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September 16, 2009
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For the record
Mark Bauerlein wonders where the academics are when the media distorts the historical record as a means of dismissing dissent:
Anybody who believes that last month's town-hall meetings marked an unprecedented eruption of anti-democratic thuggery hasn't read much U.S. history. A glance at a gubernatorial debate in Columbus, Georgia, 1906, or at any one of 10,000 other political other political moments from 1796 forward would convince you that this summer's occasions were child's play. Only the gigantic and delicate egos of members of Congress plus the nervousness of journalists who saw ordinary citizens leaping ahead of their coverage raised the town halls to dark and fearsome populist status.How it plays out now that legislators have returned to D.C. remains to be seen. But the historical ignorance of journalists should continue as an abiding concern of academics, and they should speak out with stern correctives. Two cases occurred last week.
Here is David Sirota on the Van Jones affair, claiming him as a victim of a "right-wing lynch mob."
Now, one ought to rise up at that remark and school Sirota in the reality of lynch mobs. Lynch mobs don't pressure presidents to fire political appointments. They don't rely on media figures to rile them up. They congregate outside a jail, grab someone accused of a crime (often by pointing a pistol at the sheriff's temple), get a witness to identify the accused, then take him out and, depending on the crime, torture him, mutilate him, hang him, riddle him with bullets, and/or burn him. For Sirota to turn a political power surge into a lynching isn't to recognize the racist villainy of elements on the Right. It is to trivailize the suffering of actual lynching victims. Sirota should turn off his overheated imagination and take a look at Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America.
The other one appeared in The New York Times, Maureen Dowd's column on Obama and Southern racism. In the middle of it appears an astonishing paragraph about the figure of the president:
"Now he’s at the center of a period of racial turbulence sparked by his ascension. Even if he and the coterie of white male advisers around him don’t choose to openly acknowledge it, this president is the ultimate civil-rights figure -- a black man whose legitimacy is constantly challenged by a loco fringe."
Racial turbulence? Where? Reading that line, one would think Watts was burning, or that it was the month of April 1968, or that Rodney King's arresters just got off. But none of that is happening except in Dowd's feverish Manhattan eye.
The last phrase is worse. The dash is presented as the start of a definition, as if "a black man whose legitimacy is constantly challenged by a loco fringe" is, indeed, the description of "the ultimate civil-rights figure."
Wrong. When the civil-rights movement began in the late-1940s, leaders didn't oppose fringe groups. They opposed state and local governments and law enforcers, elite and mainstream opinion. They understood that the real enemy was the governor, the sheriff, and the banker, not the Klan and the Birchers. They put their livelihoods and lives on the line, got pummeled and incarcerated.
What to say, except that we have another journalist coming off as a half-wit historian, and academics should call her on it.
It's not just historical fact that academics ought to be insisting on. It's logic, not to mention the core value of free intellectual exchange. For example, when people like Jimmy Carter go on television and assert that those who criticize Obama's policies are racist--there should be an outcry from intellectuals and educators everywhere. That sort of claim is not only grossly untrue and manipulative and chilling--it's also a terrible insult to critical thought and constructive debate. In other words, it ought to hit academics where they live, and they ought to be speaking out as a matter of principle.
For the record, I attended a tea party in my small town on April 15. It was peaceful and orderly. People carried homemade signs expressing their wish to work, their dislike for higher taxes, and their preference for self-reliance over government-engineered dependence. The same was true of the townhall meeting I went to in August (but could not get into, along with hundreds of others, because the small auditorium had been pre-packed with imported pro-single-payer-care advocates wearing union shirts and brandishing fancy professionally printed signs).
I live in a working class rural community where unemployment is high. The people here are hard-working, generous, and fiercely independent. They are not racists, they are not a mob, and they are not brainless right-wing zombies. They have legitimate reasons for being immensely concerned about what government is doing--and are, like millions of other Americans, suffering from a sinking feeling that the end result of our unprecedented governmental spending spree is that we are all going to wind up substantially less free. I think they are right.
