The politics of niceness: Dan Snyder, the Washington NFL team, and the 'N' word

By Frank Moraes 

Jonathan Bernstein made a great point over at his blog about the naming of the Washington Redskins: "The Question Is Etiquette, Not 'Racism'." The title says it all: it doesn't matter whether or how the term "redskin" is offensive, if our native American brothers and sisters don't like the term, we shouldn't use it. After all, as a group, have they not suffered enough? The United States government committed a genocide against them. Not naming mascots after culturally offensive stereotypes sounds like the least we could do.

Bernstein brings up another point that we may refer to as, "Why does mom get to call you that?" This is in reference to situations like that where my mother calls me Frankie, but I prefer to be called Frank. Why does my mother get to call me that but not you? I don't know and I don't have to provide you with an answer. It's just the way it is. If you call me Frankie, it's not going to kill me. But it does mean that you're an asshole. (For the record, it is fine to call me Frankie, although those so inclined to make my name cuter tend to go with Frannie.)

He doesn't mention it, but he's clearly talking about the surprisingly common conservative lament that African Americans can use the word "nigger" but whites can't. (I actually think that the words that they use is "nigga," which is a different, although derivative word.) This has always struck me as a bizarre complaint. Do such people think they are missing out by not being able to use that word? I dare say most of these people go their whole lives without the more useful "pulchritude" and never seem to miss it. But the more important point is that I'm sure that any African American would be willing to trade use of the word for just a fraction of the privilege that whites have in this country.

This all follows the announcement by Slate that it will no longer refer to the Washington team by "Redskins." This is just a change in their style guide, but such changes are important. (Grammar is important!) After all, newspapers changed their style guides in the 1960s to remove "negro" and "colored." So this stuff really does matter and it really does make a difference. This is all part of the fight against the offensive name and the bigger the battlefield gets, the more likely the name will change. And eventually, the name will change, if only because Daniel Snyder dies or sells the team. (Note: I'm sure he doesn't see himself this way, but Daniel Snyder is an asshole and likely a bigot as well.)

Bernstein's insight is an important one. Most of what is important in life is just about acting like a decent human being. Perhaps the biggest argument against libertarianism is simply that all its talk of marginal increases in freedom (an abstract concept under most circumstances) is nonsense in comparison to the needs of people who are literally starving thanks to a system that may tend to maximize freedom but doesn't come close to fairness. So maybe we should all just treat each other with the dignity that all humans deserve. Of course, that doesn't mean I'm going to stop calling out people like Dan Snyder for the assholes they are. 

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

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The South, in all its bigoted glory

By Michael J.W. Stickings

A couple of days ago, New York's Daily Intelligencer blog posted a couple of items that together provide a pretty good picture of the South: 

Flying Confederate Flag Along Highway Will 'Tell People That Everyone Is Welcome' in Virginia

"This will tell people that everyone is welcome," says Susan Hathaway, the founder of the pro-Confederate-flag group Virginia Flaggers, who plans to display a giant ten-by-fifteen-foot flag along the I-95 highway in Virginia. "Why do we have to be a place where Southerners who are proud of our heritage are not welcome?" Susan is a real character.

And: 

Georgia Republicans Like Paula Deen Much More Than They Like Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr., a man who played such an integral role in the fight for racial equality that his birthday was declared a national holiday, has a 59 percent approval rating among Georgia Republicans. Paula Deen, a lady who was fired for trying to treat black people like actual nineteenth-century slaves, has a 73 percent approval rating. #thesouth

In related news, Mississippi is still burning.

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Rand Paul imagines there's no racism -- it isn't hard to do

By Frank Moraes

The smart bigot's argument against affirmative action is that the very idea is racist. As George Will is fond of saying things similar to this, "If you want to stop racism, stop being racist." It all sounds so great. According to this theory, all we need to do is stop thinking in racial terms and everything will be fine. The problem is that we won't all stop thinking in racial terms. We might stop talking in racial terms. We might all pretend that many individuals, institution, and system are beyond operating in racial terms. But racist thinking will then simply have free rein to work its pernicious magic. So all we're really getting from people like Will is an appeal to ignore racism and hope it goes away (not that it matters one way or another to him).

A good example of how racism works can be found in Texas. Within 24 hours of the Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act, Texas began working to make its voting system more racist. Of course, there is nothing new about this. According to a federal court ruling from last year, "The [Texas Congressional District 23] mapdrawers consciously replaced many of the district's active Hispanic voters with low-turnout Hispanic voters in an effort to strengthen the voting power of CD 23's Anglo citizens." This is the kind of thing that the Voting Rights Act was designed to protect against. But now the Supreme Court has ruled that they have to be allowed to suppress the vote and only then stopped.

