Racial Equality – Page 6

The Problem With Dogma

A recent column by Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times focused on an impediment to positive social change that routinely drives me nuts: activists for causes I agree with who insist on making the perfect the enemy of the good.

It isn’t just the MAGA ideologues who are prisoners of their own ideology. Goldberg’s column focuses on organizations on the left that have been roiled by internal conflicts pitting purists against pragmatists.

In June the Intercept’s Ryan Grim wrote about the toll that staff revolts and ideologically inflected psychodramas were taking on the work: “It’s hard to find a Washington-based progressive organization that hasn’t been in tumult, or isn’t currently in tumult.” Privately, I’ve heard countless people on the professional left — especially those over, say, 35 — bemoan the irrational demands and manipulative dogmatism of some younger colleagues.

Recently, Maurice Mitchell, who heads up the progressive Working Families Party, has written about what Goldberg calls “the left’s self-sabotaging impulse.”

Mitchell’s piece systematically lays out some of the assertions and assumptions that have paralyzed progressive outfits. Among them are maximalism, or “considering anything less than the most idealistic position” a betrayal; a refusal to distinguish between discomfort and oppression; and reflexive hostility to hierarchy. He criticizes the insistence “that change on an interpersonal or organizational level must occur before it is sought or practiced on a larger scale,” an approach that keeps activists turned inward, along with the idea that progressive organizations should be places of therapeutic healing.

As Goldberg notes, these impulses are not new. She points out that “destructive left-wing purity spirals are at least as old as the French Revolution.”

I can think of two relatively recent illustrations of that tendency, one local and one national.

On the local level, I am personally aware of two incidents where internal insistence on maximal (and performative) devotion to non-discrimination resulted in the very public ejection of leaders who were accused of encouraging a less-than-ideal racial environment; in both of those situations, the executive found to be imperfect was anything but a bigot. (In one, there was actually an investigation by an outside company that found absolutely no evidence to support the allegations.) To the contrary, both had been involved in anti-discrimination activities for several years.

On the national level, I am convinced that dogmatic excesses actually diminished the beneficial impact of the #MeToo movement. (Admission: I still resent the unnecessary loss of Al Franken from the U.S. Senate thanks to indignation over a dumb joke told before he ran for office.)

When #MeToo first emerged, I applauded. Like all women, I had encountered unwanted “approaches” from men ranging from boorish behaviors to significantly worse and I certainly recognized the unfairness of blaming the victim (complaints about sexual assaults being dismissed with “well, what was she wearing?” or other responses suggesting that the woman was somehow “asking for it.”) Holding predators rather than their victims responsible was long overdue. Sending a message that unwanted touching and worse are not amusing, not a male prerogative, and not to be tolerated was also long overdue.

That said, there is a difference between unwanted attention and assault.

Inappropriate behaviors occur on a continuum–and responses to those behaviors should be calibrated to the severity of the behavior. Furthermore, fundamental fairness requires rejecting essentialism– all men are not dogs, and all women are not saints. Taking women seriously is not the same thing as uncritically believing anything and everything any woman says. An accusation of impropriety should be considered a rebuttable presumption–true, until and unless there is probative evidence to the contrary.

More generally, those of us old folks who have been “in the trenches” for a long time generally recognize that “strategy” is not a curse word, and a focus on strategic considerations is not evidence of insufficient devotion to the cause at hand.

Over the years, most of us learn to favor evolution over revolution, recognizing that sustainable progress is almost always incremental and that half a loaf really is better than no bread at all.

Recognizing that we aren’t going to change the world tomorrow to meet activists’ most exacting specifications doesn’t make people traitors to the cause.

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The Fox Effect

There’s clearly a lot that could be said about former President Trump’s lunch with one full-fledged Neo-Nazi and and one wanna-be Nazi, and most of it has been said or written. I won’t add my two cents to the reactions, except to say that I agree with the two most common ones: Trump’s anti-Semitism is disgusting but hardly a surprise to anyone who follows the news even superficially; and the most telling element of this whole sordid story was the lack of pushback–or even comment–from most Republicans.

