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Posts by Jessie:
Irish-Americans, Racism, and the Pursuit of Whiteness
March 17th, 2010From the archive (originally posted 03-17-2009): Today in New York City and throughout the U.S., Irish-Americans will celebrate St. Patrick’s Day and Irish heritage(
photo credit: ktylerconk). What few will acknowledge in this day of celebration is the way in which the Irish in American deployed whiteness in order to deflect the racism they encountered in the U.S.
Like many immigrant groups in the United States, the Irish were characterized as racial Others when they first arrived in the first half of the 19th century. The Irish had suffered profound injustice in the U.K. at the hands of the British, widely seen as “white negroes.” The potato famine that created starvation conditions that cost the lives of millions of Irish and forced the out-migration of millions of surviving ones, was less a natural disaster and more a complex set of social conditions created by British landowners (much like Hurricane Katrina). Forced to flee from their native Ireland and the oppressive British landowners, many Irish came to the U.S.
Once in the U.S., the Irish were to negative stereotyping that was very similar to that of enslaved Africans and African Americans. The comic Irishman – happy, lazy, stupid, with a gift for music and dance – was a stock character in American theater. Drunkenness and criminality were major themes of Irish stereotypes, and the term “paddy wagon” has its etymological roots in the racist term “paddy,” a shortening of the name “Patrick,” which was used to refer to the Irish. However, this is also a gendered image and refers to Irish men, specifically. The masculine imagery of “paddy” hides the existence of Irish women, but did not protect Irish women from racism as they were often more exposed to such racism through domestic jobs. Women typically played a key role in maintaining Catholic adherence, which resonates closely with Irishness and difference. The “model minority” (if you will) stereotype of Irish-American women is of a “Bridget,” recognized for her hard work and contribution to Irish upward class mobility.
Simian, or ape-like caricature of the Irish immigrant was also a common one among the mainstream news publications of the day (much like the recent New York Post cartoon). For example, in 1867 American cartoonist Thomas Nast drew “The Day We Celebrate” a cartoon depicting the Irish on St. Patrick’s Day as violent, drunken apes. And, in 1899, Harper’s Weekly featrued a drawing of three men’s heads in profile: Irish, Anglo-Teutonic and Negro, in order to illustrate the similarity between the Irish and the Negro (and, the supposed superiority of the Anglo-Teutonic). In northern states, blacks and Irish immigrants were forced into overlapping – often integrated – slum neighborhoods. Although leaders of the Irish liberation struggle (in Ireland) saw slavery as an evil, their Irish-American cousins largely aligned with the slaveholders.
And, following the end of slavery, the Irish and African Americans were forced to compete for the same low-wage, low-status jobs. So, the “white negroes” of the U.K. came to the United States and, though not enslaved, faced a status almost as low as that of recently-freed blacks. While there were moments of solidarity between Irish and African Americans, this was short lived.
Over the course of the 19th and early 20th century, Irish Americans managed to a great extent to enter and become part of the dominant white culture. In an attempt to secure the prosperity and social position that their white skin had not guaranteed them in Europe, Irish immigrants lobbied for white racial status in America. Although Irish people’s pale skin color and European roots suggested evidence of their white racial pedigree, the discrimination that immigrants experienced on the job (although the extent of the “No Irish Need Apply” discrimination is disputed), the simian caricatures they saw of themselves in the newspapers, meant that “whiteness” was a status that would be achieved, not ascribed.
For some time now, Irish-Americans have been thoroughly regarded as “white.” Evidence of this assimilation into whiteness is presented by Mary C. Waters (Harvard) in a recent AJPH article, in which she writes that “the once-rigid lines that divided European-origin groups from one another have increasingly blurred.” Waters goes on to predict that the changes that European immigrants ahve experienced are “becoming more likely for groups we now define as ‘racial.’” While I certainly agree that the boundaries of whiteness are malleable – it is a racial category that expands and contracts based on historical, cultural and social conditions – I don’t know if it is malleable enough to include all the groups we now define as ‘racial’ Others.
As people rush to embrace even fictive Irish heritage and encourage strangers to “Kiss Me I’m Irish” today, take just a moment to reflect on the history of racism and the pursuit of whiteness wrapped up in this holiday.
