Category: Racism

RACISM RUNS FAR DEEPER THAN BLACKFACE & THE N-WORD

You would almost think we are smack in the middle of the biggest racial reckoning since the end of the Civil War.  Sheepish white pols are throwing out their blackface kits. A Maryland legislator is on political life support after having uttered the n-word in a cigar bar.  A member of Congress lost his committee assignments because he defended white supremacy.   We may never have another Black History Month as provocative as the one that just ended, nor as shallow.

Sadly, this spectacle of superficiality shows no signs of abating. We are now into a four-day international story over whether Virginia’s first lady, Pam Northam, committed a racist act by handing raw cotton to black students during presentations on slavery. She insists she gave the cotton to students of all color.  The BBC ran a piece headlined “Virginia’s First Lady in Cotton-picking Race Row.” This was only weeks after she mitigated her husband’s (Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam) self-inflicted wounds by stopping him from doing the moonwalk at a news conference where he confessed to having used blackface in a 1984 Michael Jackson dance contest.

Now comes Michael Cohen, former Trump attorney and consigliere, – and soon-to-be federal prison inmate – with scathing Congressional testimony about his former boss. Cohen said of Trump: “He is a racist. He is a conman. He is a cheat.”  In a day-long committee hearing, House Republicans made no attempt to defend their president on the conman and cheat charges.  But Trump loyalist Rep. Mark Meadows pulled out all stops on the racist label.  He had a black woman stand next to him during his televised questioning. Meadows pointed to her and said, in the tone of a Perry Mason gotcha moment, that she is a long time Trump family friend, so how could the president possibly be racist?  He proudly rested his case, but not for long.

It went quickly downhill from there.  A number of committee members said Meadows’s use of the woman as a prop was, in itself, racist.  That sent the Congressman into an intensely emotional diatribe, protesting that he can’t be racist because he has black nieces and nephews and is very good friends with the committee chair who is black.  As a child of the 1960s, I naively thought that old racist trope about “some of my best friends are black,” had gone the way of the hula hoop and segregated lunch counters.

There are two takeaways in all of this early 2019 racial news.  One is that America’s infectious goiter of racism is every bit as malignant as it was 50 years ago.  Regardless of how offending politicians try to frame the issue, white guys corking up in blackface is not just an ancient taboo.  It’s always been wrong, but prominent white folks seem hell bent on doing it, despite the ensuing furor. A Google search for blackface produces millions of hits, a virtual who’s who  of entertainers and political figures who keep right on smearing the burned cork over their white privilege (here, here and here).  

Yes, there is a slightly higher risk now for politicians who partake in racist symbols, whether by blackface, use of the n-word or similar bigotry.   When the Virginia blackface story first broke, there was a stampede of Democratic leaders and presidential candidates issuing calls for Northam’s resignation.  A few days later, however, the situation changed dramatically.  The state’s lieutenant governor, a black Democrat, was accused of sexual assault by two women.  Then the attorney general, second in the line of succession for governor, also a Democrat, revealed that he, too, had done the blackface bit.  If all three of them quit, the new Virginia governor would be the current speaker of the house, a Republican.  Suddenly public pressure on Northam to resign all but disappeared.  Polling data show that 58 percent of the state’s African Americans want him to remain in office.

Therein lies the second – and most important – object lesson.  While elected leaders donning blackface or spewing blatantly racist speech are inexcusably despicable, their behavior is but a symptom of a much larger problem, one that gets far less attention than the deplorable antics that have captured recent headlines.  Here’s the deal:  Institutional racism is deeply baked into our culture and government, putting non-whites at an inherent  structural disadvantage when it comes to virtually every aspect of life. That will change only through new laws and public policy. For the past 100 years, that aspirational transformation has been an anathema to the Republican Party. 

It’s not difficult to understand why most African Americans in Virginia want to retain a Democratic governor with a penchant for blackface.  The alternative is control by a party of white faces totally oblivious to their needs.  And those needs cut deeply into this country’s soul, inflicting far more pain than the racist buffoonery of ignorant politicians.