Far and away the best comment I’ve come across, and the impetus for this post, was an observation by the Daily Show’s Trevor Noah.

Everyone agrees that Nick Fuentes should not be having dinner with former president Donald Trump. He’s much better suited to be a host on Fox News.

The Daily Show followed up with an absolutely devastating “mash up” of speeches by Nick Fuentes, the Neo-Nazi, and various Fox News personalities, including its most reliable and prominent bigot, Tucker Carlson. You really need to click through and watch it, and then consider the effect of Fox’s poison on its (largely elderly) audience.

There is a reason President Biden has identified Fox as one of the most destructive forces in the world, and Rupert Murdock as the most dangerous man in America.

As the linked report shows, four elements make Fox News a” uniquely damaging part of the American news landscape: its strength on the political right, the demonstrated way in which it shapes its viewers’ beliefs, its grip on Republican power and the views of its leadership.”

A national poll conducted by he Washington Post and the University of Maryland looked at where people with varying political ideologies get their news about politics and government. Researchers found that Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents consulted a reasonably wide variety of essentially mainstream sources. At least three out of ten of that group identified CNN, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, NPR, the Times, and/or The Post as their main sources of news.

Among most Republicans, though, only two sources were identified: local television and Fox News.

Cable-news viewership skews toward demographics that are more Republican in the first place, and CNN and MSNBC are fighting for a similar base of viewers — viewers who also partake of news from other outlets. Fox News’s strength with 43 percent of the country (the percentage that is Republican or Republican-leaning independent, according to Gallup) gives it a distinct advantage in ratings.

Most Americans don’t care about ratings, of course. So it’s important to put this in a more useful context: Fox News has a larger audience than its competitors — an audience that is largely politically homogeneous. And new research reinforces that this homogeneity is not solely a function of Republicans choosing Fox News but of the network filtering what it shows its viewers.

In other words, Fox chooses what it presents as “news”–and what it omits.

Another recent study paid a group of regular Fox viewers to watch CNN, then compared how those viewers understood news events with how a control group of Fox News viewers understood them. The study found “large effects on attitudes and policy preferences about COVID-19” and in “evaluations of Donald Trump and Republican candidates and elected officials.”

Participants in the experiment even grew to recognize the way in which Fox News presents reality: “group participants became more likely to agree that if Donald Trump made a mistake, Fox News would not cover it — i.e., that Fox News engages in partisan coverage filtering.”

Researchers also found that much of what Fox News did show was exaggerated or untrue.

There is a growing body of research confirming that Fox is a propaganda outlet serving the GOP, and not a real news organization–a conclusion brilliantly supported in the Daily Show mash-up.

To belabor the point: where people get their news matters–which explains the considerable concern generated by Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. In pursuit of his profound misunderstanding of the First Amendment’s Free Speech clause, Musk has opened the Twitter floodgates–the frequency of racist tweets and hate speech has grown significantly.

Twitter has thus joined Fox in normalizing bigotry and incivility. Those of us who were already worried that Twitter was shortening attention spans and increasing Americans’ tendency to substitute bumper-sticker memes for thoughtful debate, now see the platform exacerbating racial and religious divisions and reinforcing pernicious stereotypes.

The social media admonition not to feed the trolls seems appropriate here. In a very real sense, both Fox News and Twitter are America’s trolls. Somehow, we need to figure out how to keep people from feeding them.

Given the undeniable lure of confirmation bias, it won’t be easy.

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About That War On Women….

I’m a woman of a “certain age”–in other words, old–and I’ve lived through some fairly significant social changes, especially changes in the status of women. And I’ve seen enough to recognize a backlash when I’m experiencing it.

