Pat Buchanan’s “Conference”: Welcoming White-Racist Themes

• • affirmative action, government action, immigration, politics, systemic racism

Thinkprogress has a very interesting story on a conference just hosted by far-right, sometime advocate of white-nationalist thinking, Pat Buchanan. He is a former U.S. presidential candidate and now prominent mainstream (MSNBC) commentator, who has previously asserted that

our Judeo Christian values are going to be preserved and our Western heritage is going to be handed down to future generations and not dumped on some landfill called multiculturalism.

He has also in the past made clear his view of immigration:

If we had to take a million immigrants in, say, Zulus next year or Englishmen, and put them in Virginia, what group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia? There is nothing wrong with us sitting down and arguing that issue that we are a European country, English speaking country. (Citations here)

The main topic at this recent conference was how to get a Republican majority back. At one of the panels, the commentators advocated

supporting English-only initiatives as a prime way of attracting “working class white Democrats.” The discussion ridiculed Judge Sotomayor for the fact that she studied children’s classics to improve her grammar while attending college. The panelists also suggested that, without English as the official language, President Obama would force Americans to speak Spanish.

In their apparently delusional world, President Obama is going force us to speak Spanish. And, of course, mocking Latinos will really help Republicans get more votes in the fastest growing segment of the voting age population. Interestingly, Sotomayor did this extra reading (of books like Huck Finn and Pride and Prejudice) during the summer, not while attending college. She did it to improve her English, and on her own. Odd that these work-ethic, anti-immigrant, English-only folks cannot even credit immigrants and their children for such aggressive hard work and strong self-improvement efforts in English.

One obvious irony of the conference was a big banner overhead that had quote marks out of place and the key word conference misspelled as “conferenece.” (Source: Thinkprogress) Perhaps the English-only folks should first focus themselves on learning English well.buchanan

Significantly, Buchanan invited the prominent white nationalist of Vdare fame, former Forbes editor Peter Brimelow, to participate. Brimelow came up with this juicy take on U.S. society. He recommends English-only language issues as key for Republicans to get back lost white voters:

I really do recommend the language issue because you know that polls better than immigration and affirmative action. Eighty-five percent of Americans say they would favor official language policy. The wonderful thing about this issue if you look at what’s going to actually happen here is you’re going to find that the Obama administration is going to gradually institute institutional bilingualism in the country.

Brimelow amplified his white-nationalist rant by pressing conference participants to

attack affirmative action in an effort to attract the votes of “young whites” and “yellow people.” After claiming it would be “suicidal” for any “white man” to vote for Obama, Brimelow contended that immigrants should not be eligible for affirmative action because “they weren’t slaves to this country, they’ve never been discriminated against.”

Apparently, many right-wing Republicans cannot count. Do they read demographic analyses of this country’s future? Republican attacks on immigrants and people of color mean that very few of them, or their children and grandchildren, will vote Republican. I think right-wing Republicans must all operate in the same networks where they only talk to people like themselves. They certainly do not pay much attention to the social science and Census data (see here and here) on immigration trends and population composition, or they would know that strong white-nationalist appeals mainly to conservative white (especially male) voters will not get them a majority vote ever again.

And how do these white nationalist thinkers get such major mainstream media participation and coverage these days? Why are they even considered mainstream media types?

Supreme Court Does Not Invalidate the Voting Rights Act: At Least for Now

• • Jim Crow Segregation, judicial system, politics, systemic racism



At the excellent Election Law blog / Rick Hasen has a very good analysis of the Supreme Court decision today on the Texas municipal utility district’s fight to get out from under the voting rights law (rarely achieved)–which was to give the district a possibility to get out but not to deal with the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act. This law is a centerpiece of the 1960s civil rights movement and is a continuing barrier to various attempts to restrict the rights of voters of color–which white-conservative groups still often try to do.

Indeed, over the last few decades, black voters have continued to face attempts to reduce the efficacy of their political participation. Research by Chandler Davidson and Frank Parker has demonstrated that electoral discrimination persists in such forms as vote dilution, gerrymandering, the changing of elective offices into appointive offices, and unnecessary revisions in qualifications for office. Numerous strategies have been seen in each of the presidential elections in recent years.