Attorney General Eric Holder has decided that the federal government still can go after this kind of behavior before it directly affects voters. In a transcript of a talk he gave to the National Urban League Annual Conference, he said, "Based on the evidence of intentional racial discrimination that was presented last year in the redistricting case, Texas v. Holder -- as well as the history of pervasive voting-related discrimination against racial minorities that the Supreme Court itself has recognized -- we believe that the State of Texas should be required to go through a preclearance process whenever it changes its voting laws and practices."

This, of course, is great news. But it gets to the heart of this ridiculous idea that if we liberals would just shut up about racism, it would go away. That's just not true. Institutional racism existed that effectively made it impossible for blacks to vote in the south from the 1870s up through the 1965 Voting Rights Act. That's roughly 90 years of pretending that there was no problem. If it really were going to work itself out, it would have done so in that amount of time. And that is not even counting the de facto Jim Crow that currently exists in the form of the massive over-application of drug laws against African American communities.

But don't think that George Will and his band of sophisticated bigots are an old and dying bread. Steve Benen brought my attention to an interview that Rand Paul did with Yahoo! News in Iowa. Now remember: Paul is one of the more "reasonable" Republicans. And he said, "I don't think there's anyone in Congress who has a stronger belief in minority rights than I do." And he isn't lying. That's what he thinks. He thinks that explicit government racism is wrong. He even understands the drug law issue. What he doesn't understand -- and this is key -- is how America isn't otherwise a level playing field.

This is just willful ignorance -- the kind of ignorance that is very flattering to a man like Rand Paul. For example, he is a doctor. So is his father Ron Paul. But I'm sure it never occurs to him that that is correlated in any way except that Ron gave him some really great genes. But all the evidence shows it is just the opposite. So Rand Paul can think that he's the number one proponent of minority rights. But the truth is that just like the bigots who came before him, he just wants everyone to pretend. Unfortunately for him, most of us don't have the talent for such delusion.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

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A life in black and white: Personal reflections on race in America

Guest post by Robert Stein

Ed. note: I'm extremely pleased to be able to present to you this wonderful piece by my friend Bob Stein, who looks back over the nearly nine decades of his life to tell a very personal story about race in America. On another note, I'm just pleased to be able to have Bob as a guest blogger here. I've long been a fan of his blog, Connecting the Dots, which I highly recommend. He's an extremely thoughtful writer, and in his writing you will find a deeply humane and compassionate man. -- MJWS

Robert Stein has had a long career as an editor, publisher, media critic, and journalism teacher. A former chair of the American Society of Magazine Editors, he currently blogs at Connecting the Dots.

**********

Now that Barack Obama has turned personal about race and started a national debate, an older witness is impelled to step forward and testify.

Nearly 90 years ago, I was born to white shopkeepers in the black ghetto of Harlem, living in back of a small store, selling things to people even poorer than they were. Their customers were descended from African slaves, while they themselves had left behind a Europe where their kind would soon be killed by the millions.

We were all safe here from servitude and slaughter, but not fully American, free but far from equal.

When I was three and seriously ill, my parents gave up the store and moved away, but my father kept working in Harlem for the next forty years. When I was old enough, I would sometimes go with him on a Saturday for the fourteen hours he spent in a pawnshop there.

The patrons came parading through, most of them well-dressed, almost all black, carrying clothes, jewelry, musical instruments, cameras to offer as hostage for the few dollars they had to have for a few days or weeks.

Some seemed down and defeated, but many were jaunty, with the aliveness of people always dancing on the edge. Seeing me, they flashed white smiles from their dark faces, surprised and amused to find a kid among the forbidding figures guarding the pawnbroker's cash box. I always smiled back, trying to drink in some of their joy.

Pawnbrokers made loans to the desperate, with higher interest than banks were allowed to charge. In earlier days, they were little more than fences, acquiring stolen goods cheap to resell. Now strict laws required them to be wary -- but it was a sad business, bordering on usury, profiting from human misery. For my father, it was simply where he worked sixty hours a week to earn sixteen dollars.

Once he brought home an autograph, from Colonel Hubert Julian, an American pilot who single-handedly had opposed Mussolini's air force in Abyssinia to become known as Haile Selassie's "Black Eagle." What led him to a Harlem pawnshop I never learned, but for years I saved that scrap with the flamboyant signature of a genuine hero.

