Yesterday I sent the following letter to the editors of the Times Picayune, in response to this cartoon from Mike Martinez which they published on Saturday's op-ed page:

As a Southern newspaper well-versed in our troubled racial history, the Times Picayune should recognize racial "dogwhistles" when they are being blown. Saturday's political cartoon from Mike Ramirez was an example of just such a dogwhistle, and you chose to dignify it with publication.

Ever since Ronald Reagan's 1980 speeches about "strapping young bucks" driving Cadillacs and "welfare queens" buying steaks with food stamps, the conflation of food stamps and other types of welfare with the African-American community has been a staple of GOP rhetoric, particularly here in the South. The fact that it is based upon an absolute lie never seems to stop anyone from repeating it. After all, the vast majority of recipients of governmental aid are not African-American, they are white. But the lie helps to feed into white resentment, so it is useful to the GOP (which cheerfully absorbed all of the former Dixiecrats like Thurmond and Helms into its ranks). Referring to President Obama as the "food stamp president" is obviously an extension of this tired, racist trope.

The Martinez cartoon, showing a "food stamp" with Obama's face on it in the upper-right corner of a "Letter of Intent" from the "Nation of Achievement" at 100 Main Street, America, USA to the "Nation of Entitlement" at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, is part of that same sad tradition. Ignoring the fact that President Obama is himself a strong example of personal effort and achievement, having woken up at four a.m. each morning as a child to do his school work and then worked his way into Columbia and Harvard Law School, followed by the U.S. Senate and ultimately the White House, Martinez claims that Mr. Obama represents the "Nation of Entitlement", not achievement. Further, Martinez ignores the fact that discretionary entitlement spending has not been increased under President Obama, certainly not to nearly the extent it was increased under his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, who signed into law Medicare Part D, the largest expansion of federal benefits since LBJ. He ignores the billions of dollars in entitlement spending cuts that President Obama has proposed. No, for Martinez and his rightwing cohorts, Obama = black = food stamps.

The question I must ask of you, as the daily newspaper that serves a majority-black city, is why are you willing to help spread such a false and malicious message? As a native of New Orleans, I understand full well that we are surrounded by communities that are considerably more conservative (and, yes, more white) than our own, and you have papers to sell in those parishes. But surely in your ongoing quest to appeal to the hinterlands you have some standards that you seek to uphold? Surely a bare modicum of factual basis should be demanded of the opinions you publish? Or has the Times Picayune decided to simply become part of the rightwing echo chamber? If that's the case, go ahead and fire your reporters and opinion writers. It will be cheaper to simply run bylines from Newsmax and the Washington Times, and perhaps more agreeable for your non-New Orleans customer base.

Somehow, I rather doubt they'll be publishing it. Dailies like the Times Picayune show just how ridiculous the notion of the "Liberal Media" really is. Papers that serve conservative customer bases are going to willingly provide red-meat for their constituency, because that's where the money is. This is true regardless of whatever personal beliefs the editors of the paper may have.

"New Rules" (In Response to Gene Marks)

1) Before you presume to lecture poor black kids, you first have to know some poor black kids personally. And not in a "that kid delivers my newspaper" kind of way, actual friendship.

2) Before you tell poor black kids that it's okay that their schools are failing, as long as they work hard, you have to send YOUR kids to one of those failing schools. When it's your flesh and blood on the line, then you can accept the quality of those schools.

3) Before you start telling poor black kids that all it takes is smarts, hard work, and a little luck, you'd better be able to honestly look at your own situation and consider whether you had to be exceptional to get there, or whether just "being you" worked out pretty well for you. And you'd better be able to admit that "a little luck" in the case of an American white person includes having been born into the wealthiest society in human history, one whose wealth originates, to an enormous extent, with the bondage of other human beings.

4) Before you post an article about poor black kids on a website aimed at rich white guys, you need to ask yourself: "Will writing this make me look like an enormous douchebag?"

NOTE: While this post is a response to another person's writing, to which I'd normally link, I'm not going to link to Gene Marks' "If I Were a Poor Black Kid" article on Forbes.com, because from what I hear he gets money for page-views, and I don't want to drive up his traffic. Bad enough I read the piece and gave him $.000001 for his efforts...

