by publius
Let me echo Andrew Sullivan and Rod Dreher and Conor Friedersdorf in condemning the utterly shameful and race-baiting exploitation of yesterday's school bus incident. I'm not big on writing posts that start "Rush Limbaugh did outrageous thing X today…", but this is an exception.
And it's not just Limbaugh. It's also Malkin, and Gateway Pundit, and Drudge, and Tom Maguire. Though Limbaugh takes the cake:
It’s Obama’s America, is it not? Obama’s America, white kids getting
beat up on school buses now. You put your kids on a school bus, you
expect safety but in Obama’s America the white kids now get beat up
with the black kids cheering[.]
So here's the basic dilemma. On the one hand, there's nothing ambiguous about this. It's straight-up George Wallace-style race-baiting. It's an intentional attempt to stir racial prejudices.
Limbaugh & Friends took a random fight and immediately tried to pin it on Obama (some less directly than others). And after the police quickly backed off claims that it was racially motivated, the corrections either didn't come or were merely one-liner updates inappropriate to the gravity of the previous charges.
But even if it was racially motivated, what on earth does Obama have to do with it? The answer is nothing other race. The only goal here was to stir up racial resentment and then pin it on Obama. I'm sorry, but this is infuriating. We shouldn't be putting up with this in 2009.
But here's the thing — there's no way to win. If you ignore it, they get to race-bait. If you cause a big stink about it, it will have the effect of putting racial tensions in the news. And that's exactly what they want, because it hurts Obama.
Obama's numbers, recall, went down with white voters after the Gates incident. The reason, I think, is simply that racial animosities remain very much with us, despite our enormous progress. One reason Obama won was that he managed to persuade certain types of voters to ignore race. That's why Jeremiah Wright was so potentially threatening — it put race front and center, which is precisely the opposite of where the Obama campaign put it. These resentments emerged again in the aftermath of Gates.
So that's the dilemma — Limbaugh wins if you say nothing, and Limbaugh wins if you criticize. It's maddening.
But I don't care — I'm still going to criticize. This incident is not a run-of-the-mill "Limbaugh said something ridiculous today" story. This is a big deal. Limbaugh was unambiguously racist, and he had an awfully big chorus in the Malkin-o'-sphere today.
But don't take my word for it, here's Dreher:
But good grief, Limbaugh is up to something wicked. He's plainly trying
to rally white conservatives into thinking that now that we have a
black president, blacks are rising up to attack white kids! . . .[I]f the Limbaughs of the world are going to . . . blame, with no logical grounds whatsoever,
a black president for black-on-white violence, and if they're going to
do this in an increasingly hysterical atmosphere of protest against
that black president, I don't want to talk about these things at all.
Now is not the time. With this kind of inflammatory rhetoric, they are
quite simply tearing the country apart.
This isn’t merely a lie — it is a lie that, if credulously received by
its audience, is going to heighten racial tensions and mistrust in the
United States. . . . Mr. Limbaugh accuses others of exacerbating racial tensions and
obsessing about race. Sometimes he is right to do so. Yet here he is
obsessing about race and ratcheting up racial tensions. It is difficult
to think of hypocrisy more abhorrent.
Limbaugh is a motherfucker. Pity our dialog’s all coarsened an’ shit these days, because I mean for that statement to have the kind of impact it would have had if you’d screamed it out in a white Tennessee church in 1955.
Spiny – our posting rules limit profanity. I don’t want to be over-censoring, so I’ll just request that you and others don’t. We try to keep the threads civil here.
It’s of course all Rosa Park’s fault.
[/sarcasm]
Yes, more civilly, Rush Limbaugh is a @#$@# who likes to @#$@ @#&* in the back of a &*$@ and $@*% *&#% %*@&# *%(# english muffins.
No, I really don’t believe those things. I don’t even think Limbaugh is much of a racist. Smart people usually aren’t. I think he just found a shiny button that gets him a bunch of attention and listeners every time he presses it, and God help him he just can’t stop pressing that button. Kind of an addiction, you could say.
Of course, another problem is that neither he nor any of his followers care what publius or anyone else outside his bubble thinks. In fact, to them fierce dissent is a sure sign that his ‘tactics’ are ‘effective’ in ‘opposing’ the ‘Left’ or whatever.
And I’m not sure ‘they get to race-bait’ is such a winning condition. I mean, it’s kind of sad that it’s happening, but I wouldn’t call it winning. And if that’s true, then option 1 (ignoring) seems the better strategy.
Limbaugh is self-aware enough that he recorded songs about him being an assh0le and a nazi. Iirc those were at first assumed to be hoaxes using either a voice imitator or carefully selected o-tones but Rush later insisted that they were genuine.
Is there a way to talk about this without highlighting racial tensions? Something like:
The Rush Limbaugh wing of the Republican party is desperate to criticize Obama for anything – now they’re blaming him for high school bullying. A week ago they didn’t want him to tell kids to work hard in school and warned that he was trying to indoctrinate school kids, and now when a bully hits another kid it’s Obama’s fault. They picked out a case where the bully was a black kid, and somehow that means that bullying is a symptom of “Obama’s America.” It’s ridiculous.
There is a third option to being quite about Limbaugh’s [and others’] race baiting or to being publicly critical of it. That is to be critical of it privately, but in a widely dissiminated manner. We can do this by forwarding criticism, such as that by Publius, to our various email lists. Send it to friends and not-friends, and especially to those we know to be ditto heads and racists.
“If the Limbaughs of the world are going to . . . blame, with no logical grounds whatsoever, a black president for black-on-white violence,”
Ok, I’m going to be blunt about this: I have been, for years, with no logical grounds whatsoever, blamed for the racist acts of mostly long dead whites. It’s the sort of thing whites in this country are used to being subjected to, it’s the basis for a lot of our race conscious public policy.
Did you really think racial collective guilt could be applied to whites, without it being applied in turn to blacks?
Really, Brett? You call that blunt?
I grew up in the Deep South during segregation…and I’ve NEVER been held accountable – or blamed in any way – for the past bad acts of other white people.
If YOU are being held so responsible, I can only surmise it’s due to your OWN racism leaking out – despite you thinking you have a handle on it.
When I was growing up, I was taught that, if I didn’t like what others were directing at me, I should take a look at myself, to see what *I* was doing to bring it on.
I suggest you try it – before you work your way any deeper. (How’s that for blunt?)
Of course, these are the same people who oppose anti-bullying laws, and in some cases won’t even allow them to come up for votes (e.g., MI Senate). The takeaway, I suppose, is that beating the crap out of someone is okay if the someone is black, or Asian, or gay.
“When I was growing up, I was taught that, if I didn’t like what others were directing at me, I should take a look at myself, to see what *I* was doing to bring it on.”
Yeah, I got that “blame the victim” line, too, when I was growing up. Sounds like you aborbed it, instead of finally shrugging it off.
Being right doesn’t sell. Being first, and most provocative; those things sell.
Just quit buying, already.
But no, it’s like a pyramid o’ gossip. Rush is the chief neighborhood gossip, who comes by and stirs up some outrage, and then more gossip gets generated, and then the auxiliary gossips get into the mix.
This is one of the reasons why I no longer post things: because there’s this temptation to get in on whatever current story is going around, and I found out that I didn’t like just passing things around. Plus, the quality of original thinking over here was distinctly lacking, particularly in comparison with hilzoy.
The racial angle to one side, though (and I realize this is pretty much all that is interesting about this situation to some) I think they ought to have suspended some of the students who were standing around cheering. They weren’t fighting, but they were the reason for the fight.
A fight isn’t much of an event without spectators. A bully doesn’t get credit for trashing someone if no one sees it.
I’m going out on a limb, but I think when Brett talks about being ‘blamed’, it might be when someone wants to do something like change the name of a park from Nathanial Bedford Forrest park or something similar, Brett expresses his opposition to changing the name and he gets accused of racism which may escalate to being ‘blamed’ for various things. A quick google shows something like this might be defended vociferously and the responses interpreted as being ‘blamed’ for something.
I have no doubt Brett, given his rhetoric here on list, has been on the receiving end of some harsh comments, but I have a hard time arguing that this is some sort of ‘assignment’ of blame and just fightin’ words delivered to get a rise. I believe that Brett has strongly argued that any consideration of race in any decision moves in the opposite direction of a color blind society, and has strongly rejected any arguments that current structural facts about society are, in and of themselves, racist. This refusal to at least admit the possibility leads to people making more and more pointed observations which are interpreted by Brett as ‘blaming’ him for the current state of affairs. On reflection, I’m not really sure how you ‘blame’ someone for something that happened in the distant past. You can claim that they continue to maintain the same thought patterns that resulted in the past state of affairs, but ‘blaming’ seems to imply some causal relationship, which in this case would require an ability to time travel. Which, for the record, I don’t think Brett has.
I should add that I really don’t know if Brett would support or reject the possibility of a name change in the link above, I just chose that as an example. I’m sure that there are a number of points of contention that I could have dredged up from the archives, and perhaps I should have gone to that, but often times, past debates have evolved to a point where they are more about the way people interact rather than the actual point in contention.
The reasoning as I understand it for “blame”:
Race-related affirmative action is often justified straightforwardly by the plain fact that black people in the US are historically disadvantaged by slavery and by the century-plus of discrimination and disadvantage that followed slavery. White people in the US are much more likely to have ancestors who were given wealth-creating opportunities because of their race, while black people in the US are much more likely to have ancestors who were denied or turned away from wealth-creating opportunities because of their race – so that (even disregarding the issue of present-day racism) the issue of racist discrimination from generations ago cannot be disregarded.
This cartoon illustrates this neatly:
Many white racists interpret this as “OMG YOU’RE BLAMING ME FOR SLAVERY!”
A nice illustration of Faulkner’s ‘The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.’
Limbaug is still hurting from his “sportscastor” days.
Limbaugh resigns from NFL show
He think’s he does race, but I think what he does is racism.
From Publius:
But even if it was racially motivated, what on earth does Obama have to do with it? The answer is nothing other race.
From Tom Maguire:
Is Obama Smart Enough To Duck This?
Yet another racially charged incident – black students beat up a white student on a bus. Drudge is headlining it, so the story will have legs. Obama is Commander-in-Chief, not Police Chief or school superintendent – will he be smart enough to duck this, as he should have ducked the Skip Gates debacle? Or will a simple “I don’t have all the facts but it looked like the white kid sat in the wrong seat” suffice?
So I am saying this is Obama’s fault? I think the reality basis for that is pretty slim.
I also linked to the Gateway Pundit, who wanted to see whether Al Sharpton would get involved, as he did with the Jena Six.
Clown show.
Brett,
I don’t know the “expiration date” is on historical events. However, we still discuss history (The Constitution, The Civil War, Taft-Hartley, WW1 & 2, Ragtime, the Puritans migrating from England, economic theories) as if it had some sort of effect on today.
Claiming that the purty events of the past are all that matters is a bit naive? Childish? Dare I say, racist?
The Rush Limbaugh wing of the Republican party is desperate to criticize Obama for anything
Sorry, but there is no such thing as the Limbaugh wing of the GOP. The GOP owns him; if you’re a Republican, you at least tacitly tolerate his views.
Racism is one of those no tolerance issues. It’s not some policy issues like tax reform or free trade where one can have widely differing views, yet share the same general agenda. Instead, it’s an issue where there’s a bright, shining line.
I’m going to restrain myself and let Rush Limbaugh win the thread.
Brett, there are still millions of Americans who cheerfully wave the battle banner of the Confederacy. They are racists. They have not let history go. They are still making excuses for slavery and Jim Crow. This is not some totally unfair retelling of history. It is a fact of life today.
Stop feeling sorry for yourself. You are not a victim. If you want to see how the effects of racism still linger, look at the unemployment rates of African-Americans at any educational level. Then you will know who the victims still are.
Meanwhile, we’ve got a grown man fantasizing about beating up black teenagers, and a bunch of white people feeling absolutely comfortable dropping n-bombs about Kanye West on Twitter, and one of the teabagger leads calling the President “an Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug and racist in chief” on television, and we’re all supposed to be distracted into discussing the feelings of poor, put-upon Brett Bellmore because he refused to understand or acknowledge that institutional racism sometimes only cuts one way?
Well, here’s something special just for you, Brett:
Here’s a fun project for someone: How many times has the word “uppity” been used in major op-eds, both on television and in print, in some context in relation to this president? How many times has it ever been used in relation to any other president, ever?
The Republican Party made an intentional decision to appeal to racists four decades ago. Instead of celebrating that Democrats had finally stopped bowing to the racists and let the racists become increasingly irrelevent, they chose instead to bring them in. The GOP sold its heritage for a few electoral victories.
Well, they got their victories, but the stench of racism has become more pronounced in the GOP so it is really impossible for any Republican to say that the GOP is not beholden to racists. With a little luck, the Republicans will become nothing more than a cranky old party that represents the Klan. There is no active anti-racist wing in the GOP any more, there are the racists and the fellow-travelers, nothing else.
The conceptual problem with Jes’ cartoon is that it shows the same white person who’s exploited a black person refuse to help him. In reality, the situation is complicated by the fact that we’re talking about generations here. Our ancestors have benefited from exploiting other people’s ancestors, even though we might now find their behaviour repugnant. (Though I’m not an American, I have slave-owners in my own ancestry).
The problem is what do we do now? It’s not feasible to undo all the individual wrongs that our ancestors committed. That means that a lot of people don’t want to admit what has happened, because it can’t easily be remedied. But I think as a minimum what white people can do is be willing to admit what happened in the past, and also to think twice about their own history before they make comments about black people.
Brett’s statement is that it’s unfair he’s being blamed for what other whites have done, and blacks can have that now. The implicit message is that black people have never before been unfairly blamed for what other black people do. If he stopped to think about it, maybe he’d realise that that is a ridiculous thing to imagine. But maybe that requires thinking a bit more about other peoples’ experiences than is comfortable for some people.
Me: “When I was growing up, I was taught that, if I didn’t like what others were directing at me, I should take a look at myself, to see what *I* was doing to bring it on.”
Brett: “Yeah, I got that “blame the victim” line, too, when I was growing up. Sounds like you aborbed it, instead of finally shrugging it off.”
Obviously, you did not receive a traditional conservative Christian upbringing like I did. “Blame the victim”? About race?? From MY PARENTS??? Absent any sense from you on the topic, I’ll have to assume you’re delusional.
Maybe you’re just grooving this improperly: if you act like a jerk and a bully, you’re going to get flack from the other kids, from the teachers, and from your friends’ parents; this does not translate into you being a victim OR being blamed. You may not like it, but that in no way means you haven’t earned it thru your own efforts. (not calling you names or accusing you: hypothetical example is hypothetical, for me)
One of the great things about living in the US after 9/11 – and especially in the age of Obama – is that racial tensions have eased off tremendously, with dramatically less suspicion; if you have not experienced this refreshing change in tone between the races, I not only feel sorry for you, I have to wonder what is it about YOU that prevents your seeing it….
“Blame the victim”…jeez, that’s *rich*! Telling the officers that she asked for it, dressing like that, THAT is blaming the victim. Claiming your beating of the other guy is justified because he was black & in your neighborhood is *also* blaming the victim. Being an angry white guy with a chip on his shoulder – and getting noticed – doesn’t make you a victim, and it doesn’t get you blamed for the racism of the past unless you fight to defend the racism of the past. Or that of the present.
Ian MacKaye agrees with Brett: he too is Guilty of Being White:
—
I’m sorry
For something that I didn’t do
Lynched somebody
But I don’t know who
You blame me for slavery
A hundred years before I was born
Guilty of being white
I’m a convict
Of a racist crime
I’ve only served
Nineteen years of my time
Guilty of being white
—
tempting to think of that as a racist song. but it’s really just the reaction of a high school kid sitting in history class learning about slavery.
back to the subject… yeah, Limbaugh’s a straight up race baiter – and Malkin, and Drudge, and all the rest. there is no reason, other than race, that anyone outside of the town where it happened should know anything about this. “kids fight on a school bus” is not news. those who trumpet this story are obviously (even if they won’t admit it when challenged) are playing on racist fears in order to attack Obama.
it’s shameful, disgusting, and perfectly unsurprising. the GOP is a cesspool. its stars are merely the bits floating on top.
Rush is still winning the thread.
I’m willing to bet the the black kid, the bully in the school bus video, will be showing up years from now with his fellow republican bullies with a big honking weapon outside of Democratic town-hall meetings to protest unarmed citizens discussing yet another attempt to insure the uninsured.
Even as Rush and Michelle and FOX use the kid as current fodder, they are eyeing him for bigger and better things. They know their own bullying ilk when they see them.
It’s republican outreach.
@Tom Maguire — There was no need to mention Obama at all. It was a completely gratuitous reference that ties Obama to this incident. Not to mention the Al Sharpton reference.
I don’t even think Limbaugh is much of a racist.
He is something quite a bit worse than a racist.
It seems to me that Tom Maguire’s point is that given past recent events, Obama will be asked to comment on the situation, and if he were wise, he would not comment at all, since it’s not his job to get involved.
Just because you have low reading comprehension abilities doesn’t mean you have to resort to charges of race baiting when none exists.
Yeah, I got that “blame the victim” line, too, when I was growing up. Sounds like you aborbed it, instead of finally shrugging it off.
