Tag Archives: racism

A Challenge to the False Equivalency Folks

As the Republican party has become more and more irresponsible, it has become fashionable for its defenders to argue from equivalency: sure, there are some loony-tune legislators who are Republican, but there are equally demented Democrats. Both sides do it, so it’s not fair to single out the GOP examples.

Now, there is an element of truth to this. Certainly, there are rabid ideologues on both the left and right. But no fair-minded observer can deny that for sheer lunacy, the Republicans win in a walk. They have depth and breadth. (Lest you think it’s confined to Michelle Bachman and Louie Gohmert, let me assure you they have an absolutely formidable bench.)

For example, I’d never previously heard of Florida Congressman Ted Yoho.

Rep. Ted Yoho (R-FL) recently told a group of constituents that he backing a birther bill because he hoped that it would “get rid of everything” that President Barack Obama had done, and then added that the president’s “racist” health care law forced white people to pay more to use tanning beds.

The Florida Republican continued: “I had an Indian doctor in our office the other day, very dark skin, with two non-dark skin people, and I asked this to him, I said, ‘Have you ever been to a tanning booth?’ and he goes, ‘No, no need.’ So therefore it’s a racist tax and I thought I might need to get to a sun tanning booth so I can come out and say I’ve been disenfranchised because I got taxed because of the color of my skin.”

I defy anyone to find a Democrat who can match that for idiocy or racism. And this guy isn’t even one of the GOP’s usual subjects!

As Juanita Jean, who blogs from the World’s Most Dangerous Beauty Parlor, accurately notes, if there wasn’t a tax on tanning beds, that would mean that President Obama is encouraging everybody to become dark skinned like him or the Muslims. Because he’d be trying to turn us all black!

These folks are just obsessed with the President’s skin color. Too bad they aren’t equally invested in stuff like–oh, I don’t know… logic. Or coherent thought. Or public policy, although asking  that they actually do the jobs they were elected to do and stop their single-minded obsession with preventing Obama from doing anything may be too great a stretch.

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Litmus Test

It has been instructive watching the various reactions to the Paula Deen tragicomedy.

On one hand are the folks–including a number of “known liberals”– who see the Food Network’s decision not to renew her show as an excess of “political correctness.” Others, of course, have been far more judgmental.

Most people have reacted without bothering to go beyond the superficial. Had Deen only admitted to using the “N” word a couple of times in the past, it might be legitimate to find the response disproportionate. However, the admission came in the context of a number of other behaviors; the lawsuit in which she gave the deposition alleges long-standing workplace bigotry, including requiring black and white workers in one of her restaurants to use separate restrooms. A story in the New York Times quotes Deen herself about taping a TV show in which she was going to make a hamburger she called a “Sambo” sandwich, but was overruled by the producer. She was also quoted justifying other behaviors by “explaining” that “most jokes” are about Jews, black and gays. (If the lawsuit allegations are accurate, all of these groups were objects of her workplace behaviors.)

Some people who defend Deen are simply unaware of this backstory. But for others, that defense clearly has a personal element. Many of the comments on Facebook and emails sent to Food Network display the very ugly and persistent underside of our multi-cultural society.

We have a very long way to go when it comes to race. And the election of an African-American President has just exacerbated that very jagged social wound.

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Nature/Nurture

I came across a fascinating study the other day (hat tip to Ed Brayton over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars). There has been a good deal of research suggesting that racism has a biological element–several studies show the amygdala lighting up in reaction when a person of a different race appeared, for example. However…

“In a paper that will be published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Eva Telzer of UCLA and three other researchers report that they’ve performed these amygdala studies–which had previously been done on adults–on children. And they found something interesting: the racial sensitivity of the amygdala doesn’t kick in until around age 14.

What’s more: once it kicks in, it doesn’t kick in equally for everybody. The more racially diverse your peer group, the less strong the amygdala effect. At really high levels of diversity, the effect disappeared entirely. The authors of the study write that “these findings suggest that neural biases to race are not innate and that race is a social construction, learned over time.”

The upshot of the study, at least as I understood it, was that humans do have strong “tribal” instincts, but the preference for ones own tribe is not based on any particular characteristic. It’s enough to be different–the nature of the difference is irrelevant. That’s the bad news. The good news is that, with sufficient diversity while we’re young, the differences that divide us, that bring out our tribal instincts, can be overcome.

That “nature versus nurture” argument just gets more and more complicated….

The N Factor

One of the more prestigious political science journal just published an issue devoted to prognostications about the upcoming Presidential election. A variety of academics used their favored forecasting methodologies, and predicted the likely winner. The results ranged from “comfortably Obama” to “very, very close” to one “Romney by a nose.” (I’ve noted that “scientific” methods are a lot more accurate after the election has occurred.)

The problem with forecasting models is that they rarely take into account elements like likability; heretofore, they have not had to confront massive spending by SuperPacs, either. And even the scholars who employ them hedge their bets.

One element that was not measurable before 2008–and has now been measured–is the influence of race, as in the race of the candidates. Any sentient being knows that much of the anti-Obama animus is race-based (the “birthers” and people convinced that the President is a Muslim are so obviously substituting those charges for the N word). What has been unclear is the extent to which that racism motivates votes. In that journal’s issue on the election, one article analyzed data from the 2008 election, and concluded that his race had cost Obama five percent of the vote–that is, that Obama’s percentage of the popular vote would have been five percent higher had he been white. The author of that article forecast a slightly better result this time around; according to his calculations, racism will “only” cost Obama three percentage points this time around.

Of course, in a very close election, three percent is enough.

A lot of folks are in denial about the extent to which race influences attitudes about the President. They shrug off the more obvious indicators, like the guy in the photo taken at a Romney rally, whose tee shirt read “Put the white back in the White House.” I have friends whose unease with the President is pretty clearly based upon his “otherness,” but who don’t recognize or admit to themselves that such feelings are a part of their political calculus.

If we are inclined to dismiss the influence of racism, a look at Gallup’s polling may serve as a wake-up call. Gallup has been an “outlier” lately, showing Romney five or six points ahead in the popular vote. When you look at the internals, you see an interesting phenomenon: in Gallup’s numbers, Obama holds modest leads in the Northeast, Midwest and West. Romney leads in the South–by twenty-two points.

Maybe we shouldn’t have fought the civil war–and just let the South go.

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