It’s All In The Perspective

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Even Black people agree that Blacks are more racist than Whites or Hispanics.

Plainly, the poll itself, is racissssssss.

Joe doakes

Well, clearly.  Because if you say you’re not racist, it means you are.

And if you say, do or thing something racist, you’re a racist – unless, apparently, you’re a liberal blogger.

GREETINGS, MN “PROGRESSIVE” PROJECT READERS:  Great to have you here.  Quick point of order, though; I don’t say racism is “a liberal problem”.  Merely that “Dog Gone’s” rationalization of her use of the term “Uncle Tom” is itself self-indulgent, illogical and corrosively specious. 

As she says it, racism is when “You do or say something racist when you make an unfounded claim about someone on the basis of a race or an attribute to race”.  That’s just wrong.  It’s when you attribute any trait, positive or negative, to someone based on their race.  And Dog Gone’s judgment of whether something is or is not “unfounded” is the same precise logic redneck peckerwoods use when they say “N***er ain’t racist, cuz there’s black n***ers and there’s white n***ers”; in other words, the idea that using a a racist term to describe someone is ever “founded”.

And is someone going to seriously claim that the term “Uncle Tom” isn’t racist, whether you believe it’s “founded” or not?   Say what you will about Justice Thomas’ legal and personal history (liberals seem drawn to the fiction that he’s unqualified to be a SCOTUS justice, but Sonya Sotomayor is), but who out there can build a case that calling him “a slave who brown-noses his masters to curry favor” isn’t racist? Unless your name is Tom and your siblings have kids, “Uncle Tom” has no other meaning

As to her constant claim that conservatism is racist?  Leaving aside the fact that the claim is bigoted in and of itself, it’s also ideologically nonsense.  While there are no doubt conservatives who, individually, are racist (just as there are racist liberals as well – indeed, the most gleefully racist person I’ve ever personally met was a mutual acquaintance of Dog Gone’s and mine who happened to be an east-side Saint Paul DFL ward heeler), one of the bedrock tenets real conservatives observe is judging people as individuals, not by their class, gender or, yep, race. 

Martin Luther King was no conservative Republican, but he dreamed that his children would be judged by the contents of their hearts, not their color – and that (hold the stereotypes most of you no doubt romp and frolic in) is a conservative ideal. 

I’ve known Dog Gone for 20-odd years, more or less, and sincerely hope she’ll pull her mind out of the fever swamp sooner or later.  She could be better than that.

Your comments are welcome; I moderate everyone’s first comment (to cut down on spam), but unless something is slander or pointlessly inflammatory, I approve everything, because unlike certain blogs I enjoy a vigorous discussion.

111 thoughts on “It’s All In The Perspective

  1. Here is Tesler’s conclusion:
    Old fashioned racism’s influence on white Americans’ 2008 and 2010 vote choices also holds more potential to influence political outcomes than the spillover of racialization into policy preferences. Indeed, Stephens-Davidowitz (2012) suggests that OFR, as measured at the media market level with the prevalence of overtly racist Google searches, cost Obama between 3 to 5 percentage points in 2008. It is harder to quantify whether the enhanced effects of racial resentment on opposition to health care reform in 2009 and 2010 had any influence on the ultimate policy outcome.

    I won’t speak to the accuracy of the paper — standards for ‘peer reviewed’ poli-sci research are abysmal — but he says nothing about conservatives. He says ‘whites’.
    He doesn’t even attempt to examine the racial attitudes of non-whites. One of his vectors is the percentage of people who change their minds about a policy when it is associated with Hillary Clinton rather than Barack Obama.

  2. One last thing — using pejoratives like ‘old fashioned racism’ is not the mark of a scientific work, it’s the mark of a polemic. Jeez.

  3. PM, your new avatar is much more realistic and lifelike than the old one.

  4. One last thing — using pejoratives like ‘old fashioned racism’ is not the mark of a scientific work, it’s the mark of a polemic. Jeez.

    And taking an ofay pejorative like “Old Fashioned Racism” and trying to make it look like a term-of-art acronym (OFR) is just funny.

  5. As others have shown, Dog Gone, your “proof” of racism on SITD is thin. Real thin. Let me take it a step further. Your “proof” is Anorexic.

    President Obama says he was born in Hawaii in 1961. I claim I was born in Nebraska, in 1959. For pretty much any American born during that time period, the best evidence of birth is a birth certificate, either the original or a certified copy of records maintained by the relevant county or state officials. I have my original birth certificate from the hospital – my Mother kept it all these years – and several certified copies from the county vital records office. Barack Obama does not.

    President Obama has never released his original pen-and-ink birth certificate, the one with the baby footprint on it. He has never released a certified copy of his birth certificate, which he could have obtained from the Hawaii officials upon payment of a small fee (which many conservatives offered to pay for him).

    Instead, the White House press office released a digital image of a document, not an actual paper document, a substitution which every Questioned Document Examiner will tell you makes it impossible to authenticate the original document is a true and correct copy, free from any alterations. Worse, we know the digital image was altered, the White House specifically said they altered it, to add a green background. Several websites examine the layers of the document and conclude it was altered rather more substantially.

    This is the evidence you are relying on to prove Barak Obama was born in Hawaii and simultaneously, to prove I am a racist.

