He may have said, “[w]e need segregated buses,” but that doesn’t mean he’s a racist. (This, however, does.)

For purely academic reasons, I’ve never understood the argument that we should ignore Rush Limbaugh because he’s simply an entertainer who says outrageous things that millions of people are merely entertained by.  I didn’t read the complete works of Silas Weir Mitchell because they were good—they are almost uniformly awful—I read them because they were popular.  I was interested not in the content of his thought—it is almost uniformly mediocre—but in why his contemporaries found it so wildly appealing.  If you want to learn which ideas and ideologies literate Americans in 1900 found comforting, you do not consult Henry James: you turn to the inartistic novels that parroted their prejudices back to them in a language they already understood.  So when people say that we should dismiss Limbaugh on the grounds that he only says outrageous things to sell his product, I’m never quite sure why they’re more concerned with Limbaugh’s motivations than the fact that millions of Americans are buying what he’s selling.

Ignoring whatever millions of Americans are buying distorts your understanding of the American political scene whether it be 2009 or 1909.  If you work on popular culture in 1909, you are limited to tracking the flight of a given idea—but if you track a given idea in 2009, your work can actually change its trajectory.  You might not know exactly where exactly that idea will land yet, but you can do the political calculus required to figure out where it came from and where it’s likely to strike.   If it feels like you’re tilting window fans at cannon balls from half a continent away, remember what they say about rare Chinese butterflies flapping their wings: they are less likely to be minuten-pinned by mad lepidopterists—which is beside the point.  The point, as one prominent Beatles apologist recently argued, is that cultural studies can be an important fan so long as we aim it at the right cannonball.

In this case, the important issue is not that Limbaugh is a racist who makes racist statements, but that those statements resonate with his audience so powerfully. Consider, for example, that he feels no compulsion to qualify his sarcastic call for segregated busing:

RUSH: Well, did he say why, in Obama’s America, that incident with the white kid getting beat up on the black school bus was not racially motivated?

CALLER: I didn’t hear him comment about that. No, sir.

RUSH: Because we’ve seen the videotape. Have you seen the videotape?

CALLER: Sure.

RUSH: We can’t hear what’s being said.

CALLER: No.

RUSH: So we don’t know what obvious taunts this lone white student was dishing out to the whole bus.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: We don’t know what obvious taunts.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: Worse than the obvious verbal taunts, we all know the racism that was in the kid’s mind. I mean Newsweek magazine says he was born a racist. So you know the white kid is sitting there thinking N-word and all kinds of things being surrounded by these black students. They knew that. They knew that and so they just descended on the kid and beat him up. We’ve seen the videotape. What did the police chief investigate?

CALLER: He did not comment on anything other than he said more investigations shows that it was not racially motivated.

RUSH: I think the guy is wrong I think not only was it racism, it’s justifiable racism.

CALLER: True.

RUSH: I mean, that’s the lesson that we’re being taught here today. Kid shouldn’t have been on the bus anyway.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: We need segregated buses. It was invading of space and so forth. This is Obama’s America.

CALLER: Yes. Could I ask another question, not related to this issue?

RUSH: By all means, since you’re here.

Most of the liberal outrage at his remarks strip them of their relevant context: the Newsweek article “See Baby Discriminate” that claims, by Limbaugh’s reckoning, that white people are born racist.  Given that all white people are racists, he argues, the silent tape didn’t capture the racist epithets the white kid shouted that make his beating justifiable—because it’s not racist to beat down someone who’s being a racist—and that it would be best to segregate similarly racist white kids before they provoke their non-racist black peers into beating them down.  He and his defenders will read those expressions of liberal outrage, note that they decontextualize his sarcastic remarks, and dismiss as stupid anyone who believes Limbaugh actually called for the return of Jim Crow.

Punishing the straw-Limbaugh not only provides him plausible deniability, it obscures the actual, non-sarcastic racist assumptions underpinning his remarks—foremost among them, that black people are inherently violent and lack self-control.  They are justified, he unwittingly argues, in expressing their violent tendencies because the white kid in his hypothetical said something racist. Instead of talking with their mouths like hypothetical white kid, black kids speak with their fists, an idea that is so firmly entrenched in the minds of those who loudly claim to not be racist that even when black kids are talking with their mouths, they are “technically thugs” forever on the brink of expressing their innate violent tendencies.  Don’t believe me?  Watch the development of the pronoun “it” in this bit by Dan Riehl:

It went on but not really to a level that was so loud, or so confrontational that it needed to be addressed.

We just ignored them without much trouble at all.

