Tim Wise's Blog, page 12

Nativist Americans: Immigration, Historical Memory and the Dishonesty of Modern Racism

Although I am hardly known for waxing nostalgic over the American past or its white people in particular, there is one thing that can be said for such folks in the old days. When they were bigots, they were honest enough to just tell you. No prevarication, no hesitation, no pretending to be enlightened or remotely compassionate, no cloying assurances about one’s black friends, or how they once dated an Asian woman, or about being 1/16th Native American on their mother’s father’s side. They let you know where they stood, and however offensive and injurious their attitudes were, at least you could plan accordingly. You could avoid them, confront them, or plot for their overthrow, but either way, you knew who the enemy was.

Today, even racists want to seem tolerant, and so they have to lie about their real feelings; and while that might signify a type of progress, it makes knowing who’s who (and what they’re about) much harder.

Take the growing and increasingly bellicose anti-immigration movement, for instance. Always a part of the nation’s political discourse, hostility to newcomers was, for generations, sold in clearly prejudicial terms. From the Know-Nothings of the 1800s to those who succeeded in passing restrictive immigration legislation in the 1920s to those who openly opposed the loosening of those restrictions in the mid-’60s, anti-immigrant forces were never shy about making their case in blatantly racist, chauvinistic and bigoted ways. Even Benjamin Franklin’s pre-revolutionary concern that German immigrants to Philadelphia would succeed in “Germanizing us instead of us Anglifying them,” was rooted in an explicit desire to “other” those who, for reasons of ethnicity or “race,” were different from the dominant norm, and presumed inferior.

Nativists in earlier times, though they certainly made arguments similar to those heard today — about immigrants “taking American jobs” or “relying too heavily on public benefits” — wrapped all of these material concerns in a clear patina of racial hostility: newcomers were “culturally foreign,” “unassimilable” (because of language, ethnicity or even biology), and dragged down the “genetic quality” of the nation’s people. The infamous Dillingham Commission — empowered by Congress to examine the nation’s immigration situation and make recommendations for future policy — made the case for restrictions in explicitly racist and white supremacist fashion.

And for my money, their honesty made those earlier generations of anti-immgration crusaders far preferable to those we see today, whose animosities are every bit as rooted in white racial anxiety and hostility as they ever were, but who try mightily to deny it, to insist that they have nothing against brown folks, but merely worry about the labor market, or taxes, or some such thing. Whereas the old school nativists were racists, the new brood is populated by racists and liars, and sometimes it’s nice to only have to deal with one kind of sociopath at a time.

The Legality Ruse: Why Anti-Immigrant Sentiment is Not About “Following the Rules”

Of course, when you suggest that opposition to immigration from Mexico or Central America (as with the current refugee crisis at the border) is really about deep-seated racial hostility and a desire to maintain white hegemony, most who comprise the anti-immigration forces are quick to deny it. “We’re not against immigration or immigrants,” they insist, “we just think they should come the right way, legally, like our ancestors did.”

But of course this line of argument is both historically absurd and utterly insincere. As for what “our” (presumably European) ancestors did: to give them some kind of pat on the back for having “come legally” ignores the fact that for most of American history there were no laws preventing their entry, and thus no laws to break. Thanks to the 1790 Naturalization Act, which made “all free white persons and only free white persons” citizens of the U.S., pretty much immediately, there was virtually no way for them to have come illegally even had they been so inclined. To praise the law-abidingness of people who didn’t break a law that didn’t even exist is self-evidently preposterous. And surely, looking back on our ancestors, ask yourself the question: If there had been laws prohibiting their entry, and yet, they had been close enough, geographically, to come to the U.S. anyway, do we really think they would have refrained from doing so, even as they sought to escape political persecution and economic destitution, just because they wouldn’t want to break the law? Surely not. They would have done the exact same thing as current immigrants, the law be damned.

But beyond being completely counter-historical, the argument about legal versus illegal immigration is fundamentally disingenuous, in that concerns about the legal status of new migrants is not even remotely what anti-immigrant forces are bothered by.