There is a difference between being aware of how others perceive one’s actions and blindly assuming that others’ actions are correct. If you’ve been for years being “blamed for the racist acts of mostly long dead whites”, it behooves you to consider whether your actions could reasonably give cause for someone to assume you are sympathetic to past racism. This isn’t blaming yourself, it’s being other than completely self-absorbed. You can’t claim to be a victim unless there truly is “no logical ground” for a reasonable person to conclude from your speech or actions that you do in fact harbor such attitudes, and you can’t conclude this without considering how others perceive your behavior.
Which is to say, if you refuse to critically examine your actions, you don’t get to describe your refusal to do so as avoiding blaming the victim.
Race-related affirmative action is often justified straightforwardly by the plain fact that black people in the US are historically disadvantaged by slavery and by the century-plus of discrimination and disadvantage that followed slavery. White people in the US are much more likely to have ancestors who were given wealth-creating opportunities because of their race, while black people in the US are much more likely to have ancestors who were denied or turned away from wealth-creating opportunities because of their race – so that (even disregarding the issue of present-day racism) the issue of racist discrimination from generations ago cannot be disregarded….
…Many white racists interpret this as “OMG YOU’RE BLAMING ME FOR SLAVERY!”
Jes, a few points.
1. I’m not white (so I have no white privelege to leave at the door ;-p) I’m not american (so I believe I can claim neutral observer status as opposed to having vested interests) and I believe that I’m not racist. (Though according to you, my opposition to affirmative action means that I must be one. Must be my nasty libertarian false consciousness)
2. Yes, the cartoon seems to work very well. Having the cheek to talk about equality before the law etc now that you’ve got a leg up is galling. But that cartoon is just polemics. Once you realise that the cartoon is representing what happenned in different genreations (I’m for now ignoring present day discrimination) as if it was all perpetrated by 1 person, you get even more pissed off, but this time at the cartoon. Its just manipulating you. What theory of justice, may I ask, demands reparation to people in virtue of belonging to a group which was subject to terrible treatment (discrimination and slavery) by another group in the past, even though the person who is being compensated was not the one actually mistreated?
3.I will concede that given property rights properly rely on just transfer etc. Property rights which would have been transfered to the current beneficiaries, but which did not because unjust discriminatory laws denied forcibly and unjustly transfered that property to the ancestors of the current anglo majority. This means that I favour direct wealth transfers. (maybe evn over and above any minimum basic income that the poor get) Job quotas, educaiton quotas, variable standards? those look extremely dodgy to me) But you can understand the distinction right? Your argument is that african americans belong to a historically disadvantaged group. While my argument is that there was an uncompensated violation in property rights.
4. That we’re talking about probable ancestors and probable descendants, instead of actual ancestors and descendants, things may look a bit muddier, and should give us pause before we propose any corrective measure for past discrimination. Correcting the injustice is a right making feature of the transfer. Contributing to further injustice (by transferring from individual anglos whose ancestors were not advantaged by discrimination) is a wrong making feature of the situation. This may take some balancing out.
5. Given that discrimination was quite recent (Jim Crow laws) statute of limitations doesnt apply.
6. Affirmative action in order to remedy current discrimination is bizarre. I would reccommend lawsuit lawsuit lawsuit, or even prosecute, prosecute prosecute. So, to say that it might be justified by current discrimination leaves me confused. (Im adressing this pre-emptively even though Jes said that she would leave aside for now, so I’m not accusing Jes of actually making the argument)
7. Oh Yeah, Rush Limbaugh’s an a****** That’s beyond debate.
Please address me as Murali
What does Obama have to do with the incident, even if it were racist? (Which, on the evidence so far, it was not.)
I think it’s actually pretty simple: There are folks who are upset because, in the America of their dreams, someone like Obama (i.e. non-white) would not be President. The fact that he is means, in their minds, that a different race is in control. So anywhere that someone of another race gives anyone of their race anything but deference, it is all related.
It’s not that they blame Obama for causing racially-motivated incidents. Just that they see him as a symbol of the changes which, they think, have made such incidents — at least against their group — happen.
” Limbaugh’s a straight up race baiter
[…]
it’s shameful, disgusting, and perfectly unsurprising.”
It is indeed. As it is when Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and Skip Gates do the same thing. The good news is that we have almost gained racial equality in the vitriol of race baiting. Some would say that’s progress, I think of it as a fail on both sides.
Given that Tom Maguire is visiting and has written a bit more, I wonder how he would classify the comments to his original post and if the people who make comments like
Let’s hear what Gates and Jackson and Rangel and Sharpton have to say….
and
Whitey got what he deserved.
and
Didn’t Obama cover this shit in his speech to the chilrun?
are regulars or not.
As it is when Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and Skip Gates do the same thing.
anyone else see a pattern here ?
wj – nail on head.
Limbaugh is scum, duh.
Brett – that chip on your shoulder must be pretty heavy.
I submit that you have misinterpreted some things in a hyper-defensive way. You are (I imagine) convinced that you have *not* benifitted unfairly in our society b/c you’re white, and you interpret things like AA as attacks/accusations against you.
Don’t take it so personally. It’s not about you.
It seems to me that Tom Maguire’s point is that given past recent events, Obama will be asked to comment on the situation, and if he were wise, he would not comment at all, since it’s not his job to get involved.
Well, it seems to me that Tom Maguire is disingenuously trying to hide the dog whistle behind his back. But, y’know, I’m black, which, according to bizarro backlash logic, makes me a racist commie ACORN jackboot. So: grain of salt.
Anyway, my apologies for the digression — I believe we were once again listening to poor wittle Bwett kvetch as he yet again hijacks a thread about race and makes it all about him. Oh, and Marty was Brodering about (conflated caricatures of) Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson (and Skip Gates — am sure he’ll feel honoured to have been unceremoniously added to the elite canon of uppity negroes whose names are now epithets). Bowing out now before the inevitable debate over affirmative action heats up.
Wheeee I so love this new post-racial era!!1
Murali
I’m not white (so I have no white privelege to leave at the door ;-p) I’m not american (so I believe I can claim neutral observer status as opposed to having vested interests) and I believe that I’m not racist
I’m not going to speak for Jes, but your identification of being non-white suggests that you at least process sets of different characteristics as racially based and I would argue that anyone who does this (and I think it is hard to imagine someone who doesn’t do this) is “racist”, because humans always have to view things in terms of in groups and out groups. It’s part of human nature, and the challenge is to try and overcome that. Sartre said that saying a Jew is smart is just as racist as saying that a Jew is greedy. Racist is not simply thinking bad things about people who are grouped into one race, it is drawing conclusions about people based on race, which you have done for yourself already.
(ps I’m aware that being Jewish is not a racial category, but the Satre observation is too good to pass up)
“As it is when Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and Skip Gates do the same thing.
anyone else see a pattern here ?”
Got something to say?
Dreher: He’s plainly trying to rally white conservatives into thinking that now that we have a black president, blacks are rising up to attack white kids!
Dreher’s use of the phrase “rising up” to characterize where black kids would have to come from to attack white kids is fascinating. For once I followed a link and read the whole piece (Dreher seems to be doing what he’s doing every time I hear about him: “I’m brave enough to talk about what political correctness says I shouldn’t” — and it’s always something negative about LGBT people or issues, or abortion-related issues, or in this case black people).
But what I can’t tell even now is whether the phrase conveys his own unconscious attitudes, or he’s consciously attributing that framing to “white conservatives.” Or what.
The fear that angry venegeful black people will raise up and attack white people has been at the back of our national consciouness for a long time. Back in slave holding days fear of slave rebellions was a significant factor in the organization of life in the slave holding regions: passes for slaves, laws forbidding slaves to congregate in large numbers, systems to spread the alarm of a rebellion , etc.
During the dark ages of race relations prior to the CIvil Rights era white terrorism against black people was justified as necesary to protect white people, particularly white women and children.
We are in a new era of race relations, one that is particlularly complex and subtle; however,the underlying fear that black people might want revenge is still there along with the more common fear that nonwhites are taking over or unfairly beating whites in competition for limited resources. This is complicated by the fact that there really are racially motivated attacks on nonblacks by blacks every now and then.
Limbaugh is tapping into a vein; how big the vein is these days, I don’t know.
“Skip Gates — am sure he’ll feel honoured to have been unceremoniously added to the elite canon of uppity negroes whose names are now epithets)”
Long before any of the recent events, Skip Gates has a distinguished history as a race baiter.
I am really too tired of this discussion to even be incensed that no one here is willing to talk about the reality that this story could very well have been a huge headline if the colors of the actors had been reversed. Racism is a a two way discussion, too bad we are only allowed to discuss one side of it in this forum. Or, of course, we are racists.
Limbaugh is an ass; wow, did that solve the problem?
American capitalism, in its unfettered genius, has created a radio demagogue who is both above common decency and too big to fail. The way to rein in monsters like Limbaugh is to re-regulate their bully pulpits, not helplessly wring our hands.
Got something to say?
i thought it would be obvious to the one doing it… alas.
you, Brett and Tom Maguire all responded to the accusations of GOP racism with lame tu quoque arguments.
you can’t defend Limbaugh/Drudge/Malkin so you just attack someone else. “Al Sharpton did it first! (wahh)” isn’t really much of a defense of the state of the current GOP.
i realize there’s no good way to defend it, though.
On the one hand, there’s nothing ambiguous about this. It’s straight-up George Wallace-style race-baiting. It’s an intentional attempt to stir racial prejudices.
“kids fight on a school bus” is not news. those who trumpet this story are obviously (even if they won’t admit it when challenged) are playing on racist fears in order to attack Obama.
it’s shameful, disgusting, and perfectly unsurprising. the GOP is a cesspool. its stars are merely the bits floating on top.
I think Thullen is right but for the wrong reasons. Publius, you didn’t link the whole transcript. I wonder if that’s because you didn’t actually read the whole Limbaugh quote. I didn’t hear it (I don’t often listen to Rush) but know he often uses satire.
If you read the entire transcript , you get this snippet at the end:
(interruption) What do you mean you can’t look at everything through a racial prism? Obama does. And his media is looking at everything through a racial prism. The left looks at everything through a racial prism. Hey, they hit us; we hit back twice as hard. Greetings, folks, Rush Limbaugh behind the Golden EIB Microphone and the telephone number . . .
I’m assuming the interruption was from his sidekick/producer. And Rush makes it clear that everything before was explicitly seen through a racial prism. As in sarcasm.
And everyone’s reaction (save Brett) here just proves Limbaugh’s point. You can even comment sarcastically on the racial prism that seems to be dominating the left’s view of any number of issues and BAM!!! the racial hammer drops awful fast. I think that was Rush’s point.
If I’m wrong, point it out to me. I promise to even listen if you tell me it’s just my latent racism making me think this way ;).
“you, Brett and Tom Maguire all responded to the accusations of GOP racism with lame tu quoque arguments.”
I certainly didn’t defend it, others brought up Skip Gates. So how do you think we should have a discussion about racism without discussing it? Should we all just get on here and say Rush is an ass and then go to the next topic? ok, I’m good with that. Wasn’t that a meaaningful discourse?
I really doubt if a fight between high school kids on a bus would get to be national news if the white kids won. There wold have to be more drama to it than that: someone dead, something overty like a swastika.
On the other hand, if you are trying to make the case that black racism toward whites sometimes exists and sometimes results in violence–well, sure. What, however,does that have to do with Obama?
Besides, Limbaugh and the rest of the Noise Machine aren’t promotinng this stgory becaue they want a reasoned and insightful discussion. They just want to change the subject from Joe Wilson and the obvious nastiness of the crowd on the mall the other day.
There’s a long history of local politics being writ large on a national level in the U.S., where bad instincts were permitted to be legislated under cover of law and policy (segregation is the star example here) and Constitutional levers were used to justify such legislation, as though local politics were good enough for a larger polity and that democracy was all about catering to such bad instincts. Unfortunately, the bitterness of such politics is hard to wash away when certain types of people were at the receiving end of it, still feel at least the backwash of it, and on occasion a tidal wave (like right now).
So, while space permits, I’ll try as best I can for as nuanced a stance as possible: I agree that Brett has probably, as the Australian side of my family would say (my dad was American and my mum was Australian, yes), copped more than his fair share of stick with residual sands of unjustified blame and accusation for carrying a racist heritage simply by virtue of being white. Like Liberal Japonicus, I too feel that it is ridiculous to impute a sense of a racist heritage entirely ‘in the skin’, and on that tack, I can understand why Brett feels put upon.
What Rush has done is an outrage because here is a man who has never felt, even once, the weight of having to live under laws crafted from someone else’s bad instincts about race, ethnicity or heritage, yet claims the same sense of hurt from such a weight, and what is worse – is manufacturing it for a vendetta against a political opposition that, on top of all of that, he personifies in one man. In other words, the sting of prejudice is just another match to play with, a flame that with a flick of the hand you can wave off when the fire goes too low on the wick right next to your thumb.
It’s one thing to have a backwash with race in it come lapping up to your shore around your feet, as unpleasant as it is. It’s another to have to live with the weight having been, if not directly on you, on people you knew, people in your family, and not all that long ago, and with the distinct sense that there are still those out there who would turn the clock back if they could. The history of the U.S. is steeped in this, and it’s naive to think that just because some people have moved on from it, the rest will follow. This is the price of a history of racism – it makes everybody pay. It’s just that it invariably makes some pay more than others. The thing to ask yourself is how much have you really had to pay, and has the law ever placed the weight of that debt on your shoulders?
“well, sure. What, however,does that have to do with Obama?”
Not a thing, he should in fact, if asked, say it was a school kid fight, not in his portfolio to address. Then we would see if he gets to say that without left or right criticism.
Two brief things:
First, as a point of fact affirmative action was not instituted as “payback” or restitution for past sins. It was instituted to address contemporary racism.
Second:
Sorry, but there is no such thing as the Limbaugh wing of the GOP. The GOP owns him
I rather think it’s the other way around.
bc, you seem to be arguing that Rush is engaging in some sort of performance art. Obviously, the story was discussed beforehand so it wasn’t just an offhand remark by Rush, so I hope we can agree that it was planned. However, I would interpret the attribution to Obama’s racial prism (as well as the ‘we hit back twice as hard’, what does that mean?) as more like attributing a mindset that is so firmly planted in Rush’s mind that it is a given, at least for him, that everyone else thinks exactly as he does. Rush was the first, or one of the first, to report this, and the first order of business is to tie it to Obama. Everything that happens in America is seen thru the prism of Obama is black to Rush. It seems like that in and of itself tells a lot more about Rush than it does about Obama or anyone commenting here.
It seems to me everyone has lost the real point. After reading the original newstory, viewing the video from the bus and reading the comments that went with the video posting, it isn’t necessarily about race at all, but discrimination sure enough. The original article said that this student had been harrassed on this bus as a pattern. Why this was not originally dealt with by the bus driver and/or the school authorities is a separate but important question.
The real deal is that this student was being harrassed for being “different”. The suggestion was he was a “nerd”. Well, he could have been gay as well, or accused of being gay because of his non-conformity. However the perponderance and tacit acceptance of bullying is at the base of this. This is the issue which should be being discussed.
The race baiting of Limbaugh is despicable and should be called out for what it is. However, the issue here is bullying and no one seems to address it.
Just my opinion. You may want to view the video. It is very enlightening.
Yeah, when it comes to playing the victim card Limbaugh can’t be beat. Poor old rich boy Rush, from the safety of his life of upscale access to all of America’s goodies, is the victim of the liberals and black people who, out of sheer malice, unfairly burden him with guilt! Waah! Waah! With Rush it always comes down to “Poor. poor. pitiful me”. And by implication, his poor, poor, pitiful listeners.
What does Obama have to do with the incident, even if it were racist? (Which, on the evidence so far, it was not.)
What did Obama have to do with a suspected break-in in Cambridge? Or with Kanye West? Yet incredibly, people asked him about it and he jumped in. Your position as I understand it is that I am race-baiting for wondering whether a story pushed by Drudge (and later Limbaugh) will eventually prompt a question to Obama or Gibbs, and advising them to stay away from it? Absurd.
Well, it seems to me that Tom Maguire is disingenuously trying to hide the dog whistle behind his back.
Yeah, my experience is that when Drudge, Limbaugh and I all push a story it develops legs. You see right through me.
you, Brett and Tom Maguire all responded to the accusations of GOP racism with lame tu quoque arguments.
you can’t defend Limbaugh/Drudge/Malkin so you just attack someone else.
Ahh, it is OK if I defend myself?
And to whoever wanted to reprint Just One Minute comments here for discussion, hmm – that seems awfully meta. Would the point be that some of my regulars (if that is what they were) said something that someone here wants me to defend over here? Pass.
As to whether this incident was racist or racially motivated, try to guess the reaction if a negative of the same video were released, with white kids cheering while two white kids beat up a nerdy black student. THAT, I am quite sure, would push even Kanye off the front page and be a stain on our nation’s soul.
Acknowledging any of the hateful bile spewing out Rush Limbaugh’s bloated
airways may seem, to some, to merely lend this hate-monger the legitimacy he
begs for. But some things cannot go unchecked.
Rush Limbaugh needs to be relegated to the same disgusting class of people that includes white supremacists and other hate groups. His use of Scottsboro Boys-like tactics to attempt to pit angry white people against black Americans reveals him to be a stone cold racist. Anyone lending any future credibility to anything Rush Limbaugh says – other than to spotlight, document, and utlimately ridicule the hatred this man feels towards so many Americans – would in fact be aiding and abetting a cowardly, amoral, anti-American racist thug.
