Over at Dailykos.com, Joan MacCarter has an interesting blog post on the new white head of the House judiciary subcommittee on immigration, citizenship, refugees, border security and international law–Representative Steve King of Iowa. He is the one who recently referred to President Obama as “ very very urban” in connection with the black farmers compensation (for severe discrimination) program. She notes King’s clear antiblack, antipoor agenda:

In an interview with local western Iowa radio station KCIM, King discussed the oversight efforts that the new GOP House would undertake. First and foremost, he said, would be his pet cause of investigating ACORN — which no longer exists as a national organization, but whose activists at the state level could be targeted. “And there’ll be other investigations looking into the Pigford farms issue,” King added, “which I think is full of fraud, that’s — what it amounts to is paying reparations to black farmers in America. We don’t do reparations in America.”

King has previously attacked the settlement for discrimination in past decades by the Department of Agriculture as “slavery reparations.”

Actually, among other things, King is revealing his illiteracy in regard to recent US governmental history, which includes federal monetary reparations to Japanese Americans for their racist-motivated imprisonment in US concentration camps during World War II and reparations in Florida by the state legislature–to black Americans who survived the Rosewood, Florida massacre at the hands of white mobs. Rep. King has also asserted that, in regard to the black farmers compensation program:

The fraudulent claims might be, well Johnny, yeah he was raised on a farm but he wouldn’t help his dad. He went to the city, became a drug addict, and when Daddy needed the help, Johnny wouldn’t come and help his daddy. But now his daddy’s died and Johnny wants the $50,000 that comes from the USDA under this claim.

It appears that at least one arch-conservative member of the new U.S. Congress with a head full of white racist framing of black Americans and a clear antiblack agenda is now in control of an important congressional committee – in our supposedly “postracial society.” I wonder if optimistic books by social scientists (for example, by John Hartigan here) and other commentators asserting or speculating that Obama’s election was bringing “a new era in U.S. race relations” and “dramatic changes in white racial perceptions” will now be revised to show that such optimism was not warranted. Or maybe too few of these social science and media commentators actually looked at the extensive field research on systemic racism before they wrote about such trendy optimistic commentaries and predictions.