In the windows of Harlem shops, black-on-yellow placards showed the week's offerings of local movie houses: Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen (huge letters) in Gone With the Wind with (much smaller) Clark Gable, or The Big Broadcast of 1937 starring Rochester and (footnote size) Jack Benny. There was so little to nourish pride on those streets that when Joe Louis (called by newspapers, without irony, "a credit to his race") knocked out Max Schmeling in their 1938 rematch for the heavyweight title, Harlem erupted in riotous joy.

From the Bronx, I commuted to City College, walking ten blocks to and from the subway station every day through a sea of dark faces without fear or harm.

After returning from World War II and being shot at by white people, I graduated and went to work at that Harlem campus, where I fell in love with a beautiful, brilliant young woman. But a decade before Barack Obama was born, we -- certainly I -- did not have the courage to marry and bring interracial children into a world so little changed from the time of my own childhood.

Soon afterward, I went to work as an editor in midtown Manhattan and was eventually hired by George H. W. Bush's father-in-law as the first Jew among hundreds of employees. Needless to say, everyone there was white.

In 1955, at Redbook, I assigned the first article in a national magazine on 26-year-old Martin Luther King during the Montgomery, Alabama bus strike. Ten years later, when I was editor of McCall's, Dr. King wrote a memoir for me about leading young African-American gang members from Chicago on non-violent Freedom Marches in Mississippi where "they were to be attacked by tear gas. They were to protect women and children with no other weapons but their own bodies."

When I became head of the American Society of Magazine Editors, I began an effort to recruit African-American college students as summer interns, but that program was watered down by fellow editors and subverted by a young black woman hired to recruit applicants who was found to be urging them not "to buy into the system."

Martin Luther King was killed, and so was any white naivete about easily changing a culture so deeply ingrained in American life.

Looking back at that time and the years that followed brings a heavy sense of swimming against powerful tides that now seem even stronger than ever in the wake of an African-American president.

Yet there is hope in TV panels of black faces debating uncomfortable statistics on crime in their own communities and old white people trying to sort out what they can do for a better future.

Barack Obama has opened up biographical soul-searching. If it can slowly begin to change minds and hearts, the generations that follow us will be the better for it.

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President Obama, leading with maturity and understanding

By Mustang Bobby 

Andrew Sullivan marvels at President Obama's ability to handle a very tense situation with coolness and reflection.

No other president could have said what Obama said on Friday afternoon with similar authority. What was striking to me was the tone of acute sadness – a tone others could have used after what was, under any interpretation, a tragedy. And then there was the fact that this first black president, even after such a polarizing incident, spoke to all Americans, white and black. I cannot fathom how some on the knee-jerk right could have seen this as a divisive set of comments – just as I cannot quite fathom how this president is capable of controlling and channeling his own emotions.

What he tried to do was explain to white America how it must feel like to be perpetually deemed guilty before being proven innocent just because of your age, gender and the color of your skin. He didn’t deny the facts of the Martin case; he didn't dispute the jury's decision; he didn't dismiss legitimate issues like the toll of gun violence within the young black male population – but he did insist that we all understand the context, the history, and the reason, behind the anguish and anger of many African-American men and parents and boys. What he was asking for was some mutual empathy.

To answer his point about the knee-jerk right seeing this as divisive, it was a given; Sean Hannity and the rest of the people at Fox News and other such places would have had the same reaction if the president had come out and given his mother's recipe for beef stew.  Their response to anything he says is programmed far in advance. He speaks like Martin Luther King, they hear Malcolm X.

And this reaction proves the president's point: it's going to be very hard to have this discussion when you have a mindset in the nation that refuses to acknowledge that not only is there a race problem in this country, this kind of reaction is adding to it, and accusing the accuser of racism by pointing it out keeps the discussion at arms’ length.

The right wing used the same tactic after Newtown and the topic of gun control came up: it's too soon to talk about it, and by talking about gun control, you're just making the situation worse. It's an infantile evasion, but it works: the discussion is deflected from what needs to be done about the situation at hand to talking about whether or not we should even be talking about it.

What I find singularly impressive is that the president was able to step forward and speak to the situation in both strikingly personal terms but also as an adult addressing a problem that requires adult responses. I'm sure he knew what kind of response he'd get from the right wing; in fact, I'll bet that he was counting on it. That way he can lead by example – as Andrew notes, by lowering the temperature – and letting the real race-baiters prove his point for him. That takes a remarkable amount of maturity and understanding – something we rarely see in our leaders any more.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

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Too much monkey business

By Capt. Fogg

No need for me complainin' - my objection's overruled, ahh!

Too much monkey business. Too much monkey business.

Too much monkey business for me to be involved in! 