Considering today’s decision, Hasen recalls his worried commentary not long ago at Slate:

“Under the leadership of Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court has not been friendly to voting rights or reasonable campaign finance laws. But so far, its retrenchment has been incremental….What’s especially worrying about NAMUDNO is that the case does not provide the court with an easy incremental way out: If a majority of the justices want to side with the challengers to the Voting Rights Act, there’s not much they can do short of holding the act as broadly unconstitutional….The statute allows jurisdictions that can prove they no longer engage in racial discrimination in voting to petition to bail out from coverage under Section 5. The utility district wants such a bailout. But the statute clearly says that only the entire state like Texas or a political subdivision that registers voters (which the utility district does not do), can ask for a bailout. Since there’s no good statutory loophole, the larger constitutional question seems unavoidable.”)

On today’s decision, Hasen see Chief Justice Roberts as backing off on his hostile view of the Voting Rights Act, for now:

It is clear he thinks the Act is unconstitutional under the “congruence and proportional” standard, and he’s on record as believing that the plain meaning of a statute (backed by a Supreme Court interpretation no less) should generally control. So what happened here? As I’ve repeatedly said, the Voting Rights Act is a crown jewel of the civil rights movement, and it would be symbolically monumental to strike it down. Clearly such an opinion would have been a 5-4 decision. Either the Chief wanted to avoid the political divisiveness of such a ruling (while still getting a result he wanted) or perhaps Justice Kennedy was going to go in this direction, and the Chief thought it would be more politically expedient for the entire Court (or most of the Court) to go in that same direction. That buys him judicial minimalist credibility without costing much of anything. The biggest cost is punting on the question of the standard to apply when the constitutional question reemerges in a future case.

Thus,

Despite Chief Justice Roberts’ longstanding skepticism of the Voting Rights Act and his blistering set of questions to supporters of section 5’s constitutionality during oral argument, the Chief has managed to put together a coalition of 8 of 9 Justices to put the question off for another day.

It is significant that, even with Democrats in control of Congress and an African American president, that a few unelected right-wing judges can threaten to end the civil rights progress in voting and other areas. This shows how fragile some civil rights gains really are, and how easily this often undemocratic system of ours can backtrack.

Senate Apologizes for Slavery: 219 Years Late

• • politics, slavery, systemic racism

On June 18, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed a resolution apologizing for slavery and segregation. A day later, on Juneteenth, commemorated annually to commemorate the date in 1865 when African Americans learned of their emancipation, President Barak Obama praised the Senate’s action. And, the U.S. House, which voted in support of a similar resolution previously, is expected to endorse the Senate resolution, perhaps as early as the coming week.

In offering an apology on behalf of the American people, lawmakers joined peers in other settler states, namely Australia and Canada, to express regret for and in some way resolve historic injustices associated with nation-building and capitalist expansion. They took a step, even if small, to come to terms with race, but importantly, did so on terms acceptable to White America and shaped by the very racist history they so wanted to escape.

Undoubtedly, the resolution says something important about how far the U.S has come since 1865, while diverting attention away from how little has changed. Indeed, while the overt racism and legally sanctioned discrimination that flourished under slavery and were reborn under Jim Crow have receded, racial stratification, black disadvantage, and white privilege are as pronounced today, if not worse than, they were in 1965 when the civil rights movement crested in the U.S. Worse, the apology avoids accountability as it bars reparations. Words stand in for action and once more structural remedies to the legacies of slavery seem unimaginable to most white Americans and unworkable to their elected representatives.

In the apology, one can glimpse a pattern that has emerged around race relations as well. Over the past ten to fifteen years, it has become common for white celebrities and politicians who make a racist statement to issue an apology in which they express regret, claim lack of intention or forethought, and point to their true character which is not racist. As I suggested in a larger discussion of such apologies, they have emerged as important ways of disavowing racism, deflecting attention from the ubiquity of racism and deferring individual and collective responsibility for racism. In many ways, this is what I see in the apology, an effort to deny the persist of racism, locating its ills and the past as we craft images of our better selves today.