Racism As Evolutionary Check On Humanity?

Reposted:
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With this post, I am thinking out loud as I write. The ideas I am about to discuss are still developing.

There is no doubt that humanity is the dominant life form on Earth. There are no longer any predators that pose a true threat to us, if we are properly equipped (meaning, a bear can kill you, but not if you have a big enough gun). We do not have any real food shortages. The shortages we have are created by political circumstances, by conscious choices regarding the allocation and distribution of resources.

In nature, when an animal reaches a point where it has an abundant food supply and no natural predators nearby, you will usually see a population boom for that animal. This will continue until that animal puts such a strain on the local environment that the environment becomes inhospitable, frequently through food or water shortages. Then that animal will experience a sharp population decline. If one looks at the ecosystem as a self-sustaining structure (which it appears to be, according to current science), these cycles of surplus followed by scarcity can be seen as a natural method for preventing one animal's population from getting so large that it threatens the viability of other animals.

Man, because of our particular evolutionary advantages, is no longer subject to the surplus/scarcity cycle, at least not as it is imposed by nature. We have a global system of communication and transportation that can end any localized food shortage in a matter of days, if not hours. So, in one sense, nature can no longer hold us in check. We hold ourselves in check.

When I speak of our evolutionary advantages, I am thinking primarily of our ability to form complex, enduring social structures. It is not our individual intelligence that has allowed us to assume the dominant position. Several of the higher primates, including chimpanzees and gorillas, are capable of displaying intelligence that is very near human level (and may, in fact, be every bit equal to ours, but not perceived as such because of communications barriers). What put us at the apex of the pyramid is twofold: 1) our ability to collectively build upon the knowledge and insights of individuals; and 2) our ability to leverage the economies of scale.

With regard to that first point, think about two of the first major leaps for mankind: the development of speech, and the development of the written word. With speech, we gained the ability to convey knowledge from person to another, and eventually the ability to convey knowledge from generation to generation. The epic poems, the myths, all of the folklore of ancient times was a means of aggregating and distributing accumulated knowledge. With the written word, the complexity of the ideas that we could preserve and build upon increased exponentially. It was no longer necessary for each generation to repeat the intellectual achievements of its predecessors, because those achievements were stored in written form, and could be used as the leaping-off point for new achievements.

As to the second point, we see it first with the transition from solitary hunter-gatherers to hunting parties. One man, alone, can only fend off so many predators, can only kill so much prey and carry so much meat and gathered food (berries, nuts, etc.). A group of men, acting in concert, dramatically increases the ability to survive against predators, the number of prey that can be killed, and the amount that can be carried. Add in such primitive tools as liters, and that increase is more than just a linear increase in capacity. It's an early example of the advantages that come from the economies of scale.

Look then to the development of agriculture. Again, one man alone can only cultivate and maintain so much land. Two men can do more, and a group of men can do significantly more. Long-term, sustained agriculture developed as much through early economies of scale as through the invention of the plow. Stable agriculture was possible only with the usage of spoken language (how else to convey what needed to be done, and when?), and tremendously enhanced by the written word (storing accumulated knowledge about growing seasons and times, cultivation methods, etc.)

It was the development of sustained agriculture that allowed us to create permanent cities, and allowed the advent of a new "leisure" class: scholars. When our living conditions were more uncertain, so much time had to go to hunting, gathering, and preparing food, there was little time for anyone to sit down and think abstractly. There certainly wasn't time to do so as one's primary activity. The efficiencies of mass agriculture, plus the added safety of city dwelling, made it possible for some people that would otherwise have been out hunting to divert themselves away from daily survival activities and focus on purely intellectual pursuits. This in turn allowed for the technological growth of mankind. When food is no longer your most pressing concern every day, you can devote yourself to invention and innovation.

With technology came our eventual disconnection from natural cycles of surplus and scarcity. This development was gradual, to be sure, and did not reach its apex until we had the ability to communicate with one another over great distances and the ability to quickly move foodstocks between far-flung locations. But think about it: people in Ireland did not starve during the potato famine because of the localized food shortage. They starved because other human beings decided not to re-allocate food resources to the area of greatest scarcity. It was within humanity's technical capabilities to severely mitigate, if not outright solve the famine. Yet we did not do so.

