Acephalous

Your black best friend isn't an "Unfamiliar Black Male"

I'm getting more than a little annoyed with the self-righteous proclamations of conservatives that George Zimmerman's been proven innocent of profiling by virtue of his acquittal on charges of manslaughter and murder. The evidence all points to Zimmerman becoming increasingly obsessed with the presence of black males at his apartment complex in the months leading up to Trayvon Martin's death. Prior to April 2011, Zimmerman's 911 calls were the work of the neighborhood busybody. For example, he called to report:

• 12 August 2004: "a male in a green Ford pickup"
• 20 August 2004: "an open garage door"
• 27 April 2005: another "open garage door"
• 17 March 2005: "pothole that is blocking the road"
• 21 September 2005: "a stray dog"
• 10 June 2009: "fire alarm going off"
• 7 September 2009: another "pothole in the road"
• 22 September 2009: "yellow bike ... doing wheelies"

But starting in August of 2011, Zimmerman's calls took on a decidedly different note. He reported:

• 3 August 2011: "[a] black male last seen wearing a white tank top and black shorts," who he "believes ... is involved in recent [burglaries]"
• 6 August 2011: "two black males ... in their teens"
• 23 September 2011: yet another "open garage door," but specifies reason for calling is "neighborhood watch [meeting] last night"
• 1 October 2011: "two black males ... 20 - 30 [years old] in Chevy [possibly] Impala at the gate of the community," about whom Zimmerman's concerned because he "does not recognize [the subjects] or [vehicle] and is concerned due to recent burglaries"
• 29 January 2012: children "running and playing in the street"
• 2 February 2012: "[black male last seen wearing] black leather jacket, black hat, printed PJ pants [who] keeps going to [the same] location"

And then on 26 February 2012 he calls about Trayvon Martin. There's a pattern here obvious to anyone without an investment in not seeing it. What began as annoying 911 operators with pointless complaints escalated to notifying the authorities any time he saw a black male he didn't know. The argument that he's not racist and wasn't profiling is based on the fact that he "mentored black children" and "had black friends" and is entirely beside the point, because it presumes that he's an overt and deliberate racist. Those who make it claim victory when they demonstrate that he never wore a white hood or bedecked his body in Nazi ink.

I'll grant that that Zimmerman didn't pine for the days of short ropes and sturdy limbs.

I'll grant that he didn't dream of goose-stepping down the Champs-Élysées in his dress browns.

But I won't grant that race didn't color his judgment when it came to young black men with whom he wasn't personally acquainted. From 3 August 2011 forward he's increasingly -- and almost exclusively -- concerned with unfamiliar black males in his apartment complex. Maybe confirmation bias is more the problem here than racism, but the fact remains that the bias being confirmed is that young black males are suspects until proven otherwise. You can't look at the 911 calls in the months immediately prior to the shooting and argue otherwise. (At least not honestly.) He transformed from a harmless nudnik into someone very concerned with the presence of unfamiliar black males, which at the very least means that by 11 August 2011 his worldview contained the category "Unfamiliar Black Male" and that the presence of people belonging to it warranted calling 911.

That's indisputable.

Whether he volunteered the race of Trayvon Martin to the 911 dispatcher or responded to a question about it is immaterial. As evidenced by previous calls, this one was triggered by the presence of an "Unfamiliar Black Male." And as the escalation of 911 calls indicates, he was becoming increasingly frustrated with the presence of people belonging to this category. Because, in his words, "These assholes always get away." You can argue that he's simply referring to generic burglars of an undetermined and irrelevant race, but doing so requires ignoring the larger context of Zimmerman's recent 911 calls in which all the subjects were of a determined and relevant race.

But if you want to make that claim in order to win an argument with someone on the Internet, by all means, please tell me about call from 2007 in which he reported seeing two Hispanic males with a "slim jim," or the one from 2009 in which he didn't identify the race of the people "going into the pool and trashing the bathroom." Feel free to ignore the cluster of calls immediately before the shooting in favor of the ones from three and five years previous, because we all know that beliefs don't develop and concretize over time. While you're at it, continue to insist that people who instigate confrontations are in no way culpable for their outcome. You know why? Because to everyone but you your argument amounts to this guy:

Being in the moral right to shoot away should he decide that the danger he sought is more dangerous than he thought it'd be.

Wherever there's a racist being racist, I'll be there.

As someone who writes about race and also teaches at the University of California, Irvine, I take full responsibility for this egregious recording. Clearly, I'm a horrible teacher because students I never taught wore blackface on the Internet.

So say the emails that poured in after a prominent conservative blogger tweeted my email address in connection with this local scandal. But as I scanned subject lines while deleting said emails, I noticed that I'm not the only one to blame. Irvine also has an African American Studies program that failed to prevent this racist display from happening. And a department of Asian American studies that neglected to inform an Asian American student that racism is bad. The Women's Studies department also did nothing to prevent this performance of antebellum proportions from occurring on its campus (because abortion).

Point being, despite all these programs and departments dedicated to creating a more compassionate body politic, there are still students on the Irvine campus who are racist. Therefore, per these emails and the dictates of logic, the aforementioned departments should be shut down. They're disappointing the corporate charter. The only real solution to fighting racism is to stop fighting it.

Then it'll just go away.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention how humorless these "studies" people are, and how their humorlessness is responsible for everything wrong with America.