Mainstreaming White Supremacy
March 16th, 2010There are a couple of news stories in recent days that suggest a new level of mainstreaming white supremacy in American culture. The first story (via the SPLC and Charles Johnson of LGF) that Robert Stacy McCain is once again blogging at the Washington Times. In case you’re not familiar with him, here’s a little background on McCain (via SPLC):
Robert Stacy McCain, a former key Washington Times editor who has suggested that “perfectly rational people” react with “altogether natural revulsion” to interracial marriage, apparently has returned as a free-lancer to the newspaper he left in January 2008. In a “Special to The Washington Times” article published today, McCain covers a congressional race in upstate New York involving a candidate with connections to the Tea Party movement.
A casualty of the housecleaning that occurred at the Times three years ago, McCain left the paper on his own accord after managing editor Fran Coombs, with whom he was close, was terminated (Coombs had his own connections to white supremacy).
Once identified as a member of the neo-Confederate hate group League of the South, McCain’s reporting while at the Times was always controversial. As editor of the “Culture Briefs” section of the paper, McCain used excerpts from racist publications including American Renaissance magazine and the anti-immigrant hate site VDARE.com. In fact, McCain may be the only mainstream newspaper reporter to have covered four American Renaissance conferences. Twice, he offered no description at all of the group he was covering, which is devoted to race science. Once, he said it was “critical of liberal positions on race and immigration.” Only in 2004 did he note that some viewed it as racist.
While conservative-leaning, the Washington Times is mainstream news outlet, and the re-hiring of McCain – a man with clear ties to overt white supremacist groups – is a noteworthy step toward mainstreaming white supremacy and rendering these kinds of views more acceptable.
The mainstreaming of white supremacy is not new. White supremacist groups in the U.S. since the 1970s have tried a number of strategies to make their views seem more acceptable and their agendas appear benign, such as changing hoods-and-robes for suits-and-ties to participating in the “adopt a highway” program.
The fact is, even apart from these sorts of efforts, the white supremacist ideology resonates beyond these extremist groups.
This is an argument I highlighted in my first book (White Lies, Routledge, 1997). While many people may find the idea of white supremacist ideology an anachronism in the post-civil rights era, the fact is that the views of extremists are reflected in mainstream American culture. For example, the idea that white people – and specifically white men – were the primary force behind building the U.S. (as illustrated in this image from a racist publication) is one that resonates with large portions of the population and is widely repeated by leading news commentators on mainstream news channels. Other examples include when extremely popular shock-jocks such as Don Imus and Howard Stern boost their already-considerable ratings by villifying young, black women. Who needs to bother with joining a white supremacist group when you can listen to Buchanan, Imus and Stern spout the same ideas?
The second story is from Newsweek, which argues that white supremacists are “rebranding hate for the Obama era.” The Newsweek story (released on the web March 12 and set to be released in print on March 22) is a good bit of reporting about extremists groups by reporter Eve Conant and photographer Bruce Gilden. They visited two groups on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s hate group list: the Knights Party, an offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan (during a cosponsored event with the Christian Revival Center), and the Detroit-based National Socialist Movement (NSM), one of the largest neo-Nazi groups in the U.S. However, I’m not that persuaded (and don’t think most readers of Newsweek will be) of their argument about the success of these groups at “rebranding hate.” The photo essay by Gilden (from which the image above is taken) is compelling but somewhat at odds with the text of the article. The people photographed do not, I would argue, fit the image of “mainstream” but rather trade on notions of white supremacists as “other,” as extremists not at all like most Americans. It’s an interesting tension.
In a related piece from Newsweek by Joshua Alston, he notes the trend in popular television shows that rely on white supremacists as the go-to bad guy:
“…the supremacy surge seems to be much more acute in Hollywood than anywhere else in the country. The second season of Sons of Anarchycentered on a turf war in the town of Charming, Calif., between a white-separatist group called the League of American Nationalists and a motorcycle gang who are plenty unsavory, but at least they’re not bigots. Your friendly neighborhood serial killer Dexter has dispatched his own supremacist, and all three iterations of the Law & Orderfranchise have featured stories in which murders lead to an underground white-power cell. Even a recent episode of the sci-fi puzzler Fringefeatured a Nazi villain who tries to poison folks at a meeting of the World Tolerance Initiative. In this tenuous moment, when we talk about post-racial America as though saying it can make it so, there’s no more frightening a bogeyman than the occupational racist.”