Don’t believe me? Fine, feel free to test it. Ask one of these folks who claim that they wouldn’t mind Mexicans and Salvadorans and Guatemalans coming, so long as they came legally, if they would support streamlining the application process, so as to make it easier for such persons to do just that. If they are so compassionate and sympathetic, and willing to welcome these newcomers to the U.S., so long as their entry is above-board, then why not advocate immigration reform that would make it easier for them to come in a documented fashion? Significantly ease the process, simplify the paperwork, and slash the wait times for so-called legal migration, so that persons wishing to come to the U.S. would have no reason to risk their lives crossing the border, or being trafficked by charlatans taking advantage of desperate families, because they could come legally in a quick, efficient and safe manner.

Legality and illegality, after all, is not a function of some immutable characteristic of immigrants themselves; it is simply a function of how the law defines legality, how difficult legal immigration is made, and how the law is enforced. If immigration were made easy enough, few if any Mexicans, for example, would cross the border undocumented. There would be no need to. And so, voila! We could virtually eliminate undocumented migration, and almost immediately, by making these changes. If all that really bothered the new restrictionists were the legal status of those coming to the country, then they would presumably support such policy changes, support immigration liberalization, and put away their angry signs, hostile e-mails and belligerent rallies. That they don’t support anything like this — not one among them — and that they are as wedded to their hateful displays as a kidney patient is to dialysis, betrays their real motivations quite clearly.

Further demonstrating that it is the ethnicity of immigrants that concerns them, and not their legal status, note that few in the anti-immigration crowd demonstrate any real worry over the millions of persons currently in the country “illegally” who merely overstayed otherwise valid visas. At least 4 in 10 of the currently “undocumented” in the U.S. fit this description. In other words, they did not cross any border lacking proper documentation. They came legally, either as students or visitors, or to work, and remained after their visas expired. And why might they be less concerned about such “illegals” as these? It seems fair to conclude that the disproportionate whiteness of many of them — students, workers or visitors from Europe — might have more than a little to do with it.

Ultimately, anti-immigrant sentiment is motivated by an implicit form of white nationalism, which holds that “real Americans” are white and that all others are interlopers, or at least lesser Americans than we who hail from Europe. This is why so many among this bunch are quick to support policies like those passed (but largely blocked by the courts) in Arizona, which would allow law enforcement to basically stop anyone they suspected of being undocumented and ask for legal proof of their citizenship. That such policies would codify color-based profiling, thereby subjecting all Latinos in the state to these kinds of indignities, regardless of their citizenship, should be obvious. But to the nativists, they don’t care. Because to most of them, brown is probable cause, and brown is the problem.

Misremember When: The Un-Romantic Truth About European Immigration

And it is not only that brown is the problem in the eyes of the new nativists, but that brown peoples are seen as having such fundamentally different motivations for their journeys here — when contrasted with those of our own ancestors — as to render them hardly recognizable to the larger American experiment. According to the narrative of the new white nativists, our ancestors came in search of freedom and liberty — in other words, on the basis of deeply-held values and principles — while today’s migrants are only coming for stuff: jobs or health care or other public benefits that they don’t pay for the way citizens do, via taxation.

Putting aside the fact that undocumented migrants do not, in fact, receive more in public benefits than they pay in taxes, nor have much impact on the employment picture for native-born workers, the larger function of this argument is to place new immigrants in some kind of alternative moral universe, where not merely their material impact but their very motivations and ethics are called into question and found lacking relative to our own and those of our predecessors.

Framed this way, past immigration is able to retain its specialness, its mythic status as a movement of persons yearning to be free of the yoke of foreign oppression, and can be separated from any purely selfish motivations, like the desire for land or riches. To believe that one’s ancestors just wanted freedom while someone else just wants a job (as if being able to support one’s family didn’t also help purchase a certain kind of freedom), is to elevate one’s own forbears in some hierarchical pyramid of moral value. It is to suggest that while naked self-interest is what motivates Mexicans, we plucky Anglos (or Irish, or Germans, or whatever) had (and have) more high-minded concerns.

Yet this hagiographic remembrance of the Euro-American past is utterly without merit. As James Baldwin explained in 1963:

What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors. It’s astounding to me, for example, that so many people really seem to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free. That happens not to be true. What happened was that some people left Europe because they couldn’t stay there any longer and had to go someplace else to make it. They were hungry, they were poor, they were convicts.

