(saunters in…takes earbuds out ears) Oh, Hey. Wassup??
So I’ve neglected my favorite space for a grip. Sorry about that. I think I needed more time and space to unpack the assault of information, misinformation, opinion, rss feeds, tweets, status updates, check-ins, mayorships, blogs, rants, compounded by some of the banality of daily living. So what’s going on? What did I miss? What happened this summer? Did you see Inception too?
Oh wait:
“NAACP delegates passed a resolution to condemn extremist elements within the Tea Party, calling on Tea Party leaders to repudiate those in their ranks who use racist language in their signs and speeches.”
And magically, a scandal surfaced and someone had to respond to it:
[T]he national meeting of the NAACP issued a statement calling on the conservative Tea Party movement to “repudiate racist factions” in their midst, one year after many in the media and blogosphere had already pointed out evidence of racism during the health care reform protests. Then NAACP President Benjamin Jealous said they were “snookered” by a video posted by right-wing blogger Andrew Breitbart that purported to show civil rights veteran and USDA official Shirley Sherrod “revealing her past racism.” Sherrod was really telling a story about her own transformation, from a person who wanted to aid poor black farmers, to a person who wanted to assist poor farmers no matter their race. The NAACP of today should be celebrating the work of people like Sherrod, not misunderstanding who she is.
Rachel Maddow also flagged a pattern:
It all seems to be spinning out of control. The center will not hold.
“I’ll say it again: Nigger. Nigger. Nigger… If you’re that hypersensitive about color and don’t have a sense of humor, don’t marry outside your race.”
Good grief.
And this guy [Mark Williams, formerly of the Tea Party Express]:
Perhaps the most racist point of all in the tea parties is their demand that government “stop raising our taxes.” That is outrageous! How will we coloreds ever get a wide screen TV in every room if non-coloreds get to keep what they earn? Totally racist! The tea party expects coloreds to be productive members of society?
Mr. Lincoln, you were the greatest racist ever. We had a great gig. Three squares, room and board, all our decisions made by the massa in the house. Please repeal the 13th and 14th Amendments and let us get back to where we belong.
Sincerely
Precious Ben Jealous, Tom’s Nephew
NAACP Head Colored Person
Taking it all in, it must be said that the landscape is as follows: We have an administration that will contort itself to defend a movement whose convention speakers call for the reinstatement of the tools of segregation. That same administration will swiftly jettison an appointee, herself the victim of homegrown terrorism, for echoing the kind of message of redemption and personal responsibility that has become the president’s hallmark on race. Andrew Breitbart says that Sherrod’s speech, not the Tea Party’s rhetoric, is the real racism. It is an argument that is as old as American white supremacy, and one that this administration, through its actions over the past week, has tacitly endorsed.
The argument has been made that this isn’t Obama, just the people working under him. That theory elides the responsibility of leaders to set a tone. The tone that Obama has set, in regards to race, is to retreat with great velocity in the face of anything that can be defined as “racial.” Granted, this has been politically smart. Also granted, Obama has done it with nuance. But it can not be expected that the president’s subordinates will share that nuance.
And now, at rabid pitch:
Bloomberg:
“In that spirit, let me declare that we in New York are Jews and Christians and Muslims, and we always have been. And above all of that, we are Americans, each with an equal right to worship and pray where we choose. There is nowhere in the five boroughs of New York City that is off limits to any religion.”
Obama:
“Let me be clear: as a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country.That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable.”
Obama:
“I was not commenting, and I will not comment, on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there.”
Ron Paul:
The outcry over the building of the mosque, near ground zero, implies that Islam alone was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. According to those who are condemning the building of the mosque, the nineteen suicide terrorists on 9/11 spoke for all Muslims. This is like blaming all Christians for the wars of aggression and occupation because some Christians supported the neo-conservatives’ aggressive wars.
The attack structure against Muslims in particular is fairly simple. You begin with the game of “six degrees of Bin Laden.” In this game, you connect a Muslim you don’t like through a connect-the-dots scenario to Bin Laden. For example, did you know that the Cordoba Initiative sent election monitors to Sudan, and Bin Laden was once believed to have been in Sudan? It is a game that trades in absurdity and conspiracy theories. The other approach is to take quotes out of context and use them to prove that the speaker or author is duplicitous. The term for that is now “Sherroding.” Then, finally, is the ever popular and constant smearcasting, where one just hurls mud and hopes one does not get called on the misinformation.
Really, still: Barack Obama is muslim???
It’s all too much. And there’s still more. I had to make this pastiche of sorts, for myself, as much as anyone who may visit this space. News moves so fast that we barely have a moment to process these events, to delve deeper to glean understanding, to respond, construct our point of view a narrative of what all these things mean for ourselves. I’m abnormally concerned these days about the structural integrity of civil society. And what I mean by the term ‘structural integrity’, I’m borrowing from a term used in construction and engineering of buildings. A crack in a foundation of any large structure compromises its integrity: the center will not hold. Our language for these matters of race, ethnicity, identity, plurality… American is in one way, under siege in one realm. We’re maturing as a nation, yet, the narrative of the origin and progression remains as divided as ever.
The nativist resurgence certainly isn’t a surprise given our current economic climate. It certainly is a disappointment. I wrote a piece for Religious Dispatches to counter this narrative from the conservative movement. I think many of us in Douthat’s ‘other America’ had hoped we transcended this garbage. Alas, we’re confronting it again. If you doubt me, please, go back and look at boom/bust economic periods in American history and you’ll see an overlap of the ugly underbelly of demonizing immigrant populations and black slaves and descendants. This shit ain’t new. Our ongoing (9 years) conflict in Afghanistan, our occupation and ‘withdrawal’ from Iraq, an oil apocalypse, stalled job growth, the overwhelming power of corporations, well… the underbelly searches for scapegoats, and today, it’s Islam.
I’ve been thinking a lot about narratives lately and reading a lot of divergent narratives searching for a common thread. The middle ground. We lack a narrative for America’s complicated origins. Or rather, a unifying one. I’m not offering anything new to this debate, I’m simply reflecting. I’m grateful for the work of the late Howard Zinn, and this current discourse makes his absence all the more prominent.
We’re all talking and discoursing. We’re listening and not listening. We have not reached a balance.
Etc, Etc…