The Racists & The Shoe-Shine Boy

I'm still waiting for reputable conservatives to repudiate Scott Terry's statements, but I understand if they're reluctant because I couldn't prove that the Scott Terry whose reading list I linked to is the same Scott Terry from CPAC. Now I can:

Many of you are visiting this blog due to the recent CPAC controversy, where my friend Matt Heimbach and I, made national news by showing up and asking (in civil, articulate tones, mind you) a few simple questions.

What was our main concern?

There is a lot of rhetoric in the conservative movement about reaching out the mestizo demographic, or reaching out to the homosexuals and blacks.

Our question: why not reach out to whites?

In case you had any doubt about whether his concerns were racialist or racist in origin, here's how he answers that question:

This is exactly what the GOP needs to do, as a matter of fact.  Steve Sailer and the guys at VDARE have done an excellent job in pointing this out.  Please educate yourself about the Sailer Strategy.

It's not that he hates black people, he's merely upset that

The GOP wants us all to blend together into a mocha-colored, capitalist utopia!

And he's working on more reading lists! Here he is trying to define the "Kinist" canon. What's so bad about that? So long as you also believe that God ordained the social order and advocate that man's first duty is to "love one's own kind," absolutely nothing! And Terry takes "lov[ing] one's own kind" very seriously. Just look at his alarm clock:

A beautiful white girl was slaughtered while taking a ride in the top of a double-decker school bus; the cry was heard:  “Wake up!”

Another beautiful white girl, the more beautiful because she was in the late stages of a pregnancy, was attacked by a gang of twelve savage animals.  A white lawyer stands in passionate defense of one of the animals.  The sane yell “Wake up!”

If I were a professor of rhetoric, I might have something to say about Terry's choice of unnecessary adjectives here, if only because he seems as obsessed with the deaths of "beautiful white girl[s]" as a latter-day Nancy Grace. But that's not to say Terry doesn't have culture. He goes to the theater to see

a half-descent [sic?] portrayal of a group of Godless pagans, prancing around in their celebration of the downfall of Western Civilization.

Is that a pun or one of those Aryan-equivalent-of-Freud's slips? Doesn't matter. This man, with his belief in the separation of races and the divinely ordained social order (which he just so happens to sit atop), is clearly an outlier in the modern conservative movement. No real or respectable conservative holds these beliefs, or at the very least, no real or respectable conservative would air them this unabashedly.

A real or respectable conservative like National Review's Jillian Kay Melchior would write a paean to "[t]he simple shoe shine" in which, through great effort, she managed to avoid using the word "boy." She would write nothing of the divinely inspired social order, but instead  let the accompanying photograph say a little something about it:

And unbeknownst to Mechior, this shoe-shine man, Dino Wright, knows exactly which game he's playing when he "creat[ed] this entrepreneurial activity":

CPAC and events like it boost business for Wright. He says he thinks it’s because he “provides a very important service to this very image-conscious group.”

You'd have to be as dense as Melchior to believe the "service" he's paying to "this very image-conscious group" has anything to do with shining shoes.

"This was probably scrubbed by a brown person. Let me help you clean that."

Paul Ryan's committed to doing work that doesn't need to be done because someone has to do it. Or something:

Is there anything more odious than conservatives pretending to do the work of a class for which they don't care one whit in order to secure the votes of those who spit on the very people these conservatives are pretending to be?

Shorter Ann Althouse: Racists can't be racist because they love their racism.

So some of Scott Brown's staffers were caught tomahawk-chopping while war-whooping, which is absolutely not a traditional means of representing Native Americans as tomahawk-chopping, war-whooping, nothing-noble-about-them savages. There's no history of American cinema in which Native Americans were a violent bulwark against the tide of civilizing white men eager to manifest their destiny. There's no history of American literature in which Native Americans played the roles of "Captor #1" and "Captor #2" and let's just call them "Tribe of Captors" in popular captivity narratives that identified war-whooping with lady-taking and child-killing. None of that is real because Ann Althouse said so:

Someone doing the "tomahawk chop" is himself playing the role of Indian. This Indian character making a stereotypical gesture can't be read as expressing hostility toward Indians. The Indian is his hero.

See? "The Indian is his hero." Whose hero exactly? According to Althouse anyone doing the tomahawk chop. Which means that she believes that performing a racially offensive can't be considered racist because the performance itself is necessarily an act of loving emulation. For example, if one of Scott Brown's white staffers were to create a television show called

It couldn't be considered racist by definition because its use of the stereotypical Chinese immigrant is evidence of that this white staffer considers Chin-Kee to be "his hero." In all seriousness, Althouse's problem is that she's so ignorant that she doesn't realize that the stereotype of Native Americans that Brown's staffers invoke isn't historically accurate, which is why she can claim, straight-faced, that "these fake Indians, the staffers, are pretending to be real Indians," when in actuality they're pretending to be racist stereotypes of Native Americans.

One day I will wake up in a world in which "Ann Althouse" is revealed to be the work of an art collective trying to win a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for the Longest Sustained  Installation of  a Person Who Couldn't Possibly Exist. I pray that day comes soon.

In the meantime go read my other post. It'll cleanse this stupid clear off your palate.

Walter White is no White Savior

Malcolm Harris is convinced that Breaking Bad‘s Walter White is yet another example of the White Savior, i.e.

The white guy who enters a world supposedly beneath him where he doesn’t belong yet nonetheless triumphs over the inhabitants is older than talkies. TV Tropes calls it “Mighty Whitey,” and examples range from Tom Cruise as Samurai and Daniel Day Lewis as Mohican[.]

