrats simply ignore it.
Posted by: Anonymous | July 6, 2008 5:08 AM
SteveJ:
“”Sweetie writes Look at the Democrats who filbustered the civil rights act and voting rights act.
They later became Republicans.””””
COMPLETELY FALSE.
The chief opponents of the Civil Rights Bill were Democrat Senators Sam Ervin, Albert Gore Sr., and Robert Byrd. All have remained Democrats in good standing and Byrd is often called ‘the conscience of the Senate by his fellow Democrats’
A little more history:
Abraham Lincoln emancipated the slaves
1866: first civil rights act passed by Republicans over a Presidential veto, blacks granted citizenship, segregation was forbidden
1868 Republicans passed the 14th amendment passed granting equal protection
1871 Republicans passed voting rights
Theodore Roosevelt was the first President to invite an African-American to dinner in the White House.
1920s, the Democratic platforms was silent on anti-lynching legislation as the Republican platforms did.
1957 civil rights act pushed by Ike, passed . Sen Kennedy voted against it, A Democrat Senator filibustered it for 24 hrs, Senator Johnson watered it down so that it lacked enforcement
Eisenhower sent Federal troops to Little Rock to integrate Central High
1960 another civil rights act, again Dems kept enforcement measures out of it
1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Over eighty percent of Republicans voted for both.
Nixon created the EEOC and expanded civil rights law.
Ronald Reagan signed the bill making MLK day a public holiday
Today the three highest ranking black government officials ever to serve were appointed by Republicans (Powell, Rice and Thomas)
Posted by: Anonymous | July 7, 2008 7:16 AM
Liberals simply have to deny their own paries history.
Thurmond was the only switch to the Republicans and that happened in 1964.
Here’s the rest, all remained Democrats for the rest of their careers.
Robert Byrd, current senator from West Virginia
– J. William Fulbright, Arkansas senator and political mentor of Bill Clinton
– Albert Gore Sr., Tennessee senator, father and political mentor of Al Gore. Gore Jr. has been known to lie about his father’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act.
– Sam Ervin, North Carolina senator
– Richard Russell, and later Democrat President Pro Tempore
The complete list of the 21 Democrats who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 includes Senators:
– Hill and Sparkman – Fulbright and McClellan
– Holland and Smathers
– Russell and Talmadge
– Ellender and Long
– Eastland and Stennis
– Ervin and Jordan of
– Johnston and Thurmond of South Carolina
– Gore Sr. and Walters of Tennessee
– H. Byrd and Robertson of Virginia
– R. Byrd of West Virginia
Ohh, and don’t forget the Democrats that opposed school desegregation:
anti-School integration were all Democrats:
– Orval Faubus, Democrat Governor of Arkansas and one of Bill Clinton’s political heroes
– George Wallace, Democrat Governor of Alabama
– Lester Maddox, Democrat Governor of Georgia
Then there’s also ernest Hollings who was fully supported as aDEmocrat even though he opposed lunch counter integration and put the Confederate flag up in South Carolina.
Of course when the Democrats couldn’t defeat integration at the ballot box, they ran to court:
Exclusion of minorities was the general rule of the Democrat Party of many states for decades, especially in Texas. This racist policy reached its peak under the New Deal in the southern and western states, often known as the New Deal Coalition region of FDR. The Supreme Court in Nixon v. Herndon declared the practice of “white primaries” unconstitutional in 1927 after states had passed laws barring Blacks from participating in Democrat primaries. But the Democrat Parties did not yield to the Court’s order. After Nixon v. Herndon, Democrats simply made rules within the party’s individual executive committees to bar minorities from participating, which were struck down in Nixon v. Condon in 1932. The Democrats, in typical racist fashion, responded by using state parties to pass rules barring blacks from participation. This decision was upheld in Grovey v. Townsend, which was not overturned until 1944 by Smith v. Allwright. The Texas Democrats responded with their usual ploys and turned to what was known as the “Jaybird system” which used private Democrat clubs to hold white-only votes on a slate of candidates, which were then transferred to the Democrat party itself and put on their primary ballot as the only choices. Terry v. Adams overturned the Jaybird system, prompting the Democrats to institute blocks of unit rule voting procedures as well as the infamous literacy tests and other Jim Crow regulations to specifically block minorities from participating in their primaries. In the end, it took 4 direct Supreme Court orders to end the Democrat’s “white primary” system, and after that it took countless additional orders, several acts of Congress, and a constitutional amendment to tear down the Jim Crow codes that preserved the Democrat’s white primary for decades beyond the final Supreme Court order ruling it officially unconstitutional.
Hispanics in South Texas were treated especially poorly by the Democrat Party, which relied heavily on a system of political bosses to coerce and intimidate Hispanics into voting for Democrat primary candidates of choice. Though coercion is illegal, this system, known as the Patron system, is still in use to this day by local Democrat parties in some heavy Hispanic communities of the southwest.
Posted by: Anonymous | July 7, 2008 7:24 AM
“As a relatively young guy – in my mid-20s – I always accepted the generally bandied around cliche that the Republican Party has been historically racist, while the Democratic Party has been the champion of racial equality.”
Then you have to be deeply ignorant, since the Democratic Party was a thoroughly racist party until FDR’s day, with little change under FDR, with the first real cracks coming in the Truman Era, but not until the Sixties did the Democratic Party, or at least its non-Southern wings, become overall a generally anti-racist party, and, of course, racism is never gone from anyone, let alone for an entire organization.
“Can somebody here help explain this?”
Not really interested in a game of “have you stopped beating your racist wife?,” no. But a couple of quick notes: ” It was Bill Clinton that fly home to execute Ricky Rector to show how tough he was on blacks.”
Or retarded murderers; reprehensible, indeed, but since few African-Americans interpreted it as him showing “how tough he was on blacks,” this is just an example of the sort of distortions in these comments.
“The chief opponents of the Civil Rights Bill were Democrat Senators Sam Ervin, Albert Gore Sr., and Robert Byrd. All have remained Democrats in good standing”
Back on Earth, Sam Ervin and Al Gore, Sr. are long dead. The rest of this is similarly pointless. Go read some history, or don’t, but don’t expect anyone to waste much time on this sort of lame trolling. Congrats on learning to cut and paste, though.
The venomous hatred many of you have against Jesse Helms tells us more about you than it does about him. Talk about hatred! We all have different experiences that shape us. While I wouldn’t suggest it, we should be as free to be what you consider “racist” as you are to spew your venomous hate against Helms. It seems that many are so open minded except when it comes to people who don’t feel as you do. By the way, your hatred did not bother Helms, who had anti-Helms cartoons plastered all over his office and who often said things just to get under liberals’ skin. Guess it worked. Your hatred is showing.
Cassandra: The venomous hatred many of you have against [racist homophobic bigots who were openly hateful towards black people and gays in their lives] tells [those of us who see nothing wrong with being a racist homophobic bigot] more about you than it does about [us].
Fixed that for you.