In other words, the ancestors of those of us from Europe, and in each generation of migrants to these shores, were the losers of their respective societies: they were desperate, they were hungry, they were, in short, coming here for stuff no less so than the family from Juarez or Tegucigalpa or Guatemala City today. Principle is not what drove them; empty bellies were quite enough. Freedom was their touchstone perhaps, but mostly insofar as one could not be substantively free so long as one could not feed one’s family. The winners, to be sure, didn’t leave the place where they were winning, and why would they? If one were doing well in the old world, why would one choose to get on a boat with one’s kith and kin and take to the high seas in search of a new start? No indeed, the winners stayed put, while the losers climbed aboard and made the journey. And this is no calumny upon their character, but quite the opposite; it is meant to indicate the fundamental commonality between us and those we have deemed the dreaded other. It is to suggest that in our failure to understand our own history — and especially the fact that none of our ancestors actually wanted to come here either — we build a wall between ourselves and current migrants that prevents us from acting on the basis of human compassion, the way most would if we could see ourselves in the other. By believing that our families’ dreams were fundamentally different and more valid than those of Latino migrants, we perpetuate a dehumanization that ensures cruelty towards persons whose motivations to come here are largely the same as those that drove our ancestors.*

Like Arsonists Blocking the Exits: Mass Immigration as a Function of U.S. Policy

Interestingly, if the new nativists wish to reduce the flow of undocumented migrants, there are ways to accomplish this end far more humane and compassionate than sealing the border, mass deportations, and other forms of restrictive legislation. After all, much of the desperation driving people to the U.S. from Mexico and Central America has been caused by the policies of this nation: from the decades-long support for military dictatorships in Guatemala and El Salvador to so-called free trade policies of NAFTA and CAFTA, both of which have opened Mexican and Central American markets to heavily-subsidized agricultural goods from the U.S., thereby undercutting the financial stability of farming in those places and pushing agricultural labor off the land in search of jobs and income.

If the reactionary right-wing would spend less time demonizing the poor and persons of color, and more time focusing on trying to change economic policies pushed and supported by global economic elites, they could help make life more livable in those countries from which migrants are coming — thereby reducing the push-out incentives that drive immigration to the U.S. — and at the same time do something for U.S. workers, who have seen their wages bid downward by these trade agreements as well. To focus on stopping the migration without stopping the pain that drives it (and especially when your own country has helped foster much of that pain) is like an arsonist setting fire to a building and then blocking the exits as folks try and escape.

The fact is, few people in history have ever really wished to leave their countries of origin. For the most part, whether here or anywhere else, whether in this era or any other, migration patterns are driven by desperation. Most of us would prefer to be able to make it, to survive, to thrive, to support ourselves and our families right where we live, without having to pack up and go to some new place, where we will be forced to start all over again.

And surely no one would willingly subject themselves to the hostility and outright hatred being thrown in the faces of today’s immigrants, all for the sake of emergency medical care and a slot in a frankly underfunded public school. But sadly, that is what they are being subjected to, by persons too beholden to their own founding mythology to realize that insofar as we treat newcomers like permanent outsiders, we spit on the memories of our own forbears, so many of whom wanted the same thing as desperate families today.

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*Frankly, if there be any moral distinction to be drawn between the two sets of migrants, it would no doubt redound to the benefit of the modern contingent rather than our own. After all, in the case of the latter, quite a few came with the full intent to dispossess indigenous peoples of their land and to utilize the stolen labor and bodies of still others — Africans — so as to build up their own station. At least with Mexicans they are largely returning to a land that was once theirs, prior to the forcible conquest of it in the mid-1800s, and they are willing to do the work themselves, rather than enslaving others to do it for them.

 

O’Really? Bill O’Reilly’s Ongoing War on Facts (and Racial Justice)

Poor Bill O’Reilly. I mean, it’s not as if we should actually expect him to know anything about black people or black culture in America. This is the guy, you’ll recall, who was actually amazed — amazed — a few years ago when he went to Sylvia’s restaurant in Harlem, only to discover that black patrons of this venerable institution were respectful and didn’t harass wait staff by yelling things like, “Hey motherfucker, bring me some more iced tea!” Because apparently, that’s what he was expecting: crude epithets dished up with chitlins, cornbread, and purple drink, or perhaps a hostess who greets newcomers with “Yo momma’s so ugly” jokes while they wait for a seat.