Another sort of denial has accompanied the resolution: the palpable resentment of white Americans. Although the precise phrasing varies, the themes are familiar: “my family did not own or benefit from slavery as we immigrated after 1900 and lived in the North” or “race is only an issue because Blacks keep talking about it” or “I am unemployed, the economy is a wreck, and all they can do in Washington is pass meaningless, feel good legislation,” and so on. The material rewards and social privileges of being white discounted, trumped by a rhetoric of injury and angry identity politics.

In contrast with Ben Buchwalter, who reads the action as a sign of strength, for me, sadly, this historic resolution reminds me more of the persistence and power of white racism today.

Black Girls in White Schools: School Settings and Racist Actors

• • academic, African Americans, education, systemic racism

School Daze

The relatively new journal, Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Perspectives, has a very interesting article by Tiffany A. Eggleston of the Columbus City Schools and Antoinette Halsell Miranda of Ohio State University on interviews with eleven black adolescent girls in a predominantly white suburban school (Creative Commons License photo credit: Burnt Pixel).


The researchers present interesting data-comments from the students on gendered racism in everyday environments, and conclude with suggestions for teachers/principals concerned with the gendered-racial impacts and isolation faced by such isolated black students in historically white institutions:

1. Teachers should partake in cultural diversity training to help understand the normative behavior of African Americans and other racial minority groups. By learning to understand the nuances of various cultures, teachers will be better able to relate to the students and offer support, thereby helping to lessen the feeling of isolation described by many of the participants. In understanding the different cultural behaviors, teachers may be more apt to discourage the continuation of stereotypes about African Americans and other racial minorities within and outside of the classroom. 2. According to the findings of this study, many of the participants did not feel close to any of their teachers, which was reported to be a disappointment to some of the participants. … Thus, teachers should work to improve student–teacher relationships to help increase the likelihood that the students will turn to school personnel for help or support.

1. Principals should offer and ensure that teachers participate in professional development courses on cultural, racial, and gender diversity to help increase their understanding of African American females. 2. According to the participants, one source of discomfort came from being the only one, or one of just a few African Americans in class. This occurrence was specifically mentioned in relation to advanced (Honors and Advanced Placement) courses and was cited as a possible reason why more African American students choose not to enroll in those courses. Principals should closely monitor African American enrollment in such courses to ensure that students participate. If it is noticed that African American students do not participate, steps should be taken to actively recruit them. 3. Many of the participants were discouraged by the apparent lack of interest in African Americans, even during Black History Month. Thus, principals should develop cultural activities and school presentations that address African American culture. … principals should make efforts to offer courses on African American culture (i.e., African American History, African American Literature, African American Studies). Due to the prominence of racial slurs, racist behaviors, and stereotypical views, students of all races would benefit from learning about African American culture. 4. Principals should make a sincere effort to hire a diverse staff.

There is much that is important and useful in this analysis of the pressures of white images of female-ness in society and in these predominantly white settings, and these young women are quite pointed and detailed in the gendered racism they describe in this school. These is much here to learn from them.

However, the researchers seem unwilling to examine directly and analytically the role of white teachers, white principals, and white students in such educational settings. These white actors certainly appear in the student accounts.

Yet, the words “white teachers” and “white principals” are terms that never appear even once in the article. And “white students” appears but once in a critical comment from a black female student. At no point do the authors examine, substantially and specifically, the white racial framing of the many white actors who are critical to the problems of such oppressive school environments–other than to note, as above, that “students of all races” would benefit from some of the proposed reforms.

The reality of the “racial slurs, racist behaviors, and stereotypical views” is noted, but not attended to analytically much beyond these typical diversity proposals. No terms like systemic racism, institutionalized racism, or structural racism appear in the article, nor is there such a systemic racism analysis. The white racism environment is discussed in terms of the gender ideas imposed on black girls in this environment, but the white imposers are only implicitly considered, as in most social science research of this type. And the solutions are mostly considered and useful but, once again, seem too much like putting band-aids on cancers? Where are the proposals for dealing with the racist white students, teachers, and principals who cause these girls problems, and their white racial framing (their racist mindsets) and their racist everyday actions?

[Note: The journal, Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Perspectives, is a joint publication of The Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Office of Minority Affairs at Ohio State University, together with the Indiana University Press. A good journal to know about.]