I’m not one to cut Dances-with-Braveheart-Smurf slack, as I abhor little more than the notion that a white mind triumphs over brown bodies, but in this case I think Harris’ criticism is misguided. Lindsay more than adequately addresses Harris’ concern with the “purity” of Walter’s product, so I’ll focus on the simple fact that Harris doesn’t understand the trope he thinks is operative here. He seems to believe that any time a white person succeeds in a predominantly non-white discipline, said person automatically qualifies for the title of White Savior. But the examples he provides—The Last Samurai and Last of the Mohicans—indicate that on some level he’s aware that this trope traditionally involves more than a white man out-doing his non-white competitors in whatever it is they’re doing. It involves a white man teaching non-white people how to be the best non-white people they can be by leading them into battle as only a white man can. There’s typically a cultural synergy—the white man embodies the “best” traits of whites and non-whites—that enables the White Savior to lead his primitative horde to victory.

The problem with claiming this trope to be operative in Breaking Bad isn’t just that there’s no cultural synergy, nor is it just that Walter cares little for the fate of the non-white people his work displaces. Walter cuts a culturally unique figure: he’s a typical white imperialist, a brash colonialist who believes his superior technical skills make him better than the “indigeneous” cooks, and the people he wants to enslave aren’t the “natives” but white people. Eighty-one percent of known meth addicts are white people, and Walter wants each and every one of them to be addicted to his product. He’s no more a Hawkeye out to preserve Mohican culture from white incursion than he is a Lt. Dunbar determined to stall American encroachment into Sioux territory. In short: the trope Harris wants to use to condemn Breaking Bad just doesn’t apply to a show that’s more concerned with the ruthlessness of capitalist competition than the color of the working class.

I’m not saying there isn’t a racial component to the show, because there obviously is. This just isn’t it.

Now that I’ve got that out of my system, I can finish analyzing “Gliding Over All,” so more shortly.

Why is mentioning "food stamps" or "Chicago" a racist dog-whistle? Because conservatives made it one.

Conservatives have a problem with history. It's not just that their preferred rhetorical appeals harken back to a Golden Age that only existed on the television shows they watched while their mothers or their maids slaved away in the kitchen—though that's clearly problematic—nor is it just that they rely on a cursory examination of ill-worded search results to construct their devastating critiques of the evils of everything to their left to hilarious effect. So it's not just that their fake history is a projected concoction or that their understanding of actual history is wanting that I take issue with: it's that their understanding of their own history is facile they can't tell the forest from the seas.

Case in point: the oblivious guffawing about "food stamps" or "Chicago" being metonyms for racism in conservative circles. That this seems as obvious a gambit to liberals as mentioning black people and swimming pools is beside the point: they're crying "No foul!" so it needs doing. (Sigh.) To establish the metonymic "credentials" of "Chicago" I could go back to the anti-labor sentiment that prevailed during the time of the Haymarket Riot or the anti-immigrant sentiment that prevailed two decades later or the anti-machine politics sentiment that prevailed during the reign of Daley the First or the anti-left and anti-anti-war sentiment that prevailed during and after the 1968 Democratic National Convention but I won't. To do any more then note in passing that Chicago's always functioned as a convenient punching bag for conservatives would a waste of time.

Because there's a particular moment in the history of conservative metonymy that bears mentioning in the light of the "unbelievable" or "outrageous" claim that associating President Obama with "food stamps" or "Chicago" might constitute a "subtle" form of racism supposedly only detectable by liberals. But before we get there we need to perform a simple Google search for "food stamp president" and quick scan of the results. Conservatives are clearly trying to create an association between President Obama and food stamps. It doesn't matter that the majority of food stamp recipients are white because conservatives aren't building a factual argument—they're making a rhetorical appeal. The very fact that movement conservatives embraced the image of President Food Stamps indicates the success of the appeal. Why would liberals claim that there's a racial component to that appeal? Is it, as conservatives argue, simply because the President is half-black and any policy or entitlement linked to him is speciously yoked to his color?

Of course not. Only a person pig-ignorant of recent history would make such a claim. So here's where we stand:

1. The President hails from Chicago's South Side.
2. Conservatives have successfully branded Obama President Food Stamps.

Where's the racism? How about we ask the Most Blessed Saint of the Modern Republican Party, Ronald Reagan, who said the following of a woman from the South Side of Chicago during the 1976 campaign:

She has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000.

Not only did Saint Ronald invent the myth of the "welfare queen" with this remark, by doing so through the image of a woman from the South Side of Chicago he explicitly made it a racial issue because the South Side is 95 percent African-American. I grant that Saint Ronald could've done everyone a favor and summoned this mythical woman from the dark depths of a Harlem or a Compton or any other area that even the most ignorant contemporary conservative knows is overbrimming with black folk. But he didn't. He chose the South Side, which in 1976 still brought to mind images of noted rabble-rouser Martin Luther King, Jr. marching in support of public housing. To whose minds were and are those images brought? The largest block of voters in the Republican Party: old white people.

These old white people just happen to be the same who pine for the Golden Era when Saint Ronald ruled the land. When they claim that the linking President Obama to food stamps or Chicago isn't racially coded they're either age-addled or lying. They remember Saint Ronald and are still moved by references to his rhetorical appeals. That they deny knowledge of how the unadulterated appeals themselves worked points to either dementia or dishonesty. So let's add this up one more time for them:

1. The President hails from Chicago's South Side.
2. Chicago's South Side is 95 percent African-American.
3. Saint Ronald linked the South Side to food stamps.
4. Conservatives have successfully branded Obama President Food Stamps.