Seriously, what do you expect from a guy who grew up in Levittown, on Long Island? This is a community, after all, which was established for whites only, due to the wishes of its developer. And although Bill insists he never received any of that white privilege he keeps hearing people speak of (as if it were tantamount to fairy dust) — this despite growing up in a middle class neighborhood from which black people were entirely excluded, in a home financed by a government-backed loan, also off-limits to blacks at the time — it certainly meant that his contact with folks of color was, shall we say, limited from the jump. Not a lot of black folks in his Catholic schools growing up either, and hanging out occasionally with Juan Williams really isn’t sufficient to fill a lifelong blind spot.

Anyway, and despite coming by his ignorance honestly, Bill’s latest attempt to explain black culture to the masses (or at least that part of it to which he refers as “ghetto culture”), demonstrated more than just his usual complement of asshattery. Indeed, it was a statement of such monumental and verifiable stupid — unlike many of his other assertions, which at least belong to the realm of sincere if naive opinion — that one can only assume his recitation of it signifies a deliberate attempt to smear, to demean and defame black people, and especially the black poor. Feeding subtle (or perhaps not-so-subtle) bigotry-enhancing stereotypes to an audience of millions is journalistic irresponsibility of the highest order, and yet, sadly, it is something O’Reilly does, secure in the knowledge that most of his supine audience will believe it, not simply because he says it, but because the images he spoons to them fit so neatly with their equally ignorant but well-established beliefs already.

To wit, a segment on O’Reilly’s July 28th FOX News program concerning the legalization of marijuana, in which O’Reilly slipped in the jab that “in certain ghetto neighborhoods, it’s part of the culture” for children as young as nine to smoke weed. Got it? Not simply that occasionally a pre-teen might smoke marijuana in such a place (no doubt true, as it would be among some white suburbanites from Long Island, like the one who proved to be the biggest weed dealer at my college), but that the practice is absolutely normative among the black and urban poor.

To say that such a belief is racist should be obvious: it generalizes about people of color in a way that holds those people of color in low regard as pathological, defective, dysfunctional and frankly, criminal, since smoking weed (ether at 9 or 90) is illegal in most places. But more than racist, the belief is also flatly wrong. In fact it is so wrong that O’Reilly’s explication of the argument suggests he has not even a passing familiarity with that new-fangled invention known as Google. For had Bill spent just a few minutes doing simple research, he could have discovered that far from a cultural norm among blacks, drug usage rates are roughly equivalent across racial lines.*

There are three primary sources on drug use among Americans, which look at slightly different populations in calculating their data. One is the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), the second is the Monitoring the Future report (MTF), issued by the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, and funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and National Institutes of Health, and the third is the Center for Disease Control (CDC). Let’s look at those one at a time and see what they actually say.

SAMHSA estimates drug usage rates for all Americans, ages 12 and older, and occasionally breaks them down by ages 12-17, 18-25, and 26 and above. Drug usage rates for persons under 12 are so low for any racial group that literally no one even calculates numbers like that, let alone has ever demonstrated the “normalcy” of use for black children that age. There is simply no research, anywhere on the planet, which ratifies O’Reilly’s claim about black 9-year olds in the so-called ghetto.

In their most recent report, SAMHSA did not break out drug use numbers and rates by race and age combined, so unfortunately we are unable to see the racial usage differences for white and black youth who are 12-17, young adults 18-25 or adults 26 and older. Previous reports did provide this breakdown, and as I have noted in prior essays and books, typically demonstrated that white youth and black youth were equally likely to be current drug users in the youngest age group, whites were slightly more likely to be current users in the middle age group, and blacks were slightly more likely to be current users in the oldest age group, resulting in a rough equivalence between whites and blacks overall, in terms of drug use within the last 30 days.

In their most updated report, looking at data for 2012, SAMHSA only provides overall racial use data for all persons 12 and older. Looking at that data, we see racial differences to be sure, but they are small. So, for instance, roughly 9 percent of whites and 11 percent of blacks, 12 and older have used some form of illegal substance in the past 30 days, thereby making them what researchers call “current users.” Needless to say, if 89 percent of a particular group (in this case blacks) does not use illegal drugs of any kind, it is preposterous to claim that drug usage by that group is a cultural norm.

