The question isn’t so much “why is the President losing ground on healthcare”; socialized healthcare is a dumb idea, and most Americans (especially those of us who’ll be paying for it and losing from it) know it.  It was the shoal that the liberal Bill Clinton of 1992-1993 ran up on; it’ll be proof that the Obama administration is only human, too:

Pluralities now say that the president’s health care plan is a bad idea, and that it will result in the quality of their care getting worse. What’s more, just four in 10 approve of his handling on the issue.The poll also finds that Obama’s overall job-approval rating has dropped to 53 percent. And it shows a public that has grown increasingly concerned about the federal government’s spending as the administration defends its $787 billion economic stimulus and supports a $1 trillion-plus health-care bill.

No, the question is this:  Given that grassroots support for socialized medicine is falling faster than Nancy Pelosi’s jawline, the question is, how does this lack of support make middle-America racist?

A year ago, Obama was being hailed as a “light worker”, the salvor of our nation’s soul; a man, but not just a man.

Today, of course, his poll numbers are gratifyingly human:

The nation is close to evenly split in its assessment of the president’s policies to date, and there is great intensity on both sides of the debate with dwindling numbers in the middle.Those are the chief findings of the latest NPR poll of 850 registered voters conducted nationwide Wednesday through Sunday by a bipartisan team. The pollsters found 53 percent approving of the president’s handling of his job, while 42 percent disapproved — the narrowest gap of the Obama presidency to date. Most of the approving group said they approved strongly, and an even greater majority of the disapproving group said they disapproved strongly.

Poll respondents liked a Democratic statement on solving health care problems better than a Republican statement (51 percent to 42 percent). However, when asked about the plan now moving through Congress, a plurality of 47 percent was opposed and 42 percent said they were in favor, based on what they had heard about the plan so far.

Presidential poll numbers are the most fungible transient asset in American politics, of course; Ronald Reagan’s numbers were abysmal in 1982, but jumped enough to give him re-election in 1984 and a Republican house of Congress in 1986.  So don’t start writing Obama’s political epitaph yet.

Because poll numbers aren’t forever.

I’m not so much saying this to the Republican and Conservative readers, though.  It’s not them I’m worried about.

No, it’s the readers on the left that concerned me.  Because while poll numbers change with the breeze, hatred just smolders on; Eric Kleefeld is finding racists under rocks.

He addresses the “racism” between the lines (it must be between the lines) from, in this case, Rush Limbaugh (with commentary inset):

So let’s take a look at some of those recent racially-charged attacks that have circulated against Obama, both right before and after the Gates incident.

• Above all others, the real celebrity here has been Rush Limbaugh. He’s done this kind of thing before — remember the “Barack, The Magic Negro” song? [which, while un-PC, was a takeoff on a line by a liberal commentator; certainly not a commentary on Limbaugh’s approach to race – Ed.] But in the wake of the Gates incident, he’s managed to become even more hard-edged about it. “Here you have a black president trying to destroy a white policeman,” Limbaugh declared this past Friday. [which would have been pretty below-the-belt, had it not been for the fact that that’s exactly how Gates played it – as a racial issue- Ed.] Yesterday, he shared a dream he’s had about the dangers to capitalism: “I had a dream that I was a slave building a sphinx in a desert that looked like Obama.” [Remember when dissent was the highest virtue?  Now, it’s apparently “racist”- Ed.] And he joked that food-safety advocates will go after all the unhealthy foods people like to eat, one by one — but they’ll have to wait until Obama is out of office to ban Oreos. [I suppose it would have been safer to say “Starbucks” or “Volvo” or “Patagonia”…- Ed.]

How much intellectual seed corn is the left willing to burn to prop up The One?  Poll numbers come and go,  but assaults on the integrity of half of ones’ fellow countrymen – defamatory, specious, intellectually vacuous attacks, of course – are gifts that just keep on giving.

Last week, Webster School in Saint Paul voted to change its name to “Barack and Michelle Obama Service Learning Elementary School”.