What do you get? I get a rhetorical situation in which conservatives can negatively signal Obama's blackness to their core constituency of old white people in two interrelated ways that can both be directly traced back to Saint Ronald. Meaning that not only is Obama's blackness connected to food stamps and Chicago via an established rhetorical appeal, that appeal bears the authorizing imprimatur of the Most Blessed Saint of the Republican Party. The only way contemporary conservatives can credibly claim that there's no racial component to mentioning Chicago or food stamps would be to disown Saint Ronald. But I don't see that happening anytime soon.

Dear The Media,

I understand why you're reluctant to identify Wade Michael Page as a white supremacist, but I'm an expert in visual rhetoric and I'm here to help you out. Consider the photograph of Page you're currently using:

There are some subtle clues as to Page's ideology hidden in this image. First:

That is a Nazi flag. You can tell because it contains a Swastika in a white circle surrounded by a red hem. It is highly unlikely that someone hung it because it means "good luck" in Sanskrit. Also:

The repeating patten on that guitar strap is the Confederate Battle Flag. It reminds white people of those glorious antebellum days when blacks were in their place and no real American had even heard of Muslims. Also:

That is a Celtic cross. It is the most favorite symbol of the good people at Stormfront.org. Also:

That is the number fourteen. It stands for the Fourteen Words most dear to oppressed white men in America today. Those words are "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White Children."

So let me assure you: if you have correctly identified the man in the photograph above, you don't need to "speculate" as to whether he was a white supremacist. Because there's no room for speculation. That man in that picture is a white supremacist. Whether his white supremacist beliefs influenced his decision to murder peaceful Sikhs, that may well be a matter for debate. But that man? The one in the picture? He's a white supremacist.

You're welcome.

The Dark Knight Rises is not a conservative film.

At least not in the way that conservatives think it is. Christian Toto contends that "everyone not blinded by liberal ideology" can see that The Dark Knight Rises is critical of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and that the film is therefore "downright conserative." There are two significant problems with his claim: logically, it is not necessarily true that any cultural artifact that's critical of the Occupy movement is conservative; and visually, the optics of Bane and his followers don't correspond to those of the Occupy movement. The logical problem is easy enough to dismiss: I can criticize the rhetoric and tactics of the Occupy movement without being instantly transformed into a conservative. The visual problem isn't that much more complicated, because this is what Bane and his followers look like:

I would like to ask Toto and John Nolte and every other conservative whose claim that the object of the film's critique is the Occupy movement is predicated on obviousness whether the heavily armed fatigue-garbed lot pictured above look more like this:

Or this:

I would like to ask them to examine these images closely and count the number of raised weapons in the first and compare that to the number being raised in the second and the third. Then they can tally up the number of bandoliers and re-purposed fatigues and wrapped heads there are in each of these images and compare those too. If they possess a shred of intellectual honesty they'll have no choice but concede that Bane and his cohorts more closely resemble Afghan mujahideen from the 1980s than Occupy protestors from last year. Toto claims that only those "blinded" by ideology could fail to recognize the similarity between the people in the first and second images. But it seems to me that only someone who is actually blind could be convinced that there's a greater correspondence between the first and second than the first and third.

There's a solid reason that Bane and company more closely resemble the mujahideen than the Occupy protestors: they're from the same part of the world. Batman Begins opens with Bruce Wayne being recruited in a Bhutanese prison and then scaling the Himalayas to train with the League of Shadows. The prison pit in The Dark Knight Rises is located near the northern Indian border with Pakistan, and the majority of those imprisoned in it aren't chiroptophobic American billionaires. That Fu Manchu mustache sported by Ra's al Ghul belongs to a tradition of racist caricature of people who come from China and Japan and India. The geographic and narrative cues align with the visual to demand that the League of Shadows be seen as an old school Oriental menace whose politics amount to whatever-frightens-white-people.

Only in this last sense can the projection of conservative politics onto The Dark Knight Rises be understood: the only thing the League of Shadows shares with the Occupy movement is an ideological commitment to frightening white people. That both are successful says nothing about the film, but speaks volumes about the conservatives watching it, who have invested so heavily in their illegible projection that they makes claims like:

Gotham City is thriving as the third film in the trilogy opens. Harvey Dent’s legal legacy is so profound there’s no longer a need for Batman. He’s retired, bum knees and all, while crime continues to decline. So clearly the city’s punitive system isn’t corrupt, and we certainly don’t see mass economic woes.

Toto is wrong on all counts. Far from "thriving," Gotham is a city in which orphans have taken to living in the sewers to survive. Dent's legal legacy may be "profound," but it's also founded a lie and maintained by mass incarceration. Crime "continues to decline," but the prisons overflow with criminals whose prosecutions were legitimate, because "the city's punitive system isn't corrupt," so all those prisoners must have committed the crimes of which they're accused. Finally, Toto fails to "see mass economic woes," even though, to return to where this chain of inept summation began, ophans have taken to living in the sewers to survive.

In this case, the competing political interpretations of The Dark Knight Rises are not the result of the multivalenced nature of all aesthetic objects so much as simple incompetence from one of competitors. There are sophisticated arguments that the film's politics don't square with contemporary liberal or leftist thought—see Aaron Bady or Henry Farrell or Jeff Spross and Zack Beauchamp—but it's no coincidence that those analyses are eminating from the left. Conservatives aren't accustomed to considering cultural artifacts with the seriousness they merit, and so on the rare occasion they want to claim ideological kinship with one, they have no idea how.