Happy Juneteenth!

• • African Americans, racism, slavery, social change, systemic racism

This is an African American holiday started in Texas, for obvious reasons. Wikipedia has a nice summary of key info:

Juneteenth, also known as Freedom Day or Emancipation Day, commemorates the announcement of the abolition of slavery in the U.S. State of Texas in 1865. Celebrated on June 19, the term is a portmanteau of June and nineteenth, and is recognized as a state holiday in 31 of the United States.

That is, word of President Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation of January 1863 reached Texas only in June 1865:

The holiday originated in Galveston, Texas; for more than a century, the state of Texas was the primary home of Juneteenth celebrations. Since 1980, Juneteenth has been an official state holiday in Texas. It is considered a “partial staffing holiday” meaning that state offices do not close but some employees will be using a floating holiday to take the day off. Twelve other states list it as an official holiday, including Arkansas, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Alaska and California, where Governor Schwarzenegger proclaimed the day “Juneteenth” on June 19, 2005. Connecticut, however, does not consider it a legal holiday or close government offices in observance of the occasion. Its informal observance has spread to some other states, with a few celebrations even taking place in other countries.

As of May 2009, 31 states and the District of Columbia have recognized Juneteenth as either a state holiday or state holiday observance; these include Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Wyoming.

This is also a day to remember the 500,000 African Americans, who as soldiers and support troops, many of them formerly enslaved, volunteered for the Union Army at its low point, and who thus played a (the?) key role in winning the Civil War. This is an ironic day, too, given the very weak apology for slavery voted on this week in the mostly white US Senate. A bit late.

Race, Racism & White Supremacy: Link Roundup

• • links, racism

Here are some interesting links on race, racism and white supremacy. The blogosphere seems to be heating up on some of these issues. There is no shortage of racism material to write on!

The Holocaust Museum Attack and Cyberhate

  • Rinku Sen writes about The White Supremacist in All of Us at the Huffington Post.  Sen criticizes the discussion of the Holocaust Museum shooting has boiled down to the idea that racism is an intentional, violent act of a lone crazy white man.  She writes “Collectively, we bemoan the backwardness of ‘some’ people before we move on, thinking of racism as isolated extremism.”
  • David Niewert writes at Crooks and Liars about the infiltration of the army by neo-nazis, first reported by Salon this week.  Jim Burroway at Box Turtle points out the irony of a military that is happy to include white supremacists but not openly LGBT members.
  • Jesse Walker thinks the threat of right-wing terror has been blown out of proportion.
  • Joshua Holland at Alternet has some probing thoughts on the Eliminationist (that is, killing) Mindset of many on the racist right.

Judge Sonia Sotomayor

  • Transgriot calls out Pat Buchanan – and others of the “vanilla privileged” class –  for their treatment of Sotomayor.

Education

  • Over at DailyKos, Tristero 312 has a good analysis of the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) charges at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that argue the educational policies of school “turnarounds,” one of the “Renaissance 2010” policies, is discriminatory, especially for black teachers.

Demography

  • Over at Asian-Nation, there is an interesting analysis of some U.S. demographic data showing that among Asian-Indian, Chinese, and Korean Americans, there is a significant gender imbalance among children, boys being more common than girls, as in some Asian countries—apparently mainly for Asian immigrant couples in which both spouses are foreign-born.

Pop Culture

Idiocy in America

  • And, though not online and not exactly on racism issues, there is the new book Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free by Charles P. Pierce. The book is uneven, full of ranting on conservatives like Limbaugh (who deserve it), but the general points are quite accurate about stupidity becoming a virtue. Here is his response to a question in an interview: “With the election of President Obama, is Idiot America coming to an end? Or, will there always be a place for idiocy in America?” [Pierce answers]: Look at the political opposition to President Obama. “Socialist!” “Fascist!” “Coming to get your guns.” Hysteria from the hucksters of Idiot America is still at high-tide. People are killing other people and specifically attributing their action to imaginary oppression stoked by radio talk-show stars and television pundits.