Do I roll my eyes and shake my head when my local school district subscribes to a personality cult for a president that’s been in office just a skosh over three months?  Of course.  Indeed, it strikes me as the kind of second-hand hubris (I don’t know a better term for “participating in others’ hubris”) that I can see people looking back on in, say, five years, shaking their heads, and saying “well, maybe we were a bit rash…”

But the real problem is  Ain this thread, on E-“Democracy’s” Saint Paul forum.  Saint Paul school board member Ann Carroll chimes in later in the conversation:

Now just hold on here a minute! Some of the posts on this topic are veering
way too close to racist comments, which is not tolerated on either this
Issues Forum or by SPPS.

“Racist comments?”

Read the thread.  Before Carroll chimed in, one commenter (Gary Fishbach, friend of this blog and a noted Highland Park Republican) dropped a couple of pleas for fiscal sanity.  A couple of DFLers responded.

And then Carroll cried “Racism”.

You’ll examine the thread, as I did, in vain for the faintest sign of racism…

…unless you believe, as Carroll seems to, that criticizing the name change, for any reason, is itself racist.

I’ll be asking Ann Carroll for comment.

The name change is just plain dumb – although not, perhaps, as disturbing as the curriculum change.  “Service Learning” is education establishment shorthand for “shanghaiing students into serving as free labor for non-profits”. Like so much that passes for normal in the Saint Paul and Minneapolis public schools, it’s got very little to do with education, but much with paying chits to the educational establishment’s supporters, and making sure future generations get healthy doses of koolaid at an early age.

Mona Charen takes down the Congressional Black [Liberal] Caucus’ trip to Havana.

It’s a long, detailed beat-down, full of juxtapositions like…:

In finest useful-idiot fashion, Representative Rush said this of 77-year-old Raul Castro, who has served Fidel throughout the 50-year totalitarian siege of the island: “I think that what really surprised me, but also endeared me to him,” he told the Los Angeles Times, “was his keen sense of humor, his sense of history and his basic human qualities. I intend to do everything that I can when we get back to the States to make sure that normalization with our relationship with Cuba is given proper consideration both within the House of Representatives and the neighborhoods of America.”

Here’s the Black Book of Communism again on treatment of prisoners in Cuba:

The violence of the prison regime affected both political prisoners and common criminals. Violence began with the interrogations conducted by the Departamento Tecnico de Investigaciones (DTI). The DTI used solitary confinement and played on the phobias of the detainees: one woman who was afraid of insects was locked in a cell infested with cockroaches. The DTI also used physical violence. Prisoners were forced to climb a staircase wearing shoes filled with lead and were then thrown back down the stairs. Psychological torture was also used, often observed by a medical team. . . . The children of detainees were banned from higher education, and spouses were often fired from their jobs.

Please, Democrats. Keep these hamsters out front.  Thanks.

David Horowitz on the importance of the events of the past two days – the Inauguration and the Martin Luther King holiday before it – to conservatives:

 …In order to do [observe and celebrate the events] as conservatives — as conservatives who have been through the culture wars — we need to get past the mixed feelings we will inevitably have as the nation marks its progress in moving away from the racial divisions and divisiveness of the past. These feelings come not from resistance to the change, but from the knowledge that this celebration should have taken place decades ago and that its delay was not least because our opponents saw political advantage in playing the race card against us and making us its slandered targets.

 

If we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday at a time of presidential inaugurals, this is thanks to Ronald Reagan who created the holiday, and not to the Democratic Congress of the Carter years, which rejected it. If Americans now have accepted an African American to lead their country in war and peace that is in part because an hysterically maligned Republican made two African Americans his secretaries of state. And if, after the passage of the Civil Rights Acts, race has continued to be a divisive factor in our politics over the last 40 years that is because the generation of Sharpton and Jackson and their liberal supporters have made it so. What conservatives need to recognize in getting past these feelings (and therefore to celebrate) is that because of this political reality, it is only they themselves who could end it.

Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.

On November 4th, many of America’s hardest workers and most loyal Democrats are going to punch out, head to the polls and vote.

…for John McCain.