Here is the real problem with America’s racism in 2019:  Black households have only 10 cents in wealth for every dollar held by white households. Only 43 percent of African Americans own a home, a figure that has fallen almost every year since 2004. Young black men are 21 times more likely to be shot and killed by police than young white men.  Blacks are incarcerated in state prisons at more than five times the rate of whites. Overwhelmingly white school districts receive $23 billion more than predominantly black districts, despite serving roughly the same number of children. Black people face a greater risk of death than white people at every stage of life. One study found that racial segregation caused 176,000 deaths in a year, about as many as were caused by strokes.

As depressing and distressing as it is to relive the racist tropes of the 1960s, it is far worse to assume that our deep racial divide will be healed by simply getting rid of politicians who dabbled in blackface or used the n-word.  I’d like to think such a purge would be a start to dealing with the underlying evil of structural racism.  But I fear it is a superficial diversion, one that may create the illusion of doing the right thing, while leaving a diabolically broken system still very broken.

THE UNRAVELING OF AN UNHINGED PRESIDENT

Say what you want about Donald Trump, keeping in mind that it matters dearly to him. In fact, it may be the only thing that does matter to this president. The Donald traverses a relational line that is, at once, simple and binary. It goes from commendation to condemnation, from singing praise to a dirge of denouncement. There is nothing in between and directions are often quickly reversed. So too are the presidential rewards and penances that accompany those changes. Just ask Omarosa Manigault Newman and John Brennan, names you would never expect to appear in the same sentence.

Omarosa, as she is now mononymously known, has owned the news cycle for the past week on the basis of her aptly named memoire, “Unhinged”. In it, she takes a verbal machete – along with a tape recorder – to the president who gave her a high level White House job, a position that consisted mainly of saying nice things about him. Omarosa, a former reality tv star, started writing her tell-all shortly after she was booted from the administration last December. Why was she hired in the first place? As Trump tweeted, “She was vicious but not smart. . .but (she said) such wonderful and powerful things about me. . .until she got fired.” (Here and here.) The president, who once heaped effusive praise on his mentee, quickly reversed course, calling her “whacky”, a “lowlife” and a “dog”.

Former CIA director Brennan has only known one of Trump’s polarities; they have only spoke ill of each other. In the ring of alpha male one-upmanship, being leader of the free world has its perks, and the president used them last week to punish Brennan’s criticism by withdrawing his top security clearance. Trump was so thrilled with this new toy he’s made a long list of other current and former intelligence types he wants to use it on. And that, in turn, has alarmed serious policy wonks who see the president’s rush to silence critics as another giant step toward authoritarianism.

That may well be, but it’s also, in the nauseating expression of his sycophants, “Trump being Trump”. The Donald has always had his own ridiculously simplified version of the Myers & Briggs personality assessment. People who praise him are “amazing”, “tremendous”, “terrific”, “incredible”, “tough” and “smart”. Those who criticize him are “weak,” “crooked”, “low energy”, “phony”, “pathetic” and “low IQ”. Or, as in the case of Rosie O’Donnell back in 1996, a “disgusting slob with a fat, ugly face”.

Donald Trump is the same vicious, emotionally crippled narcissist he always has been, wholly unable to situationally modify his behavior based on circumstances. The only thing that has changed is the amount of power he wields. And that’s what makes him so very dangerous.

A recent story line, one which Congressional Republicans are refusing to touch out of understandable disgust and embarrassment, is that Trump shows his blatant racism by calling his black critics unintelligent. He’s labeled Rep. Maxine Waters as “low IQ” seven times this year alone. He recently called LeBron James and CNN’s Don Lemon “dumb” or “stupid”. He used similar pejoratives on Omarosa, the only high-ranking African American on his staff prior to her discharge.