Black Masculinity

Sotomayor and Race in America

• • Latinos, racism, women

sotomayor_poster
(Cross-posted from http://www.newracialstudies.ucsb.edu/blog; Image from Presente.org)

The point is simple – clichéd, even.  But this simple point is so often denied in the United States of 2009.  The point is that race matters.  More specifically, race matters in how we interpret the Constitution of the United States. Debates over the constitution, especially at the Supreme Court, often willfully ignore or obscure the living and continued significance of race and racism.  The racial category you belong to plays a significant part in your life, if you’re an American, but American legal doctrine over the last several decades has refused to accept this fact.

Much as they did during the 1800s, today’s American courts allow entrenched racial discrimination to continue.  Throughout the 19th century and into the 20th, the courts used openly racist thinking to enforce policies like slavery, segregation, and whites-only citizenship.  Today, the courts use colorblindness to brush aside the reality of race and racism aside.  They overturn and restrict race-conscious policies designed to help alleviate racism faced exclusively by people who are identified as racial and ethnic minorities.  The courts can and should consider the impact of race when it deals with cases like voting rights, sentencing for drug use, law enforcement strategies that roundup random Muslim and Middle Eastern Americans, and the legality of practices and policies that drove nonwhite families into needlessly expensive “subprime” mortgages.  But instead, legal scholars (including a majority of the Supreme Court Justices) regularly disagree with the need even to recognize the mere existence of socially constructed race.

It’s not a coincidence that Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court has already become contentious on the issue of race.  Sotomayor’s views on race and racism are becoming an object of public debate, thanks to coverage by national media (and thanks to well-publicized and ridiculous accusations that Sotomayor is herself “racist”).  Her rulings during her illustrious career show that while she’s hardly a radical, Sotomayor does favor a reality-based judiciary that understands and considers the impact of race and racism.  Because of this (and in part because she is Latina), she has already faced more questions about race than any other nominee to sit on the Supreme Court than anyone else in quite a long time.  And she hasn’t even sat for confirmation hearings yet.

Before Judge Sotomayor arrives on Capitol Hill for confirmation hearings, I’d like to take a moment to consider why legal scholars argue against recognizing the existence of race in America.  And then let’s consider how the next decade in legal thought might be influenced, thanks to Sotomayor’s presence on the Court.

The legal argument for denying reality – for denying the existence of race – is rooted in the colorblindness doctrine.  My understanding is that the basic idea behind colorblindness is: only by ignoring race can we truly transcend it.  You see, if we keep talking about race, if we acknowledge it, then we allow the race concept to persist.  So, what we should do is pretend that race isn’t there.  If we adjust our thinking to a colorblind world, then in time, reality will catch up with our thinking.  This kind of thinking has been proven wrong again and again, most thoroughly by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva.

The colorblindness perspective didn’t come out of nowhere.  Continue reading…

Von Brunn, Bad Apples, and Hegemonic Whiteness

• • racism, white supremacists

At least for this week, the nation focuses on the fatal shooting of officer Stephen T. Johns at the Holocaust museum on 10 June by alleged gunman, and white supremacist, James W. Von Brunn. Various networks such as CBS, Fox , MSNBC , and ABC provide palatable narratives on how such a distasteful act came to pass. For example, on NPR’s 12 June edition of “Tell Me More” Mark Potok, from the Southern Poverty Law Center and Randy Blazak, a sociology professor at Portland State University, spent the allotted radio time responding to host Michel Martins’ introductory question: “… there are plenty of people who seem to want to ‘talk trash,’ you know in leaflets, on websites, or whatever, but do we have any sense of why and when this crosses over into violence, is there some tipping point?”

Martin’s query seems to miss the point. Reflecting on the program and what is left unsaid helps us recognize how framing Von Brunn as the proverbial “bad apple” mystifies white supremacy in the everyday. Dominant folk wisdom tells us “racism” is something practiced by overt hate-mongers, therefore Von Brunn is merely a manifestation of a rare kind of white male exceptionalism. This portrayal creates a picture of social reality in which battle lines are clear: the racists are easily identified, victims sympathetically portrayed, and the difference between the “good” and “bad” whites is certain.