Dan Riehl admits, openly and proudly, that he's a racist.

Not that we didn't know this already, as this is the man who once claimed that all black kids, even when they’re “pretty young [and] not that big,” are “technically thugs," but his latest statement welds the deal shut in such a way that no excuse or apology will ever be able to escape it:

As Media Reports Conflict, Why Was Trayvon Martin Photo Altered?

Among a few interesting items uncovered in trying to examine the facts behind the shooting of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin without drawing any conclusions, was that a widely viewed photograph of Martin appears to have been altered, somewhat.

Here is what appears to be the original via the Miami Herald.

The one below has been observed in the media and at forums such as Democracy Now. Clearly, it has been lightened, or softened, somehow. Along with other possible alterations, he looks far more, perhaps innocent is the right word, in the altered image.

Dan Riehl believes that if you "lighten" an image -- that is, if you contribute to the impression that there's a possibility that the person in the photograph may be white -- that person "looks far more ... innocent." So:

White people?

Innocent.

Darkies?

Guilty.

Just look at them. They're "technically thugs," and therefore deserve to be shot by gun-toting racists who've made 46 calls to 911 complaining about "suspicious" darkies engaging in activities such as walking in and out of their parents' open garages or playing soccer in the street.

I won't republish them here, but I exchanged a series of emails with Riehl -- who's more than welcome to republish my replies, if he so desires -- after I called him a racist for being afraid of seventh graders who were only "technically thugs." His defense was that I would've been afraid too, which tells you all you need to know about Dan Riehl. That he worked for and admired Andrew Brietbart and supports the political theater of James O'Keefe is entirely beside the point, except that it isn't. He's a racist parading his denial with all the subtlety of someone who dons a "GOD HATES FAGS" sign at a Marine's funeral.

And just as classy, too.

Pat Buchanan’s not a racist, unless you ask Pat Buchanan, who thinks otherwise.

Victor Davis Hanson should be celebrated for writing an entire post without mentioning that he taught Classics to poor people. But he shouldn’t be celebrated for writing what he wrote:

[W]e all must deplore that [Pat] Buchanan was booted from MSNBC, and recognize why it happened now.

Must we?  Buchanan begins the book with a lament that “[b]y 2020, deaths among white Americans will exceed births, while mass immigration is altering forever the face of America” (2).  He later opens a chapter entitled “The End of White America” with an analysis of Tom Buchanan—no blood relation, just the ideological one—discussing the novel’s fictional version of Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy.

“Well, it’s a fine book and everybody ought to read it. The idea is that if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.” (123)

Instead of dismissing his namesake’s approval of unscientific racism, Buchanan hems and haws about Margaret Sanger and eugenics as a liberal science and Stoddard being an Ivy League-educated racist who predicted

Japan’s rise to power, its war with the United States, a second European war, the fall of the Western empires, mass migration of peoples of color to the West, and the rise of Islam as a threat to Western civilization. (124)

He can’t decide whether to condemn Stoddard for being a typical academic liberal or praise him for being a prophet. So does neither. Or possibly both.

What Tom Buchanan and [Stoddard] feared [some clearly non-white academic writing in the Atlantic named] Professor Hsu welcomes: “The End of White America is a cultural and demographic inevitability.” (124)

Both Tom and Pat Buchanan align themselves with Stoddard and against Hsu, which is odd considering that Stoddard and Hsu are making essentially the same argument: white America is on the decline. The only difference between any of them is that the Buchanan boys share Stoddard’s “unashamedly racialist” assumption that the death of white America should be mourned. Did Buchanan forget he condemned Stoddard for being a racist when he joined him in mourning? Or does he simply not care about the contradiction? It’s genuinely difficult to tell. He’ll acknowledge that

The Tea Party and town hall protests of 2009 were almost wholly white affairs. (126)

But its impossible to parse that sentence. Is the attempt by white people to organize white affairs to defeat racial and cultural assaults on white America a good thing? Given his assessment of Stoddard, the answer would seem to be clear. But a few pages later he’ll be complaining about the very fact he just he conceded:

CNN, NPR, and USA Today all zeroes in on the racial composition of the crowd [at Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally] as “predominantly,” “overwhelmingly,” or “almost all white.” The media’s unsubtle message: the Tea Party is a protest movement of, by, and for white people. (131)

You know who would agree with that assessment? The Pat Buchanan who admitted as much five pages previous. His argument is that the media accurately portrayed the Tea Party movement and should be condemned for doing so. Why? Because America is becoming more racially and culturally diverse and accurate portrayals of white anger about that fact should be avoided—despite the fact that according to Buchanan himself the demographic shift is inevitable and the white anger real. So let me modify my reply to Victor Davis Hanson:

Why exactly must we “deplore” the exit of an inconsistent and incoherent thinker like Buchanan from the ranks of professional political commentators? I’m having problems seeing what value his nostalgia for a whiter America brings to the table—especially when he only acknowledges the anger of white Americas when complaining about media coverage of them. Davis Hanson doesn’t say. Instead, he claims Buchanan had to be pushed out because

Now that there is no Bush to criticize, and given that Obama did not turn out to be a left-wing version of a Ron Paul isolationist, anything Buchanan might say about foreign policy will be critical of Obama—and he will probably say it well and often, given that he is better read, sincere in his convictions, and more informed than the other guests. The Obama agenda at home is the antithesis of everything Buchanan has ever said or written. In the network’s view, the days of Buchanan as a useful idiot are over; and now, in a changed climate, he offers no utility at all.