Alston goes on to offer some analysis of this phenomenon:
“The reason the card-carrying white supremacist lingers in the public imagination is not just because he’s scary, but because he fortifies our self-regard in an area where we all occasionally need some convincing. …to acknowledge—or even inflate—white supremacists is to assuage our guilt with the knowledge that there are people out there far more prejudiced than most of us could ever be. … For writers, these characters have even more appeal. Their beliefs are so stigmatized, there’s no need to bog down the story with motives and expository monologues.”
This, too, is something I’ve noted in the earlier work (White Lies, Routledge, 1997). At the time, television talk shows regularly featured white supremacists as sure ratings-boosters. Providing white supremacists with this kind of platform – whether in fiction or non-fiction television – contains the threat of white supremacy by identifying specific targets (”those are the white supremacists – there”) while it simultaneously lets other whites off the hook. So, the not-so-subtle message gets conveyed that those of us sitting at home watching white supremacists on the television have nothing to worry about.
What’s remarkable here is that two mainstream news outlets – the Washington Times and Newsweek – are calling our attention to the mainstreaming of white supremacy (although there’s clearly a difference of intention and political allegiance between the two news organizations). The question is how will the rest of the U.S. respond to this attempt to ‘rebrand’ hate?
Race, Abortion and Reproductive Justice (Updated)
March 1st, 2010March 1 marks “National Women of Color Day,” situated at the end of Black History Month and at the beginning of Women’s History Month. Over the weekend, I attended the SexTech conference in San Francisco and heard a discussion by feminist sexual health educators that was interesting and flawed because it largely left out black women’s experience of sexual and reproductive health. This confluence of events seemed like an opportune moment to address the controversy churning around race and abortion. The current discussion, which is highly politicized in the U.S. in ways that it’s not elsewhere, has been touched off by a new multimedia activist campaign, called “The Endangered Species Project.”
The campaign was launched in early February at a press conference by Georgia Right to Life and The Renaissance Foundation announcing a provocative billboard which proclaims “Black Children are an Endangered Species” and urges people to go to the site TooManyAborted.com (more about which below). Here’s one of the billboards in the campaign (which reportedly costs $20,000 for approximately 65 signs around Georgia):
The main group behind the billboard campaign is the predominantly white organization, Georgia Right to Life (GRTL). Prior to this campaign, the GRTL was probably best known in the region for its “Miss Right to Life” pageant. With the new ‘endangered species project’ campaign, GRTL is partnering with a Ryan and Bethany Bomberger. The very slick website for the campaign, says the effort is a “collaborative effort between The Radiance Foundation and Georgia’s Operation Outrage.” The three layers of identification here — “Too Many Aborted.com,” then The Radiance Foundation, and then Operation Outrage — work as a kind of Internet slight-of-hand. The illusion of a multi-layered organizational structure disguises the fact there’s no staff here beyond the Bombergers. Ryan Bomberger is a former ad exec, and wife Bethany is a former school teacher, and they live in Georgia with their three children. Ryan Bomberger, who is biracial, has a compelling story about being the product of rape and the beneficiary of adoption, and this narrative frames much of the discussion in this multimedia campaign. Bomberger wants more mothers of black and biracial children to consider adoption rather than abortion.
Perhaps more disturbing even than the slickly deceptive multimedia campaign is the corporate involvement of CBS. According to RHRealityCheck, the billboards are the property of CBS Outdoors, a subsidiary of the multi-media CBS corporation. This pro-life campaign comes very quickly on the heels of the CBS decision to air a Super Bowl ad earlier this month from Focus on the Family, the ultra-right conservative organization that seeks to limit the rights of women, LGBT folks, and people of color generally. CBS simultaneously denied ad space to advertisers for condoms and organizations representing gay advertisers. At this point, it’s not clear whether CBS is endorsing or underwriting the ads in any way, but it’s certainly a telling coincidence.