The MTF report looks at drug use among 8th graders, 10th graders and 12th graders. They find, much as with SAMHSA, that whites and blacks use illegal drugs at roughly the same rates. Among 8th graders, 6 percent of whites and 9 percent of blacks have used an illegal drug (mostly weed) in the past month; among 10th graders, 18 percent of whites and 20 percent of blacks are current users, and among high school seniors, the usage rates are the same for both groups at about 1 in 4. As for daily (which is to say, heavy) use, almost no whites or blacks in 8th grade smoke weed daily, only about 5 percent of whites and blacks in 10th grade do so, and only about 7 percent of each groups’ seniors get high every day.

The CDC suggests a slightly greater racial disparity, but even their data far from indicates drug use as a social or cultural norm for African American youth. Examining high schoolers in general, CDC notes that about 29 percent of black high schoolers have smoked weed in the past month, as have 20 percent of whites.

In New York, where O’Reilly lives and broadcasts, drug use rates among youth have long demonstrated very little if any difference between whites and blacks. According to the most recent data available (from 2009), in Manhattan and Staten Island, white youth are actually more likely than black youth to have used marijuana, while in Brooklyn and Queens black youth are slightly more likely to have done so. The same Borough-level trends hold for current users, with 28 percent of white high schoolers in Manhattan currently smoking weed, for instance, compared to only 18 percent of black high school students there. Nearly 1 in 11 white Manhattan youth have used cocaine too, (in either its powder or rock form), it is worth noting, compared to only 1 in 20 blacks.

But while some might see the national data and say O’Reilly’s claim was at least partially fair (after all, however slightly, black youth do seem to use drugs more often than whites), other data not mentioned by O’Reilly (or those who push the “black people are drug users” meme) demonstrates the fundamental fallacy in his logic.

Fact is, those same sources that show slightly elevated rates of drug use for black youth over white youth, also show significantly higher rates of alcohol use (and abuse) by white youth than black youth. But you won’t hear Bill O’Reilly opining that there is something cultural about white suburban communities that normalizes heavy drinking and alcoholism. So, for instance, according to SAMHSA, whites are 50 percent more likely than their black counterparts to drink underage (27 percent as opposed to 18), and more than twice as likely to binge drink. In fact, whites between 12-20 are just as likely to binge drink as blacks that age are to drink at all. According to the MTF report, although white and black 8th graders are equally likely to be current drinkers, by 10th grade, nearly 30 percent of whites are, compared to only 20 percent of blacks, and by 12th grade, fully 44 percent of white students are drinkers, compared to 28 percent of African Americans. Whites in both 10th and 12th grade are roughly twice as likely as their black counterparts to binge drink, which refers to drinking five or more drinks at one sitting.

According to the CDC, 36 percent of white high school students are current drinkers, compared to 30 percent of blacks, and white high schoolers are nearly twice as likely as their black peers to binge drink (23 percent versus 12). Interestingly, while only 1 in 63 black high schoolers have consumed 10 or more drinks at a time (truly massive binging), fully 1 in 14 whites in high school has, meaning that whites in high school are about 4.5 times more likely to have engaged in this clearly pathological (and so far as high school students are concerned, illegal) behavior.  Also worth noting: white youth according to all three sources have much higher rates of prescription drug abuse, but one doubts that O’Reilly has any intention of criticizing white parents for not better securing their Vicodin or Hydrocodone scrips from little Johnny and Susie, or proclaiming legal opioid abuse by such persons to be evidence of a deeper race-based cultural flaw.

According to a recent study conducted by researchers from Duke University, when examining substance abuse and dependence (not just usage rates), whites are nearly twice as likely as African Americans to present for such serious problems related to drugs and/or alcohol.

Far from a mere academic matter, O’Reilly’s lies about black drug use among young people feeds a dangerous and destructive mentality, which serves to legitimize racial profiling of such youth, their harassment by cops beholden to those same racialized suspicions, and their arrest for crimes that whites engage in with roughly equal frequency. By continuing to promote the connection between blackness and drug use — a connection so strong that one study found fully 95 percent of persons asked to envision a “typical drug user” said they envisioned a black person — O’Reilly gives license to racially-disparate enforcement of the law. In short, he gives cover to institutional racism.

Of course, at the same time O’Reilly feels qualified to weigh in on the cultural norms of a community in which he has spent exactly zero time, he also assures us that blacks are not actually treated more harshly for drug possession when compared to whites, or that if they are, such disparity is somehow justified by higher overall crime rates in urban areas. But in fact, and despite roughly equal rates of marijuana usage, blacks are nearly four times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana possession. Whether that is the result of deliberate racial targeting, or, as O’Reilly would have it, the simple and perhaps unintended outcome of saturation policing caused by higher crime rates (i.e., more cops in poor urban neighborhoods means they’ll uncover more crimes there, including drug possession), the outcome is the same: justice is not dispensed in a fair and equitable fashion. Whites doing the same crime with roughly equal frequency are able to get away with their illegality at much higher rates.