Let me see if I have this right: because Obama was elected nearly four years agoBuchanan had to be fired last week. I can see why Davis Hanson’s upset. It’s not like he can just change the channel and find a new brother-in-nonsense to embrace.

 

An iterative algorithm is implemented to make this say what we all know to be true.

According to the always reliable John J. Miller, “[a] study says that black students take easier courses than white students at Duke University.” He offers the following as his pull-quote:

Although black and white students enter college with similar academic interests, 68 percent of black students eventually chose to study humanities and social sciences. According to the study, this is because “natural science, engineering, and economics courses are more difficult, associated with higher study times, and are more harshly graded than their humanities and social science counterparts.”

The pull-quote is fairly incendiary, I admit, but not nearly as offensive as Miller’s summary of the study with its implication of genteel agreement. Miller’s sentence suggests that this study informs his audience of what it already knows, i.e. that their prejudices are informed by science. But the real problem with Miller’s post is right there in the citation from the study: “natural science, engineering, and economics courses are more difficult … than their humanities and social science counterparts.”

I know what you’re thinking: “But Scott, isn’t economics a social science?” It is. But it occupies its own special space next to the hard sciences because it does. Two of the study’s authors (Peter Arcidiacono and Esteban Aucejo) are economists, but the other (Ken Spenner) is a sociologist. Which means that if the special dispensation of economics is revoked, all three of the authors of this study are as dumb as black students.

Such is the logic of Miller’s implied argument.

But that’s not the logic he intended to use. He wanted to wink at Charles Murray and nudge his fellow-travelers. Miller certainly didn’t want people reading the actual study, either, which indicates that there’s another group of students just as dumb as the black ones:

Legacies at Duke start out behind their white non-legacy counterparts (though not as far back as blacks) with 65% of the gap removed by the end of the senior year. Similar major-switching patterns occur for legacies as well, with large shifts away from the natural sciences, engineering, and economics towards humanities and social sciences. The divergent grading standards across courses legacies and blacks take, coupled with the tighter variances on the grade distributions of upper year courses, accounts for their catch up to their white non-legacy counterparts.

I wonder why Miller didn’t include that in his pithy remark about black students? It’s almost as if the claim “a study says that black students and most of my colleagues at the National Review take easier courses than white students at Duke University” wouldn’t have been well-received at the National Review.

Holy Terror, Frank Miller!

In 2006, Frank Miller announced a forthcoming publication called Holy Terror, Batman! in which the Dark Knight would go to Afghanistan and get in a fistfight with Osama bin Laden. He claimed it would hark back to an earlier era in comics history when, for example, Superman would marshal his many powers to annoy Hitler:

All well and good, except DC didn't think the Batman brand would be enhanced by being aggressively associated with the worst elements of the Bush administration, and so the world was spared Holy Terror, Batman! Until a few weeks ago, that is, when Miller published Holy Terror, a book about a Batman-type vigilante who teams with a Catwoman-type thief and a Commissioner Gordon-type chief to defeat a series of terrorist attacks against a Gotham-type Empire City. (Miller's roman à clef is so obvious I believe DC might be able to sue for copyright infringement.) Let me begin by warning you:

This book is more terrible than I'm leading you to believe it is. It's Batman as written by Pam Geller after she and Glenn Reynolds split a box of wine. Only worse. Where the art isn't muddled it's obscured by a dense bank of unnecessary Eisner spritz. Human proportions—especially female proportions—remind anyone who may've forgotten of his directions to Jim Lee on All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder:

On teaching racially fraught literature in racially diverse classrooms (American Born Chinese)

The two problems that confront any author attempting to write a confessional comic are likely best summarized in these two sequences from Art Spieglman's Maus:

In short: how are painful memories and painfully stereotypical people best represented in a medium associated with childishness?  I'll discuss Spiegelman's answer to this question in more detail when I teach Maus in a few weeks.  For now, it is enough to pose it and identify it as a critical problem faced by all non-white authors, including that of American Born Chinese, Gene Yang.  Unlike Maus, in which an already assimilated Art Spiegelman is depicting his decidedly unassimilated father, American Born Chinese is very much concerned with the process of assimilation: what is gained, what is lost, etc.  For example:

You lot will believe anything.

While trying to make a point today about how the expectations a reader brings to a work structure his or her experience of it, I brought up this image from the black and white Scott Pilgrim comic as an example:

SEK: What color is Knives Chau in this panel?

CLASS: ...?

SEK: This isn't a 'What's in my back pocket?' question.  I just want to know what color you think she is.

CLASS: ...?

SEK: (archly) ...?

CLASS: (demurely) Chinese?

It took them a little while to figure out where they'd lost the rails, but eventually they realized that the dots and lines above only looks "Chinese" because O'Malley told the reader that Knives Chau is Chinese.  If he had said she were South American, the reader would have brought a whole different set of cultural baggage.  In fact, if he had said the above was a boy from Los Angeles County, the reader would have believed that too.   

This is why I "support" majoritarian rule.