Why? As much because of tribalistic tensions between the Irish and their nearest neighbors the Scottish and English as for any other reason. To the people who had enough food, and the means to move it if they wanted to, the Irish were "other", part of "them" instead of "us." And so the famine continued, localized scarcity causing local population depletion just as you see with a herd of deer that has grown to large and eaten all of the nearby vegetation. Only it wasn't "nature" as an external force that caused this, it was the human tendency to subdivide and differentiate ourselves, to be loyal to kin and tribe, all others be damned.

This is why I believe that in some senses racism, which is another variant of the same tribalism described above, may be an evolutionary check on humanity. If we did not keep ourselves separated on the basis of race, our ability to cooperate, and to collectively achieve our goals, would logically increase to a significant degree. Too much cooperation, too much efficiency in how we allocate resources, could, ironically enough, lead to a population boom that would be truly unsustainable. There are no natural predators who can keep us in check anymore, and the forces of natural calamity do not (so far) threaten our viability as a species (the loss of 250,000 in the 2004 tsunami was devastating locally but did not threaten mankind as a species).

Perhaps our tendencies to resist cooperation, to balk at collective action, to define ourselves in narrow group terms and view other groups with suspicion, are a natural deterrent against us truly going too far as a species. If you look at the industrial revolution and its child the computer revolution as examples of high-order cooperative thinking and action (requiring both the accumulation and disbursement of knowledge and significant economies of scale), and you observe the fact that the bulk of the environmental harm we have done as a species is connected to those two revolutions, you can see how it is possible for our own ability to collectively build upon knowledge and labor can become a threat to our survival. Absent a large asteroid striking the planet, the only foreseeable threat to our survival is our technology getting to the point where it makes the Earth uninhabitable for humans (it would remain habitable for a great many other species, e.g. cockroaches).

Obviously, I am not writing this as an endorsement of or defense of racism or tribalism. This whole train of thought was the result of my trying to figure out why it is that our species seems almost as hard-wired for conflict as it is for cooperation. Who knows...maybe, just maybe, if mankind ever really did the "Kumbaya" thing, bought the world a Coke and taught it to sing in perfect harmony, we would be so unfettered by natural restraints we would ultimately end up destroying ourselves with our own progress

Cry Havok, and Let Loose the Dogs of War

Repost, circa late October 2008:

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For so many months, the far right has been trying to convince America that Obama is secretly an angry radical, that Michelle holds a racial grudge against white people, that Rev. Wright hates America. How bitterly ironic, then, and how desperately sad it is that the real rage, the radicalism, the animosity...is coming from the right's supporters.

McCain's public rallies have descended into cries that Obama is a terrorist, and calls for his head to be cut off. McCain himself said nothing to correct an audience member who referred to Obama as a socialist and a hooligan. One of McCain's senior advisers referred to Obama as "some guy off the street." What we are seeing is the early stages of a blood frenzy. Old, old anxieties and resentments are being stoked, and directed against Obama the "other" as a convenient scapegoat for what ails the audience member. The (so far) sporadic calls for violence are going un-checked, which is, in itself, a form of tacit encouragement.

The country is on fire, and McCain is pissing gasoline.

Coming from the South, and being a student of her history, I can tell you that these are forces that cannot easily be contained, once unleashed. The old stories of blacks usurping white power during Reconstruction have not gone away, nor have the tales of black violence during the most tumultuous phase of the Civil Rights Movement. These resentments have been out there, covered by a thin coat of anti-welfare rhetoric (and now the effort to blame the mortgage crisis on poor black people who had the nerve to buy houses).

They never went away, they just became the subtext for much of our political discourse. Only now, they are less and less a matter of subtext. They are being brought to the forefront, and inflamed. To all those thinking that somehow America had "transcended race" via Obama's nomination, here is your undenaible proof that no such transcendance has taken place. For all of the Benetton ads, Cosby Shows, and "Yes We Can" videos, we have not excised the emotional cancer of our collective past. At most, it has only ever been in remission, waiting for the chance to grow again.