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio — You just knew that when Joe O’Connell, former head of the local AFL-CIO, got on stage here with John McCain and Sarah Palin things were not going smoothly for the Obama campaign among union voters.

“I am a lifelong Democrat, an intelligent Democrat, who is supporting John McCain,” O’Connell said last week as a crowd of 7,000 waved “Another Democrat for John McCain” signs and roared its approval.

Ladies and Gentlemen, that’s a seven with three zeros behind it. And why exactly are they leaving the DNC at the bottom of their lockers?

Race?

Oh oh.

(Pennsylvania AFL-CIO President Bill George) narrows the problem down to race. “There is no question, earlier in the primary campaign the racial issue was there, just like the gender issue was with Hillary for some unions,” he says.

“We in America like to think we don’t have any hang-ups or stereotypes. But because of our history and because of a lot of industrial psychology controlling the masses, people have innate prejudices.”

Did he just call his membership a bunch of racists? A history of racism?

George says that the mind-set of some people in the labor movement regarding race is no different than it is in church groups, or in the Republican Party.

Oh, scratch that. Union members, Republicans and the Spiritually Inclined are all racists. Gotcha.

Joe Rugola is George’s counterpart in Ohio and he, too, is seeing a problem with race and his members. Yet he also sees another dynamic going on — a respect among union members for McCain.

Might this be a little closer to the truth? Respect for McCain? And…huh? Because of their conservative values? Bam!

Stricker says that other than people not voting for a black candidate, a couple of factors — such as Obama’s cultural style and pro-choice stand — do not sit well with culturally conservative union members.

I’m not sure what the euphemism “cultural style” [Kevin Nealon]reverendwrightarrogantelitist[end Kevin Nealon] represents. But sadly Obama’s race is apparently an issue with some Americans, to an extent probably not reflected in the polls.

Side note: I think we can all agree that if Obama loses his bid solely due to his race it will be a sad day in America.

Whether the issue is abortion, race or “cultural style”, the Democrats are running scared in Pennsylvania and Ohio.

“It’s a problem,” George admits, “but we are in an all-out effort to educate our members that the Democratic Party is the only one for working families.”

Democrats count on unions for get-out-the-vote efforts and for the support of members and their families. Without them, states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio — which each have about 740,000 workers who belong to unions, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — would move into the Republican column.

Obama’s handlers have been heard to say that they can win without Ohio. But Ohio and Pennsylvania? Not so much…not to mention the East Coast Effect that could have on voters on election night.

…and Joe Biden, thought to be the key to securing these very voters, the “Energizer Bunny Mouth” isn’t helping much either.

Is this the beginning of the end for Obama?

It’s tempting to look at the new AP-Yahoo poll and have a chuckle. It’d be a bad idea.

The poll – which shows that a third of Democrats have issues with black people…:

Deep-seated racial misgivings could cost Barack Obama the White House if the election is close, according to an AP-Yahoo News poll that found one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks — many calling them “lazy,” “violent,” responsible for their own troubles.

The poll, conducted with Stanford University, suggests that the percentage of voters who may turn away from Obama because of his race could easily be larger than the final difference between the candidates in 2004 — about two and one-half percentage points.

…which, in fact, jibes closely with my own observations; Democrats have been among the most corrosively and casually racist people I’ve met in the past twenty years. Anecdotally, I’ve found mainstream Democrats to far more casual and blase about having racist attitudes than mainstream Republicans.

Still, the number is pretty daunting:

40 percent of all white Americans hold at least a partly negative view toward blacks, and that includes many Democrats and independents.

Hm.

But as with all polls and studies, you have ask – where did they get the numbers?

And why?

More than a third of all white Democrats and independents — voters Obama can’t win the White House without — agreed with at least one negative adjective about blacks, according to the survey, and they are significantly less likely to vote for Obama than those who don’t have such views.

“Agreeing with a negative adjective” is racism? Because being loud, violent and responsible for their own troubles describes perceptions of a lot of groups – American teenagers of all races, Harley-Davidson riders, The Real World contestants and on and on.