    In my job, I work with deeds and mortgages, ordinary government documents. Suppose a person came to the counter with a smart phone and showed me an image of a document that he admitted was a photo-shopped photocopy of a birth certificate. Suppose he wanted to use that image as proof of his identity as the owner of a house in Ramsey County. I would not accept it. We require originals, or certified copies of documents in other government offices.

    He might have his friends say “Oh yes, that’s his birth certificate.” Not acceptable. He might have government officials elsewhere say “We are satisfied.” Not acceptable. The rule is very straightforward, it’s mandatory, it’s followed by every bank, every title company, every county recorder, every clerk of court. And by me. I must see the original, or a certified copy from the government agency that has the original.

    That’s not because everyone in the real estate industry cares about the race of the person at the counter, it’s because we care about the integrity of the public land records system, in which only verifiable documents are accepted, not altered ones. My refusal to accept his digitally altered document is not racist.

    My refusal to accept the White House’s digitally altered document is not because I care about the race of the person offering it, but because I care about the integrity of the American political system. My refusal to accept his digitally altered birth certificate is not racist.

    There are plenty of non-racist reasons to reject a digitally altered image of a political candidate’s birth certificate but the best race-neutral reason is that if he really wasn’t born in the United States, he wasn’t eligible to run for President (John McCain wasn’t born in the United States either, but in the Canal Zone, and people like me debated the same objection when he ran, a WHITE man, again, because of INTEGRITY, not RACISM).

    If you cared about the integrity of the American political system, the candidate’s refusal to prove his eligibility would concern you. If you cared solely about forcing your political will on the populace, it would not. I know where I stand, and now we also know where you do.

    I hesitated to post this response since arguing with you, Dog Gone, is like arguing with a bitter ex-spouse: everything I say will be twisted around and used against me as proof that I am rotten and you the victim. As I spent a decade litigating family law cases before moving to my present field, I’m used to it. Twist away.
    .

  6. Just FYI, my official birth certificate from the Minnesota Department of Health is an electronic version, like the one Obama released. It has my mother’s name wrong. It says her name is ‘Najice’, rather than ‘Janice’. It’s a typo. I’ve got the actual, handwritten birth certificate to compare it to.
    So when some Lefty points to the electronic version of Obama’s birth certificate from the state of Hawaii and acts like it came down from Sinai on graven stone I know that they are an idiot.
    I live in Hawaii. It’s a corrupt, one party state. I imagine that back in the early 60’s there was more than one newborn that was made an American citizen by virtue of a registrar’s stamp.
    But not Obama’s. Black-white couples were unusual even in Hawaii in the early 60’s. People still alive remember his birth. There would have been no reason to lie about it. At any rate, most of the questionable native-born citizens were probably from the Phillipines, not Africa.
    But I wish to God people on the Left would stop saying that Obama was a law professor (he was a part time lecturer on the 14th amendment and civil rights), and I especially wish that the next time he claims that his father left his mother when he was two years old, the press would call him on it. It is beyond dispute that Stanley Ann Dunham took Obama to Seattle shortly after his birth, while his father continued his studies at Manoa on Hawaii.

  7. you know whats funny, under UK laws we probably could have filed hate speech charges against DG and won damages. Just letting everyone know how great this country is, by allowing Ms. Teasdale to throw around such slanderous statements without facing any reprecussions, also Mitch is this a record now?

  8. POD:

    Long thread? Yes.

    Record? Not close. Back in 2004, one or two threads dealing with “Plain Layne” went out over 240 comments.

  9. DG,

    Any updates on all those *other* sources that “prove” your contention that conservatives are racist, or whatever it is you’re contending?

    Also – since I asked you close to a year ago why it was you figured that Tony Cornish’s “Stand Your Ground” bill, which was passed by a solid bipartisan majority in both chambers of the Legislature to be vetoed by Governor Messinger, was “crap legislation”.

    You responded with another very dubious study that this blog had already shredded months earlier (which, risibly, claimed that killings rose – without recognizing that most of the “new” killings were justifiable homicides; they were, in all likelihood, shifts in death from victim to perpetrator).

    Wanna take another whack at it?

  10. PM – the storage form of the “official” record is whatever the responsible government agencies says it is. That’s not the same as a certified copy of the official record, which is what we’re talking about.

    For example, when you apply for a passport, you need to send them a certified copy of your birth certificate. That’s not the electronic version on the computer in Minneapolis, it’s a paper version with a raised, bumpy seal pressed into the paper that you mail to Washington or wherever.

    Suppose you buy a certified copy of your birth certificate from MDH, then scan it on your home scanner into your home computer, then photoshop the image to look nicer, save the altered image as a PDF, email it to your cell phone, and hold up the cell phone at the passport counter. “See, here’s a photoshopped image of my birth certificate.” Think they’d hand over the passport? ^&#* No! But that’s what Barack Obama wants to use.

    I want him to back up a few steps. Just hand me the certified copy that he got from the Hawaii government. Let me run my finger over it to feel the bumpy seal pressed into the paper. Let me hold it to the light to look for erasures. Let me look at it under the hand lens to see if numbers or letters have been carefully altered, if inks match, if the paper looks right. Or if not me, personally, then at least my agents in the national conservative media.

    There is a standard practice to prove American births. Why not use it? Why the elaborate terpsichore . . . if there is nothing to hide? Not releasing your college grades, I can understand that. Not meeting minimum eligibility requirements for candidacy? That makes no sense . . . unless . . . .

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