Yeah, they were technically thugs. But the reality was they were still wannabes really, pretty young, not that big, or many. And if the several adults there for 9/12 actually needed to do something about it, the kids wouldn’t have lasted very long. Maybe if they were bigger, or more numerous, it might have been worse.

That first “it” refers to a conversation that was “not really to a level that was so loud, or so confrontational that it need to be addressed.”  But the second one lacks an obvious antecedent and could, if you’re feeling charitable, refer back to the conversation; more realistically, “it” refers to the general situation in which young black kids are quietly saying things in a non-confrontational manner, and Riehl immediately concludes that that “it” might be a situation that he and his white companions might need “to do something about.”   Let me repeat that: Riehl believes that black kids quietly saying things in a non-confrontational manner is a general situation that, through no fault of white people, typically escalates to violence.  That third “it” is even more damning: the general situation in which black kids quietly say things in a non-confrontational manner “might have been worse” if they were bigger or there were more of them because, had the people with innately violent tendencies been larger or more numerous, Riehl and company would have been powerless “to do something about it” after the inevitable escalation.  The implication here is that the physical and numerical superiority of the white adults kept those black kids in check.  They wanted to beat Riehl down, but like the President they admire, they are pragmatists who avoid fights they can’t win—but put a white kid on a bus full of black kids and what happens?

Riehl answers that question by the simple act of pairing his experience on 9/12 with the video of the school bus beating; Limbaugh answers it by unwittingly revealing the beating racist heart within his sarcastic straw-compatriot; and the commenters at Michelle Malkin and Gateway Pundit answer it by voicing their belief that it’s no longer safe to be a white person in America anymore:

We are seeing a new culture of hate and terror coming from Washington to feed violence. This would never have happened under Bush.   Obama behaves more like a common street thug than a leader of a country, and [g]iven the overbearing sense of racial entitlement that most black people in America have, and the encouragement offered to their worst aspects by the liberal establishment, these kind of incidents are going to become much more frequent and much more severe.

It[']s open season on whitey.  Blacks can say anything, do most anything without so much as a burp of backlash.  This is what we get for paying this parasitic underclass to breed. We’ve been watering the weeds for 50 years, and it’s only getting worse.  We should be very careful of where this is going.  It will end ugly.  We need our laws to step in and stop this crap before white folks feel a need to take the law into their own hands. How long are white people supposed to put up with this?  We could solve the problem in no time if we treated them the way that they would treat us if we were only 12% of the population.

Can you tell me there is no race war going on?  While white people sit around shaking their heads and looking the other way black people have made every possible issue about race and their anger is erupting more daily. It’s only going to get worse.  That’s why we are clinging to our guns and religion.  When you start the war, we finish it.  You want a race war?  You have no idea of what is about to hit you.  You are sowing the wind and you will reap the whirlwind.  You are outnumbered, you are surrounded, and you have made the grave mistake of awakening the sleeping giant.

Bernard Goetz knew how to handle [a] situation in which the “n” word is appropriate.

Limbaugh knows his audience—he’s priming it for the moment when he needs to justify a preemptive strike against an innately violent party or parties, and the message is trickling down the airwaves to bloggers like Riehl and those who read him. It behooves us not to ignore such developments solely because their provenance is contemporary instead of historical.

(x-posted.)

Comments

[Ahistoricality]

I'm having a flashback to those halcyon days and days and days of discussion about the responsibility and audience proclivities of Patterico and KC Johnson.

[SEK]

That was different, because then the President was a Republican, and the denounced constituency was, um, it was different then, because, you know, because. Don't make me pull this car over! I will!

[davis.br]

Two words, the elephant in the room you're either ignoring or (to put a charitable light on it) simply missing:

affirmative action

And by ignoring the myriad implications - social and personal - inherent therein in early 21st century America (and some forty years after Montgomery and the National Guard), you miss the whole raison d'tre behind Limbaugh's point. Missed. It. Entirely. And hence, both your pseudo-analysis and argument slides off the road into the Leftist swamp of "racer-ism" (seeing everything as tainted by the "inherent racism of ...well, anyone-you-disagree-with-politically-regardless-of-their-genetically-inherited-melanin-count".

Deep. Real deep.

[Karl Steel]

pseudo-analysis

You mean like when Limbaugh said ...oh, hell, you can just check the link yourself

[Dan Riehl]

Don't sweat it, Ditto Heads. Chuckles here just linked back to the post to try to get a little traffic based upon Russh's popularity. Just your typical liberal mindset, trying to get by on someone else's dine.

Thank Me!