As a means of registering my discontent with conservative claims that the fact that 70 percent of Americans abhor the idea of the "Ground Zero Mosque" means it should be abandoned, I hereby present other things that 70 percent of "certain" Americans once hated. For example, consider the responses to this question from a Gallup Poll reported in the Los Angeles Times on 14 July 1963.*

I snipped the June numbers because at that point only 62 percent of respondents had decided that the Civil Rights Movement was moving "Too fast." I also have other, less inflammatory, examples. To wit:

That would be from the Los Angeles Times four days earlier.** I did say I was only referencing "certain" Americans, however, and because I'm an honest chap, I'll tell you that Gallup calls them "Southern Whites." You heard that correctly: the same conservatives who illegitimately claim the moral high ground Martin Luther King, Jr. struggled to capture have the same high regard for Muslims as Southern segregationists once did for blacks. To put it finely:

Those who oppose the building of Park51 are justifying their opposition on the fact that the same percentage of Americans are currently as bigoted as Southern whites demonstrated themselves to be when asked how they would "feel about a law which would give all persons—Negro as well as white—the right to be served in public places such as hotels, restaurants, theaters and similar establishments." All of which is only to say that insisting that this "is" should be enshrined in history as an "ought" makes a person as big of a bastard as a Southern white who couldn't brook the thought of sharing his or her establishments with an African-American.

It's a rebellious stance to be sure, but in the end they'll be standing in a field screaming "Wolverines!" while the world passes them by.

*Gallup, George. "Views Revised on Rights Push." Los Angeles Times (14 June 1963): M2.

**Gallup, George. "Slim Majority Backs Accommodations Bill." Los Angeles Times (10 July 1963): C18.

Andy McCarthy hates being called what his words prove he is.

This post plain confuses me. It opens with a lament:

Having worked for a very long time with moderate Muslims, I can tell you it’s disheartening to be called an Islamophobe.

Then demonstrates that that epithet, along with a few others, is well-deserved:

I have long argued that: (1) Islam is not a moderate doctrine; (2) Islamists who practice terror and are otherwise aggressive toward non-Muslims (and toward Muslims who disagree with them) are not twisting or perverting Islam; (3) this does not mean that the Islamist interpretation of Islam is the only possible viable interpretation; but (4) a concrete theology of “moderate Islam” does not exist (even though there are plenty of moderate Muslims) and therefore it will have to be created; and (5) because it will have to be non-literal and reformist, it will have a tough time competing with Islamist ideology which, however noxious it may be, has the advantage of being firmly rooted in Islamic scripture. Nevertheless, (6) Islamist ideology is anti-constitutional and anti-freedom in many of its core particulars, so that (7) if, instead of letting them pretend to be “moderates,” we force Islamists to defend their beliefs, we will marginalize them—at least in our society, which (8) will empower true moderate Muslim reformers and—maybe—give them the space they need to solidify a coherent, moderate Islam that embraces the West, and in particular the separation of secular public life from privately held religious beliefs.

If "Islam is not a moderate doctrine," how is it that he has "worked for a very long time with moderate Muslims"? How can McCarthy distinguish between "moderate Muslims" like his coworkers and those Muslims who merely "pretend to be 'moderate'"? Where does he believe these "moderate Muslims" come from? Are they Amabo—secret Christians pretending to be Muslim—whose moderate views are the result of never reading the Koran or attending services at a mosque or keeping halal?

McCarthy attempts to dismiss such questions in a parenthetical of dubious explanatory power:

a concrete theology of 'moderate Islam' does not exist (even though there are plenty of moderate Muslims) and therefore it will have to be created[.]

Granting their existence in an aside is purely strategic—if he fails to do so, he will be disheartened again, so he grants their existence, then explains all the many ways in which people like them can never come to exist.

It's the political equivalent of holding up a duck and beaver; explaining that no matter how much you coax them, they refuse to fuck; then astonishing the crowd by pulling a duck-billed platypus out of your hat. You have no idea how that strange beast came to be, nor are you interested—all you want to do is prove that ducks never fuck beavers. Which is an admirable goal, I suppose, if you want to tell the world that your lack of intellectual curiosity is matched in its profundity only by the pride you take in being ignorant.

The ultimate irony, of course, is his claim that this new moderate Islam "will have to be non-literal and reformist." McCarthy openly and unselfconsciously confesses that religious beliefs based on one-thousand-year-old books—or, for that matter, political beliefs based on two-hundred-year-old documents—might be obsolete, if not outright dangerous, when the people who possess them interpret their sacred texts literally.

His opposition to literalism as an interpretive mode is to be commended, or would be, if it extended to the Old Testament or the Constitution. But neither of those texts are "anti-constitutional and anti-freedom," at least not in the Platonic form in which they exist in the minds of people who have never read them.

They hate soccer and are racist.

Jonah Goldberg wrote something stupid. It feels like I never left. So what was it this time?

I am willing to concede that some conservatives get carried away in their anti-soccer tirades, usually just for fun, but I’d very much like to see a few more liberals admit that at least some of the soccer-mania here in the states is driven by a faddish desire to seem hip and worldly.

He’s clearly only talking about white people—and not white people like me, as I’m so attached to my Sambas I once wrote a paean to them. Now, I live in a predominantly Hispanic community—largely first and second-generation Mexican immigrants—and during the South Africa-Mexico match, I noted that I

considered it odd that everyone on Facebook is rooting for South Africa, because me and everyone else in my apartment complex are clearly rooting for Mexico. If I didn’t have to grade while half-watching, I’d be in the rec room with the rest of the complex, by which I mean: my neighbors, the gardeners, the pool guys, the cleaning women, and the office staff.