I’ve written before about how important reproductive autonomy is to women’s emancipation–not to mention their health. Without the ability to control their own childbearing decisions, women are hobbled in innumerable ways–returned to a time when they were economically dependent on their husbands/partners, and a time when they were far less employable.

There are plenty of other reasons to be outraged by the decision in Dobbs– not least because it elevates dogma held by one religious sect over equally sincere and longstanding beliefs held by others–but it is the decision’s attack on women’s equality that is most egregious.

Dobbs is just the most visible part of a wider war on that equality.

I recently became aware that among the books being attacked by self-described “conservatives” is a popular middle-grade book series “Girls Who Code.” The books are about–duh— girls who code, focusing on the adventures of a group of young girls who are part of a coding club at school.

According to a report in Daily Kos, the series was added to PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans, a nationwide list of restricted literature.

After hearing about the book ban, Reshma Saujani, founder of the Girls Who Code nonprofit organization, shared her thoughts with Business Insider.

“I was just shocked,” Saujani told Insider. “This is about controlling women and it starts with controlling our girls and what info they have access to.”

She added: ”In some ways we know that book banning has been an extreme political tool by the right—banning books to protect our kids from things that are ‘obscene’ or ‘provocative’—but there is nothing obscene or provocative about these books.”

According to the website associated with the Girls Who Code organization, the goal is to “change the face of tech” by closing the gender gap in new entry-level tech jobs.

“Moms for Liberty”–the group that has been actively trying to ban books that focus on topics like critical race theory, sex education, and inclusive gender language–is said to be responsible for adding the series to the banned books index.

The Girls Who Code books are used to reach children and encourage them to code, but because of how “liberal” they seem due to the diverse characters and the message that girls can do anything, conservatives are looking to ban them.

Saujani noted that removing the books not only hinders visibility for women in technology fields but also diversity in the industry, as most of the characters in the series are people of color.

“You cannot be what you cannot see,” she said. “They don’t want girls to learn how to code because that’s a way to be economically secure.”

Apparently, showing girls of various races engaged in coding is “woke”–and as we all know, being “woke” horrifies the White Christian Nationalists who want to take America back to the “good old days.”

According to PEN America, books were banned in 5,049 schools with a combined enrollment of nearly 4 million students in 32 states between July 2021 and July 2022. About 41% of banned books on the list had LGBTQ+ themes or characters who are LGBTQ+. The other majority of banned books featured characters of color or addressed issues of race.

The Republican determination to return America to those (mis-remembered) “good old days” explains a lot of other things, including Congressional votes against reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, and against the Lily Ledbetter Equal Pay Act among others. The Party even opposes the League of Women Voters, insisting that the League’s stands on behalf of women and against gerrymandering have remade the organization into a “collection of angry leftists rather than friendly do-gooders.”

Today’s GOP labels anyone–male or female– who supports gender (or racial or religious) equality–as “angry leftists.”

Forty-two years ago, my husband and I met as part of a Republican city administration. When we married, a reporter told me we were considered “nice, but a bit right of center.” Our political philosophies haven’t changed–but the GOP has. Dramatically. Today’s Republicans now consider us part of that “angry leftist” mob–along with most of the then-Republicans with whom we worked.

Make no mistake: today’s GOP is a radical, dangerous cult that bears virtually no relationship to the political party that was once home to people like Richard Lugar and William Hudnut–or even Ronald Reagan. Its war on “woke-ness” and women is part of its hysterical effort to return America to a time when White Protestant males ruled the roost.

November 8th is about whether we are going back.

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Playing Cozy With The Nazis

It is getting very scary.

Over the past several years–aided and abetted by Trump’s normalization of racism and anti-Semitism–the GOP has become less and less distinguishable from its Neo-Nazi fringe, and less embarrassed by the relationship.

Just a few of the many available examples:

In Washington State, the Republican Party is paying a pro-Nazi blogger.