Such numbers are a harsh dose of reality in a campaign for the history books. Obama, the first black candidate with a serious shot at the presidency, accepted the Democratic nomination on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, a seminal moment for a nation that enshrined slavery in its Constitution.

“There are a lot fewer bigots than there were 50 years ago, but that doesn’t mean there’s only a few bigots,” said Stanford political scientist Paul Sniderman who helped analyze the exhaustive survey.

Yep. There are. Some of them wear wifebeaters and drive pickups with confederate flags. Other bigots wear suits and work at networks.

Obama’s weakness in polling outside of his key demographics – Afro-Americans and people in state capitols and university towns – has been troubling his campaign since well into the primaries. It shadowed his performance in the primaries, and it dogged him even before Mac picked Palin as his running mate, in large part, I’d like to think, to exploit this very weakness (and to highlight Democrat bigotry on gender in the process).

The pollsters set out to determine why Obama is locked in a close race with McCain even as the political landscape seems to favor Democrats. President Bush’s unpopularity, the Iraq war and a national sense of economic hard times cut against GOP candidates, as does that fact that Democratic voters outnumber Republicans.

The findings suggest that Obama’s problem is close to home — among his fellow Democrats, particularly non-Hispanic white voters. Just seven in 10 people who call themselves Democrats support Obama, compared to the 85 percent of self-identified Republicans who back McCain.

So why are we hearing this?

Because “some Americans are bigots” is news? Please.

I suspect this is “news” because the Tics’ leadership is building a firebreak in case Mac – still a decided underdog – upsets The One in the general election.

In 2000, the Dems blamed their loss on perfidy in Florida. In 2004, they blamed (and still blame) the Swift Boat Vets for…I dunno, telling the truth about their impeccably weak candidate.

But The One isn’t weak (other than being a half-term Senator with no executive experience, but that didn’t become an issue to Democrats until Palin’s nomination); he’s been a juggernaut, a phenomenon. He should, says the Tic conventional wisdom, win in a landslide against a GOP that’s staggering from four really tough years.

And yet it’s not breaking that way.

And it seems to some in the Democratic part it’s better to undermine the system and slime the voter than to admit – should The One lose – that they fielded yet another weak candidate, hobbled by policies left over from the late sixties that most Americans reject long before they reject someone’s skin color.

Bonus question: do you think bigotry would be an issue for a black conservative running for President?

To:  Jack Cafferty, inexplicable pundit
From:  Mitch Berg. common citizen

Re:  Racism

Mr. Cafferty – let me ask you this:  If a political party nominates a black person who believes in nothing I believe in, supports no policies I support, and shows active contempt for a good part of this nation (a part where I grew up, by the way), and is utterly unqualified for office, and I don’t vote for him for those reasons, am I a racist?

I look forward to your answer.

That is all.

Mitch Berg

PS:  You were much better with the Beaver Brown Band.

The Associated Press states the bleeding obvious; the GOP isn’t real stacked with minorities. 

The Republican National Convention showcased a Native American color guard, a black preacher and video footage of civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks, all part of its effort to present the GOP as a picture of diversity. What it hasn’t offered is many minorities speaking from the podium in prime time, or sitting among the delegates.

Well, tell me about it!  Here in the Fourth District, we realize the GOP’s shortcomings at reaching out to the Afro/Latin/Somali/Hmong American communities.  It’s a challenge the GOP needs to meet. 

But I think it’s worth noting that as “white” as the GOP’s body of delegates may have been, it was a lot more diverse than the clots of protesters outside, who were as close to universally white as anything this side of a Klan rally.

Just saying.

Bob Collins on the DFL’s potemkin DNC delegation.

It’s very, very “diverse” (in terms of color and orientation, anyway; ideology, not so much, but then it is a convention delegation.  Although it might be mistaken for a small university’s English department).  Much moreso, indeed, than the state it purports to represent:

You get the picture, but is it a picture of Minnesota? “It’s a good picture of the state of Minnesota,” Gilbert-Pederson said.Several speakers noted the Minnesota stereotype; we’re pretty white and the DFL delegation is meant to explode that stereotype.