Of course, every single one of those people is clearly an illegal immigrant in Goldberg’s mind, but that’s a failure of imagination on his part. He’s unable—or, more likely, unwilling—to accept that the demographic shift in the United States is against him. When he writes:

But being told that all the smart and decent people love something is a sure way to get the Irish up in a lot of Americans.

He does so because he’s incapable of imagining an American who lacks any Irish to get up.

Moreover, he mistakenly believes that the article that started him on his anti-soccer tirade argues that “Racists Hate Soccer,” when it does nothing of the sort. (Though there is an incidental connection, as noted in my title.) He even quotes the very paragraph in which the author, Dave Zirin, argues conservative soccer-hatred is not about racism, but losing:

But maybe this isn’t just sports as avatar for their racism and imperial arrogance. Maybe their hysteria lies in something far more shallow. Maybe the real reason they lose their collective minds is simply because the USA tends to get their asses handed to them each and every World Cup.

I can imagine no better support for this argument than the fact that every four years conservatives are tremendously excited about sports infinitely more boring than they think soccer is, e.g. competitive swimming. Because so long as there is a chance for them to flex their patriotic muscles by proxy, conservatives will embrace a sport. As Zirin notes, the existence of countries like Brazil and players like Messi prohibit them from doing so.

But, to circle back to where this post started, Zirin’s article itself is a response to Glenn Beck’s comment that

It doesn’t matter how you try to sell it to us, it doesn’t matter how many celebrities you get, it doesn’t matter how many bars open early, it doesn’t matter how many beer commercials they run, we don’t want the World Cup, we don’t like the World Cup, we don’t like soccer, we want nothing to do with it.

If Goldberg really wants people not to consider him in league with racists, he needs to explain how Beck’s “we” is inclusive enough to accommodate my soccer-mad neighbors. If he can’t—and he can’t—then he has to admit, to paraphrase what David Cross said of Irvine Spectrum when he performed there, that his imagination contains all the colors of the rainbow from white … to white.

(x-posted.)

The absence of blacks is more significant than the presence of whites.

Dennis Prager confuses me.  In an attempt to mitigate the overwhelming whiteness of the tea partiers, Prager argues that "the virtual absence of blacks from tea party rallies cannot possibly reflect anything negative on the black and minority absence, only on the white tea partiers."  Is he employing "virtual" as an intensifier and admitting that these tea parties are abundantly white affairs?  Or is he claiming that there is merely a "virtual absence of blacks," but that in reality tea parties are teeming with blacks?  Clearly he means the former, which is quite the confession in itself, but he confuses the issue by blaming minorities for being inherently irrational and not supporting his position:

But in a more rational and morally clear world, where people judge ideas by their legitimacy rather than by the race of those who held them, people would be as likely to ask why blacks and ethnic minorities are virtually absent at tea parties just as they now ask why whites predominate. They would want to know if this racial imbalance said anything about black and minority views or necessarily reflected negatively on the whites attending those rallies.

Note that Prager himself is not asking these questions: the hypothetical rational inhabitants of a morally clear world are.  That they happen to agree with Prager is beside the point.  The point is that these hypothetical rational people want to know why "blacks and ethnic minorities" are so irrational they refuse to attend events hosted by rational people who just happen to be white.  If only minorities would stop thinking for themselves and looking out for their own self-interest long enough to listen to what the hypothetical rational people (and their proxies like Prager) have to say, they would see the error of their ways and choose to attend tea parties.  

Which is to say: the tea parties will become more diverse when minorities become rational and decide to defend white interests.  I have a feeling this paternalistic insult will be received quite differently than Prager intended, but who knows?  Maybe minorities really are irrational.  We should monitor the racial composition of tea parties and find out for ourselves. 

The Tea Party's love affair with tokenism.

Remember all those older, white conservatives who were upset when I pointed out that most Sarah Palin fans were older, white conservatives?   They do.   The headliners of the current Tea Party Express include a few token minority participants whose presence is designed to prevent critics like me from pointing out the obvious, i.e. that the Tea Party consists of old white people who'd denounce their Medicare benefits as fascist if they had sense enough to self-reflect.

You don't have to take my word for it: one of their token minority presences unwittingly admitted as much in a post intended, ironically enough, to prove that the Tea Party has no problem with race:

I am a black performer/activist traveling on my third national Tea Party Express tour. We just finished our rally in North Platte, Neb. Two white families asked me to hold their newborn babies and pose for pictures. Excited white grandparents who are fans of my articles and music asked me to pose for pictures with them and their grand kids. Numerous white patriots shook my hand with tears in their eyes thanked me for what I was doing for our country. A white woman who said she was 86 years old gave me a big hug in thanks for my efforts. Polatik, our young Hispanic conservative rapper, got his usual huge positive response from the mostly older white crowd. [emphasis mine]

Needless to say, trying to demonstrate that the Tea Partiers have no problem with race by saying that the "mostly older white crowd" loves its token minorities is counterproductive.   But it also, and importantly, reminds us why the logic of tokenism is so pernicious: when your version of "diversity" involves placing in positions of power the one or two minority candidates who buy into your backward ideology, you're inevitably going to end up with a host of Michael Steeles.

Creating structural incentives that level the playing field, however, allows for actual talent to rise through the ranks.  Instead of establishing a system in which talent will out, conservatives would rather elevate an untalented token for P.R. reasons, which is a pretty clear indication of what they're up to: they need to protect the future status of their own marginally talented children, and if that means having to brook the presence of a Michael Steele, really, what choice do they have?