Arnold runs the far-right Telegram account “Pure Politics,” which traffics in Jan. 6 conspiracy theories, praise of controversial lawmakers, and anti-COVID-containment sentiments. It also has more than 12,000 followers who frequently comment with racist and antisemitic language.

But Arnold himself has said plenty of distressing things. As CNN reported last year, Arnold has advocated shooting refugees, killing undocumented immigrants, and has posted praise for Nazi Germany. He actually once said Adolf Hitler was “a complicated historical figure which many people misunderstand.”

In a statement shared last week with The Daily Beast, the communications director for the Washington Republican Party, Ben Gonzalez, didn’t deny Arnold’s employment but claimed his tenure was short-lived.

The paid tenure may have been “short lived,” but the party’s relationship with Arnold isn’t. The GOP congressional candidate who won this year’s Republican primary was photographed alongside Arnold, “a move praised by his followers.”

Other media outlets have reported on Arnold’s strong ties to white nationalist Nicholas Fuentes. Fuentes leads a group of “college-aged, far-right activists that refer to themselves as “groypers”—a rebranding of the racist alt-right movement”–and within the far-right “America First” movement, Arnold is a lieutenant.

The embrace of Nazi ideology isn’t limited to Washington State, nor to organized far-right groups. Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake has endorsed an “out and proud” Oklahoma anti-Semite. Doug Mastriano, running for Governor of Pennsylvania, has a long history of anti-Semitism and has made anti-Jewish attacks on his Jewish opponent.

As one media outlet put it,

From Dr. Oz in front of Hitler’s car to Marjorie Taylor Greene spouting the Great Replacement Theory to the GOP supporting Kanye West—the message is clear.

GOP officials have praised figures like Hungary’s Victor Orban, and Americans have been treated to a stream of pro-Putin, pro-Orban, anti-Semitic propaganda by Fox News figure Tucker Carlson.

Even though Fox News star Tucker Carlson’s interview with Kanye West was so expansive that it ran during both his Thursday and Friday night broadcasts, it appears the far-right cable host left out plenty of newsworthy footage, Motherboard reported on Tuesday.

These segments of the interview omitted from the final broadcasts showed the rap superstar, now known as Ye, casually peddling antisemitism while making strange claims about “fake children” used to manipulate his own kids.

Last week, before West went on an antisemitic tantrum on social media, he was welcomed on Carlson’s show to discuss the backlash he faced for donning a “White Lives Matter” shirt alongside right-wing provocateur Candace Owens at Paris Fashion Week.

In the interview that aired on Fox News, Carlson presented West as a conservative folk hero, praising his “interesting, deep, provocative” observations on politics and social issues, even shrugging off concerns about West’s mental-health issues and documented struggles with bipolar disorder.

Carlson has been a major apologist for the so-called “replacement theory”–the fear expressed by far-right White Christian Males that they will be “replaced” (displaced from their perceived status as “real” Americans) by Jews and people of color. The men who rioted in Charlottesville chanted “Jews shall not replace us.”

Almost immediately after his appearance on Carlson’s show, West used social media to issue antisemitic threats against Jewish people and was locked out of both his Instagram and Twitter accounts. Carlson has ignored the controversy and has continued to laud his “standing up for oppressed white people., as have most Congressional Republicans

Kanye West –now “Ye”–is currently a Republican celebrity, one of a small number of Blacks being used by the GOP to rebut charges of racism. (“I can’t be racist. Some of my best friends/current candidates are…”) Hershel Walker is another. As several pundits have commented, the issue for these cynical Republicans is how to handle personalities like West and Walker, both of whom have publicly struggled with mental health issues and seem unaware of their status as pawns.

As one observer put it, “I am not personally worried that Kanye is going to bomb a synagogue or something like that. I’m more concerned that there is a huge political movement that’s holding him up as this figure.”

Members of disfavored minorities used to worry about rightwing “dog whistles.” These days, the GOP isn’t bothering to whistle–instead, the party (now fully captured by its one-time fringe) is enthusiastically embracing its inner bigot.