In a moment resembling a Saturday Night Live sketch, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders defended her boss against racism charges by noting that he has also called a number of white people stupid. To carry this absurdity even further, the Washington Post produced a graphic tracking Trump’s insults of stupidity by race. The upshot was that he used that label mostly for white Republicans during the primaries, then targeted white Democrats during the general election, but has mostly aimed his low-intelligence barbs at blacks since taking office. They never covered this metric of investigative reporting back when I went to journalism school.

There is but one constant when it comes to Trump’s word choices. It matters only whether he has been praised or criticized. For example, he once said of Germany’s Angela Merkel, shortly after she treated him nicely, that she is “a really great leader; I was always a Merkel person.” Then the chancellor took exception with something Trump said, drawing this response from him: “The German people are going to end up overthrowing this woman.”

He called foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos an “excellent guy”. That was before Papadopoulos reached a plea deal in the Mueller investigation and drew this Trump tweet: “Few people knew the young, low level volunteer named George who has already proven to be a liar.”

Before former Texas governor Rick Perry started complimenting Trump, the president had condemned him with tweets: “should be forced to take an IQ test”, “should be ashamed of himself”, “failed on the border”, and “doesn’t understand what the word demagoguery means”. Once Perry offered praise for Trump, he was given a cabinet position by the president who heaped several paragraphs of syrupy praise on him.

When Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, one of Trump’s 2016 primary opponents publicly supported the president on a couple of pieces of legislation, he was rewarded with these Trumpian words at a Florida rally: “I want to express our deep gratitude to a man who has really become a friend of mine. He is tough. Man, he is tough, and he is good, and he loves you”. That was quite a change from calling Rubio a “lightweight” in 21 tweets, in addition to those that said the senator was “dishonest”, “a joke”, a “phony”, “scamming Florida”, “bought and paid for by lobbyists”, has the “worst voting record in the U.S. Senate”, and “truly doesn’t have a clue”.

Words mean absolutely nothing to Donald Trump. They are mere pieces of a bizarre Rorschach test, measuring his friend-or-foe assessment of the moment. There is nothing remotely relational about them. It’s all transactional. He thinks Vladimir Putin once said he was “brilliant, a genius”. That was actually a mistranslation. Putin’s terminology was closer to “colorful”. But it was enough to shape Trump’s mind-boggling pro-Russian foreign policy. The Kremlin hardly needs blackmail to curry favor when sweet nothings work so well.

This would all be amusing if the fate of our country, perhaps the world, were not at stake. We don’t need Omarosa’s book or tapes to know that our president is unhinged. All we have to do is read his tweets and listen to his rants. And then pray that this out-of-control reality show is canceled before our democracy is totally destroyed.

APES, CUNTS & TWITTER, OH MY!

What’s worse on the hierarchy of insults: calling a black person an ape or the president’s daughter a cunt? That insightful question is at the heart of our latest national conversation. Remember when our national conversations focused on substantive, compelling issues, like race, sexual harassment, gun control and income disparity? We are so through the looking glass right now, it’s hard to distinguish a Saturday Night Live sketch from the Nightly News. We have become our own parody.

Yet, for one, brief shining moment, it seemed that the hateful, racist, misogynistic depravity that has been gushing into our cultural veins since the 2016 presidential election had finally encountered a substantial abatement. A major corporation, ABC, acted against significant financial interests in an unambiguous repudiation of racism. The Disney-owned company summarily canceled the “Roseanne” show after its star, Roseanne Barr, tweeted that former Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett, an African-American, looked like the offspring of “the Muslim Brotherhood & Planet of the Apes.”

Channing Dungey, president of ABC Entertainment, called Barr’s tweet “abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values.” For at least 24 hours, hardly anyone disagreed with her. It was an amazing, almost redemptive, moment in our Trump-induced dystopia. A corporate conglomerate slaughtered its cash cow in order to take a principled stand against racism. There was no instant rebuttal from the right, no white nationalist defense of the centuries-old African-simian racist trope. You could almost make yourself believe that there was a national consensus that this kind of blatant, hateful bigotry was simply wrong and unacceptable. It was so pre-Trump.