                                                                                                    -Chuck Berry-

As though to deliberately illustrate what I've been saying, a horde of "impassioned" zealots in liberal clothing rallied in Miami Saturday to hear Bishop Victor Curry, a Baptist church official and South Florida president of the National Action Network tell them that the Zimmerman verdict was a "wake up call" which of course it was not, at least not any more than any case in which the accused was given the benefit of the doubt. The argument that Zimmerman was a murderous racist looking to hunt black people is as disgusting as any of Al Sharpton's accusations, including his portrayal of Bernhard Goetz as a racist for shooting armed robbers. The argument that the verdict was pursuant to the 'stand your ground' law is so earth shakingly false it would show up on a seismometer, so what is this all about? The NAN is the creation of Al Sharpton who makes and has made his living by imaginatively accusing people of racism so egregiously, I'm sure Dr. king would be making speeches against him and his business were he alive today.

Bishop Curry has also staged protests in New York, Washington, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Chicago, and more than 90 other cities around the United States. This Zimmerman business is a business and a business that needs to foment race tension as much as the Mason Family did.

Dragging Trayvon Martin's head around the country on a pike is about politics, not justice and I sure as hell don't remember Nicole Simpson or Ron Goldman being used similarly. It was far more a travesty of justice that OJ was described as the victim of racism and that science and fact and evidence were laughed at. It's a business, and as much as I loathe racism, I loathe the business of using it to sell product, to make money, to build careers on it, to accuse people of it to further a political purpose far more because it cheapens the real cause, detracts from the real cause and furnishes the real racists a defense they don't deserve.

The death of Trayvon Martin was not about racism, not about a new birth of Jim Crow. Zimmerman wouldn't be allowed into the Klan, nor does he represent some resurgence, some recrudescence of an early 20th century southern white mentality. The verdict was not the result of racism and most of all, neither the verdict, the defense, nor for that matter the facts had anything to do with the law that some people oppose so hysterically that they dishonor the memory of an unlucky kid and a grieving family as well as they dishonor truth, decency and the liberal causes of justice and freedom for all.

Zimmerman got off because the prosecution could not prove that Martin was not holding him down so that he couldn't run away. That is an argument based on the older law requiring the duty to retreat, not the Stand your Ground law which did not permit Zimmerman to pursue or confront Martin nor to threaten him. Such actions would, as I read the law, nullify his claim to self defense and his right to draw a weapon.

Are we willing to dispense with the presumption of innocence because of the presumption of racism?

That Zimmerman was wont to call 911 when seeing suspicious characters in his neighborhood shows only that he was doing what a neighborhood watch participant is supposed to do, and when a preponderance of unidentified people and a preponderance of those engaging in vandalism are black those calls are evidence of racism only to racists.

I'm all for practical gun control. I passionately hate racism and racists and bigots of all kinds, and I hate it when bigotry, stereotyping, racism and outright lies are used by people getting rich pretending to fight it.

(Cross-posted at Human Voices.)

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Making sense of the Zimmerman verdict

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Like many others, I tweeted a lot last night in response to the Zimmerman verdict. Like many others, I wanted -- and still want -- #JusticeForTrayvon. Here are a couple of them:

It's the justice system imperfect? Yes. Is there racism in America? Yes. Are Florida laws appalling? Yes. Strive for change. #ZimmermanTrial

— Michael Stickings (@mjwstickings) July 14, 2013

Ultimately, the problem is much deeper than a verdict in a single case, however sad. Fight for change, fight for justice. #ZimmermanTrial
— Michael Stickings (@mjwstickings) July 14, 2013

And yet, while I understood, and still do, the enormous outpouring of outrage, and while I abhorred, and always will, the gloating coming from the pro-Zimmerman types on the right, I must say I found much of the reaction to the verdict, from those outraged, unnecessarily weighed down with grotesque hyperbole at a time when what is needed is perspective and a sober sense of what to do now now that the trial is over.

For example, there were those attacking the jurors for supposedly being right-wing morons, as if we can possibly know what was going through their minds, consciously or not, as they reached a verdict in one of the most controversial trials in recent memory.

And there were those attacking the defense attorneys. Yes, there was some ugly gloating on their part, but they were also just doing their jobs.

And those attacking the system without really understanding how criminal justice works.

And today I saw some insanely calling for a boycott of the State of Florida, as if that somehow would solve the problem.

And so on.

This is not to say that I'm happy with the verdict or that I think justice was done. Please. This isn't an either/or thing.

I think we know pretty clearly what happened, or at least we think we do, and I think we know pretty clearly that racism was involved in what happened, and perhaps also in some rather less clear way in the trial/verdict, and I think it's understandable to be angry, disappointed, frustrated.