The parallels with Germany in the 30s are too obvious to miss.

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Accounting For MAGA

In a recent newsletter from The Atlantic, Tom Nichols echoed a frustration of my own. He wrote that, in his lifetime, he’d seen” polio defeated and smallpox eradicated. Now hundreds of thousands of Americans are dead—and still dying—because they refused a lifesaving vaccine as a test of their political loyalty to an ignoramus.”

Ever since 2016, a significant percentage of my posts have revolved around the reality (or actually, the unreality) of that political loyalty, and my inability to understand what–other than racial grievance–might account for it. Study after study, however, has confirmed that it is, indeed, racism that explains support for Trump and the MAGA movement.

The Guardian recently published an article building on that research. The author began by commenting on President Biden’s forceful condemnation of Trump and MAGA, and as he noted, that attribution was correct —so far as it went.

The deeper, more longstanding threat, however, was articulated by historian Taylor Branch in a 2018 conversation with author Isabel Wilkerson recounted in Wilkerson’s book Caste. As they discussed how the rise of white domestic terrorism under Trump was part of the backlash to the country’s growing racial diversity, Branch noted that, “people said they wouldn’t stand for being a minority in their own country”. He went on to add, “the real question would be if people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?”

Whiteness is the deeper threat because championing whiteness is what makes Trump powerful. People forget that Trump was not particularly well-regarded before he started attacking Mexican immigrants and signaling to white people that he would be the defender of their way of life. In the months before he launched his campaign, he was polling at just 4% in the May 2015 ABC/Washington Post poll. After stirring the racial resentment pot, his popularity took off, growing exponentially in a matter of weeks and propelling him to the front of the pack by mid-July 2015 when he commanded support of 24% of voters, far ahead of all the other Republican candidates.

Of course, Trump’s discovery of the power of racism is nothing new. (That’s why the Right doesn’t want accurate history taught in our schools.) The author quoted George Wallace’s epiphany: “I started off talking about schools and highways and prisons and taxes – and I couldn’t make them listen. Then I began talking about n—–s – and they stomped the floor.”

People who’d dismissed Trump as a loudmouth buffoon “stomped the floor” when he began talking about (brown) Mexicans and Muslims.

The article reminded readers of Wallace, Nixon’s “southern strategy,” and the fact that David Duke–an “out and proud” Klansman–had attracted the support of 44% of Louisiana’s voters when he ran for the U.S. Senate.

The good news is that the proponents of whiteness do not command majority support. The original Confederates themselves were in the minority and represented just 11% of the country’s white population. People who enjoy majority support have no need to unleash fusillades of voter suppression legislation in the states with the largest numbers of people of color. Yet, from the grandfather clauses of the 1800s to the restrictive voting laws passed last year in the south and south-west, we are seeing an unrelenting practice of trying to depress and destroy democracy by engaging in what the writer Ron Brownstein has described as, “stacking sandbags against a rising tide of demographic change”.

It’s one thing to confirm that a majority of Americans aren’t racist. It’s another thing to ensure that the people in that majority turn out to vote. As the author says,

In order to defend democracy and win the fight for the soul of the nation, two things must happen. One is to make massive investments in the people and organizations working to expand voting and civic participation. Coalitions like America Votes Georgia and Arizona Wins played critical roles in bringing hundreds of thousands of people of color into the electorate, helping to transform those former Confederate bastions.

We also need to “name and shame” the numerous political figures who are appealing to racist sentiments in order to turn out their supporters. Too many liberals shrink from calling out those who are trafficking in racism–it seems so uncivil. But racism is also uncivil–and far more dangerous.

To ultimately prevail in this defense of our democracy, we must clearly understand the underlying forces imperiling the nation, name the nature of the opposition, and summon the majority of Americans to unapologetically affirm that this is a multi-racial country.

This is a test, and we cannot afford to fail.

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