So please, mainstream media, stop treating Limbaugh as anything more than he is: A hateful race-baiting extremist.
“and has the law ever placed the weight of that debt on your shoulders?”
Well, yes, it has. For thirty years, most of my adult life, the law has squarely placed the burden of Affirmative Action and any number of other preferential programs on the backs of middle class white people who have watched their children have less opportunity (particularly lower middle class families). Good or bad from a cultural standpoint? I lean toward good overall. But, yes is the answer to the question.
Rush: What do you mean you can’t look at everything through a racial prism? Obama does.
this is another one of those ideas the GOP seems to repeat every chance they get but which makes no sense at all to me. how is Obama racist ? i’ve Googled a bit, but all i find are articles which try to tie unrelated events back to Obama.
i get that it’s a very easy way to attack him and defend yourself: claim the other guy is a racist, then when you want to be racist, whine “but he did it first!” but for it to really work, the other really has to do it first. and i just don’t see it.
no, what i see is the GOP doing exactly what it accuses the left of doing: seeing everything through a racial prism while using “he’s a racist” as a defense.
—
So how do you think we should have a discussion about racism without discussing it?
this isn’t a discussion about race. it’s a discussion about Limbaugh, Malkin, Drudge and the rest of the GOPs mouths. you can tell by reading the article publius wrote, above.
“Two brief things:
First, as a point of fact affirmative action was not instituted as “payback” or restitution for past sins. It was instituted to address contemporary racism.”
No, it was instituted to address the trailing effects of historical racism. Thats a slightly different concept. It was implemented as a preference program beyond that concept.
Marty, I thought you were Canadian. Apologies if I am wrong, but if that’s the case, there are a number of confounding factors to bring in before you can simply map US rhetoric to the Canadian situation.
Well, yes, it has. For thirty years, most of my adult life, the law has squarely placed the burden of Affirmative Action and any number of other preferential programs on the backs of middle class white people who have watched their children have less opportunity (particularly lower middle class families).
Squarely on your shoulders? Jeebus Marty, do you have any idea how limited affirmative action programs are? How small an effect they really have? And how they can be satisified by hiring qualified and overqualified minorities, such that it’s not really a burden or unfair to anyone?
Get to grips my man. And get some facts.
bc- LJ is onto something here that I want to expand upon.
Rush’s meat-and-potatoes rhetorical move is to be outrageous and inflammatory ahead of the break, come back from the break with a quick, quiet explanation of why his outrageousness isn’t serious and then move on to his next topic. He’s done it for years.
He’s also observed his faithful listeners picking up the inflammatory parts and repeating them — without the part from after the break — for years.
If the part after the break was most important to Rush he would have changed his schtick in order to better make his point. He hasn’t. That tells me as much as I need to know about Rush Limbaugh’s rhetoric.
For thirty years, most of my adult life, the law has squarely placed the burden of Affirmative Action and any number of other preferential programs on the backs of middle class white people who have watched their children have less opportunity…
…than they would have had if a whole segment of the population continued to be excluded from the chance to participate.
It would have been much better to leave the burden where it always was, on the backs of black people who watched their children get systematically excluded from good schools, good neighborhoods, and good jobs for generation after generation. What’s one more generation, after all? And then another, and another after that.
Tom Maguire,
sorry to be so meta, but if your comment section is composed of people who think talking about Obama’s ‘chilrun’ is just a bland observation, it suggests that this is not a recommendation that Obama avoid the subject but a dog whistle.
No, it was instituted to address the trailing effects of historical racism.
No, not even close. When the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were passed, Jim Crow laws were STILL IN EFFECT THROUGHOUT THE SOUTH. How on earth can you refer to that as “historical racism?” Affirmative action programs were designed to address institutionalized, legalized anti-black racism that was occurring AT THE TIME.
Publius, clean up on aisle 5
I mean, for pete’s sake, Marty, Kennedy’s “affirmative action” memo, the first such Executive Order of its kind, was issued in 1961; only four years prior to that, in 1957, the Arkansas National Guard was lining up to keep black kids out of schools. If we’re relegating the passage of four years to the dustbin of history, we must have institutional Alzheimer’s or something.
About a generation ago, or at least up to WW2, one could not be part of the mainstream unless one was racist. It was the obvious and natural way in which a modern civilized nation operated. By the 1950s conservatives were the primary advocates of maintaining the “traditional” view of racial relationships while leftists and liberals were adjusting race, ethnicity and culture. Not that it didn’t morph into other forms of social organizing.
Anyway, considering the way society organized itself, as a result of these views, I can’t think of a way to ignore that long and distiguished history.
I am going to tell a story. It’s probably a story any of uus could tell, but here goes: an acquaitance of mine, John,, grew up in a separated and unequal community in the South. His parents were openly racist. Time passed, society changed, and the community grew less separated and more equal. Race issues became genreally better but also more complex.
One day John took his small granddaughter to the public pool to play. She splashed around and accidentally knocked another little girl off her feet. The othger girl’s mother immediately rose up in defense of her child, face, body language ane voice full of wrath. John thinks he can spot a potential race incidennt when he sees one so he grabbed is grandchild and left.
John is a nice guy. he didn’t tell this story to play the victim card. He has enough insight into the history of his community to understand why an AA woman might assume that her daughter was a victim of a racsim and might want to leap to her daughter’s defense even though the assumption that he and his granddaughter were racists was unfair to them.
We are at a point in race relations where all kinds of kinnds of contradictory things can be true at the same time: black men are demonized and fear and one got elected President, there is racism and yet a new lack of racism that opens unpresidennted opportunity; some black people are unduely paranoid about race and some have good to reason be, some white people do feel guilty about history and some feel put upon becuase they feel a guilt they put on themselves and some have really been blamed for things they did not do, there are black people who cross the line between being assertive and being paranoid and there are whites who unconsciously interpete any kind of assertiveness from a black person as an attack on white entitlement and so on. We are in an immensley complicated point of our histopry mademore commplicated by the fact that different generaltions perceive things different ways.
So we all need to be patient with each other through this time of change and try to be good communicators. Which is exactly what Limbaugh does not want to do. He wants to ennd communication, to inflame the worst in his listeners and to do so for partisan benefit. I really don’t care if he personally is a racist or not. His inntentkion is to worsen race realtions and that constitutes race baiting.
Sorry about all the typos but i have to run to work now.
Cleanup in aisle three. Pity the nick is from a monty python sketch.
“Get to grips my man. And get some facts.”
Just answering the question. Have any of your kids been denied access to a college or a job due to Affirmative Action, or not qualifying for other programs? Please note, I expressed a positive view of most of the outcomes, but the answer to the question was yes.
However, I would interpret the attribution to Obama’s racial prism (as well as the ‘we hit back twice as hard’, what does that mean?)
LJ: I thought it meant what the White House said about attacks on the proposed health care plan. It shows the nature of his satire.
Everything that happens in America is seen thru the prism of Obama is black to Rush. It seems like that in and of itself tells a lot more about Rush than it does about Obama or anyone commenting here. .
I don’t know if that is true or not. I don’t listen to Rush enough to know. I do know that when I do listen (usually when I’m driving long distances through the mountains and I can only pick up a.m. and I’ve forgotten my Ipod) there is a lot of satire that is often taken out of context. Like here.
no, what i see is the GOP doing exactly what it accuses the left of doing: seeing everything through a racial prism while using “he’s a racist” as a defense.
At least you say that after reading the whole transcript. Google the issue and you’ll see a lot of left sites aren’t quoting the entire transcript. My main point wasn’t to defend Rush on the merits of “Obama’s America” because that wasn’t Rush’s main point either.
bc- LJ is onto something here that I want to expand upon.
Nous: I don’t think LJ was on to it at all. You are. At least you recognize the satire and are moving beyond that to what does the satire mean. And I think it’s a good point. I don’t know whether or not Rush deliberately waits until after the break to “reveal” is satire because it is obvious just from reading the part before the break. It seems to me that everyone’s brains turn off when Rush is mentioned and the discussion becomes awful shallow and knee-jerk in character.
At the outset, this discussion was simply about the satire as truth. Which seems still to prove Rush’s point. It’s all about race.
I think satire plays an important place with tough issues. It can help discuss the merits. It doesn’t help when satire is only taken as “truth” and we don’t get to the merits.
No, it was instituted to address the trailing effects of historical racism. Thats a slightly different concept.
I beg to differ.
The historical legacy was slavery and Plessy-sanctioned “separate but equal” laws. In other words, explicit, legally sanctioned racism.
The actual phenomena that affirmative action was intended to address, as explicitly stated in the executive orders and other documents that established it, was then-current discrimination in hiring and promotion in violation of standing civil rights law.
“Discrimination” here refers not just to discrimination on the basis of race, but also national origin and religion, and eventually was extended to gender.
But discrimination based on race — which is to say, racism — was certainly a large, I would say prominent, part of the motivation.
Would that the conditions that motivated AA were no longer in existence.
Marty: For thirty years, most of my adult life, the law has squarely placed the burden of Affirmative Action and any number of other preferential programs on the backs of middle class white people who have watched their children have less opportunity…
JanieM: …than they would have had if a whole segment of the population continued to be excluded from the chance to participate.
My guess is that there may be small-scale and short-term instances of white people not getting something or other because of Affirmative Action, but that, overall, everyone, including whites, benefits in the long run. Opportunity is not a zero-sum game, and taking advantage of under-utilized talent and potential helps us all, I think. Maybe a black doctor who might otherwise not have gotten into medical school but for AA will save Marty’s life and he’ll feel less burdened.
Just answering the question. Have any of your kids been denied access to a college or a job due to Affirmative Action, or not qualifying for other programs? Please note, I expressed a positive view of most of the outcomes, but the answer to the question was yes.
Marty,
I grew up in a rich, ultra white suburb of NYC. What I saw were kids with mediocre grades and SAT scores go to Ivy League and other near Ivy schools (Georgetown, Johns Hopkins etc) ahead of other kids with much, much better grades/test scores.
It was common knowledge that legacy parents were extremely generous in terms of donations and had very good connections (frequent refrain: guess they just built a [insert name of kid who got accepted way above his merit] wing at [insert really good school]), and that this got their kids in the school.
And those grades and test scores were mediocre despite having food in their stomachs, a relaxed, peaceful environment to attend school, access to the best teachers, access to the best tutors, access to expensive Test prep courses.
So, really, why don’t you focus on a more unjust outcome in terms of preferences rather than a far more justifiable and understandable program.
“I mean, for pete’s sake, Marty, Kennedy’s “affirmative action” memo, the first such Executive Order of its kind, was issued in 1961; only four years prior to that, in 1957, the Arkansas National Guard was lining up to keep black kids out of schools. If we’re relegating the passage of four years to the dustbin of history, we must have institutional Alzheimer’s or something.”
I said “for the last thirty years or so” on purpose. The Kennedy Memo, the legislation, Johnsons followup and even Nixons memo do fall into, at waning levels, correction of both past and present injury. The expansion over the years beyond Federal contracts, then to anyone who got federal money, to quotas in education trailed all of those by many years.
My apologies for using the term loosely.
Bowing out now before the inevitable debate over affirmative action heats up.
Clearly, you are aware of all internet traditions.
Check this out . Sullivan links to TPM which links to Media Matters who leaves out the part that makes it clear it is satire. And this is an honest discussion how?
And, Publius, did you read or listen to the entire exchange, or just get it from the three sources you link to, none of whom actually quotes the entire passage?
The expansion over the years beyond Federal contracts, then to anyone who got federal money, to quotas in education trailed all of those by many years.
Quotas in higher education were banned by the SCOTUS in the Bakke decision in 1978. What are you referring to, Marty?
Please note, I expressed a positive view of most of the outcomes, but the answer to the question was yes.
The rain falls on the just and the unjust. My guess is that that is not news to you.
I’m not being flip or a smart-aleck. Sometimes it costs us something to make the right things happen, that’s all.
bc,
an unsourced comment from a private meeting during the height of the townhall meetings, a month and a half ago? Rather tenuous, don’t you think?
And reading the transcript leaves me more, not less disgusted. It’s hard to tell who was responsible for the title, and the pictures, but the claim that people are claiming that attacks on Kayne West are racist seems to be really out there, but was carefully woven into the monologue. The show is carefully constructed to make a specific point, and it is hard to believe that he somehow was just doing a improv and then pulled it all together for his listening audience. The structure is carefully set, I wouldn’t be surprised if the phone calls are previously recorded (‘cueing up 17, 18 and 19) and cut so Rush can springboard off them to the greatest effect. Interpreting them as just an off hand chat is a big mistake.
“I grew up in a rich, ultra white suburb of NYC. What I saw were kids with mediocre grades and SAT scores go to Ivy League and other near Ivy schools (Georgetown, Johns Hopkins etc) ahead of other kids with much, much better grades/test scores.”
I was pretty sure this was true. So let me tell you I grew up in a dirt poor part of Texas, never got less than an A, SAT’s anyone would have been happy to get and there were no Ivy League schools looking to recruit me. My version of affirmative action was three years in the army and night school helped out by the VA. Six years behind my peers in getting a degree and working 60 hours a week for $9000 a year to make ends meet. In those days, affirmative action hadn’t come to higher ed very much so my experience wasn’t dissimilar to others I knew.
Over the next thirty years those experiences diverged substantially for my kids generation. Both getting in and getting it paid for were not an equal proposition for the lower middle class.
Call me when it has effected you in any way. Otherwise don’t tell me I don’t know what I am talking about. I have actually lived it and worked hard enough that I managed to help them get through.
But the answer to the question was yes.
Just for clarity, all this discussion is from this question posed
to which the answer, factually, is yes. I find myself becoming more animated on the subject as people try to say the answer is no. I didn’t object that much in the first place, there were some excesses but in generl it was ok with me.
Now I am irritated that the facts seem uncomfortable to the people here enough to do everything except deny them.
“Quotas in higher education were banned by the SCOTUS in the Bakke decision in 1978. What are you referring to, Marty?”
Reality
Call me when it has effected you in any way.
Um, why wouldn’t it have affected me? Why you and not me? I don’t get it. Wouldn’t I be disadvantaged by it? Why not?
And Marty:
I responded because of you saying the burden fell squarely on your shoulders, when really it is but a mere glancing blow at best.
I grow animated by people that blow it out of proportion.
Over the next thirty years those experiences diverged substantially for my kids generation. Both getting in and getting it paid for were not an equal proposition for the lower middle class.
And you have what evidence that, if true, this was due in a significant way to Affirmative Action?
FWIW, I would favor socio-economic AA, which would help disadvantaged people regardless of their group (aside from socio-economic grouping), thereby helping groups of people to the extent that a given group has socio-economically disadvantaged members.
Dirt poor white kids (Marty)could start, along with dirt poor black kids, displacing rich white kids (Eric) and rich black kids at universities. (I’m being half-funny here. Pick whichever half you think is offensive.)
I didn’t object that much in the first place, there were some excesses but in generl it was ok with me.
I’d say nobody could ask for more than that.
I was pretty sure this was true. So let me tell you I grew up in a dirt poor part of Texas, never got less than an A, SAT’s anyone would have been happy to get and there were no Ivy League schools looking to recruit me.
Marty, I’m not sure how old you are, but interpreting lack of interest for active discrimination is pretty bizarre. And if you were going to school at the same time I was, certainly, schools were looking for minority candidates, but positing that because they did that and didn’t go looking for you really misunderstands the college selection process. In fact, now, because schools work towards geographic diversity as well, if you were in the same situation today, you’d have a much better chance than a comparable candidate from say Boston or New York.
The simple act of looking to increase diversity is taken as discriminating against the majority. I don’t think I could come up with a better example.
Marty: Long before any of the recent events, Skip Gates has a distinguished history as a race baiter.
BUAHAHAHHAHAHA Skip Gates? Skip Gates?!?!
Marty, prior to the Harvard incident, had you ever even heard of Henry Louis Gates, Jr? Because only someone who has blindly swallowed the steady stream of racist wingnut agitprop that transformed someone who is (or was) the epitome of the post-racial apologist into the second coming of H Rap Brown would say something so unremittingly ignorant. There’s a reason why blackademia responded with collective shock when reports first surfaced that Skip Gates (Skip Gates?!) had actually called out someone for racism.
bc – “I don’t think LJ was on to it at all.”
But I think he was. Rush is attuned to what will get his listener’s attention, and part of that is saying things that he knows will piss off Those Other People TM. LJ is simply pointing out that when he pitches his outrage he almost always takes aim at a minority or at feminists or takes a shot at effete liberals or the ACLU or Europeans and immigrants. I’ve never heard him take a similar shot at Christians or Southerners.
Limbaugh’s schtick takes the form of satire, but it doesn’t work like satire because the pleasure of outrage completely overshadows the effectiveness of the irony. His clarifications only serve to excuse the outrage, they seldom enlighten because the thing he treats as ironic is usually untrue.
Dave Chapelle did similar things, but he changed things up when he heard stupid people repeating his soundbites without getting the irony.
“I responded because of you saying the burden fell squarely on your shoulders, when really it is but a mere glancing blow at best.
I grow animated by people that blow it out of proportion.”