In a way, I think that Ta-Nehisi may be a little too kind in his appraisal of McCain's actions:

I've been thinking about this McCain-Palin Obama "palling around with terrorist" idea more lately. The saddest thing about many Republicans isn't just that they disagree with liberals on race--it's they are largely ignorant on race. When the McCain campaign cast the spell of diabolical jingoism, they have no idea of the forces they are toying with. We remember Martin Luther King's murder as a sad and tragic event. Less remembered is the fact that ground-work for King's murder was seeded, not simply by rank white supremacy, but by people who slandered King as a communist.

They have no idea of the forces they are toying with? With respect to TC, there's just no way that the Republicans don't know what they're doing. The Dixiecrats, after all, became closely intertwined with the core power structure of the GOP when they switched over from being Democrats. If any group of people has collective knowledge about the nature of these emotional forces, it's the Dixiecrats. For most of their period of ascendancy in the South (from the Tilden-Hayes Compromise onward), the Dixiecrats' hold on power was predicated on manipulating those exact emotions. There is no credible basis to assume that somehow the rest of the GOP remained ignorant of these things after they welcomed the Dixiecrats with open arms.

No, the Republicans know. They know, and they continue. There is nothing innocent in their conduct. The road that the GOP has put themselves on, the road that they want the rest of us to take, leads directly to black preachers bleeding out on hotel balconies, to small chidren blown to pieces in their own church, to presidential candidates dying in hotel kitchens. The road to Hell is paved with political intentions.

Do They No Know Who Obama Is...Or Do They Just Not Know Black People?

Reposted:

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Obama's been running for President since early 2007, and he's been under near-constant medai scrutiny for at least the last year. He's been interviewed by everyone from Newsweek to Mountainbiker Magazine, he's appeared in a slew of debates and made endless television appearances.

Yet the GOP folks keep claiming that we don't really know who Obama is. On the one hand, there's no reason to take the GOP at face value: they know damned well who Obama is, which is why he scares them, and why they keep trying to present him to the voters as some mysterious, unknown (therefore dangerous) quantity.

For all of the GOP's insencerity in pushing the claim, I do think there's a fairly good sized chunk of the electorate that honestly doesn't feel as if they know Obama. At least, I believe that's how they explain those feelings to themselves. I think Obama is merely the focal point, however. What they really don't know, still can't understand, is black people.

In those parts of the country with few, if any, actual black people, the only exposure to black people comes from television, movies, and music (I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most residents of lily-white regions aren't snagging this month's Ebony magazine in the checkout line). We all know how narrow and distorted the depiction of black folks is in the media. If somebody isn't doing the Mantan Shuffle, they're slanging rocks and riding on 20-inch rims. Or maybe, just maybe, they're lucky enough to be that magical, "soulful" black person who saves an uptight white person (see Bagger Vance, Legend Of; Bullworth). Where does Obama fit in all of that? He doesn't.

That, I think, is the root of the strange debate among white folks regarding whether Obama is "black enough" or "too black" to be President. They have a certain paradigm in mind for black people, and Obama isn't it. So they start thinking he's not black "enough" to win. But then he daps up his wife on national television, and talks about Jay-Z and Ludacris, so maybe he's "too black" for the White House. What box to put him in? What box?

I think that there are plenty of people smart enough to realize that what they know about black people from the media is either incomplete or wrong (actually, it's both). As this campaign has gone on, I think a lot of these people may have started to realize just how little they know about black people. Hopefully, some of them are starting to wake up. Because here's the thing: just as was the case with the Cosby Show, the only way you can be surprised by the emergence of Barack Obama is if you don't know the black community.

For decades there have been black teachers, black lawyers, black doctors. During segregation, the only people who could (or would) provide such services to the black community were other black people. There were entire economies within the larger black enclaves like Harlem: restaurants, shops, offices. Black owners, black workers, black customers. When people were forbidden from going outside the community to get what they needed, the community developed, internally, the ability to provide the necessities. If you know that black lawyers have been around for 100 years, along with black doctors and black teachers (probably even further, actually), the sight of an educated, articulate black man is nothing new or surprising.