Such thinking can hold severe repercussions. For example, the Department of Homeland Security was recently pressured to backtrack on an April report which suggested (drawing from examples like Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh) that disaffected veterans with military training might serve as recruiting targets for right-wing, racist extremists. Many folks, particularly American Legion National Commander David K. Rehbein, took issue with the report’s insinuation that mainstream, patriotic, even military veteran, whites could become vehicles for white racial supremacy and domestic terrorism.

Moreover, in my doctoral work, “White Guise: The Common Trajectory of the White Antiracist & Racist Movement,” I found that white male racists and white male anti-racists relied on strikingly similar racist worldviews. (For example, both groups relied upon and often accepted views of blacks and Latin@s as culturally or biologically dysfunctional and dangerous, while simultaneously treating racial “otherness” as a kind of “epidermal capital” which served as a temporary alleviation of their collectively-shared understanding of whiteness as “bland,” “boring,” and “meaningless.”) These shared dimensions of what I call “hegemonic whiteness” were solidified in the nation’s founding as a white male supremacist state. And while these racialized and gendered violent foundations may be invisible to most, their influence is continuously present among varied contexts of predominantly white male groups like white supremacists, American Legion outposts, and even some “white antiracists.”

From this perspective, the logic motivating Von Brunn, evident in his book “Kill the Best Gentiles,” his website, and various leaflets such as the one he left in his car on 10 June that states “The Holocaust is a lie. Obama was created by Jews. Obama does what his Jew owners tell him to do,” is commensurate with the dominant logic and performances expected of white men across varied contexts. Whether acting on the impulse that whiteness is a stigmatized or even oppressed racial identity in need of (violent) defense, believing in the biological or cultural pathologies of non-whites, justifying segregation as “natural,” harboring a white-savor complex, or appropriating items and practices marked with the “exoticism” of racial “otherness”—the various dimensions of “hegemonic whiteness” are not limited to that of Von Brunn, and Von Brunn is anything but a “bad apple.”

~ Matthew W. Hughey is assistant professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Mississippi State University. He can be reached at MHughey@soc.msstate.edu. (See his blog at http://mississippilearning.wordpress.com/).

White Prof, White Pride

• • academic, racism, white supremacists

19-griffincoverToday’s Inside Higher Ed includes an article about Robert S. Griffin, a tenured professor who has taught education classes at the University of Vermont for nearly 40 years and written extensively and sympathetically about white nationalism and white supremacy.  Griffin’s own (non-University) website includes a links page to a number of white nationalist and white supremacist organizations and websites, including David Duke’s website and Stormfront: White Pride Worldwide (both of whom I discuss at length in Cyber Racism). The image included here is of Griffin appearing on a 2006 cover of American Renaissance (image used without permission, from here).   The Southern Poverty Law Center includes Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance as one of the four leading proponents of “academic racism.” Here’s what the SPLC has to say:

Jared Taylor, the man who heads the New Century Foundation and edits its American Renaissance magazine, presents himself as a cosmopolitan, open-minded thinker not afraid to take on the taboos of his time without stooping to racial epithets and the like. But, in fact, he is a man who promotes the “clear conception of the United States as a nation ruled by and for whites,” …

This is the pose that Griffin has adopted as well, that of the “cosmopolitan, open-minded thinker not afraid to take on taboos.”

In his 2006 article called, “A Knock on the Door: Writing for AR  – Coming out of the closet is not always easy,” that accompanies the cover image above, Griffin reflects on the fallout from his initial experience of writing for American Renaissance and the mainstream press that followed it.  By likening this writing to ‘coming out of the closet,’ Griffin acknowledges the illicit nature of his collaboration with the magazine but this only fuels his certitude about his views.

Griffin mainly uses the article to quote himself being quoted.  The crux of his argument boils down to calling him a neo-Nazi or a white supremacist or a hatemonger is mere “namecalling and mudslinging.” Furthermore, Griffin claims that he is simply engaging in “ethnic pride,” and attempts to call him to task for this are part of a “double standard” in which “pride and self-determination” are good for minority folks, “but the very same things in white people are bad.”  He then quotes his own attempt at humor in an interview:

“The late comedian Lenny Bruce told a joke about a guy who, when caught in the act of cheating by his wife, says to her, ‘Are you going to believe me or your lying eyes?’ I’d like to think that in matters of race more and more white people are getting past the Orwellian newspeak that has been coming at them for decades and starting to look hard at reality for themselves. That is what I’m doing.”