I didn’t blow it out of porportion, you did.
displacing rich white kids (Eric)
For the record, my parents shoehorned us in sideways into said town (small house at the very edge of the school district). I was not anything like rich, but I still consider myself extremely blessed and fortunate for that.
“FWIW, I would favor socio-economic AA, which would help disadvantaged people regardless of their group (aside from socio-economic grouping), thereby helping groups of people to the extent that a given group has socio-economically disadvantaged members.”
Me too.
Shorter Tom Maguire:
“I wasn’t race-bating; I was concern-trolling.”
Or race-baiting, even.
And you have what evidence that, if true, this was due in a significant way to Affirmative Action?
I’m not gonna wade in a speak for Marty here because he does a very good job of speaking for himself.
What I will say is that it’s foolish to denigrate the cost that gets paid by somebody, somewhere whenever we try to level any of the various playing fields that we operate under.
IMO there’s a good case to be made that AA, frex, is worth the cost. But the case that should be made is that, net/net, it’s worth it, rather than that the cost doesn’t exist.
the law has squarely placed the burden of Affirmative Action and any number of other preferential programs on the backs of middle class white people who have watched their children have less opportunity (particularly lower middle class families
What you are doing here, is that you are taking 30 years of the economic decline of the lower middle class in this country, and you’re blaming it on the blacks.
hairshirthedonist: “FWIW, I would favor socio-economic AA, which would help disadvantaged people regardless of their group (aside from socio-economic grouping), thereby helping groups of people to the extent that a given group has socio-economically disadvantaged members.”
Marty: Me too.
Me too. Three of us, it’s a movement! What shall we call it?
But I do wonder: how is forcible (via mandated AA programs) redistribution of opportunity different from forcible (via taxes) redistribution of wealth, a lot of the concentration of which was helped along (as Eric points out) by unequal distribution of opportunity in the first place?
And Marty, favoring socio-economic AA but not race-based AA implies that the problem with race-based AA in your eyes isn’t the AA part, but the race part. But if race and poverty are linked in this country, then what you’re really saying is that AA needs some adjusting, but mostly it’s moving us in the right direction. It needs to include more people from the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum, and exclude rich blacks, and then it would be fine?
It needs to include more people from the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum, and exclude rich blacks, and then it would be fine?
I’m on board with that too FWIW.
But the case that should be made is that, net/net, it’s worth it, rather than that the cost doesn’t exist.
I agree, russell. But Marty attributes a substantial divergence of experience over a generation to AA. In my earlier comment I agreed that there may be small-scale and short-term instances of white people not getting something or other because of Affirmative Action. That is a cost, at least in the short-term. But does this represent a substantial divergence of experience between Marty’s generation and that of his kids? Perhaps there was a substantial divergence of experience, but how significantly can that be attributed to AA? It is really that much of a factor?
‘When Affirmative Action Was White’: Uncivil Rights
What hairshirt said.
That was my objection too.
rea — What you are doing here, is that you are taking 30 years of the economic decline of the lower middle class in this country, and you’re blaming it on the blacks.
Yes, and it’s certainly convenient for some people that the focus stays so relentlessly on the blacks and not on the people who are really benefiting from that decline.
From some numbers that I posted in an ObWi discussion last March:
Better link
When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America
But I do wonder: how is forcible (via mandated AA programs) redistribution of opportunity different from forcible (via taxes) redistribution of wealth, a lot of the concentration of which was helped along (as Eric points out) by unequal distribution of opportunity in the first place?
I’d say AA redistribution is more productive. It does more to grow the pot rather than simply moving what’s already in the pot to another spot, zero-sum style.
But Marty attributes a substantial divergence of experience over a generation to AA.
I’ll let Marty defend his own statements, or not, as he wishes.
My only point here is that AA (along with lots of other forms of trying to make things better) does come at a cost, which is borne by particular people, and it’s not useful to try to tell those people that in fact it hasn’t cost them anything.
People here keep using the word “satire” . . . I do not think it means what they think it means.
Russell, it seems to me that there are different kinds of costs. Some of the “cost” of affirmative action is that some people lose something that they only had in the first place because other people were arbitrarily deprived of their share of it. Whatever “it” is.
If you thought that as a legacy you were going to get to go to an elite college despite your crappy SAT’s and lackadaisical study habits, and the college changed its policy to admit more demonstrably bright students from disadvantaged backgrounds, then yeah, you’ve lost something — the expectation of a privilege that you did nothing to deserve. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for that.
Unfortunately, the world is messy and the effect of AA isn’t always that straightforward. As you said, the rain falls….
“But I do wonder: how is forcible (via mandated AA programs) redistribution of opportunity different from forcible (via taxes) redistribution of wealth?”
Fair question, and one I thought of as well. An answer after about 5 minutes of thought:
Opportunity must be grasped, which means effort on the part of the disadvantaged people you’re trying to help. It’s easier to get behind offering a helping hand to “deserving” types than it is to (supposedly) hand out checks to (insert mental picture of the undeserving poor here). It’s a moral thing, and even I, liberal that I am, feel its pull.
“My only point here is that AA (along with lots of other forms of trying to make things better) does come at a cost, which is borne by particular people, and it’s not useful to try to tell those people that in fact it hasn’t cost them anything.”
Thanks Russell.
I am not inclined to continue to deal with statements that I am blaming thirty years of decline on anyone. There are plenty of fingers to point on that to go around.
Nor do I overestimate the impact of AA on any one individual. There is a cost. The question was whether there was a cost and the answer was yes.
Suddenly I am blaming everything in the world on people I couldn’t conceive caused any of those problems.
Not so much.
Murali,
Your argument is that african americans belong to a historically disadvantaged group. While my argument is that there was an uncompensated violation in property rights.
Way too narrow. There certainly was a huge uncompensated violation of property rights, but to define past discrimination solely in those terms is completely inadequate.
Having one’s opportunities in life be severely restricted, being treated as an inherently inferior human being in all sorts of ways, is a much greater loss than can be measured in material terms.
“IMO there’s a good case to be made that AA, frex, is worth the cost. But the case that should be made is that, net/net, it’s worth it, rather than that the cost doesn’t exist.”
And the nice thing about this kind of case would be that you can evaluate it over time, and phase out AA as the balance changes. The problem with AA policies as currently formulated is that they seem poised to last forever. (And the fact that in college admissions they mostly hurt Asian students is worth attending to).
As for Rush, ugh. I don’t like him at all. I think he is a ridiculously corrosive part of the media circus and that my side would be much better off if he (and people like him) would go away.
But I also hate blatant misreadings of texts, and I’m pretty sure that this one is being misread. (I can’t speak for all of the conservative reporting on this story, but Rush’s quotes are being damned so I’m addressing them).
He very explicitly is NOT saying that this bus beating incident was a racially motivated incident. In fact, he is stongly implying that it was not. I got the transcript from here
He is critiquing the idea that reflexively seeing disagreements between a white person (say Rush) and a black one (say Obama) ought to be analyzed under a race rubric when other things may very well explain what they are.
Rush is using a ridiculous example to try to illustrate that coding everything by race isn’t helpful. Saying that the white kid got beaten up because of racism is just as stupid as saying that Rush opposes Obama’s health care because of race.
This point is made even more explicit in the next part of the transcript:
Again, Rush is trying to show that there is a lot more going on than race in the criticism of West and a lot more going on in the criticism of Obama. (Actually I think the West case has a strong racial, gender and class components–she was white, country and a woman. He has rudely interrupted lots of people, but it is tough to imagine him doing the same thing to a popular black rap artist).
Now is Rush’s argument corrosive? Probably. He is trying to reduce all the objections to his arguments to charges of racism, which is ridiculous. There are lots of reasons to disagree with Rush on health care for example. But he isn’t race baiting (at least in the way you all are describing it). He is using the bus example to show how viewing everything through a racial/racist lens is stupid.
Now is there a subtler subtext of race-baiting? Maybe. He is definitely setting it up as an US vs. THEM thing that may have a racial component. But it is also easy to read it as Democrats vs. Republicans so it is tougher.
JFTR, the biggest beneficiaries of AA policies aren’t African-Americans.
(Wasn’t I bowing out? I give this thread 20 more comments before abortion & Florida 2000 are woven into the tapestry of drift.)
I’ve got $10 on The Bell Curve in 30.
Seb — “The problem with AA policies as currently formulated is that they seem poised to last forever. (And the fact that in college admissions they mostly hurt Asian students is worth attending to).”
The consequence you are pointing to here is that Asian students aren’t getting into their *first choice* colleges, not that they are not getting into college. I hear this complaint a lot from my students. Their parents have done everything they could for them to get into Stanford or Berkeley — they’ve sent them to tutoring and to Kaplan and they’ve gotten them the best volunteer experiences they could and these top schools, (as thy see it), take lower scoring hispanics and blacks in their place. So my unfortunate Asian students instead tumble down to a school ranked in the mid 40s nationwide.
How can they compete?
Here, as elsewhere, the real story is that poor Asian students can’t compete against the more privileged ones who are never in danger of not being able to go to college, merely of not getting into the one they most wanted to attend.
To the extent that Sebastian’s apologetic for poor ol’ misread Rush holds any truth, it doesn’t go far enough: Rush is trying to deligitimize the very idea of ever viewing things through a racial lens*, the better to provide cover for people who actually do racist things. Then you can simply accuse those wronged or offended of “playing the race card.”
Yes, Rush Limbaugh can object to Obama’s healthcare plan without a racist motivation. But that’s not the issue. The issue is whether the larger anti-Obama movement has motivations beyond liberals vs. conservatives, or Democrats vs. Republicans, or what have you. And it’s hard to look at the signs carried by the teabaggers and answer “No” to that question. In fact, it’s dishonest and stupid.
But in order to obfuscate and try and sweep all that under the carpet, Rush tries to make the very idea of examining racist motivations look dumb. And dumb people get taken in by the schtick.
*Unless even a single white person is disadvantaged, of course.
I mean, “black people/Hispanics/Democrats/liberals are the real racists” is a meme that Sebastian has to have encountered from conservatives — who sincerely believe it!! — if he’s been paying attention for more than 10 minutes. Heck, he need look no further than our own Brett Bellmore.
What I will say is that it’s foolish to denigrate the cost that gets paid by somebody, somewhere whenever we try to level any of the various playing fields that we operate under.
There is a cost, but I think it is much less than people often expect. Imagine that you’re the parent of student applying to colleges. Your kid, who you think is smart, hard working, etc. doesn’t get admitted to the schools they want. Now, that might be because (1) your little precious isn’t as smart or as hard working or as dedicated or as interesting as the other applicants that got in. Or it might be because (2) your little precious was totally qualified but got beaten by less qualified applicant because of AA.
As you consider the possibilities, it will be much easier for you to believe (2) than (1), even if (1) is true and (2) is not. No parent wants to admit that their little precious somehow didn’t measure up. Especially when they can’t see the rest of the applicant pool so they have no idea who their little precious was competing with. Believing (2) means that your kids’ failure isn’t their fault, and that’s the kind of thing that parents desperately want to believe.
Now, there clearly are some people who get screwed over by (2). I don’t deny that. But that number seems small compared to the number of people who are…not as good as they think themselves to be.
My only point here is that AA (along with lots of other forms of trying to make things better) does come at a cost, which is borne by particular people, and it’s not useful to try to tell those people that in fact it hasn’t cost them anything.
Look, the problem isn’t that people who have been screwed over by AA are angry at the cost. The problem is that lots of people, most of whom have not been harmed by AA are angry about a cost that most of them never paid.
But in order to obfuscate and try and sweep all that under the carpet, Rush tries to make the very idea of examining racist motivations look dumb.
Not to mention the strawman he sets up that doesn’t even resemble people he’s criticizing. That transcript makes him sound like a raving lunatic to me. It’s hard to tell what the hell he’s talking about.
The biggest problem with Sebastian’s analysis is that Rush is setting up a straw man. Nobody (that I know of) is saying all criticism of Obama or healthcare reform or even of AA is racist. Rush is deliberately overstating the case to get a reaction from his listeners with a rather obvious subtext that the school bus incidence is what real racism is all about.
When Rush talks about how the white kid was a racist and deserved the beating everybody with any sense knows he is saying just the opposite. His listeners (probably 99% white) hear him and get the message which is don’t let the blacks out there (backed up by the media) get away with this. He truly believes in “calling a spade a spade” but only under the derogatory meaning of the term.
Rush is extremely smart and knows how to phrase things to get people riled up (yes, to race-bait) with some little bit of verbage that provides him with an out.
Just like there are people out there that don’t believe that Reagan was using racism to stir up the pot (which does not mean he was a racist) there are people that don’t believe Rush is either.
It is interesting, however, that unlike a year ago, nobody is trying to say that Rush is not representative of the current GOP.
“But in order to obfuscate and try and sweep all that under the carpet, Rush tries to make the very idea of examining racist motivations look dumb.”
I agree with this entirely. I think that Rush is making an essentially very bad argument, based on the false premise that people disagree with HIM because they think he is racist.
But of course posts like this one don’t help, because they are calling him a racist by interpreting his statement almost exactly backwards.
If you want to argue that these statements are racist you have to do something more than “blaming a white kid getting beaten up on a bus on race is racist”. You’re making the same point Rush was making and you aren’t even realizing it.
“I mean, “black people/Hispanics/Democrats/liberals are the real racists” is a meme that Sebastian has to have encountered from conservatives — who sincerely believe it!!”
I don’t understand what you are saying here Phil. I feel like it is a restatement of what I said, but framed in a way that you think I’d be opposed to it. Yes, Rush is definitely doing something sort of akin to that. He is doing it by showing how stupid it is to try to see everything through a racial lens, and using the bus incident to bolster his case.
Is he doing something insidious by overplaying the race-based criticism and dismissing the legitimate criticism? Yes.
We should call him on that. But using that statement to accuse him of racism (at least in any straightforward way) is
A) misreading the statement
and
B) playing into his hands (you are focusing on unsubstantiated racial charges when you should be focusing on the legitimate criticism).
Turbulence: “Now, there clearly are some people who get screwed over by (2). I don’t deny that. But that number seems small compared to the number of people who are…not as good as they think themselves to be.”
I don’t know if it seems small or not. We don’t get “Would Have Been Admitted except for AA” letters from colleges. And they understandably wouldn’t be thrilled about that.
But isn’t that part of the problem? Isn’t that part of the cost to be weighed? It has the direct effect of actually harming a number of people. It has a further indirect effect of causing lots of people to suspect that they were in the first group of people, and they can’t normally ever demonstrate one way or the other if they were. That doesn’t seem well designed.
Nous: “The consequence you are pointing to here is that Asian students aren’t getting into their *first choice* colleges, not that they are not getting into college. I hear this complaint a lot from my students. Their parents have done everything they could for them to get into Stanford or Berkeley — they’ve sent them to tutoring and to Kaplan and they’ve gotten them the best volunteer experiences they could and these top schools, (as thy see it), take lower scoring hispanics and blacks in their place. So my unfortunate Asian students instead tumble down to a school ranked in the mid 40s nationwide.” The problem with this explanation is that it applies equally well to almost qualified black and hispanic students. They aren’t being denied college entirely. They just don’t get to displace better qualified Asian students to do it.
Sebastian, normally I like and respect your writing, but this is one of the most embarrassing paragraphs I’ve ever seen you compose, bar none. It is complete horsesh1t from top to bottom that is entirely disconnected in any way from the facts of the incident and what Limbaugh actually said.
The only racial element to this story was the bare fact–absent any conclusion drawn from that fact–that the attacker was black and the victim was white. No racial epithets or political statements were uttered during the altercation. Demonstrating that the principle of stopped clocks being right twice a day is at least half-correct, Sullivan was dead-on: the assailants were bullies of the sort that exist at every school in every town, and this was the same kind of garden-variety bullying that happens every day. It’s sucks, but it’s not racism.
Despite this, Limbaugh’s reaction was:
Exactly where does Obama come into this? What connection or commonality does he share with the assailant in this incident that would prompt Limbaugh to blame Obama for this incident?
Setting aside overly broad categories like “living male human” and “citizen of the US”, there is only one significant thing shared in common between the assailants and President Obama: the color of their skin.
I defy you to explain where in that vile rant Limbaugh is trying to make a point that viewing everything through the lens of racism is stupid–or anything even close to it. That paragraph consists of nothing but an attempt to portray an ordinary school bullying incident in terms of racial conflict, emphasizing that in “Obama’s America” the “white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering”.
This isn’t open to interpretation or debate. There is no reading of the above quote that supports what you wrote in even the most strained fashion. If you believe otherwise, I invite you to explain–with direct quotes and in detail–exactly how you get from what he wrote to what you wrote. It cannot be done in the English language.
“The biggest problem with Sebastian’s analysis is that Rush is setting up a straw man.”
That isn’t a problem with the analysis. Of course he is setting up a straw man. The problem is that publius is reinforcing the strawman by accusing Rush of a baldly racist statement, when in fact that statement isn’t baldly racist.
If we want to make an argument that it is subtely racist I guess we could, but far better just to say “Ummm, no, people disagree with you for other reasons, and we say so.”
The problem is that publius and the people he quoted don’t even seem to understand the Rush quote they are talking about, and as a result they are actually reinforcing the strawman rather than acting to counter it.
I think Rush is doing both “black people/Hispanics/Democrats/liberals are the real racists” AND flat-out race baiting. All in one rant.
Hand the man a trophie.