[SEK]

Dan, I get links from BoingBoing: I'm not attacking you for traffic, you racist moron, I'm attacking you because you deserve it.

[Luther Blissett]

My impression is that Rush is playing on lefty tropes here. The left often assumes that white folks do have some latent racism on the verge of erupting on to black folks. So he's sarcastically suggesting that in this instance, where a white kid is beaten up by black kids, that the white kid must have been a racist, whether or not he said anything inflammatory. He thinks that in Obama's America, black folk would like buses to be segregated to keep black groups safe from white racism. It's a silly argument, but it's not racist.

[Ahistoricality]

It's a silly argument, but it's not racist.

Except that his audience knows he's not sincere about justifying the attack: he's mocking the Newsweek argument.

Rather, he's highlighting the "blacks can't help being violent" theme and saying that blacks also must be racist and should be segregated for the safety of white kids.

How is that not fundamentally and blatantly racist?

[Julian]

Davis.BR:

I don't know if affirmative action qualifies as an "elephant in the room" since liberals will, in fact, talk your ear off about it if you let them. Also, how does affirmative action relate to the OP? It is not helpful to assert things like

"you miss the whole raison d'tre behind Limbaugh's point. Missed. It. Entirely. And hence, both your pseudo-analysis and argument slides off the road into the Leftist swamp of "racer-ism"..."

without explaining how he missed it, what Rush's point actually was, and so on.

[JPool]

Luther,
You're getting the trope wrong. The trope, which is not just lefty, but mainstream Sociology, is that we're all (white, black, etc.) racist, because we're raised in a racially divided society with racist tropes suffused through the cultural mix. The left has used this to say that we can't assume that we're the good people who don't have to worry about racial prejudice, and should therefor be open to other folks telling us that we screwed up. The right of course have twisted this into "The left think that all white people are secretly racist." This is then used to both dismiss claims of racism and, ironically, rally white racial identity as some kind of put upon class. (In other words, they want to read Minor Threat's "Guilty of Being White" unironically/context-free). The added problem is that Limbaugh isn't saying any of this, he's "saying" it. ("And now I'm using sarcasm to confess the whole thing!")

SEK, I think that you actually weaken your case by going back to Riehl here, both because you've already said everything worth saying about that post, and because Riehl, not being the kind of prominent figure that Limbaugh or Malkin are, doesn't advance your more interesting argument, that these are influential folks playing to and manipulating a widespread set of fears and prejudices. People get beat up in St. Louis all the time; it's one of the most violent cities in the US. This brouhaha over a lone white kids getting beat up by a group of black kids makes its way around right wing talky town, not because it somehow proves that Obama will actually make everything worse, but because it plays to a more primal set of fears about race and violence, of which the "race war" commenters are only the most colorful examples.

[SEK]

Two words, the elephant in the room you're either ignoring or (to put a charitable light on it) simply missing: affirmative action

I'm doing neither, Davis.BR, because your point is completely irrelevant. I'll tell you what I tell everyone who complains about it: until you 1) learn what legacy admissions are and 2) are outraged by them, I'm not going believe that your opposition to accepting qualified candidates into universities is based on anything other than pure, unbridled racism. That said:

And by ignoring the myriad implications - social and personal - inherent therein in early 21st century America (and some forty years after Montgomery and the National Guard), you miss the whole raison d'tre behind Limbaugh's point. Missed. It. Entirely.

I dare you to connect the dots between what Limbaugh said, what I said, and what you said. I can wait. (Alternatively, what Julian said.)

I think that you actually weaken your case by going back to Riehl here, both because you've already said everything worth saying about that post, and because Riehl, not being the kind of prominent figure that Limbaugh or Malkin are, doesn't advance your more interesting argument, that these are influential folks playing to and manipulating a widespread set of fears and prejudices.

Riehl's not there as a person of prominence---no matter what he thinks about his traffic, which he seems to think both a lot of and about a lot---but what's been trickled down to. He's the fiddle being played to the tune of racism, as it were.

This brouhaha over a lone white kids getting beat up by a group of black kids makes its way around right wing talky town, not because it somehow proves that Obama will actually make everything worse, but because it plays to a more primal set of fears about race and violence, of which the "race war" commenters are only the most colorful examples.

Absolutely. The fact that conservatives have even connected it to the President is indicative of their bad faith: they're color-blind, they don't see race, but middle-school kids of different races scuffle and they're all "This is why I protested ObamaCare!" Not that their opposition to ObamaCare has anything to do with race, mind you---it's merely the first thing that pops in their mind when they hear about a fight in a middle school.