And then, Griffin ends on a self-congratulatory note:

“I was beginning to stand up for myself — and my race. Not bad.”

The Inside Higher Ed article interviews Heidi Beirich, director of research for the Southern Poverty Law Center, who says:

“no mystery” in her mind that Griffin is a neo-Nazi. “It’s an amazing thing to see a tenured professor at a serious university writing a fawning biography of a neo-Nazi nut — just shocking,” she said.

Beirich urged The University of Vermont to investigate the professor’s classroom activities and condemn his work.  Yet, the university as an institution and at least one colleague of Griffin’s are standing by him and defending his views as bringing “a perspective to multicultural issues that is different from what dominates the field.”

The problem here, in my view, with people who are appalled by Griffin’s views — and they are appalling — is that they the standard white liberal response is insufficient to to the task because it only concedes Griffin’s premise.   Calling him a “neo-Nazi” allows Griffin to continue to claim the high ground in this debate and assert that he is “interested in ideas” while others are merely engaged in name-calling.   Similarly, attempts to discredit his assertions of ethnic pride within the context of multiculturalism-absent-an-analysis-of-power is equally fraught.   In a multi-vocal world where “all voices” are valued equally, there is no basis for critiquing white pride.

The key that’s missing in this debate is an analysis of power and white privilege, and these have everything to do with knowledge.   Epistemologies of race, that is, how we know what we say we know about race and racism, are rooted in profoundly different experiences for whites and people of color living in a social context of racial inequality.  Within such a context, some people experience the constant drumbeat of racism as part of their everyday life,  while others enjoy the privilege  of ignoring race and racism on a daily basis. The danger in views like those of Griffin’s  is in the pernicious way that his claims to “knowledge” challenge important values that are politically hard won, values such as racial equality.

Why Kim Jong Il Jokes Aren’t Funny

• • Asia, Asian Americans, racism, stereotyping, white racial frame

Or, to be more precise: From Kim Jong Il to the Asian American Man: What Being Foreign, Female, and a Rapist Have to do with Both

In times of war or international tension, it makes complete sense that the United States would mercilessly mock their enemies, as any nation would. When the enemy is of fellow European descent, perhaps issues of ethnicity and nationality take precedence over those of race. When the enemy is Middle Eastern, Muslim, or Asian, however, racial code is used as the basis for mockery and insult. The use of ‘race’ in this manner is problematic precisely because it fits within a larger pattern of racial inequality.

Take the case of North Korea. There is no doubt that Kim Jong Il runs a formal dictatorship. There is no doubt that some of his actions and personal quirks are oppressive by any society’s standards. Neither of these things, however, gives opinionmakers and comedians a free pass to reinforce racist ideologies.

“It’s just humor!” some may say. But nothing is ever that simple. History shows us that U.S. politicians and capitalists constructed racist ideologies of Asian-descent males to use them for their labor and deprive them of settlement and citizenship. The U.S. government, for instance, used the 1875 Page Law to deny Chinese women entry and thereby prevent family formation. As sociologist Yen Le Espiritu eloquently argues in her book Asian American Women and Men: Labor, Laws & Love, it was Chinese American men’s feminized jobs and their lack of wives and children that gave birth to the effeminate, asexual, homosexual Asian man. Nothing is wrong with these gender-sexual identities alone. But essentializing as such a whole group for racially unjust purposes? That’s wrong.

Indeed, depicting Asians as sexually deviant has been a key foundation for denying them entry into, and rights within, the United States. Beyond stereotypes of asexuality and homosexuality, however, White Americans also hypersexualized Asian men. For instance, the government passed anti-miscegenation laws for fear that Filipino American men would rape and steal away White women. During the WWII years, as Espiritu shows, Japanese ethnics became the hypersexual Yellow Peril ready to multiply and take over the White race. Such notions allowed President Roosevelt to mass incarcerate over 120,000 Japanese Americans without evidence of the group’s “un-American” activities.