LOL. Trophy, not trophie. Time for me to clear my head.
At the risk of committing a tu quoque offense, it really is you who do not appear to understand the Rush quote in question. I will present it here again:
Explain, please. Explain how this is not fit for gracing the encyclopedia under the entry for “race-baiting”. Explain what words in this quote constitute an argument that viewing things through the lens of racism is stupid, as opposed to being a definitive example of doing so. Explain in what way we are misunderstanding this and you are not.
“This isn’t open to interpretation or debate. There is no reading of the above quote that supports what you wrote in even the most strained fashion. If you believe otherwise, I invite you to explain–with direct quotes and in detail–exactly how you get from what he wrote to what you wrote. It cannot be done in the English language.”
First of all the “Obama’s America” thing is a direct callback to the “Reagan’s America” mass media thing that got Rush’s start in the first place. One of the big points among conservative media critics (both the legitimate and illegitimate variety) was how journalists would discover things in Reagan’s America that had existed all along and had nothing to do with Reagan. Homelessness was the prime example. The left-leaning media would discover homelessness when a Republican was president and attribute it to the badness of Reagan’s America. The problem would persist under a Democrat and lose media valence. It would be rediscovered under the next Republican and “Homelessness in Bush’s America” would be discussed. I’m not attacking or defending the idea, I’m just describing the trope.
So “Obama’s America” is a direct satiric callback to one of the most enduring tropes in Rush’s arsenal–that the mass media reports things differently under different Presidents despite underlying non-change. He’s inverting it.
As for the rest of it, did you read the full transcript I linked? Classic talk radio. Story. Argument. Story. Argument.
Story: white kid gets beat up
Argument: if I were like my detractors, who see racism in everything, clearly this would be a case where racism caused it. But in reality, my detractors are wrong, I oppose Obama for policy reasons.
Story: Kanye West humiliates Taylor Swift
Argument: If we criticize him we must be racists. Wait that is stupid, we have legitimate reasons to criticize him even though he is black.
Now, does Rush have a good argument? No. His detractors don’t just oppose him by calling him a racist. They oppose him for policy reasons!
But his whole rant is about how unfair it is to accuse someone of racism just because a black actor and a white actor disagree. His examples for that are the bus incident and the Kanye West incident. Those incidents illustrate that race isn’t the important factor, it is something else.
“The problem is that publius and the people he quoted don’t even seem to understand the Rush quote they are talking about, and as a result they are actually reinforcing the strawman rather than acting to counter it.”
That is exactly the point of publius’ post, Sebastian. We all get it and we see it for what it is. And it’s a win-win for Rush, as publius points out.
Just for grins, what is the real–the effective–counter to Rush you would have us adopt?
Sebastian, I can tell you that nerdy kids have been getting beaten up under Presidents of all ideologies, by kids of all skin colors since there were kids and schools.
Rush Limbaugh, is, as described by the Honorable Senator from Minnesota, “A big fat idiot.”
“Story: white kid gets beat up
Argument: if I were like my detractors, who see racism in everything, clearly this would be a case where racism caused it. But in reality, my detractors are wrong, I oppose Obama for policy reasons.
Story: Kanye West humiliates Taylor Swift
Argument: If we criticize him we must be racists. Wait that is stupid, we have legitimate reasons to criticize him even though he is black”
Sebastian, I think you are giving Rush’s listeners way too much credit. And I think you are giving Rush way too much credit.
Now I will agree with you on one thing. I am not necessarily going to call Rush a racist any more than you or I are racists (meaning we all are a little and some people are a lot). However, if he really wanted to make those arguements he has the ability to do so, but he doesn’t. Instead he talks in a way to make people believe the opposite, in order to gin up a response.
IOW, he is playing to the racist elements of his listeners.
“Sebastian, I can tell you that nerdy kids have been getting beaten up under Presidents of all ideologies, by kids of all skin colors since there were kids and schools.”
Precisely. And Rush knows that too. And he explicitly is using that to argue that people are overusing the race card.
Look at the Kanye West/Taylor Swift part of the transcript. It is part of the same argument and follows immediately after the discussion of the bus incident. Rush is saying that (just like the bus incident) the racial component of the two people isn’t the important part of it.
He is using the bus example to show how viewing everything through a racial/racist lens is stupid.
he swings his rant in that direction, but it’s clear he’s got a few other thoughts in his head as he goes along. this bit for example:
It’s Obama’s America, is it not? Obama’s America, white kids getting beat up on school buses now. You put your kids on a school bus, you expect safety but in Obama’s America the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, “Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on,” and, of course, everybody says the white kid deserved it, he was born a racist, he’s white. Newsweek magazine told us this. We know that white students are destroying civility on buses, white students destroying civility in classrooms all over America, white congressmen destroying civility in the House of Representatives.
that’s a pretty straightforward attack on Obama, the idea of a post-racial society, and especially on anyone who says it’s white people’s fault that race relations are where they are.
“Rush is saying that (just like the bus incident) the racial component of the two people isn’t the important part of it.”
What is the important part?
Yeah, Limbaugh is a piece of crap (too profane?) and a hypocrite, with lots of other miserable low-life traits mixed into his pathetic being — and everybody’s right when they say this was race-baiting, ascribing racial context to conduct that may or may not have had a racial component (still an open question). But racially motivated or not, Limbaugh was wrong to ascribe racial motivation where it may not exist, in a media forum where those kinds of assertions reverberate in greater amplitude than they merit.
Sort of like what Jimmy Carter said yesterday, claiming Joe Wilson’s outburst was based on racism, and that the ‘overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man.”
Jimmy Carter (who I respect for his after-office commitment to public service and good works) isn’t as bombastic or confrontational as Limbaugh, and he can play race-card solitaire, based on his own anecdotal experience, and get away with making assertions about Wilson’s character and motivation, and by association paint anyone else who impolitely objects to Obama’s policies as racist as well, and nobody on the Left blinks an eye.
The old double-standard, as usual.
chmood: “I grew up in the Deep South during segregation…and I’ve NEVER been held accountable – or blamed in any way – for the past bad acts of other white people.”
And you never heard anybody blame ‘white people’ for slavery, with the implication present day whites bare a share of the responsibility — the old guilt by color trip?
Where do you live, Smallville?
slaratibartfast: “I think they ought to have suspended some of the students who were standing around cheering. They weren’t fighting, but they were the reason for the fight.”
I think they did — but they didn’t fire the driver, who sat there and continued driving and didn’t intervene while the kid got beat up. They should fire his ass asap.
Jesurgislac says:
“White people in the US are much more likely to have ancestors who were given wealth-creating opportunities because of their race, while black people in the US are much more likely to have ancestors who were denied or turned away from wealth-creating opportunities because of their race -”
More likely? I don’t think so. The majority of white people in the US are descendants of immigrants who came here after slavery was abolished, you know, the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. They were low-skilled people who worked themselves to death in factories and sweatshops to provide better lives for their children. None of my ancestors were given wealth-creating opportunities because they were caucasian, not unless you consider lugging bricks by wheelbarrow 60 hours a week a wealth opportunity. Same for the majority of the other immigrants who came here. They thrived by the sweat of their brows, not because of the color of them.
Freelunch says: ...there are still millions of Americans who cheerfully wave the battle banner of the Confederacy. They are racists.
Do you consider Americans who wave the Stars and Stripes at rallies to protest illegal immigration racist too?
What about Americans who wear flag pins in their lapels, at Native American Indian Pow Wows? They racist also?
While this reference may or may not have been Rush’s intent, it’s irrelevant to the argument over whether or not he was race-baiting. Race was not a factor in the original incident. The police mistakenly asserted this and then quickly retracted it. The children in the incident did not bring race into it. President Obama did not bring race into it. Daily Kos and Michael Moore did not bring race into it. Rush Limbaugh did so by making the incident a key anecdote in his rant about racial strife under Barack Obama’s presidency.
Nor does whether or not he was making a historical reference change in any way the fact that he was attempting to associate Obama with this incident, an association that–as noted–only exists in skin color.
The format of the show has no relationship whatsoever to the nature of its content, racial or not. This is a red herring.
I did read the full transcript. I’m not sure why you think it helps your argument though; the whole transcript is actually more damning than the quote by itself, because it makes it even clearer that the story about the bullying incident has no place in the argument you claim he’s making–unless you are already predisposed to view black kids attacking a white kid through the lens of racial strife.
Barack Obama did not bring race into that story. Daily Kos did not bring race into that story. Not even the kids themselves brought race into it. In the chain of events and public information that led from the fight itself to Rush Limbaugh’s rant, exactly three people brought race into the story: the policeman who quickly retracted the speculation that race was a factor, Drudge by running a local story nationally with the headline “white student beaten on school bus; crowd cheers”, and Rush Limbaugh in choosing to heavily emphasize the race of the people in an incident where race was not a factor.
Put simply, the anecdote does not support his argument. I have not heard one single person attempt to blame the victim. And very nearly as one, the reaction of the left to the incident was, “why is this national news and why are people trying to turn it into a racial incident?” Again: the only way in which this incident was even remotely connected to the argument you say he’s making is the fact that the assailants were black and the victim white. And because that didn’t factor into the original incident, this is only relevant if you are already predisposed to view a conflict between a black person and a white person as a racial conflict. Limbaugh, in short, has taken a non-racial incident, framed it as black-on-white violence, and invented out of whole cloth a series of straw man liberal arguments about white man’s guilt that not one person has actually made regarding this incident.
“Do you consider Americans who wave the Stars and Stripes at rallies to protest illegal immigration racist too?”
They might be or they might not be. Are you suggesting this is the same as waving a Confederate flag, in terms of the well-understood cultural and historical implications behind that symbol?
“What about Americans who wear flag pins in their lapels, at Native American Indian Pow Wows? They racist also?”
Probably not. If they sported a vintage 7th Cavalry kepi, though, someone *might* get the wrong impression!
This isn’t open to interpretation or debate.
No, no, take it out of context, don’t quote the whole thing, it’s all right. Don’t even think. Rush is racist, that’s all you need to know.
Now, does Rush have a good argument? No. His detractors don’t just oppose him by calling him a racist. They oppose him for policy reasons!
Seb, you concede too much. The argument is absolutely valid as is perfectly clear reading many of the posts here. As I said earlier, Rush wins the thread. Even parodying the racial prism is racist. What’s next?
“Jimmy Carter (who I respect for his after-office commitment to public service and good works) isn’t as bombastic or confrontational as Limbaugh, and he can play race-card solitaire, based on his own anecdotal experience, and get away with making assertions about Wilson’s character and motivation, and by association paint anyone else who impolitely objects to Obama’s policies as racist as well, and nobody on the Left blinks an eye.”
Can we parse that bit about Obama’s policies being racist?
Seb – “The problem with this explanation is that it applies equally well to almost qualified black and hispanic students. They aren’t being denied college entirely. They just don’t get to displace better qualified Asian students to do it.”
Viewed from the perspective of qualifications and credentials this is accurate. Viewed from the perspective of classroom dynamics and critical dialogue the universities are exchanging a less diverse student body for one in which a wider range of perspectives is being represented.
Institutionally, the educational benefits of a diverse student body outweigh the educational benefit of a highly prepared but less diverse student body.
I wonder if Obama is going to come to the defense the assailants the way he did his friend Skip Gates up there at Harvard.
No doubt Sebastian will tell us that conflating a man who’s lawfully occupying his own home and people who were beating the crap our of someone, purely on the basis that all of them are black, is part of the satire. Sorry, not buying it.
I’m pretty comfortable making the following claims:
Lots of folks who listen to Rush dislike black people, period.
Rush knows that, and panders to that dislike.
Anyone care to argue to the contrary?
Stars and Stripes: Red and white horizontal stripes, blue canton in the upper left, set with stars equal to the number of states in the Union. The flag of the United States of America for 200 years and change. Symbolic, generally speaking, of democracy, liberty, and American nationalism.
Flag pins: In the context offered, a miniature representation of the flag of the United States of America, to be worn on the clothing in order to openly express patriotism and love of country.
Confederate Battle Flag: A blue saltire bordered in white on a red field, with thirteen stars set within the bars of the saltire. Used during the Civil War as a naval jack, and as the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia. Now viewed broadly as being symbolic of the Confederate States of America as a whole, an organization that attempted to split the country in half in order to preserve the institution of slavery.
One of these things is not like the others. I leave it as an exercise for the intelligent reader to identify which.
This blithering idiocy and what follows it might as well have been lifted verbatim from the 17k transcript that I did in fact read and am not in fact about to reproduce entirely in a comment. It’s written in the same “opposite day” style of sarcasm that Rush is fond of, apparently under the delusion that it contributes to making any kind of a meaningful point with clarity.
Let me know when you’re done beating up all that lethal straw and care to respond to what I actually wrote.
All quarterbacks in the NFL get either too much credit or too much blame. Every single damned one of them. Anyone who follows football knows that.
So when Limbaugh says that this is true of Donovan McNabb because he’s black, is this more of the satire that the rest of us are too obtuse to understand?
“I did read the full transcript. I’m not sure why you think it helps your argument though; the whole transcript is actually more damning than the quote by itself, because it makes it even clearer that the story about the bullying incident has no place in the argument you claim he’s making–unless you are already predisposed to view black kids attacking a white kid through the lens of racial strife.”
The whole point of his rant is that things with black and white actors in disagreement aren’t necessarily racist or even about race. Really it is all about Rush. He either feels or thinks it helps him to appear to feel put upon by people who have called him racist. The whole point of the rant is that you can fight with or oppose people from other races without race race being a major or even minor factor in the dispute.
Everything after the opening story is about that, right? Do we agree with that? So you can believe that the story is wholly unconnected to it, or you can believe it is connected to the rest of the rant. If it is connected to the rest of the rant, it makes no sense whatsoever for Rush to be saying that the incident was racially motivated. Yet if Rush is saying that the bus incident was NOT racially motivated, it fits it in very well with the rest of his rant.
So in context you want are arguing that he is offering a story which directly contradicts the latter 3/4 of his rant? You can argue that. But it isn’t obvious.
“The format of the show has no relationship whatsoever to the nature of its content, racial or not. This is a red herring.”
What are you talking about? The format of the show has quite a bit to do with it. It is a daily talk show. He takes little bits of info that have come to his attention in the last day or so and fits them into his rants. The West/Swift incident and the bus incident were recently in the news. And complaints about people complaining about him are always of interest to Rush. Combine that with a rant against the major media’s framing of things (which is THE #1 classic which gained him popularity) and you have the rant we are talking about. He talked about 2 incidents where black and white players were in conflict DESPITE the fact that racism was not a major component of the issue. He used those to defend himself against charges of racism because they illustrated that there can be non-racial reasons why black and white people come into conflict.
Yes it is a strawman argument with ridiculously heavy doses of narcissism. But it isn’t the “fear of a black planet” argument that publius and others seem to make of it.
You don’t get it, do you Sebastian? Limbaugh’s point is that he and other good white people like himself are always being called racists. Even when some poor innocent white kid is being beaten up by black thugs, it’s because he’s a racist. Even when some black guy acts in a way that anybody with eyes can see is misbehavior, he still has the get-out-of-jail-free card that anyone who criticizes him is called a racist. What’s a poor put-upon white guy to do when the whole system is stacked against him?
This blithering idiocy and what follows it might as well have been lifted verbatim from the 17k transcript that I did in fact read and am not in fact about to reproduce entirely in a comment.
O.k., putting my blithering idiocy aside, this is what you wrote:
This isn’t open to interpretation or debate. There is no reading of the above quote that supports what you wrote in even the most strained fashion. If you believe otherwise, I invite you to explain–with direct quotes and in detail–exactly how you get from what he wrote to what you wrote. It cannot be done in the English language.
and you were specifically referring to this passage:
It’s Obama’s America, is it not? Obama’s America, white kids getting beat up on school buses now. You put your kids on a school bus, you expect safety but in Obama’s America the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering[.]
And since it cannot be done in the English language . . .
Puesto que no puedo hacerlo en ingles, voy a hacerlo in espanol. Es satorico, no? Rush, en una forma satirica, es hablando como si fuera el vea todo el munde de punta de vista racita. Este pasaje es no diferente. Al fin del pasaje (despues de lo que ud. cito’) Rush clarifica su intento satirico. Es muy sencillo, en actualidad. No se por que ud. no lo puede ver. Tratalo in Espanol.
Sebastian: “Precisely. And Rush knows that too. And he explicitly is using that to argue that people are overusing the race card.”
I see nothing in the excerpts you posted that shows or implies that.
“Even when some black guy acts in a way that anybody with eyes can see is misbehavior, he still has the get-out-of-jail-free card that anyone who criticizes him is called a racist. ”
But that isn’t what he says about Kanye West/Taylor Swift incident at all. Kayne West did NOT get a get-out-of-jail free card. Kayne West was criticized without people being called a racist. Because sometimes it is about the guy being a drunk ass&@!* not about the fact that a black guy was rude to a white chick.
The point of the West story is: see it really is possible to criticize a black person and have it not be about race. Even the mainstream media knows that is possible.
bc,
The ‘satire’ is only funny/insightful if you accept the premise that ‘the left’ sees ‘everything’ through the ‘prism of race’. Otherwise, it’s just an annoying strawman. Asi de sencillo.
publius, thanks for the thread – this is fascinating (albeit completely predictable).
Fine.