Then comedian Samantha Bee called Ivanka Trump a cunt, and all hell broke loose. Bee, on her cable show, had shown a warm, loving picture of Ivanka and her young son, and contrasted that touching parental moment with the Trump Administration’s policy of separating children from their immigrant parents. Said the comic, “You know, Ivanka, that’s a beautiful photo of you and your child. But let me just say, one mother to another, do something about your dad’s immigration practices, you feckless cunt!”

The Twittersphere was apoplectic with demands for equal justice for foulmouthed entertainers, an insistence that if Roseanne had to be sacrificed for her racist criticism of an Obama confidant, then surely Samantha should be fired for calling Trump’s daughter a cunt. Needless to say, the illusion that ABC’s principled stand in canceling “Roseanne” was a positive turning point in our culture wars, was now dead. What had briefly looked like a constructive consensus was now a full frontal battle between ape and cunt, a bizarre false equivalency between racial hatred and the use of a crude profanity.

The ensuing dialogue had nothing to do with civility or decency. It was all about politics, in the most decadent use of that term. Presidential Press Secretary Sarah Sanders announced that “such explicit profanity about female members of this administration will not be condoned,” leaving the door open, of course, to condone use of the c-word for Hillary Clinton, as many Trump t-shirts and campaign signs did during the 2016 campaign. Trump himself weighed into the battle, insisting that Bee be fired since that was the fate his buddy Roseanne suffered. That left us with yet one more unimaginable absurdity about the times in which we live: you can be elected president after admitting that you grab women by their pussies, but calling the first daughter a cunt is a dischargeable offense for a comedian.

Then the left fired back with numerous examples of Trump having used the c-word, along with the often told story of singer Ted Nugent calling Hillary Clinton a cunt and then being invited to dinner at the Trump Whitehouse. Moving right along with this scintillating intellectual exchange, the conservative surrebuttal hit its stride with counterclaims to Barr’s dismissal, including a Bill Maher episode featuring side-by-side pictures of Trump and an orangutan. As is so often the case with political discourse these days, the parties use whataboutism the same way a drunk uses a lamppost, more for support than illumination.

There is simply no moral equivalency between a brutally racist comment and the use of the c-word, particularly in this context since it was not used to demean women on the basis of their gender. Bee offered a sincere apology, as she should have. Her sin was not so much the offensiveness of the word, but the fact that its use predictably detracted from her overall valid message about the hypocrisy of Trump family values versus the treatment of immigrant families.

This is, obviously, a powerful word that packs a seismic etymological punch. Yet, it has not always been so offensive. In Middle English, the term was a standard reference for the female genitalia. The earliest reference to it in the Oxford English Dictionary is from the name of a 13th century London red light district street, Gropecuntlane. Chaucer used a variant for the word in two of his works. Shakespeare spun puns from the word in Hamlet and Twelfth Night. By the mid-1900s, the c-word had become quite notorious, generally considered one of the vilest of obscenities. It was used mostly by men to demean women, an angry, hateful, misogynistic slur, like “bitch” squared. That began to change in the 1990s. Many prominent women entertainers, prompted by playwright Eve Ensler and her The Vagina Monologues, began using the word, in effect reclaiming it from the misogynists. That new meaning was reflected in actress Sally Field’s reaction to this week’s brouhaha. Bee, she said, was “flat wrong to call Ivanka a cunt (because) cunts are powerful, beautiful, nurturing and honest.” So sayeth the Flying Nun.

As the dust begins to settle from this latest culture wars skirmish, we seem to be in a pretty good place. Roseanne remains canceled, and an apologetic Samantha is still going strong. When it comes to evil, racism trumps obscenity. After all, cunt is just a vowel movement away from can’t. Now, there’s a bumper sticker for you!