At the launch of the ‘endangered species project’ GRTL also announced that they would seek to pass House Bill 1155, legislation that would:
“make it a crime to ’solicit a woman to have an abortion based on the race or sex of the unborn child.’ “
GRTL’s “endangered species” ad campaign is an incredibly sophisticated strategy for reaching out to black women about issues of reproduction because it trades on a rhetoric that evokes the long history of racist practices directed specifically at black women. For example, forced sterilization of black women was so commonplace in parts of the deep south during the Jim Crow era that it was referred to as a “Mississippi Appendectomy.” It was routine for white doctors who perform these sterilizations on black women without their knowledge or consent, presumably “for their own good” and the “good of the larger society.”
It’s also true that black women, like women of other races, want to control their reproductive lives. Usually what this means is deciding on when and how many children to have. For many African American women in Georgia (and around the U.S.), a lack of access to birth control, lack of education, and even a high rate of sexual violence make this kind of control difficult to achieve. The fact is that a disproportionately high percentage of black women seek abortions, from the New York Times:
Data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that black women get almost 40 percent of the country’s abortions, even though blacks make up only 13 percent of the population. Nearly 40 percent of black pregnancies end in induced abortion, a rate far higher than for white or Hispanic women.
As the state’s largest anti-abortion group, GRTL has been trying to find ways to address the issue of abortion in the black community, but without much success until they began to reframe the issue as one of genocide. GRTL also did a very savvy thing and hired an African American woman, Catherine Davis, to be its minority outreach coordinator. Ms. Davis travels to black churches and colleges around the state, delivering the message that abortion is the primary tool in a decades-old conspiracy to kill off blacks. Not surprisingly, given the genocidal practices in the U.S. against black and brown people over centuries, this is a message that has resonated with African American audiences.
SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective in Atlanta works for reproductive justice for women of color. Executive Director Loretta Ross refers to the controversy this way:
“It’s a perfect storm. There’s an assumption that every time a girl is pregnant it’s because of voluntary activity, and it’s so not the case.”
SisterSong also notes that “the association between the born and unborn with endangered animals provides a disempowering and dehumanizing message to the Black community, which is completely unacceptable.” Other people, such as this blogger, have noted that the “endangered species” ad campaign sends an insidious message about African American women’s sexuality that:
African Americans are more promiscuous, practice unsafe sex, and because they obtain more abortions, are less responsible. This has many lasting effect across the country that further enables historical constructs and stereotypes surrounding race to flourish. (Such as the construct in which the African American Women are portrayed to be an out-of-control sexual being that always wants sex).
The billboards also imply that “black women somehow are perpetrators of a coordinated and intentional effort to ‘execute’ black babies is harmful, deplorable and counterproductive.” This assessment comes from SPARK, another reproductive justice organization that, along with SisterSong, is pushing back against the “endangered species” ad campaign and the proposed House Bill 1155. SPARK released this statement in support of black women’s self-determination over their own reproductive lives:
“Black women know what is best for our lives, our families, and our communities and are capable of making these decisions without a coordinated assault by organizations that are not genuinely committed to addressing the host of social issues confronted by the black community. We strongly reject and denounce these billboards and the sponsoring organizations, Georgia Right to Life, the Radiance Foundation, and Operation Outrage for speaking about us, demonizing our decisions, and assuming they know what is best for our lives.”
While the Bombergers and other pro-life advocates like the GRTL say they want to encourage adoption because they care about black children, the reality is that adoption placements are heavily influenced by race and the racial preferences (if not outright racism) of adoptive parents. According to one recent study, both straight and gay adoptive parents in the U.S. exhibit racial biases when applying to adopt a child, consistently preferring non-African-American babies (pdf). So the reality is that if more African American babies are given up for adoption, they will very likely languish in the foster care system rather than being adopted due to the racism of prospective adoptive parents.
The “Endangered Species Project” is yet another villification of black women (there are so many available), and a rather cynical effort to play upon some well-founded suspicions of black people. If groups like GRTL really cared about black children they might better spend their time working to reduce or eliminate the racism which negatively affects birth outcomes for black mothers (pdf). Rather than the narrowly focused agenda of preventing black women from getting abortions, we need think differently about abortion, not as a “right to life” versus a choice, but as part of a broader reproductive justice agenda that places black women’s experience at the center.