“See, the MSM decided that people can criticize Kanye West without being called racist, so now everyone’s doing it. But the first time I quote Obama in my Kingfish accent, they’ll start calling me a racist again. They hate me, folks, they hate me.”
You continue to miss the point by a mile.
The fact is that Rush Limbaugh took an incident where race was not a factor, and invested it with one. In the end, whatever argument he was trying to make, noble (snicker) or not, is beside the point. The key point here is that even in the most chariable reading imaginable, Limbaugh saw an incident in which there was no racial conflict, and was inspired to manufacture paragraphs of nonexistent statements from nonexistent liberals blaming the white victim, emphasized the skin color of the participants every time they were mentioned, and used the story as a launchpad for a rant about how stupid it is to reflexively view everything through the lens of race.
In other words, Limbaugh looked at a story that was non-racial, and saw race in it based on nothing more than the fact that the assailants were black and the victims were white. There was nothing else in the entire altercation other than the incidental fact of the participants’ races that had anything at all to do with race. The very fact that he saw this incident as a useful springboard for a rant about reflexively viewing issues through the lens of race provides a clear demonstration of the lens through which Limbaugh himself views such things.
What you went on to describe is a generally accurate description of the talk radio format. It may even be an accurate description of the creative process Limbaugh uses to come up with his material.
But whether true or not, it is not in any way dispositive in the question of whether or not a given thing he says on the radio is racist, race-baiting, anti-semitic, homophobic, or unfairly portrays people who like cats and listen to electronic music. If I yell “n1gger”, it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference whether I do it on TV, talk radio, podcast, a blog, or Microsoft Exchange Web Forms, nor is it meaningful to distinguish whether I used a stream of consciousness, outlines in Word, or a goddamn button of peyote as my method for coming up with this content. The process is not the medium, and the medium is not the content.
This is an elementary error of logic.
“The point of the West story is: see it really is possible to criticize a black person and have it not be about race.”
That, *and* our President is as stupid and arrogant as Kanye West.
“But whether true or not, it is not in any way dispositive in the question of whether or not a given thing he says on the radio is racist, race-baiting, anti-semitic, homophobic, or unfairly portrays people who like cats and listen to electronic music.”
Sure. I think we could probably find actually racist things that Rush has said, and he has certainly said things that were baldly race-baiting. I don’t like the man, and wouldn’t be bothered in the slightest if I never heard from/of him again.
“The fact is that Rush Limbaugh took an incident where race was not a factor, and invested it with one. In the end, whatever argument he was trying to make, noble (snicker) or not, is beside the point. The key point here is that even in the most chariable reading imaginable, Limbaugh saw an incident in which there was no racial conflict, and was inspired to manufacture paragraphs of nonexistent statements from nonexistent liberals blaming the white victim, emphasized the skin color of the participants every time they were mentioned, and used the story as a launchpad for a rant about how stupid it is to reflexively view everything through the lens of race.”
But if the point of the story is that the bus incident was ACTUALLY about race, it undermines his whole rant. The more you believe that the story isn’t actually about race the better it works into his rant. If it were really about race, then when he analogized the criticism he gets, that would suggest that his stuff was really about race. Which is the opposite of what is rant was about.
“The process is not the medium, and the medium is not the content.”
This is a deeply artificial divide. Are sonnets really wholly divorced from the medium? Of course not. Without the structure it wouldn’t be a sonnet.
In daily talk radio, the format tilts strongly toward hooking your rants on recent news articles or things that have recently come to the public eye. So for his rant about everything being viewed through racial eyes he needed a couple of recent examples of strife between actors of different races which were NOT primarily about race.
The bus incident and the West incident have to be NOT primarily about race, or they go against his rant. If he chose events that were primarily about race, they would go AGAINST his point.
So talking about investing racial components into non-racial events doesn’t make sense. The whole point is to illustrate how silly it is to invest racial components into non-racial events. So of course he does that. He does that to illustrate how stupid it is to do that. If you posit the opposite, than his rant would tend to show that in the liberals and mainstream media were right, and surely that can’t be his point.
West did NOT get a get-out-of-jail free card. Kayne West was criticized without people being called a racist. Because sometimes it is about the guy being a drunk ass&@!* not about the fact that a black guy was rude to a white chick.
The point of the West story is: see it really is possible to criticize a black person and have it not be about race. Even the mainstream media knows that is possible.
Uh, yeah, except, see, then this happens, and when one points it out, Rush and his ilk accuse them of “playing the race card.”
You’ve already conceded that Rush is trying to delegitimize the very concept of viewing things in a racial context at all. Why do you suppose he’s doing that? Because he believes in a noble Martin Luther King-esque vision of America?
The more you believe that the story isn’t actually about race the better it works into his rant.
After the last caller points out that the police have said that there wasn’t a racial motive, Rush closes with
Thanks much with the update on the chief of police in Belleville, Illinois, saying upon further review there was no racial element in the school bus full of black students beating up a white student and cheering about it.
Rush certainly believes it is all about race. And he tells his listeners (shades of McNabb) that no matter what evidence you are presented with to suggest that it is not about race, it always is. That is the whole point of the exercise. Whether Rush “believes” it or not is beside the point.
Seb – I think that a lot of the people here are noting a convolution that you are discounting. You are reading his argument correctly, but the ‘moral’ of his gleeful little exercise in outrage is that people who try to make things be about race when they aren’t are racist.
Except that no one was doing that until he himself invented that frame, imputed it to the other side, and then attacked them for how stupid this sort of thing is. Classic strawman.
So his moral is moot in this case. He could not have made up his frame without engaging in the behavior he is busy trying to pin on his target. He’s viewing everything through a racial filter.
Yes, that’s the point of his rant. But it’s not something that anyone except him was doing in this instance. No one on the other side did the things that he was pointing to except in his imagination as he thought about how great this would go over with his audience and how he could cry foul when someone pointed this out.
“That’s a racist strawman.”
“See, I knew they would make this about race.”
Sebastian, look at the other links in publius’ post. Now, why do I get the feeling that Rush isn’t aiming his chat at *those* people, but at the *silly liberals* who imagine that anyone would criticize Obama because they feel some deep-seated racial hostility? Is it the endless, gratuitous digs at Obama, black intellectuals and black media figures in general? Is it the opening paragraph, mocking the idea that white people could be racist?
And what are we to make of this, before the first break:
“Look, this thing on the bus cannot possibly be a hate crime. The cops are probably lying about what happened even though we have the video. The video was probably doctored and edited. We all know that cops are liars, racist pigs and that the white kid deserved it. I mean that’s modern 2009 going into 2010 America.”
…except that it *was* a racial incident, and that only silly liberals would think otherwise?
Where does the sarcasm end and the seriousness begin? I would suggest that it’s awfully hard to tell.
So talking about investing racial components into non-racial events doesn’t make sense. The whole point is to illustrate how silly it is to invest racial components into non-racial events. So of course he does that.
Asi es.
The ‘satire’ is only funny/insightful if you accept the premise that ‘the left’ sees ‘everything’ through the ‘prism of race’. Otherwise, it’s just an annoying strawman. Asi de sencillo.
I disagree. I don’t think it is necessarily funny. And I don’t think that “the left” sees “everything” through a prism of race. Enough, however, has made it to my attention (cries of “racism” in response to arguments against Obama/health care reform/stimulus/ACORN etc) for the satire to be at least valid.
That Publius’ citations did not even get to the end of the transcript is an ironic manifestation of Rush’s point.
I want to follow up my previous comment by emphasizing again the relentless negativity and mockery in Rush’s portrayals of black Americans. (I’m reading the *whole* transcript here, it’s on his web site.) From the title of the piece on down, they’re all frauds and hypocrites–even when they’re the victims of fraud and hypocrisy. I cannot see how, in spite of the purported “message” of the speech, this does anything except fuel disrespect for and mistrust of blacks. Maybe someone can point out why this wouldn’t be the case.
Jay Jerome quotes me & responds:
“chmood: “I grew up in the Deep South during segregation…and I’ve NEVER been held accountable – or blamed in any way – for the past bad acts of other white people.”
And you never heard anybody blame ‘white people’ for slavery, with the implication present day whites bare a share of the responsibility — the old guilt by color trip?
Where do you live, Smallville?
Metro Atlanta.
Sure I’ve heard “white people” blamed (can we say “held accountable”?) for racism; I never felt it directed at me in any way. I had no trouble understanding which white people were responsible – or, at least, which were the authors of accountable acts who were held UNaccountable by the larger white community.
I was just a kid, back then, but I could see it happen around me. The same (white) men who made blacks nervous when they were around made ME nervous. The veiled threats, the out-loud cursing and belittling and intent to humiliate were as plain to me as they were to their authors, their targets, and any bystanders within earshot.
The Klan was active then, quite comfortable, powerful, and well-entrenched; even white people who thought themselves ‘above that sort of thing’ would not let a Negro tradesman into their home, would only speak to a black man or woman to issue instructions and evaluate performance, would not tolerate a Negro to obstruct a white on the sidewalk, and would directly confront any black person who failed to step into the street in time to avoid the insult (and yes, it was commonly held to be an significant insult. Police would be called.).
You seem to be under the impression that one day, white folks said, “Ooops!”, and all that stopped. It did not stop. It not only continues, there are today individuals ALL OVER this land who actively enjoy reminding black people AT RANDOM that they may have it good now, but the tables will turn, and they’ll all be dead. I have seen it, heard it. Not just in the south.
This is not a game played for points. Our survival as a society depends on our ability to really let all that go. Yes, blacks have a great deal they’ve had to let go of – and anyone who thinks that they have not let go of a very great deal is too ignorant to talk, and should make an effort to learn by listening, not trying to score points off the very real burdens that racial animosity put on all of us.
Taking shots at each other is a bad idea. Literally, politically, socially, no matter how good it feels, it keeps the cycle of resentment going, keeps the fire of anger alive…and that just makes everything harder, more difficult, and ultimately more dangerous for all of us.
I don’t care what the other guy did, if YOU’RE doing it, YOU should stop. Period. Playground rules don’t apply here. We all have a responsibility – day by day, day after day – to treat each other as if we were all functional human beings. We already know the alternative, we live with it every day.
In this light, well – I guess you’re either part of the solution, or you’re part of the problem.
Rush certainly believes it is all about race
maybe he’d have come to a different conclusion if the police chief had first taken the time to take the bone out of his nose first. maybe there was a miscommunication?
or maybe Rush was longing for the good old days of slavery, when the streets were safe after dark, and white kids could ride their own buses.
or maybe he wishes James Earl ray had taken out a few more of them.
or maybe he was confused and thought it was a bus full of Jesse Jacksons (who always jump for the race angle, unlike Rush).
or maybe he thought it was like an NFL bus: full of Bloods and Crips.
i could go on, but that would be an insult to the definitely non-racist Rush Limbaugh.
And another thing: in my experience and observation the incidence of “guilt by color” on a white-to-black ratio would be fewer than 1 in 1000. If that seems strange or unrealistic to you, perhaps you should turn off the computer and go out and meet people. Meet some black people. Try to learn something about your fellow-citizens first-hand.
Anybody waving a Confederate flag at an I-hate-the-black-president rally IS saying ‘nigger, your time is coming’…but oh, that plausible deniability works wonders, doesn’t it? Simply deny the obvious meanings and implications, and claim that any attempt to address the dissonance between claims and behaviors, acts & outcomes must be racially motivated. Sometimes, a “Forget, Hell!” bumper-sticker really does mean, “I’ll shoot you if I get the chance”.
Back to your spinning, boys, but you really can’t believe how transparent it really is./
Which brings us back to the subject of Brother(?) Publius’ sermon for today.
Sebastian: the “Obama’s America” phrase may well be a call-back to Reagan (emphatically *not* stipulated), but that IN NO WAY clears you to ignore the extremely inflammatory content of that segment). You seem to think that if you can dismiss that off the top, then you can sell your extreme spin on Rush’s rant.
I don’t honestly know HOW you expect to sell it, since it requires redefining or ignoring virtually everything that is recognisably Rush in the text under comment.
Anyway, you can’t toss it out; and you CAN explain why you are tone-deaf to the obvious import of Rush’s words. If you had never actually listened to him – like, ever – including the rant at hand – that would explain your seeming total innocence of what Rush does and how he does it.
Somehow, though, I can’t quite believe you’ve never listened to him. He’s fascinating, and he’s extremely good at what he does, a sort of Hannibal Lecter of the airwaves; I’ve listened to him for years (much to my cardiologist’s dismay)…and if HAVE listened to him enough to deconstruct him the way you claim to do here, then you must know that you’re just making it up to see if you can squeeze it by the dumb liberals.
Please, prove me wrong.
sebastian: I think you are taking an unrealistically favorable view of both Rush Limbaugh’s words and his intent, especially given his track record of lies, hate, and blatant racism.
It’s “paint {anyone else who impolitely objects to Obama’s policies} as racist”, not “paint anyone else who impolitely {objects to Obama’s policies as racist}”. There’s not any literal painting going on.
wonkie: The fear that angry venegeful black people will raise up and attack white people has been at the back of our national consciouness for a long time.
Yeah, and they did.
1964–Riots in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, New York City
1965–Riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles after Malcolm X killed in New York.
1967–Several dozen riots, some in Newark and Detroit, etc..
1968–Black riots all over the US after Martin Luther King, Jr. killed.
1992–massive riot in Los Angeles after Rodney King acquittal.
wonkie: “We are at a point in race relations where all kinds of kinnds of contradictory things can be true at the same time”
I totally agree with your summation.
Unfortunately we live in a time of media distortion, where almost anything and everything about race is spun dizzily out of proportion, from both left and right.
We are a contentious, divided society, and it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
Yeah, and they did.
Hey man, you forgot Nat Turner.
We are a contentious, divided society, and it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
Hey, check it out. I agree with Jay.
Nobody wants to argue against my bold claim upthread that Rush panders to racists?
All I’m hearing is crickets.
Obama’s nation, indeed.
FBI: Beating at Cracker Barrel may be hate crime
Troy Dale West Jr., of Poulan, Georgia, is facing charges including misdemeanor battery and disorderly conduct after allegedly beating Army reservist Tashawnea Hill, 35, after the two had words at the entrance of the Morrow, Georgia, restaurant the evening of September 9.
Hill, an African-American, told police that West, 47, yelled racial epithets at her as the attack took place.
“He did punch me with a closed fist repeated times. My head is still hurting today. I have knots on my head,” Hill told CNN Wednesday night, adding she also was kicked.
Police said witnesses confirmed her account.
The FBI has “initiated an investigation in the matter to determine if a civil rights violation occurred,” the agency said in a statement.
Because the alleged incident happened in full view of Hill’s 7-year-old daughter, the Clayton County district attorney’s office added a felony charge of cruelty to children.
Thanks, KCinDC. I didn’t think I was reading that right but for some reason I couldn’t muster the brain power to figure it out. 😉
The fear that angry venegeful black people will raise up and attack white people has been at the back of our national consciouness for a long time.
Yeah, and they did.
Wrong, Jerome. Unlike Haiti, the US has never had a real black ‘insurrection’. By far most of the victims of the riots you mention were black people. Some of the property destroyed was owned by outsiders, but black people didn’t rise up and burn down upper 5th Ave. in Manhattan, or Beverly Hills in CA. They mostly burned down their own neighborhoods.
My nutshell take on the dynamic is this: after slavery ended, black people had to assume that whites (being sentient beings) couldn’t be so stupid and self-destructive as to purposely delay the racism regime’s demise as long and hard as they did (it didn’t make sense), and white racists didn’t understand why blacks *didn’t* get more violent, the way they were treated – *they* would’ve done.
So here we are! Makes you proud, doesn’t it?
Russell:
“Nobody wants to argue against my bold claim upthread that Rush panders to racists?”
Well, I’m now of the opinion that Rush Limbaugh displays the subtlety of Jane Austen and the fine racial parsing of Ralph Ellison in his on-air seminars about the American condition.
And Glenn Beck is a regular Isaiah Berlin with an understated vein of Joseph Heller running through his commentary.
They are part and parcel of the long American dialogue between the voices in our heads and the voices in other people’s heads.
I’ve also come to realize that our intellectual, but misunderstood masters who gathered on the Mall last week use a higher and more pristine calculus than we do as they return home to visit their doctors for shortness of breath (from all of that ventilating and perambulating) and search through their wallets and pocketbooks for their Medicare cards.
Meanwhile, ACORN apparently has something David Vitter needs.
And the government-run subway system in D.C. apparently was inadequate for the needs and aspirations of the GALT folks spirited to their protest grounds.
They require a new spur to be built all the way to Galt Gulch in Texas.
Washington Monthly.
They are part and parcel of the long American dialogue between the voices in our heads and the voices in other people’s heads.
John Thullen wins. Not just the thread, but everything.
I was going to post something last night along the lines of John Thullen | September 17, 2009 at 09:32 AM, only not as funny and without the references I’m not familiar enough with to employ properly. But, yeah, I’m sure Rush’s audience is doing the same sort of analysis as Sebastian in accord with Rush’s expectations. Right.
I don’t think so. The majority of white people in the US are descendants of immigrants who came here after slavery was abolished, you know, the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. They were low-skilled people who worked themselves to death in factories and sweatshops to provide better lives for their children. None of my ancestors were given wealth-creating opportunities because they were caucasian, not unless you consider lugging bricks by wheelbarrow 60 hours a week a wealth opportunity. Same for the majority of the other immigrants who came here. They thrived by the sweat of their brows, not because of the color of them.