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Comments:
I don't think that most of the criticism of Obama is racist, but I suspect that some is. The whole birther/Obama-is-a-secret Muslim bit, for instance.
Jimmy Carter, for the record, was referring to people who "begin to attack the president of the United States as an animal or as a reincarnation of Adolf Hitler or when they wave signs in the air that said we should have buried Obama with Kennedy." Such people are not necessarily racist per se, but Carter's claim is hardly something that the historical community should rally against.
Peter -- That's what he said he meant after all hell broke loose. It's not what he actually said the first time around. The words you quote were planned carefully and aimed at defusing the outrage he has caused with his original, more unguarded statements. Did he misspeak the first time? Or is he backpedalling? Either way, I think you are giving him way too much credit.
Original quotes are at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4g_8PrllYk
Erin,
Thanks for the video feed. Let's look at his original, "unguarded" statement:
"I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man."
Others may disagree, but I do not think that he paints all Obama opponents with the same brush. Rather, he limits his claim to those who demonstrate strong "animosity" toward the president. (Surely some of the animosity toward George W. Bush was a function of the fact that he was a white male from a privileged background.)
So why did all hell break loose? Because the suggestion that people may be motivated by racism is *always* incendiary in American society, regardless of how legitimate or limited the claim.
Peter, I think you are spinning. And I don't think Jimmy Carter is worth the effort. He was race-baiting, plain and simple. And *that* is what's incendiary. This is a nation that proudly elected a black man for president. This is a nation where those who did not vote for Obama *still* celebrated the fact that we had elected a black man to the presidency as a major and proud historical moment. You perhaps did not watch the FOX coverage on election night. I did. The commentators there were not Obama voters--but were still moved by what Obama's election says about how far this country has come.
I did not vote for Obama myself--I also did not vote for McCain--but I shared the national sense of joy that we live in a nation that can now elect a commander in chief regardless of color (I also wonder when we will show we can elect a commander in chief regardless of sex).
I think the majority of people who have issues with the Obama administration are not motivated by racism. They are motivated by anxiety about the debt, the spending, the failure to keep promises, the move toward ever bigger government, and, frankly, by Obama's failure to live up to his biggest campaign promise of all--that to elect him would be to elect hope and change, would be to end politics as usual in Washington and to move toward a more transparent, honest, accountable, and truly democratic style of governance. He was pretty convincing. I was among the millions, I think, who didn't vote for him -- but did hope that he'd do what he said he would do, and did hope that we'd all end up better off for it. Since January, it's been an unmitigated disaster. Incompetence, arrogance, and poisonous partisanship have been the watchwords. And the American people are paying for it. Our grandchildren will still be paying for it. I am angry, I will admit it. Is that racist? No way. Is it racist to suggest that such anger is racist? You bet.
I stand behind my interpretation. If looking at what people actually say is spinning, then I plead guilty.
As for what is incendiary: clearly Carter found some of the protesters' behavior incendiary, you find his remarks incendiary, and I'm sure that some will find your accusations of "race baiting" to be incendiary too. Welcome to the problem of race in America.
Carter was a segregationist well into the middle of his active political career. This is projection on his part, and the idea that any significant percentage of the policy opposition to this president is racism is an outrageous, desperate, libelous smear.
On an unrelated point, I'm actually a bit of a fan of Mark Bauerlein's "The Dumbest Generation." I'm struck, however, by how incoherent his critique of Sirota and Dowd is. First he schools Sirota about what a real lynch mob was like and then—in virtually the same breath—he dismisses fringe extremism as a factor in the civil rights movement. Even if we grant that the fight against lynching was not a significant aspect of the civil rights movement and that the main target of late-1940s leaders was the establishment, that doesn't tell us much about the nature of the civil rights right now.
This strikes me as politics masquerading as a history lesson. Is the definition of a "civil rights figure" in 2009 really something that historians can settle?
Erin, thanks for your straight talk on former President Carter's baseless accusations of racism against "tea-party" protesters. I've attended a number of protests here in Michigan (attended also by those of various races and ethnic backgrounds) and haven't encountered any such ugly sentiments.
J A DeLater, PhD, Life Member, VFW