Note, I'm not waxing romantic about the days of segregation. I'm merely observing that there has been a black professional class for some time now. But that professional class has been largely invisible to the white community. That's why Claire Huxtable the lawyer and Cliff Huxtable the doctor were so noteworthy when The Cosby Show premiered. I remember distinctly people talking about how unrealistic the show was, both because of Claire and Cliff being professionals, but also because of the range of skin tones within the family. Those two observations could only ever have been made by white folks, because black folks knew better.

Some people have a hard time believing this, but I was moving up in social class when I married my wife. In my family, I'm the first and only lawyer, from the first generation where everyone went to college. Only one of my grandparents even finished high school. We're maybe 40 years out from the tennant farm and the dockyards of the Mississippi River. My wife's family, by contrast, has had doctors and lawyers for generations. That fact is no surprise to people familiar with the Creole community in New Orleans. But for people who don't know much about black folks? They can't quite wrap their heads around it. It seems strangely ironic for them, the notion that the white person in an interracial couple would be the one moving up the ladder.

My greatest hope for Obama as a leader doesn't really have to do with his economic plans, or what he will do about the war in Iraq. No, what I most want to see from him is quiet, daily evidence of how perfectly natural it is for a black man to be that intelligent, that educated, that thoughtful. He doesn't ever have to say "You see? A black man can do all of this!" He says that by doing.

It's a message that America is long overdue in hearing.

Regarding Whether McCain Was "Actually" Racist, Or Just Tolerated Racism

Another Too Sense repost:

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As McCain's and Palin's rallies have gotten uglier and uglier, and McCain's overall strategy has gotten more aggressive and more negative, one of the questions that keeps coming up, at least among commentators, is whether McCain's heart is really in this negative stuff. Does he really believe that Obama pals around with terrorists? Does he really think Obama is dangerous, or radical? My response: does it really matter whether he does or not?

Let's say for the sake of argument that McCain is no racist. Let's say he doesn't see Obama as some terrorist-befriending leftist radical who is going to destroy America. If that's true, how is it relevant, given the fact that McCain, Palin, their surrogates, and their supporters have been using those very arguments to support their campaign? As Rachel Dawes said in Batman Begins, "It's not who you are underneath, it's what you do that defines you."

Put another way: would anything change for you if you found out that deep in his heart of hearts Jeffrey Dahmer longed to be a meek, harmless vegetarian?

Another repost from Too Sense:

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Okay, that's it. I'm done. I've officially had it.



You know how kids can sue to have themselves emancipated from their parents? Go off on their own, legally independent, et cetera? I'm gonna sue to emancipate myself from these kinds of white people. It's gonna be tricky to draw up the right language, because I'm not looking to sever associations with all of my white brothers and sisters. But those motherfuckers in the video? Those have got to go.

I'm gonna do the white version of Chris Rock's famous "niggas vs black people" routine. Just substitute...well, see, there isn't a true white equivalent for the n-word. Cracker, redneck, PWT, et cetera can carry similar meanings, but they don't have the same weight. When you hear black folks talking about regular black folks versus "niggas" you know exactly what kind of people are being discussed. Refer to crackers or rednecks, you could have a pretty wide range of meanings.

Terminology aside, in the immortal words of Hillary Clinton, I reject and denounce those jackasses. I am so sick of this being the face of "real, hard-working white America", like there aren't any salt-of-the-Earth white folks who aren't also psychotic, virulent racists, ignorant xenophobes, or religious whack-jobs.

It's people like this that give the white working-class and lower-class a bad reputation. Some of us actually prize knowledge, and education. Some of us read books...for fun. Some of us work our way up from modest means to try to go further in life. Some of us are perfectly fine with people from other races, religions, cultures, what have you. Some of us are fully capable of loving ourselves, our history, and our culture, without hating everything and everybody else. And we don't need these cousin-lovin' pig-fuckers dragging us down, see?

Point being...I ain't responsible for those people in the video, they don't speak for me, they ain't related to me, no blood, no culture, not a motherfucking thing. They can kiss my hairy white ass until it bleeds.

H/T: TNC