Updated 3/1/10 @ 12:10pmET: A reader responded saying she was confused by the stance toward abortion in the original post. The point here is not to re-has “pro-life” vs. “pro-choice” arguments which are framed by a white feminist movement and the mainstream media, but rather, to put reproductive justice at the center of the analysis. One way to do that is to begin my looking at women of color’s experience with reproduction, such as African American women’s lives. For an excellent analysis from this perspective, I encourage readers to read Renee at Womanist Musings (also linked in the original post). Miriam writing at Feministing has a good analysis of the bias in the NYTimes piece (which I linked to above) that also offers some insight into reproductive justice and women of color.
And, I was remiss in leaving out a call to action from the organization SPARK Reproductive Justice Now, mentioned in the original post, which has a campaign to urge CBS Outdoor to bring the billboards down. Click here to take action.
Celebrating Black History: W.E.B. DuBois
February 23rd, 2010
Today marks the birthday of pioneering sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois (February 23, 1868 – August 27, 1963). Du Bois was the first African American to earn a PhD in Sociology at Harvard University. Du Bois was an prolific and insightful scholar who, over his lifetime, wrote wrote 21 books, edited 15 more, and published over 100 essays and articles. He’s probably best known for The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899) The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (1903), and Black Folk, Then and Now (1939). Du Bois also published John Brown (1909), a sympathetic portrayal of the controversial anti-racist.
From 1897 to 1910 Du Bois served as professor of economics and history at Atlanta University, where he organized conferences titled the Atlanta University Studies of the Negro Problem and edited or co-edited 16 of the annual publications, on such topics as The Negro in Business (1899), The Negro Artisan (1902), The Negro Church (1903), Economic Cooperation among Negro Americans (1907), and The Negro American Family (1908). In grad school, I spent a good deal of time pouring through the archives of these conferences and came very close to writing a dissertation on the conferences which were fascinating. (I think there’s still a dissertation to be written on these conferences, in case any readers are looking for dissertation ideas!)
Du Bois was also an activist, in addition to being a scholar. He was one of the founding members of the NAACP, and over his lifetime, his views became more radicalized. He long identified with the African roots of black American culture, and was a leading Pan-Africanist. As he aged, he grew more and more disillusioned with the seemingly intractable state of racism in the U.S. and emigrated to Ghana in West Africa. He died there at age 95 in 1963 and was honored with a state funeral.
Man Arrested for Threats on White Supremacist Website
February 19th, 2010A man has been arrested for making threats on a white supremacist website against the President and First Lady (via @BlackInformant). This arrest is good news, in my opinion, although I’m sure that some of first-amendment-absolutists will howl that this is an infringement of free speech. Here’s the story and the screenshot via the Associated Press:
“A Kentucky man has been arrested and charged with posting a poem threatening President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama on a white supremacist Web site.
The U.S. Secret Service said Johnny Logan Spencer Jr. of Louisville wrote and posted the poem, titled “The Sniper,” on a site called NewSaxon.org.
Special Agent Stephan M. Pazenzia (PAH-zen-zee-ah) said the poem describes a gunman shooting and killing a “tyrant,” later identified as the president.
Spencer is scheduled to appear before U.S. Magistrate Judge Dave Whalin on Friday for a detention hearing. He’s in federal custody charged with making threats against the president and threatening to kill or injure a major candidate for the office of the preside. “
There seems to be some awareness, at least when it comes to the president, that racist language online is not protected speech. A jury in Roanoke, Virginia recently found white supremacist William A. White guilty on four counts of threatening and intimidation via email and online postings (as well as threats made through older technologies such as letters and phone calls) to journalists. When I was finishing my book, I made note of William White for his racist website attacking the young men in Louisiana known as the “Jena 6.” He had posted a website with their addresses and phone numbers suggesting that (white) people take violent action against them, yet he was not arrested for this. While I’m glad to see that White is finally getting his just due (he faces up to 35 years in prison for his recent convictions), it seems like a bit of justice delayed.