And of course, at least in places like New York, we know that the disparities in drug arrests are certainly the result of deliberate targeting, not happenstance. Under the city’s stop-and-frisk policies, which were in place from the late 1990s until just a year ago when they were struck down by the courts, black youth (and Latinos) were routinely targeted in ways that were disproportionate, even when you take into account higher crime rates in black communities. Overall, out of millions of stops (nearly 90 percent of them involving black or brown folks), drugs were found in fewer than 2 percent of all stops (and were actually less likely to be found on blacks than whites), and the racial makeup of a precinct predicted who was likely to be stopped three times better than the crime rate in the neighborhood. In fact, when it comes to drug crimes, stop rates were indeed correlated with reported drug crimes in various neighborhoods, but the correlation was negative. In other words, stops of blacks on suspicion of drug possession, were highest in neighborhoods with fewer reported drug crimes, rather than more. The NYPD was not responding to actual rates of crime; they were profiling on the basis of racial bias and false assumptions about who was most likely to be carrying contraband.

Until media talking heads, who have the potential to influence millions of people — including politicians, teachers, and law enforcement officials — are called to account for the spreading of disinformation, little will change. The conservative cognitariat, of which Bill O’Reilly is such a central and bellicose figure, must be held accountable for their incessant race-baiting and the spreading of false and defamatory information about youth of color and the communities in which they live. His lies and distortions, whether the result of simple ignorance or malicious intent, cannot be ignored or tolerated any longer.

(To join the call for O’Reilly to apologize and issue a correction of his egregious distortions regarding drugs and black youth, sign here).

*I realize that in O’Reilly’s defense, he would likely say that he was not speaking of blacks generally, or even the black poor, necessarily, but rather, only that portion of the black and black poor community that lives in so-called urban “ghettos.” As such, he might willingly grant the data presented here and agree that blacks, in general, do not use drugs as part of some cultural norm. But this dodge would be insufficient to acquit him of the charge of stoking racial resentment and stereotypes with his rhetoric, for the following reasons: 1) His statement about “ghetto” black folks still is not accurate according to any source that he can cite or that exists. I defy him, in fact, to produce one piece of scholarly research in support of his argument that it is normative in black, poor, urban communities for 9-year olds to smoke weed. In other words, he is still making up cultural arguments without evidence, due to his own prejudices and ignorance; 2) it is doubtless the case that a large number of listeners to his program (and Americans generally), equate so-called “ghetto” black folks with black folks more broadly, because sadly we tend to assume that a majority of African Americans live in such places (even though a distinct minority do). So to make this argument is to play into white prejudices about the larger black community, even if that were not one’s intent; and 3) let’s be honest, Bill O’Reilly has never in his professional life differentiated between the black community generally and black poor folks specifically when it comes to social pathology. Indeed he routinely attacks black entertainers (who are hardly poor) for encouraging everything from drug and alcohol use to out-of-wedlock pregnancy. O’Reilly no doubt believes that blacks generally are a tangle of pathology and cultural deficiency, and if I’m wrong about that, he should say so, clearly and without hesitation. Here’s betting he won’t.

Because They Hate: Health Care Obstructionism and the Conservative Mind

It’s because they hate. There is no other logical explanation.

After all, it’s one thing to oppose a piece of legislation and fight to keep it from being passed because you honestly disagree with it as a matter of principle. Decent people can disagree on policy.

But it’s quite another to celebrate like frat boys at a keg party upon hearing the news that millions of people may now lose their health care, or that their care may become so financially prohibitive as to bankrupt them.

Yet that is what they are doing, and by they I mean pretty much the entirety of conservative America. Check out their Twitter spew, where you can see their nearly orgasmic delight at yesterday’s 2-1 decision by an appellate court panel to the effect that only persons enrolled in state level insurance exchanges can receive federal subsidies for coverage under the Affordable Care Act. Since most states — especially those with conservative political leadership — have refused to establish exchanges, thereby forcing residents to turn to the federal version, the ruling (were it to stand) would mean that millions of Americans may no longer be able to access care under the law.