But the statistics don’t lie. Minnesota as a state is very white. The DFL delegation is not.

Here’s a comparison of the delegation vs. the latest census data for the state.

Demographic	Minnesota	Metro Area	Outstate	DFL delegation
White	89.4%	85.7%	95.1%	66%
African American	5.1%	7.5%	1.4%	23%
Asian	3.8%	5.5%	1.3%	9.1%
American Indian	1.6%	1.1%	2.4%	5.5%
Hispanic	3.8%	4.4%	2.7%	6.4%

Interesting – although it’s their party, they can do what they want to, and at the end of the day it’s only a convention.  They could send a 100% Laotian Lesbian team to Denver to help annoint The One, for all the difference their individual votes make.

And national delegate slots are usually rewards for long-standing service in the party (at least, they are in the GOP, and am I the only one that wants to pants the seventeen-year-old dweeb in the story just on principle?), and the DFL certainly has its workers-of-color.  More power to ’em.
But it does highlight not only the DFL’s picayune obsession with race and gender, but indeed, what a bunch of cretins some of them are about it:

Stafford took a shot at Republicans during his remarks. He said the appearance of the DFL delegation in Denver will “contrast with what you see a week later” at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul.

“What do you mean by that?” MPR’s Curtis Gilbert asked.

“White,” he said.

Taxpayers.  Family people.  Veterans who’ve served in combat.  People who’ve spent years stuffing envelopes and knocking on doors.  If you’re a Republican, anyway.

A skin tone trotted out for show and/or ridicule, if you’re a Tic.

I’m happy to belong to a party that doesn’t use skin color as a prop for their facile propaganda.

For decades – until the larger movement started wising up just a tad, within the past decade or so – one of the standard gun control advocates’ lines usually went like this:

“Guns may be fine in rural America, but in the city – in urban America – guns are a plague that needs to be controlled”.

“Urban”, in this liberal context, meant “black people” pretty universally. Given gun control’s universally racist roots, it’s understandable.

Likewise on tax policy; tax cuts proposed by suburban and rural interests were seen as a dagger at the heart of “urban” American – meaning “America of color” to the left.

“But wait, Mitch”, you might respond. “Where is that written down?”

The Urban League; Urban Studies programs; Urban issues. All of them are code words of the left. All of them are, to one degree or another, code words for “black”.

To the right? True conservatives don’t focus on race – but “Urban” is a code word as well. It means “bureaucratic”, “dominated by lefties and their visions”, “a net tax suck on society”. And judging by the lilywhite (albeit impeccably-far-left) makeup of most “urban” governments, it’s – to be charitable – color-blind. Being less charitable, it means “white-as-the-driven-dandruff”.

Of course, we have other code words on the right. “Journalistic Code of Ethics”, to a civilian, means “rules”. Not so, to “journalists” and the conservatives who watch ’em; for them, it means “framework by which “journalists” rationalize unethical behavior”.

Steve Perry – former journalist, now kommissar of the Minnesoros “Independent”, plumbs the left’s bottomless well of callow racism in this bit of yellow flakkery, about a recent speech by Rep. Michele Bachmann:

“This is their agenda,” Bachmann states bluntly. “I know it is hard to believe, it’s hard to fathom—but this is ‘mission accomplished’ for them,” she asserts. “They want Americans to take transit and move to the inner cities. They want Americans to move to the urban core, live in tenements, [and] take light rail to their government jobs. That’s their vision for America.”

The context is fairly clear: Liberals want cities to be centralized; they see our future as high-density, connected by rails and bikes and scooters, shopping at vegan corner delis selling only locally-produced goodies; above all, they see us paying taxes, directly and indirectly, to The Man. The Democrat, Liberal Man (race irrelevant).

Can anyone see, by any rational measure supported by any sort of context at all, any other meaning to Rep. Bachmann’s statement?

Outside of the projection of insecure liberals, I mean?

Of course not. There is none.