Posted by: Jay Jerome | September 16, 2009 at 05:31 PM
I just have to respond this. There is no doubt that Southern and Eastern Europeans had to struggle in the US, once migrating here. However, let’s place this ecstatic romanticism in its context. Much of the “sweat” that formed on their brow was the result of fighting to become White Men and to benefit from laws which were the result of White Supremacy. If the laws and culture identified them as White Men, they could become part of the White Supremacist regime which guided US society, and not have to suffer under the laws which viewed non-whites as “less than human” let alone, less than American. These “huddled masses” were not naïve, it would have been better to embrace the White Supremacist ideology, than to question it.
Cleek:
Are you sure that top ten list is true? Do you have any citations? Most of those I hadn’t heard before and when I googled them all I really got was a bunch of cross posting from left-wing sites.
Even the “bone in your nose” has a single citation from a Newsday article nobody has seen and was allegedly said in the 70’s before Rush had his own show.
Nobody wants to argue against my bold claim upthread that Rush panders to racists?
From this thread, I think he actually panders to those liberals who don’t attempt to even see the satire or simply can’t. I’m sure Rush gets great satisfaction from watching them dance to his tune.
Sure, there is likely some racist out there that took Rush literally. Look how many liberals do. Does the fact that racists exist mean you cannot engage in satire without pandering?
I’m not defending Rush writ large (no pun intended) but this passage seems like a ridiculous indictment on him being racist. My initial reaction was simply due to Publius, Sullivan et al not quoting, citing, or apparently even reading or listening to the relevant material.
By the way, I’m not trying to diss Sebastian, but either he has convolutions in his brain that I don’t, which is a distinct possibility, or sometimes all of us over- think things.
Sometimes a lentil is just a lentil.
John Thullen wins. Not just the thread, but everything.
What Janie said. Retire the man’s number, there is no other like him.
Thullen, come to Boston and let us buy you dinner. Bring the family.
bc,
who is worse, the person is has racist thoughts, or the one who doesn’t but just uses them to try create divisions?
And, sometimes a Czar is just a Czar.
Unless, it’s an Obama Czar, with that suspicious sounding “z” after the “c”.
My solution to too many Czars is a whole lot of Bolsheviks.
If the “z” is a problem.
Thullen, come to Boston and let us buy you dinner. Bring the family.
Seconded.
bc – you keep using that word, “satire” – I do not thin’ it means what you thin’ it means…and, like so many others, I think you understand Rush just fine – but prefer to hide behind your plausible-deniability (‘you liberals just don’t get it!’ Oh, yes, we definitely get it – and we see what you do there. It’s called BAD FAITH. Among other things.) rather than actually own the beliefs and behaviors that thrill you so deeply.
There’s a word for this “tactic”, and since you’re not good with words, let me help you on this one: What you’re feeling is cowardice – the barely-restrained passion of a coward that gets to see and hear others do and say what you haven’t the guts for.
Me? I think I’ll dress as the ACORN “pimp” this Halloween!
The ‘pro-Rush’ contributions to this thread have given way to the sound of crickets – O where art Thy strong Right-wing arms, O Limbaugh?
At home, perhaps, doing their “victory dance” where no-one can see and laugh? Or perhaps pleasuring themselves at the thought that they FINALLY GOT ACORN. Those two “undercover” morons are lucky they didn’t get their smug cartoon asses kicked clean out-of-state – just walking in dressed like that kid (“hey, looka me – I’m a peeyump!”) could have gotten them anything from a thumping to an escorted slow walk out of the neighborhood. Instead, the volunteers play along with their space-case invaders – KNOWING something is up (too obviously ridiculous to take seriously)…and are then paraded on the tube as BEING TOO CORRUPT TO WORK THERE.
Of course, a superior mentality was behind it: Andrew “wanna play with my big hollywood?” Breitbart – a master of race relations and an expert on the African-American experience. And OF COURSE the “Right” swallows the entire vaudeville routine as if it was a master’s thesis.
This belongs here because it’s part and parcel of the “Right”‘s delusion that it understands perfectly the things about which it knows nothing at all – in the current example, that would be RACE (exhibit A: Michael Steele). Rush is more clever, more ruthless, more vicious than the hapless children sent to beard ACORN in its den (and more than the imbecile whose hallmark is just this sort of tone-deaf, off-target idiocy) – but no more accurate, nor reasonable, nor compelling. In short, this nonsense will not stand up under thoughtful scrutiny by anyone who comprehends human nature.
These racists do not need parsing; they don’t need analysis. They need to be exposed to light, air, and other disinfectants, and laughed off the air every time they try these venal, contemptible, RIDICULOUS stunts.
“John Thullen wins. Not just the thread, but everything.”
John always wins, to quote Steve Stricker on Tiger Woods “We are all just taking up space in his world”. We are just taking up comment space in John Thullen’s world.
Yeah, and they did.
1964–Riots in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, New York City
1965–Riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles after Malcolm X killed in New York.
1967–Several dozen riots, some in Newark and Detroit, etc..
1968–Black riots all over the US after Martin Luther King, Jr. killed.
1992–massive riot in Los Angeles after Rodney King acquittal.
Holy smokes. You actually think those were black uprisings against white people? They were explosions of violence, driven by rage at the (white-dominant) system, but I don’t recall (note: my memory only includes the Rodney King riots, whereas I must rely on historical accounts for the other, much older – I mean, before I was born older – episodes) much actual damage to: a) whites; or b) said system.
“and white racists didn’t understand why blacks *didn’t* get more violent, the way they were treated – *they* would’ve done.”
That certainly sounds like a plausible explanation of the fear. They basically know they’ve got a beating coming (if they had been treated in such a manner, they’d be violent), and expect to get it. It doesn’t occur to them that it can be avoided.
“You’ve already conceded that Rush is trying to delegitimize the very concept of viewing things in a racial context at all. Why do you suppose he’s doing that? Because he believes in a noble Martin Luther King-esque vision of America?”
Good heavens no. I’m not defending Rush as a person or as a political force. He is doing it to defend himself, and to strawman his opposition so he doesn’t have to deal with more real objections. But strawmanning isn’t the same as “straight-up George Wallace-style race-baiting.” And in fact the reaction plays right into his hands because you’re attacking him based on a reading of the quotes that is pretty much the opposite of how they fit into his rant. You’re reinforcing the strawman. Now he can easily say something like: “See even when I talk about injecting race inappropriately into the discussion and give examples of how stupid it would be, even THEN I get called a racist”.
Nous “I think that a lot of the people here are noting a convolution that you are discounting. You are reading his argument correctly, but the ‘moral’ of his gleeful little exercise in outrage is that people who try to make things be about race when they aren’t are racist.
Except that no one was doing that until he himself invented that frame, imputed it to the other side, and then attacked them for how stupid this sort of thing is. Classic strawman.”
Absolutely. Definitely a classic strawman. Which is precisely why it is so bad to try to attack on the strawman grounds. You don’t attack him for being a racist, at least on the grounds of that statement. You say “God this man is crazy. He wants to act as if the main reason we don’t like him is because he’s a racist. But we disagree with him for this…”
One of the funny things from this thread is how much praise John Thullen gets for practicing the exact same style of ironic inversion that Rush did in the quoted piece.
As a race-baiting demagogue, Limbaugh makes the debate whether he is a racist or not moot. He is worse.
Limbaugh knows damn well what he is stirring up when he says “Obama’s America” — and so do we.
I wonder if Limbaugh talked about the issue of bullying in schools before this. I doubt it.
The MySpace girl who killed herself was white, as were the girls who taunted her.
To reduce a big societal problem like bullying to a racial issue shows Limbaugh’s true colors.
Even when I pass by him accidentally on the radio dial, I feel overwhelmed by the need to take a bath.
Chmood: “Somehow, though, I can’t quite believe you’ve never listened to him. He’s fascinating, and he’s extremely good at what he does, a sort of Hannibal Lecter of the airwaves; I’ve listened to him for years (much to my cardiologist’s dismay)…and if HAVE listened to him enough to deconstruct him the way you claim to do here, then you must know that you’re just making it up to see if you can squeeze it by the dumb liberals.”
I’ve heard him about 3 or 4 times. I find him really disturbing because he has a scary charisma about him that draws at you. The reason I can deconstruct the “Reagan’s America” thing is because he didn’t make it up, and I heard the critique on the talk radio I did listen to in high school. The rest doesn’t need much deconstruction, it is just a straight reading of the rant
it is just a straight reading of the rant
given that people here can’t agree on what Rush was saying, do you nevertheless assume that Rush’s real-time listeners heard it the way you did ?
“”Somehow, though, I can’t quite believe you’ve never listened to him. He’s fascinating, and he’s extremely good at what he does, a sort of Hannibal Lecter of the airwaves;”
I haveen’t ever heard him, except excerpts on the news. Is he even on the radio in Boston?
Race-baiting is not satire.
This is satire.
Sebastian:
That last occurred to me, too, but I’ll opt for attending dinner on a separate night from him, and Hannibal Lechter.
I’m scared of his charisma, too, and besides,
having no health insurance for my liver in Rush’s world and having my liver eaten by Hannibal Lechter makes me want a third option, the public one.
four times is probably enough, Thom.
Race-baiting is not satire
everything is satire with Rush. it’s his Get Out Of Responsibility Free card.
and just listen to him deliver that satire!
parsing the text of that is absurd. this wasn’t a prepared speech, it was an extemporaneous rant. just listen to it. he makes almost no sense in real-time – he’s just throwing out “conservative” catchphrases. and he’s baiting like a pro.
Cleek, “given that people here can’t agree on what Rush was saying, do you nevertheless assume that Rush’s real-time listeners heard it the way you did ?”
Definitely. The reading of the story as a racist example requires that it actively conflict with the rest of the rant and that it conflict with his other example. The reading of it as an example where race wasn’t actually an important factor works well with the rest of the rant and is in harmony with his other example (Kayne West/Taylor Swift).
The whole rant was not discussed until about 100 comments in here but for the most part would have been heard as a whole by the listeners.
Again, and this isn’t meant as an insult to Thullen because ironic inversion is a great tool for mockery, you all recognize and applaud the technique when Thullen uses it here against Rush.
I hypothesize that ironic inversion is generally a more effective tool when preaching to the choir than it is when attempting to seriously convince. Since you aren’t part of the choir Rush is preaching to, you don’t find it all that funny. You are a part of the choir Thullen is preaching to, so it seems deep and insightful.
The problem is that you want to read Rush’s ironic inversions as straight, and Thullen’s as ironic, but they are in fact using precisely the same mockery technique in the instances described in this thread.
Do you really think that Thullen believes: “And Glenn Beck is a regular Isaiah Berlin with an understated vein of Joseph Heller running through his commentary.”?
Would you use that quote to prove the proposition that “Thullen clearly doesn’t understand the respective contributions of Glenn Beck and Isaiah Berlin”?
Sebastian: You keep talking about “ironic inversion”, but it’s not evident at all in the transcript you posted.
And Rush Limbaugh is no John Thullen.
The problem is that you want to read Rush’s ironic inversions as straight, and Thullen’s as ironic, but they are in fact using precisely the same mockery technique in the instances described in this thread.
listen to the clip. not only does the transcript skip over a break of some kind (he comes back in with a greeting just before the “this is Obama’s America”), but it totally fails to convey his tone of voice. the text is a mere shadow of what he actually said and how he said it.
he’s not being ironic. he’s angry, and jumping from topic to topic. he’s nearly incoherent. listen to it. after hearing him deliver it, it’s really hard to think all the text you quoted is part of a large thought-out and coherent piece. it’s not. he’s just rambling.
Great bouncing cherry-flavored gummi christs, how many times does this falsehood have to be corrected before you stop arguing against the straw man you’ve set up. Nobody in this thread is reading Rush’s argument literally. We get what the hell he’s doing just fine.
The accusations that Rush is race-baiting do not depend on what argument he was or was not making.
They do not depend on whether or not the listener “gets” the argument.
They do not depend on whether his argument requires the use of an example story that is or is not race-baiting.
They do not depend on whether you take his rant a straight or ironic–and given that at least twice in this thread I’ve emphasized that, I will thank you to actually recognize the fact that this is not the origin of the problem with his rant, instead of persisting with the “you’re taking him too seriously” straw man.
The fact that this is race-baiting derives from the fact that Rush was the only person who brought race into his rant.
It sounds to you like he is trying to make the argument that reflexively viewing things through the prism of race is stupid. I think you are giving him entirely too much credit, far beyond the point of good faith: his record as a bigot and race-baiter is so extensive and documented that it beggars credibility to think that he actually believes that.
But whether that is his argument or not makes no difference. As noted upthread, Rush’s entire rant, the entire “moral” of his segment, as it were, is to point out that all of his opponents are race-baiting. He does this by rattling off a laundry list of caricatured liberal race-baiting arguments, holding them up for ridicule and implying that the opposite of these arguments is true.
The problem is that he’s the only one using those arguments. Neither the bullies nor their victim did. One policeman speculated about a racial dimension, which was immediately corrected–certainly long before Rush got on the air about it. Not one liberal blogger or pundit–and certainly not one of any significance–did this.
Rush manufactured all of those examples out of whole cloth, based on caricatures or examples that he’s used in the past. In order for it to even be possible for him to use that story in his rant, he had to engage in precisely the kind of thing he’s arguing against.
His actual argument, straight or ironic, is irrelevant. In order to make that argument at all, he had to invent racism where it did not exist before. That is the very definition of race-baiting.
Nate: “You keep talking about “ironic inversion”, but it’s not evident at all in the transcript you posted.”
So you think for example that Rush believes that criticizing Obama’s health care plan really is based in racism? You think that Rush believes that Americans created free markets to enslave her trading partners?
You think that Thullen really believes that Beck is similar Isaiah Berlin?
The technique is to promote ridicule by exaggerating and inverting your true meaning. The whole rant is “liberals will find racism in everything”. The inversion is taking things that aren’t about race and making them about race. The strawmanning is the pretense that criticism of Rush is unfairly finding racism in his non-racist statements. He deflects other criticisms by pretending that the few people who say that criticizing the health plan is grounded in racism offer the most serious criticisms of Rush. Attacking that very same rant as evidence of racism is illustrating his point.
This isn’t a defense of Rush. I loathe him. This is a defense of understanding the text you read. Attacking Rush as a racist for speaking the words that he is being attacked for is counterproductive because they weren’t racist, and because it makes it seem like he has a good point. He set a trap and you waltz right into it.
If you want to criticize him for being a charismatic windbag who misleads people all the time in ways that are dangerous to political discourse, I’m right there with you.
Hell, if that is the charge I’ll go with you on THIS rant. It inappropriately ignores real objections to Rush’s ideas and proposals and diverts attention to a hyper-sensitive pseudo-anti-racist strawman. In doing so he turns an important conversation that needs to be had on health care into a farce. He has also turned a once useful critique of the 1970s and 80s era liberal media into an overdrawn excuse to ignore reality any time it is inconvenient.
But don’t fall into his trap on this rant and attack it for being racist. That is exactly the distraction he wants.
LJ:
“bc,
who is worse, the person is has racist thoughts, or the one who doesn’t but just uses them to try create divisions?”
Both are wrong. If Rush had no point at all, sure, wrong. But he had a point.
Chmood:
“bc – you keep using that word, “satire”.”
Uh, yeah. The satire is of the human foible of ascribing racist motives to other persons, no? It is broad enough to include parody and irony, as Rush does here. What am I missing?
“rather than actually own the beliefs and behaviors that thrill you so deeply.
There’s a word for this “tactic”, and since you’re not good with words, let me help you on this one: What you’re feeling is cowardice”
Chmood: And there you go. Ascribing racist motives to me in this discussion AND calling me a coward. You prove Rush’s point. Behind the school after the bell. No guns or knives.
“See even when I talk about injecting race inappropriately into the discussion and give examples of how stupid it would be, even THEN I get called a racist”.
As just happened to me for simply pointing out the fallacy in the discussion as it started here.
“One of the funny things from this thread is how much praise John Thullen gets for practicing the exact same style of ironic inversion that Rush did in the quoted piece. ”
Amen. And I laugh with Thullen and appreciate his creativity even though I don’t often agree.
Clearly, if you use the same tools, you end up building the same thing. That’s why I get all warm and fuzzy thinking of the way Rush gently chides liberals into changing their thinking like Thullen used to do with DaveC and OCSteve.
Sebastian: He’s not doing any kind of sophisticated “ironic inversion”, he’s ranting incoherently about perceived racism of anti-racists, launching off a school bus fight that had nothing to do with race.
The chain of events looks like this, to me:
Rush Limbaugh says something dumb, hateful, and trying to whip people up about how white people are threatened by black people in “Obama’s America”.
Publius posts about how stupid and plausibly racist Rush Limbaugh’s argument is.
various commentors agree.
sebastian tries to defend Rush Limbaugh’s rant as sophisticated ironic inversion to point out the hypocrisy of liberals or something.
various commentors go “wait, what? It’s not that, it’s just a dumb and hateful rant.”
Repeat.
“His actual argument, straight or ironic, is irrelevant. In order to make that argument at all, he had to invent racism where it did not exist before.”
He’s mad because he feels (or perhaps wants to look like he is mad because he feels) that he is being attacked as a racist. (Which btw I strongly suspect he is).