But while wanting justice for Trayvon Martin, and finding the whole damn thing abhorrent, let's not make the mistake of mistaking this one case for more than it was.

Even if it was a reflection of the deeper and broader problem of racism in America, as well as of the country's gun-crazed culture of violence, even if we're certain, absolutely certain, that things would have gone differently had a black man been the killer, this was one case with one set of evidence, one judge, and one jury. And unfortunately, in that context, the verdict, however disappointing, however disturbing, made some sense.

Yes, sense. I'm sorry, but it did. And if saying that loses me some twitter followers, as it appears to have done, or if some of you take that to mean I'm pro-Zimmerman, no different from the gloaters, because you can't see the nuance here, well, what can I say?

One of the best tweets I've seen came from ex-NFLer Scott Fujita:

Who really failed here? The prosecution? The jury? No. The laws in the state of FL failed. Be constructive in response. Focus on change.
— Scott Fujita (@sfujita55) July 14, 2013

And the smartest thing I've read on the verdict came from Slate's Emily Bazelon, in a must-read piece that includes the following:

It feels wrong, this verdict of not guilty for George Zimmerman. It feels wrong to say that Zimmerman is guilty of no crime. If he hadn't approached 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, if he hadn't pulled his gun, Martin would be alive.

But that doesn't mean Zimmerman was guilty of murder, not in the state of Florida. It doesn't even mean he was guilty of manslaughter, though that was the middle ground I hoped the jury would find its way toward... Here's the problem: To convict Zimmerman of murder, the six women of the jury had to find that he killed Martin out of ill will, hatred, or spite, or with a depraved mind. The law didn't account Zimmerman's fear or feeling of being physically threatened.

But the physical evidence suggested that in the heat of the moment, Zimmerman could have felt both of those things.

In other words, the verdict may not have been racist, and, given the laws in Florida and the high bar of "beyond a reasonable doubt" (a bar that must remain high at all times if the legal system is to be in any way just), maybe the verdict actually made... sense.

Here's The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates, also not a right-wing pro-Zimmerman apologist, making the same case:

I think the jury basically got it right. The only real eyewitness to the death of Trayvon Martin was the man who killed him. At no point did I think that the state proved second degree murder. I also never thought they proved beyond a reasonable doubt that he acted recklessly. They had no ability to counter his basic narrative, because there were no other eye-witnesses.

And on this I am in full agreement:

[T]rials don't work as strict "moral surrogates." Everything that is immoral is not illegal -- nor should it be. I want to live in a society that presumes innocence. I want to live in that society even when I feel that a person should be punished.

Did the system work? Well, yes, in its flawed way.

It's an imperfect system, after all, that when it works as it should presumes innocence even for those who seem the most guilty and places the burden of proof on the government.

I'm not saying that racism played no part here, or that the system isn't deeply corrupt, but I think we should take a step back before hurling accusations in all directions.

And while there is undeniably a sense of gross injustice here -- Trayvon is dead, Zimmerman walks -- the point for us all should be to rally together to fight for change as the pathway to justice.

Fight to end racism, particularly as it manifests itself in institutions like the justice system. Fight for meaningful gun control legislation. Fight to put an end to America's gun-crazed culture of violence.

Fight for Trayvon, yes, but do so in the right way, and without turning on the system for doing what, at the end of the day, it was supposed to do in this case.

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A Paul problem: Ron, Rand, and racism

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Jon Chait, New York: "Racists Love Ron and Rand Paul for Some Reason."

Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon: "Rand Paul’s team has another white supremacist."

Or there are a couple of posts I wrote last year:

-- "The ugly truth about Ron Paul"; and

-- "So is Ron Paul a racist, or what?"

Well, I wouldn't say that the Pauls are overt racists, let alone white supremacists, although Ron's notorious newsletters from way back when certainly suggest otherwise.

But it's interesting how racism keeps popping up all around them, notably these days in the sordid company they keep.

Not that it should come as a surprise. As Chait writes:

The deep connection between the Pauls and the neo-Confederate movement doesn't discredit their ideas, but it’s also not just an indiscretion. It's a reflection of the fact that white supremacy is a much more important historical constituency for anti-government ideas than libertarians like to admit.

Obviously, most of their libertarian supporters are anti-government in more general terms. But there are others among them who want the government out of the way because they want the Confederacy back in some form, including the ideology of racial supremacism that went along with it.

The Pauls can try to run from this association, but it's just too much a part of what they are, whether they and their followers like it or not.

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