This is not the typical view in the U.S. of racist speech online. For the most part, most people believe that anything that’s said online is protected by the First Amendment. As I noted here back in November, the opinion in the U.S. about racist speech online usually follows along the line of this piece in the AtlanticOnline (a mainstream to left publication). In the U.S. is that many people here want to argue that the First Amendment, which is designed to protect dissent against the government, protects all manner of racist speech. This simply isn’t true.
The reality is that there are lots of legal restrictions on speech that apply to speech on the Internet, like threatening the president’s life. We in the U.S. have to begin to think more critically about our notions of “free speech” in the digital era.
Briefly Noted: Online Database about Prejudice
February 19th, 2010This notice was posted in the January newsletter Footnotes, a publication of the ASA. I thought this might be of interest to some readers here who didn’t see it there:
Prejudice and Conflict Reduction Online Database. The database is bibliography of approximately 1,000 empirical reports of interventions to reduce prejudice and/or intergroup conflict. The database consists of laboratory and field-based studies, examining interventions from priming to affirmative action policy. Visitors can do a keyword search to find specific types of interventions or outcome measures. Using the advanced search option, users can also search by study methodology. Users can export the studies they select into a bibliographic list in APA format, post comments on references, and sign up for an RSS feed to receive updates of new references added to the database. The database includes unpublished dissertations and policy reports. Users are encouraged to email new dissertations, unpublished reports, and any studies we may have missed. The database is meant to be a pragmatic resource for scholars and practitioners interested in evidence-based theory and intervention. The database is available at www.betsylevypaluck.com under the heading “Online Database.” Contact: Betsy Levy Paluck at epaluck@princeton.edu.
Woman Kills White Supremacist Husband (updated)
February 11th, 2010There’s an under-reported story out of Belfast, Maine that merits some attention here (h/t: Cheryl Fuller). Amber Cummings, 32, admits to killing her husband James Cummings, a white supremacist.
On December 9, 2009, Amber Cummings walked into her husband’s bedroom and fired two bullets into his head while he slept, then fled with her 9-year-old daughter to a neighbor’s home and called police. On January 8, 2010, Cummings appeared in court and received a suspended sentence for the killing. In granting the suspended sentence, the judge said that James Cummings had subjected his wife and their daughter to years of extreme abuse. What’s noteworthy in the story for discussing here is this bit about James Cummings:
“The killing drew the FBI’s attention after Nazi mementos, radioactive materials and instructions on how to build a ‘dirty bomb’ were found in their home. ….Her husband was angered by Barack Obama’s election as president and the bomb-making materials were discovered near the time of Obama’s inauguration… “
James Cummings, then, gets added to the growing list of white people – mostly white men – who are so angered by the election of black president that they are contemplating resorting to violence. Amber Cummings reported feeling an “escalating sense of doom” about her husband’s plans to set off large scale destruction and his increasing abuse of her and their daughter. Following the sentencing, Amber Cummings referred to her husband as “mentally ill,” and that’s undoubtedly one part of the explanation for his behavior. I also want to offer another explanation that directly takes into account race, gender and sexuality. James Cummings’ abusive treatment of his wife and daughter and his white supremacy are connected to more mainstream manifestations of gender and racial entitlement.
Entitlement is the sense that one is deserving of some particular reward or benefit. In many ways, gender and racial entitlement are a defining characteristic of white men in contemporary U.S. society, whether as “white saviors” in popular culture or as “masters of the universe” in banking, white men – by their own words - see themselves as those who are most entitled to material wealth and psycho-sexual power over individual women and children. Yet, if anyone dares to point this out, there are lots of people – frequently white women – who are eager to call this is “lunacy.”
Examples from the mainstream of this sort of connection between gender and racial entitlement abound, but there is a very recent one in the news that makes this point quite nicely. John Mayer, a white male, a pop singer, most known for his ballad “Wonderland,” and for dating actress Jennifer Anniston. Mayer is about as far away from the popular notion of a ‘white supremacist’ as anyone would imagine. He’s also not visibly mentally ill. In a recent interview for Playboy magazine (to understand how the underpinnings of this magazine’s founding in a sense of male entitlement, read: Barbara Ehrenreich’s Hearts of Men), Mayer revealed perhaps more than he intended. When asked if he dated black women (actually, the interviewer revealed his own racial/gender assumptions by asking “do black women throw themselves at you?”), Mayer’s answer was no, because his (male member) “is sort of like a white supremacist,” and went on to refer to it as “David Duke.” While Mayer’s racist response has quite reasonably offended lots of people and he’s apologized for the interview, it’s emblematic of the same sort of intertwined gender and racial entitlement that extreme white supremacists like Cummings exhibit. Interestingly, while Mayer is not being portrayed as “mentally ill” for his statements in the interview, at least one report attributes his remarks to the fact that he was drinking Scotch during the interview, which brings me back to the putatively mentally ill James Cummings.