These real-life depictions of the racially inscrutable and sexually deviant Asian man have real-life consequences. In the 1980s, Chinese American Vincent Chin was blamed by two White autoworkers for the loss of their jobs in the U.S. auto industry (“the Japs’ fault!”); Chin lost his life to their baseball bats. In the 1990s, the U.S. government charged and detained U.S. citizen Wen Ho Lee for spying for China, a charge that was so baseless that the government exonerated him under a flurry of apologies. Still today, Asian American men are considered by most surveys as the least desirable men, leading to difficulty finding partners and low self-esteem. Furthermore, the Asian American Justice Center reports that rates of anti-Asian violence have long been high, in part because so-called “foreigner” competition is unwelcome in the United States. While these violent consequences repeatedly unfold, the message that Asian Americans experience no racism lives on.

In this racial context, newsmakers and entertainers have unselfconsciously recycled stereotypes that affect all Asian-descent men. One of the most common images is of the inscrutable Yellow Peril. Mostly non-Asian news anchors and cable pundits wring their hands over the “strange,” “unpredictable,” “twisted,” “abnormal” North Korean leader. While some of the labels have a kernel of truth to them, they are also inspired by, and reinforce, the longstanding notion that Asian people are somehow inscrutable. As MSNBC Chief White House Correspondent Chuck Todd aptly sums up, Americans tend to think, “Crazy ol’ Kim Jong Il, again.”

Entertainers have been especially ruthless. The writers behind the puppet movie Team America: World Police, also of South Park fame, are obviously satirists. But there is not enough of a separation between the “real” and “ridiculous” depictions of Kim to comfortably say that the Team America stereotypes have no negative impact. In the movie, the Kim Jong Il puppet brutally kills anyone who disagrees with him, like Swedish diplomat Dr. Hans Blix. He then switches into a melancholic mood and sings to himself the ballad “So Ronery” [translation: “So Lonely”]. As the Kim puppet wanders alone through his enormous Stalin-esque palace, he laments life as the inscrutable foreigner:

Sitting on my rittle throne
I work rearry hard
And make up great prans
But nobody ristens
No one understands
Seems rike no one takes me seriousry
And so Im ronery
A rittle ronery
Poor rittle me

The Kim puppet’s inability to speak English properly is an obvious play for laughs. It certainly reinforces the foreignness of Asians as well as their subordinate status, given America’s exalting of English as the only language worth knowing. In a Saturday Night Live (SNL) skit, Latino cast member Horatio Sanz plays the “yellow man” leader, and draws on both notions of foreign inscrutability and sexuality to get laughs:

Sanz: “When I was first informed of the aggressive actions of the United States, my first response was violent anger. Then a lengthy crying jag, followed by sudden deep sleep for about two days. Then several hours of frantic masturbation, punctuated by more crying jags. Afterwards, I burned my thighs with matches.”

Also invoking racial foreignness and sexuality, Bobby Lee, a Korean American comedian on MadTV, self-stereotypes as the “Dear Leader” in skits like “The Kim Jong Il Show.” The variety show musical introduction includes the words “He’s a little man with a big dick.” During the show, Bobby Lee’s Kim forces North Korean peasant minions to salute him with honorific titles. As the leader probes for more accolades, the minion remembers to add, “Oh, and, ‘Babe magnet with a magical penis!’” In another scene, Lee’s Kim also performs a rap collaboration called “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb,” with a likeness of hip hop mogul Diddy. In it, Kim straddles a bomb and belts out that he gets a lot of tall blonde “coochie.”

In essence, we are supposed to laugh at the fact that Kim Jong Il frantically masturbates in response to U.S. threats and is a “well-endowed” womanizer who scores sexy White ladies. The jokes are funny because Asian-descent men are thought to be the precise opposite: asexual with little penises to whom White women wouldn’t give the time of day. Indeed, in “Bomb! Bomb! Bomb!” the Diddy impersonator reminds us of the truth: the “Dear Leader” has a “small salami.”

Yet, Asian-descent men are not just deemed asexual or insecure about small salamis; they are also hypersexual. That stereotype is evident in Sanz’s comedic turn as a Hollywood film-obsessed Kim Jong Il who violently fantasizes about another blonde, Reese Witherspoon:

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