Which doesn’t stop Perry – Soros-employed rentablogger – to make some up out of whole cloth:

Inner cities. Urban core. Tenements. Here, in a nutshell, is one explanation for Bachmann’s urgency in spreading the $2-a-gallon gospel: To save her sort of people from living in close proximity to, um, Negroes.

Note to Mr. Perry: Look up the term “projection”.

No, really. Your publications have always wallowed in it.  But it’s OK – it’s not original.  It’s a pattern.  The people that pay Perry’s salary want callow racemongering, so they’ll get it.

Why would that be?

UPDATE:  Commenter Master of None notes that code words are, indeed, everywhere.  Say “suburb” to a real lefty – for example, this old, deranged colleague of Steve Perry’s – and see what happens.

With DNC in mind, city bans carrying urine, feces

Poo and pee dominated a public hearing Monday on a new law that prohibits people from carrying certain items if they intend to use them for nefarious purposes.

What other purpose might there be for carrying these “products”? I’d say monger away. This is a law whose time has come!

Representatives from some of the groups planning large-scale protests during the DNC this month said the ordinance was unnecessary and accused city officials of fear mongering.

No Pun intended? 

“The intent of this ordinance is to try to smear protesters and make them look as if they are somehow criminal or somehow going to engage in some kind of gross conduct,” said Glenn Spagnuolo, an organizer with the Re- create 68 Alliance.

The ordinance makes it illegal to carry certain items, such as chains, padlocks, carabiners and other locking devices. It also prohibits the possession of noxious substances. Two of the most frequently used examples of a noxious substance are a bucket of urine and a “feces bomb.”

Police have to prove that people carrying such items intend to use them to block public access or emergency equipment or to thwart crowd control measures.

“Our intent for this bill is not about suppressing or chilling First Amendment rights,” he said.

“Young man!”

“Yes Officer?

” Just exactly what do you intend to do with that shit?”

“Exercise my first ammendment rights?”

“Put down the poop son. Before I get pissed!”

One of the biggest problem in trying to “talk” about “race” with people – mainly but not exclusively with the white liberals who try to control so much of the “debate” – is that while it is human nature to be a racist, a sexist, a classist…a me-ist, in short, is the same problem one always encounters when dealing with people whose fundamental approach to life is idealistic, rather than pragmatic (and what is a liberal but an arrested idealist?); the definition of “racism” becomes less a matter of “lynchings” and “detritus of slavery” and “lack of opportunity”, and more a matter of “failure to adhere to some inhumanly-obtuse standard of purity in thought”.

William Raspberry – in a column that appeared nearly two decades ago, long before the online era – allowed that the former version of racism was dead, and was manifested (as of about 1991) primarily in the sort of ignorance that is, to a modestly secure person, more or less irrelevant.  Now, as I noted the other day, the aftereffects of institutional racism are still with us – mainly, in my humble opinion, in the devaluation of the male, especially the father, in black society.  And there’s a “racism of low expectations” that operates in our welfare system and in our schools, to be sure.  Those are sins of arrogance, political hubris and institutional stupidity (I’ll be charitiable), though, not of racial malevolence; as partisan as I am, I’m not going to say “the Department of Education and the Klan are different sides of the same coin”.

So dialog me this;  does anyone actually think there’s not less racism – defined as “active ractial hatred” – today than there was 50 years ago?  If not, how so?
Bonus question:  If your answer is “yes”, can you show me a society in all of history that has done as much to repeal human nature, as fast as our society has?

Jason Lewis had/has a liner in his promo reel. It goes a little something like…:

“Let’s have an intelligent conversation; Jason will talk, you listen”.

That’s what I think about when I hear most people who are calling for a “dialog about race” in this county.

Dialog.

I don’t know that that word means what they think it means.

———-

I don’t go to Jeff Fecke to take the cultural barometer of this nation. I go to Jeff Fecke for howlingly overwrought conclusions; I go looking for checks that his logic and knowledge can’t cash.

And he wrote a doozy the other day:

In general, if you ever find yourself saying, “I’m not a racist,” you’re a racist.

I rubbed my eyes, thinking perhaps it was the fatigue playing tricks on my eyes.