Entitlement, in its extreme form, is often associated with a narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) and this may have been part of what went so terribly awry with James Cummings. However, it would be a mistake to dismiss this story as merely a personal tragedy separate and apart from a broader social and political context. In that broader context, white men have a disproportionate amount of resources, wealth and privilege and feel entitled to it. Like the old joke that Jim Hightower used to tell about George W. Bush, “he was born on third base and think he hit a triple.” That’s the essence of entitlement. Whether or not Amber Cummings did the only thing she could by killing her husband, I don’t know. The fact Amber Cummings took extreme action to save her daughter and herself from – and possibly lots of other people – from her husband’s excessive sense of aggrieved entitlement and violent tendencies is a symptom of a larger set of social conditions.
Updated (Friday, 2/12/10): Another name to add to the growing list of angry, violent white men: Gregory Girard, a Massachusetts technology consultant who said he feared an imminent “Armageddon” and appears to have been active in the Tea Party movement, was found with a stash of military grade weapons, explosive devices including tear gas and pepper ball canisters, camouflage clothing, knives, handcuffs, bulletproof vests and helmets, and night vision goggles, reports TPM. Online news reports I found did not mention whether Mr. Girard was married, or whether his wife was also heavily armed.
American Tea Party Movement Fosters White Racial Resentment
February 7th, 2010At the National Tea Party Convention held in Nashville, Tennessee this weekend, leaders in this movement sought to turn the fringe group into a serious political force by fostering white racial resentment and suggesting a return to the Jim Crow days of literacy tests for voters. Several news commentators, including Rachel Maddow at MSNBC (opens video) and Rich Benjamin at Alternet, have commented on the racial subtext of the Tea Party Movement, and there’s building evidence of this based on the recent convention.
Tom Tancredo, former Representative (R-Colorado), was the initial speaker at the convention. Addressing the overwhelmingly white crowd, Tancredo said, “It is our nation.” Tancredo repeatedly referred to President Obama by his middle name, Hussein, and said he was thankful Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona lost the 2008 presidential election because Obama has mobilized an uprising. “People who could not even spell the word ‘vote’ or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House,” he said. The kinds of literacy tests Tancredo suggests were once used in the U.S. under Jim Crow to keep blacks from voting. These racist laws were overturned with the Civil Rights Voting Act of 1965.
The big news story out of the convention was, of course, the keynote speech by Sarah Palin. Rich Benjamin is spot on when he writes in his analysis of Palin:
“Packed beneath her beehive is a spitfire brew of optimistic, yet aggrieved, whiteness. Palin embodies a bizarre, sometimes alluring, combination of triumph and complaint that many Caucasian Tea Partiers identify with through and through. Deciphering the racial codes on the movement’s ubiquitous placards does not require a doctorate in semiotics. One popular sign shows the president’s face and a caption: ‘Undocumented worker.’ Another combines Obama’s image with this caption: ‘The Zoo Has an African Lion and the White House Has a Lyin’ African!’ Aside from the festive, ad hominem attacks against President Obama, the Tea Party’s leaders and its rank-and-file rarely mention race in debate, instead tucking it just under the surface of ‘nonracial’ issues like health care reform, public spending, immigration, and pointedly, taxes.”
There is evidence that these sorts of subtle racial cues matter in political elections. A study by researchers Valentino, Hutchings and White published in American Political Science Review (2002), 96:1:75-90, suggests that subtle racial cues in campaign communications may activate racial attitudes, thus altering political decision making. In an experiment, they tested whether subtle racial cues embedded in political advertisements prime racial attitudes as predictors of candidate preference by making them more accessible in memory. Results show that a wide range of implicit race cues can prime racial attitudes.