He defends against it by deflection. He says that it is stupid to impute race into disagreements where it isn’t pertinent. His examples are the Kayne West incident and the bus incident.
Focus on the West incident. Do you agree that the Kayne West incident fits this?
Is talking about that incident in that way, race baiting? Or is it an example of pointing out how inappropriately injecting race into the discussion wouldn’t help?
He is DEFINITELY strawmanning by pretending that is the most important objection to who Rush is and what he does. But that isn’t the same as race baiting, at least in this example.
Well, Rush is paid better for his deep insights.
I’ll add that the discourse would be improved if Sebastian’s reading of Rush Limbaugh was first, correct, and second, shared by many more of Limbaugh’s troops.
But Sebastian is the first Limbaugh listener (by which I mean he listens sometimes) I’ve encountered (limited sure, but quite a few family, friends and acquaintances) who doesn’t and wouldn’t turn off the radio and engage in some sotto voiced (if in mixed company) disparagement of black people and black history in this country.
I’ve heard it enough to know.
It would be truly ironic if Rush doesn’t know that.
Plus, if he wants to engage in irony, he needs a gig on NPR, since irony is an elitist tactic, so I’m told.
Catsy:
Nobody in this thread is reading Rush’s argument literally. We get what the hell he’s doing just fine.
Sure, now. But not at the beginning. Full context was not provided. It appeared to me that everyone was reading it literally.
He does this by rattling off a laundry list of caricatured liberal race-baiting arguments, holding them up for ridicule and implying that the opposite of these arguments is true.
The problem is that he’s the only one using those arguments.
Sure they are caricatured. Caricature is part of satire. Isn’t that the point? If you take it literally, sure it sounds racist. That’s the point.
The problem is that he’s the only one using those arguments. Neither the bullies nor their victim did.
Exactly. I’m not seeing your point. I read (and hear) Rush as criticizing the “left’s” attack (by implying racism) on the “right” for the “right’s” criticism of OTHER issues, including but not limited to Obama, stimulus, etc. You seem to be reading Rush as overtly saying that the bus incident was racist. That was parody.
I don’t see how any of this refutes the point you quoted–that in order to use the bus story in his argument at all, he had to invent racism where it did not exist. That is the very heart of what race-baiting is.
Go back and read or listen to that entire segment again. Listen to all of the “ironic” caricatures of liberal race-baiting he rattles off in trying to make his point.
Have you seen any liberal pundits, bloggers, politicians, or anyone else of note actually making those arguments about the bus incident? Have you heard any liberal saying that the white kid was racist and had it coming, or anything like that?
Of course you haven’t. There might be a random commenter on Daily Kos you can dig up, but we have a word for that: nutpicking. I will guarantee you that no one of any importance has actually provided an example anything like the ones that Rush ginned up.
And that’s the whole point. His argument doesn’t matter. The problem is that in order to make that argument possible, he had to invent race-baiting arguments to caricature, or else he would’ve had no examples of the thing he’s actually arguing against. And that, in and of itself–crying “racism!” when it is not actually there–is the very definition of race-baiting.
I’ve tried explaining this at least three times using different words. I remain mystified as to why you refuse to engage this argument, instead of the one you wish I was making.
Yes, because there actually were a handful of people who suggested that it had a racial angle to it–which is why I have not even once claimed that Rush’s use of that example was inappropriate. I’m not going to focus on the example that’s favorable to your argument while ignoring the one which undermines it.
Sebastian, for as many times as you want to type “ironic inversion,” what Limbaugh is really doing here is the equivalent of a jock, surrounded by all his jock buddies, calling someone in the marching band a faggot, then following up with a “Just kidding,” while winking to his friends so they know that, yeah, he thinks the kid really is a faggot.
Picking up on what Phil said, I’ve always looked at Limbaugh as a shock jock and, in that vein, a talented one.
I don’t think he can have it both ways — shock jock and social commentator.
To be a social commentator, I think an ounce of humanity is needed.
“Yes, because there actually were a handful of people who suggested that it had a racial angle to it–which is why I have not even once claimed that Rush’s use of that example was inappropriate. I’m not going to focus on the example that’s favorable to your argument while ignoring the one which undermines it.”
I actually haven’t encountered much of a racial angle to the West incident, though I kinda see how it would go (I think I alluded to the race/gender/class differences that would likely be different if he tried that stunt with a big male rap artist instead of a young female country artist). But Rush certainly isn’t quoting or using any of those actual examples. He is using it as an example of something that obviously doesn’t have much of a racial valence and saying how stupid people would be if they injected such a racial valence into it.
“I’m not going to focus on the example that’s favorable to your argument while ignoring the one which undermines it.”
The problem with this approach is that the West example is part of the context. By ignoring the context you ignore the fact that your interpretation doesn’t fit with the rest of the context. Now contextualizing can certainly be overdone, and maybe I’m guilty of it. But in this particular case I don’t think so.
When the discussion is about race, and the accusation is race-baiting, the argument he was making absolutely does matter.
The argument he was making was about liberals accusing HIM of racism which he claimed was sparked because of HIS opposition to Obama’s health care. (Yes I believe that Rush believes it is all about himself). Yes this is a strawman. But so far we are definitely not at race baiting. Democrat-baiting perhaps, and it seems to have worked really well.
He then uses a very well worn technique when preaching to the choir of parodying the strawman view by exaggeration. See Thullen.
He chooses 2 very recent examples where race did not in fact play a big role, but where the actors on either side were from different races. He uses these to support the argument that HE isn’t a racist because of disagreeing with a black man.
Yes it is a stupid argument. Yes it is a straw man deflection. Clearly just because some people aren’t racist and some situations aren’t racist doesn’t mean that Rush isn’t. But that is where the logical craziness lies in his rant.
But he uses TWO examples with respect to his argument. BOTH carry the same lesson–that if you take the arguments of what he would think of as race obssessed liberals seriously, you should take these non-racially-valent issues as if they were racially-valent.
Now if you want to say that this was liberal-media baiting (and strawmanning) I’d agree. But this makes no sense considering the argument “he had to invent race-baiting arguments to caricature, or else he would’ve had no examples of the thing he’s actually arguing against.” Of course he had to invent it. If he used cases with real racial valence, it would completely defeat his point. Then the inference would be “oh, Rush does oppose national health care because he is a racist.”
Which I’m pretty sure Rush wasn’t trying to say.
I guess you can object to the use of ironic exaggeration as a tactic in general. Or say that if you ever use it while talking about race it almost has to be race baiting.
I guess my general concept is that even though Rush is racist, not everything he says about race is race-baiting. This particular case was attacking his very favorite target, “THE LIBERAL MEDIA”.
The nice thing about that in this case is it opens up perfectly good avenues to attack him. If you point out that for the most part the liberal media is not saying that he opposes health care because Obama is black, we can get somewhere. Or maybe respond with “Name them, and lets talk about how important they are” (of course Jimmy Carter–again–didn’t do you any favors on that count). If you point out that quite a few of the protestors really did seem to have racist slogans, you can get somewhere. But reacting with “OMG this shows he is racist” doesn’t.
I think this particular rant and rants of its type are bad because of the ways that it demonizes people who disagree with Rush and in the way that it falsely plays for sympathy. These are indeed bad things for the political climate.
But on this particular one, calling it race baiting isn’t right, and isn’t really central to why this rant is bad (in a moral sense–as icky entertainment I’m sure it scores well).
If you want to criticize him for being a charismatic windbag who misleads people all the time in ways that are dangerous to political discourse, I’m right there with you.
With the “charismatic” part excluded, I criticize him for all of that.
But there is a part you left out which is relevant to this discussion.
In addition to all of the above, Limbaugh panders to racists. And for “pander” please feel free to include all readings ranging from “encourages”, to “gives satisfaction to”, to “acts as pimp for”.
He’s just giving the people what they want. It’s what he gets paid for.
But you sounded like you meant it.
“In addition to all of the above, Limbaugh panders to racists. And for “pander” please feel free to include all readings ranging from “encourages”, to “gives satisfaction to”, to “acts as pimp for”.”
I believe that too. So lets use better examples when talking about it.
Is ironic inversion like a double negative, where if you do it twice, it stops being ironic? Or if not, how many times can you ironically invert something before it’s indistinguishable from reality? Maybe Rush Limbaugh was using advanced Irony Techniques that we can’t see because we’re not as high level as Sebastian?
We know it was a parody. Does the parody prove you are in fact a racist? Does it suggest it?
So, because Rush is trying to say “Look at how poor, not-racist me gets put down as a racist because of my views, which have nothing to do with racism, by mean liberals always trying to see racism where it doesn’t exist” in such a way that allows him to say all sorts of racist things on the radio to a largely racist audience, one cannot conclude that he is race-baiting. Right?
His argument boils down to “They’re always playing the race card with me.” Of course, that’s not an argument a racist would ever make, though. And it’s one often made by non-racists, whom no one bothers to call racist because they don’t act like racists. Right?
No.
People call Rush a racist because he acts like one. He reacts by accusing them of playing the race card. He does so in such a way that further reveals his racism twice over – once in that he says things that will clearly get other racists all worked up, and twice in that he doth protest too much.
There is nothing in the above that I can see as being in conflict with Sebastian’s reading of Rush’s statements, but it still makes Rush seem very much like a racist to me.
We know it was a parody.
actually, we don’t. you insist it is, but i don’t think everyone agrees.
I once did a triple ironic inversion with a kip at the end.
Threw my hip out.
We know it was a parody.
Saying the word nigger is a parody of the people who think you’re the kind of person who says the word nigger. At least that’s the logic we’re dealing with.
Close!
Close!
Sorry, I don’t speak Italic.
If Limbaugh his being ‘ironic’, then his argument, as I understand it boils down to the following parallel:
Hypothetically, black racists might attack boys on buses or support this, but in fact this attack was not driven by racism
Therefore, while hypothetically white racists might be opposing Obama’s policies, in fact their opposition was not driven by racism.
Now if he used this argument it would have all kind of evidential flaws, but it’s at least an argument that can be engaged with.
The problem is that Limbaugh doesn’t say that hypothetically black racists might support beating up white children. He implies that black racists are actually saying such things, he throws in the suggestion that Newsweek supports such behaviour. So he is deliberately trying to mislead people about facts. And that does make it race-baiting. If you are going to talk about a hypothetical situation, if you are going to be responsible, you need to make it damn clear to your audience that it is a hypothetical situation e.g. ‘Suppose that someone said’.
Why was my post deleted? I was making a point, not spewing racism. The mere mention> of the word nigger gets the thread purged? Chmood mentioned the word too, nobody deleted him. If Hilzoy were around she could explain to you dumbasses the difference between using a word and mentioning it.
These italics be fucked up.
Thom, are you familiar with the word “gratuitous?”
It’s from the latin gratis, right?
Thom – as in ‘gratuity’, a tip. So take a tip & quit while you’re behind.
Sebastian: If you have spent so little time listening to and learning from the brightest ‘conservative’ light since George Wallace, I decline to be tutored by you in his methods. By your own admission, you are nowhere near as familiar with them as you would need to be.
If your analysis is not in fact a deliberate deception for the purpose of scoring points, then I respectfully suggest you need a much better – and more plausible – analysis.
If it helps, remember that the owls are not what they seem.
Another amusing satire from Limbaugh today.
Not this shit again. Get a life, troll.
go away, troll.
Cleek:Are you sure that top ten list is true? Do you have any citations? Most of those I hadn’t heard before and when I googled them all I really got was a bunch of cross posting from left-wing sites.
a bunch of those are sourced here. two of them are disputed (James Earl Ray and the “slavery” one).
but that list also includes such gems as:
“They oughtta change Black History Month to Black Progress Month and start measuring it. ”
and
“The NAACP should have riot rehearsal. They should get a liquor store and practice robberies. ”
We know it was a parody. Does the parody prove you are in fact a racist? Does it suggest it?
Was it “parody” when he sang “Obama the Magical Negro” (and, no, Rush, just because someone else created it doesn’t mean you can use it. “members of the club”, nu?). Maybe it was irony so deep you need the Trieste to see it? Whatever.
Cleek:
Most if not all should be disputed. Those aren’t sources. I don’t know whether or not he said any of those things on your original top ten list other than the Darfur quote and the McNabb quote, but I wouldn’t believe he did just from those “sources.”
Google them like I said and you get a bunch of left-wing sites recirculating the quotes. Snopes notes on the “bone” and “Jackson” quotes that the support is almost purely anecdotal, and this about statements allegedly said in the 70’s and only surfacing allegedly in the 90’s. Can you say urban legend? And statements while he was a shock jock under a pseudonym no less. Snopes “he’s never denied” standard leaves a lot to be deserved.
But if a lot of people believe he actually said these things after reading them on Kos, I understand the animosity.
Those aren’t sources.
LA Times
Chi- Sun Times
CBS Sportline
LA Weekly
yes, and Snopes
if Rush is apparently so concerned about being labeled a racist, wouldn’t he have made those places cough up some pretty big retractions for inventing such horrible quotes? that NAACP quote is 9 years old. he wouldn’t have made even a small noise about it by now ? yeah right.
what does Rush love more than negative attention from the liberal media ? and to go after a big juicy target like one of those, and win? he’d die from glee. (and not that crappy show, either)
And statements while he was a shock jock under a pseudonym no less.
pseudonyms absolve you of racism ?
Yep, it’s those liberals who see everything through the lens of race. Not good conservatives like Glenn McCoy.
Rush Limbaugh is a bully. The people who defend him have the same relationship with Rush that the hangers-on have to the classroom or school bus bully. He’s there to do their bullying for them so they don’t have to think of themselves as being bullies. Of course part of the repsonsiblity avoidance is to rationalize away the things Rush says. I can remember having this conversation with Charles Bird who claimed that Rush was funny but also claimed that there was nothing wrong with finding humor in degrading, dehumanizing eliminationist rhetoric directed toward people like hilzoy.
Changing the subject is another way to aviod the responsibility for supporting a bully. The post that started this thread was about Limbaugh linking a bus icident to Obama. Of course there is no real link. The debates on affirmative action and wehtere or not the bus inncident was really racial ( I think it probably was) are irrelevant. This linakage–Obama as Prex equals upsurge of racially motivagted black attacks on whites–is classic Limbaugh, exactly the sort of infammatgory self-pitying intellectually dishonest propaganda intented to demonize the Other in the eys of those who wish to to fill themelseves with feelings of selfrighteous rage. SOme people need their Five Minutes Hate. Some people need more hate than that. They can get their hate fix from Rush. That’s what’s being excused here.
LA Times
Chi- Sun Times
CBS Sportline
LA Weekly
yes, and Snopes
Cleek: My point is that they are mostly repeating the quotes without attribution. That isn’t the same thing as “Rush was interviewed for this story” or citing the air date or such. I think a lot of these are made up.
There’s enough ammo to not have to resort to unverified “quotes.” That’s my point.
His numbers went down during Gatesgate because he called the police stupid. The police is holy in the United States.
Newspapers routinely publish things they know to be false. Their usual standard of “accuracy” for sources is that they accurately relate what the particular person they chose to quote had to say.
Accurately, in this context, means that the source can’t prove the newspaper got it wrong. Which is why it’s a really good policy to make your own recording of any interview with a journalist, by the way.
You really have to watch closely, to determine whether the paper is asserting that A is true, or is asserting that somebody said A is true. Only in the former case will many newspapers feel even the slightest concern over objective truth. In the latter case they believe their obligation ends at getting the quote right, and figure how they they picked the person they’d quote is their business.
Yes, I have a rather low opinion of the newspaper industry. Years ago I viewed trying to get newspapers to issue corrections on errors that supported their editorial policies as an amusing hobby. It taught me a lot about the industry.
Ask the LA Times and so forth to produce their evidence. Betcha they can’t.
Do you have a high opinion of anyone, Brett?
Newspapers routinely publish things they know to be false. Their usual standard of “accuracy” for sources is that they accurately relate what the particular person they chose to quote had to say.
*marks this comment with a white stone*
I think this is the first time in I don’t know how long that Brett’s actually said something I wholeheartedly agree with.
(Just stop there, Brett, because I expect we won’t agree if you go on…)
i stand by the notion that Limbaugh would’ve happily sued any of these companies if he thought he was being libeled.
I stand by the notion that Limbaugh believes that any publicity at all is good publicity.
I agree with Brett, too, regarding newspapers, but I’ll extend the criticism to all of the media.
What’s curious is how the internet and its tens of millions of self-appointed nattering nabobombudsmen have failed to improve the situation.
Instead, the media, imperfect to begin with, followed their audience down the rat hole.
A business will follow its customers anywhere they want to take it.
LJ:
“Do you have a high opinion of anyone, Brett?”
Well, look, if you signed on with Harry Browne and HE disappointed, wouldn’t the entire human race kind of lose its luster?
I stand by the notion that Limbaugh believes that any publicity at all is good publicity.
i agree.
but, what started this whole topic is that Rush is allegedly upset about being called a racist, when Obama is the real racist (wahhh).
so, sometimes Rush is OK with being called a racist, and sometimes he isn’t. fair enough. he contains multitudes.
“What’s curious is how the internet and its tens of millions of self-appointed nattering nabobombudsmen have failed to improve the situation.”
The great last hope of civil disagreement wrapped in the most polarizing reality in history…
not to be too over the top.