Alas, no:

The same holds true for a variety of hatreds, of course. “I’m not a sexist” is evidence one is sexist; “I’m not homophobic” proof that one hates gays. Those people who truly have no internalized misogyny, racism, or homophobia are few and far between, and those most likely to be good allies to those groups are also the most likely to be aware of their own shortcomings.

Apparently I’m a purple female rhinoceros who walks along the ceiling, having dislaimed each of those as well as affirming the power of gravity.

It’s easy to bag on Jeff Fecke for these kinds of “conclusions” – and it deserves bagging; it’s a simplistic, hamfisted answer to a very complex question. The problem is, this is a symptom (albeit a not-very-challenging one) of something that plagues nearly every attempt to have a “dialog” across ideological lines with the left, whether the issue is man-made global warming, gender, or race.

They frame the argument to not merely favor their side, but to paint disagreement as base, benighted and depraved.

Which makes for a fun rhetorical game (Fecke was reportedly a college-level debater, so one might suspect that’s the goal), but – and I say this as someone who’s been cut down to size for substituting “rhetorical games” for “communication” enough times to know better – it makes for lousy dialog, if indeed “dialog” is what you want.

And of course, “dialog” is not what most of the parties to this “discussion” want. They want it no more than Jason Lewis wants an even conversation – and at least Lewis’ liner is funny.

There’s nothing funny about the way the “dialog on race” is being framed.  No “dialog” exists while one side assumes the other is depraved until proven depraved.
———-

I’m going to start out with a very broad statement: “Isms” are part of the human condition. All people are conditioned to favor people who are like them, and to suspect people who are different from them, whether tangibly (skin color, language, accent, smell, dress) or subtly (class, education, geography). Many white people get uneasy around many black people, sure, but that’s an easy one. Middle-class white people get uneasy around mullet-headed bikers; New Yorkers sneer down their noses at Arklahoma accents; light-skinned blacks disdain darker blacks (or so said Spike Lee); farmers roll their eyes at people in suits and ties and clipped city accents and manners.

This is true across every culture on this planet.

In many of those cultures, that suspicion is codified in the language. In many languages, the word for “Human” varies, depending on how closely-related or situated the subject is to the speaker; for “humans” whose tribe is closer to that of the speaker, it’s a fairly benign or amiable term; the farther afield the subject, the less-benign and more derogatory the term will get.

To say “everyone’s a racist” is itself simplistic; it would be fairer and more accurate to say “we are all we-ists”; all of us, black or female or suburban or mentally ill or urban or atheist, are more comfortable around people who are like us.  And every single one of us practices “profiling”, whether you’re a black couple “profiling” some agressive drunk rednecks, or a Xhosa turning on a Bantu in anger, or Molly Priesmeyer “profiling” white males, or even the stereotypical white middle-class guy sizing up…anyone else.

What matters, of course, is how we deal with this bit of human programming.

So far, so good?

———-

Let’s take a moment and launch a pre-emptive strike on a liberal cliche or two. I’ll ask my conservative homies to indulge what might sound to some of them (mistakenly) like heresy.

The effects of racism didn’t end in 1865 – or 1964, for that matter.

And I’m not just talking about the racism of low expectations that is inherent in the welfare system to which so many Americans have been induced to addiction, a system that’s perpetuated any number of “isms” by making something that is completely counterintuitive to most humans – subsidizing poverty, in order to make misery and disenfranchisement a viable lifestyle. By subsidizing poverty to enable people to say in it for generation after generation, racism and classism and dozens of other corrosive “isms” are given an environment to see to their own permanence.

But most of us – the conservatives, at least – know about both of those already. But that’s a post-1964 mistake.

There’s one bit of racism that’s gone back 400 years, and is alive and well today – the devaluation of the black male. Black males – fathers – were sold off pretty much at will, as befitted what what considered property at the time. They were shipped around like cattle, worked to death, killed without the benefit of legal protection – it’s not a new story to anyone, is it? African-American society built on the matriarchal nature of many African societies, and became even more so; fathers were a transient thing.