Such research lends support to the critiques by news analysts on the Tea Party Movement’s attempts to gain political support by fostering white racial resentment.
Boston Cop Fired for Racial Slur in Email
February 6th, 2010Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis said Officer Justin Barrett was fired yesterday for violating department rules when he sent the e-mail on July 22, 2009. In the email, Barrett called Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates a “jungle monkey.” The email was sent following the incident in Cambridge last summer when Prof. Gates was arrested in his own home on a disorderly conduct charge. “(Gates’) first priority should be to get off the phone and comply with police, for if I was the officer he verbally assaulted like a … jungle monkey, I would have sprayed him in the face with OC deserving of his belligerent non-compliance,” the e-mail said.
Barrett, for his part, said at the time, “I am not a racist.” Barrett sent the email to several individuals and to the Boston Globe. He went on to explain, saying, “It was a poor choice of words. I did not mean to offend anyone.”
No doubt some will argue that Barrett’s “right free speech” has been violated with this decision, but from my perspective it seems like an appropriate step on the part of the Boston Police Department, and a step in the right direction for those interested in equal protection under the law.
Racism and Health: Henrietta Lacks Revisited
February 5th, 2010The life of Henrietta Lacks is the subject of a new book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. Ms. Lacks is a notable historical figure for her unwitting “donation” of her cells to scientific study. David Strohecker wrote about Ms. Lacks’ here back in October, around the 50th anniversary of her death from cervical cancer. Dwight Garner gives Skloot’s new book a rave review in The New York Times (hat tip: Jessica in Austin), and here’s a longish clip from that review:
“The woman who provides this book its title, Henrietta Lacks, was a poor and largely illiterate Virginia tobacco farmer, the great-great-granddaughter of slaves. Born in 1920, she died from an aggressive cervical cancer at 31, leaving behind five children. No obituaries of Mrs. Lacks appeared in newspapers. She was buried in an unmarked grave.
To scientists, however, Henrietta Lacks almost immediately became known simply as HeLa (pronounced hee-lah), from the first two letters of her first and last names. Cells from Mrs. Lacks’s cancerous cervix, taken without her knowledge, were the first to grow in culture, becoming “immortal” and changing the face of modern medicine. There are, Ms. Skloot writes, ‘trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body.’ Laid end to end, the world’s HeLa cells would today wrap around the earth three times.
Because HeLa cells reproduced with what the author calls a ‘mythological intensity,’ they could be used in test after test. ‘They helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization,’ Ms. Skloot writes. HeLa cells were used to learn how nuclear bombs affect humans, and to study herpes, leukemia, Parkinson’s disease and AIDS. They were sent up in the first space missions, to see what becomes of human cells in zero gravity.
Bought and sold and shipped around the world for decades, HeLa cells are famous to science students everywhere. But little has been known, until now, about the unwitting donor of these cells. Mrs. Lacks’s own family did not know that her cells had become famous (and that people had grown wealthy from marketing them) until more than two decades after her death, after scientists had begun to take blood from her surviving family members, without their informed consent, in order to better study HeLa.
Ms. Skloot tells the story of Mrs. Lacks’s life, from those tobacco fields in small-town Clover, Va., to the ‘colored’ ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore in the 1950s, where she was treated for her cancer, and where her cells were harvested. She follows the members of Mrs. Lacks’s family to East Baltimore, where many of them live today, still struggling with her complicated legacy. As one of Mrs. Lacks’s sons says: ‘She’s the most important person in the world, and her family living in poverty. If our mother so important to science, why can’t we get health insurance?‘
…
Ms. Skloot writes with particular sensitivity and grace about the history of race and medicine in America. Black oral history, she points out, is full of stories about ‘night doctors,’ men who could pluck black patients off the streets to experiment on their bodies. There was some truth behind those tales.”
While I’m glad that Ms. Lacks’ story is getting the attention it deserves in this new book, it would be mistake to regard this compelling narrative as an anomaly in U.S. history. Rather, the experience of Ms. Lacks and her descendants is in many ways an archetypal story about racism and health in the U.S., as Harriet Washington documents in her thoroughly researched book Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present.