During the Jim Crow years, of course, black men could be discriminated against, attacked, lynched with impunity. Worst of all,  we really haven’t learned much since the end of Jim Crow. Black men, to the welfare system, are pretty much expendable; “families” without fathers get better benefits. Add to that an educational system that systematically fails blacks, a welfare system more concerned with its own self-perpetuation than in helping people find the self-respect (as opposed to “self-esteem”) that it takes to break the cycle, and an urban popular culture that plays into the nihilistic devaluation of the African-American male…

…between all that, America doesn’t need to “invent HIV”, as Jeremiah Wright famously claimed, to screw up African-Americans. 

So we’ve established in advance; racism exists, and it’s a pretty normal, albeit lamentable, human condition.

———-

So you want a dialog about race?

OK. So in the next installment, let’s talk. Or at least I’ll give you, the audience, my monologue. You can respond any way you’d like.

Oh, yeah – Fecke’s wrong. If you say you’re not a racist, it means you’re not. Or you are. Or somewhere in between – somewhere in that immense continuum between “hating people who are different than you” and “not really recognizing differences at all”. All generalizations are false.

Except that one.

I’m of two minds about this story, about Alabama’s Stillman College hosting a conference on…not race relations in general, but the “N” word itself:

With a debate swirling nationwide over the n-word, a historically black college in Alabama has set aside four days to discuss the racial slur.Participants at the conference, which began Thursday and ends Sunday, discussed topics ranging from the origins of the epithet to whether juggling a few letters makes it socially acceptable at the NSurrection Conference at Stillman College.

Organizers said the goal of the event is to challenge the use of the n-word “through the use of intelligent dialogue and a thorough examination of black history.”

Debate over the use of the word has escalated in recent months, with comedian Michael Richards racial rant prompting black leaders such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson and California Rep. Maxine Waters to urge the public and the entertainment industry to stop using it.

Uh…waitaminnit.

Is there really “debate” over the word? Doesn’t pretty much everyone agree that it’s wrong?

Well, of course not; the conference does indeed address the very incongruity that has gone through every thinking person’s mind since they saw Richard Pryor’s first movie; why the “N-word” is the most caustic word in the history of the language when some people say it, and a term of endearment when others do:

“I really think that as far as white people are concerned, the word is almost on its way out,” said Hacker, who is white. “That said, there are a lot of white people who still in the privacy of their own minds think the word even if they don’t use it because they regard black people as genetically inferior and that word categorizes that.”

Kovan Flowers, co-founder of AbolishTheNWord.com, said striking the word from use would help set an example for other races.

“We can’t say anything to Hispanics, or whites or whoever unless we stop using it ourselves,” he said. “It’s the root of the mind-set that’s affecting why people are low, from housing to jobs to education.”

Stillman senior Maurice Williams said he organized the conference hoping to educate his peers about the history of the word. The event includes a community fair, charity basketball game, unity march and discussions ranging from the word’s origin to its use among various ethnic groups.

“I had to understand that a lot of the images that we portray in television, in the media, in the hip-hop environment — all of those things have the same connotations as the n-word itself, so therefore it’s the n-word personified,” Williams said. “Where do you see another culture portraying some of these same images?”

Not just “where”, but “why”?

Rapper Tupac Shakur was credited with legitimizing the term “nigga” when he came out with the song “N.I.G.G.A.,” which he said stood for “Never Ignorant Getting Goals Accomplished.”

Stillman English professor Alisea McLeod said she doesn’t buy it.

“It’s hogwash. What this is really indicative of is a heart problem,” she said. “What is coming out of mouths is what is coming out of souls. These are not words that are uplifting and I think (they) point to a bigger problem — a lack of self-love.”

“Self-love”, perhaps.

Self-awareness, as well. Shakur’s “Strictly 4 Ma N.I.G.G.A.Z.” came out in 1993, two years after “N.W.A“, short for “N___z With Attitude”, a group that achieved immense success without the benefit of any radio airplay in the late eighties. It also happened nearly two decades after Richard Pryor released “That N_____’s Crazy”, his first big mainstream success.

Wanna get rid of the word? Stop saying it.