Decent human beings, irrespective of their take on a matter of policy, do not celebrate at the news that millions of peoples’ lives could now be made harder. Decent human beings do not cheer and gloat at the news that millions of children could now go without care, or that millions of people may once again be forced to choose between health insurance they really can’t afford, or paying a light bill, or buying groceries, or paying rent. Decent human beings don’t put such a premium on political victories that they would purposely seek to harm people, deliberately make them worse off, intentionally leave them adrift with no real recourse to obtain care, possibly causing them, in many cases, to quite literally die. But conservatives in America do all of these things.

Because they hate. There is no other logical explanation.

There is no other logical explanation for why some among them would have even launched the lawsuit that ultimately brought about this result. Again, it is one thing to try and defeat legislation you don’t like through democratic channels. They tried that. They lost. It’s even OK, one supposes, to try and have the law deemed unconstitutional. They tried that too, and they lost again. What is not OK is to be so committed to the defeat of anything Barack Obama touches — even a horribly inadequate health care bill that, while better than nothing, is truly a mild reform — that you will launch a Hail Mary pass to judges you know are in your corner, hoping they will do what you could not at the legislative level. Because that what you’re doing when you ask them to block the subsidies (thereby torpedoing the law), because of vague language in the legislation, even when you know that your interpretation of that language is certainly not what the law’s framers and supporters intended.

The right knows full well that the drafters and supporters of the ACA did not mean to leave those insured on the federal exchange out of the subsidy pool. They know that the failure to include them explicitly thanks to confusing and under-inclusive language was a clerical error, not a purposeful choice. And yet they have pounced on this technicality — thus flouting the intent of the law’s framers, in violation of their normal bellowing that we should always follow the intent of lawmakers rather than “legislating from the bench” — as a way to deny millions affordable care. Not because they have a better plan (or any plan) to provide them that care, but because they hate.

First, they hate Barack Obama. This is why they disrespect him in the middle of speeches by shouting at him and calling him a liar. This is why they refuse to shake his hand. This is why they don’t challenge their constituents when those constituents call him a secret Muslim or terrorist. This is why so many of them — including at least two-thirds of Republicans – indulge the lunatic notion that the president is not an American at all. This is why they send around all manner of blatantly racist e-mails with the president made to look like an ape, or pictures of the White House lawn covered in watermelons, or carry signs calling him a “Lyin’ African,”, or picturing the president dressed like an African witch doctor with a bone through his nose. This is why, most recently, a right-wing policy analyst for an anti-immigration think tank told Tea Party activists (much to their delight) that being “hung, drawn and quartered” would be “too good” for the president, and that perhaps his head should be put on a stake.

It’s why they argue he probably wasn’t qualified to get into Columbia or Harvard Law — in other words, it had to be affirmative action — and why they say he looks like a “skinny ghetto crackhead.” It’s why they accuse him of “appeasing his Islamic overlords,” or planning to confiscate the land of white farmers, just like his “personal hero” Robert Mugabe did in Zimbabwe.

Not because any of that is rational, but because they hate.

But worse than that, they hate the people to whom they would now deny health care. There is no other way to understand their glee at a decision that, if it were to stand, would cost millions of people affordable care, literally devastating their lives and the lives of their families. How could you celebrate that outcome unless you despised, utterly reviled, absolutely detested the people who would be harmed? After all, it’s not like you have an emergency bill waiting in the wings that would cover all those folks, regardless of pre-existing conditions, once they are no longer covered by ACA. Of course not (indeed, prominent conservatives insist that requiring coverage for people with pre-existing conditions is “welfare” and “nonsense,” which should not be part of health care policy). No, no alternative plan, because to the right there is no need. Conservatives will be content to leave folks twisting in the wind, just so they can proclaim Obamacare a failure, tarnish its namesake’s legacy and hope voters will punish Democrats at the polls. In short, political victories mean more to conservatives than the actual lives of poor and working class people.

Not that this should surprise anyone of course. These are people who regularly insist that the poor are “too comfortable” in America, and are like animals who become spoiled when you feed them. So presumably, instead of nutrition assistance programs for such individuals, the poor should simply get their food from dumpsters and be made to feel shame for their poverty, and utter embarrassment for having to rely on any form of government aid. These are people who inveigh against the roughly one-half of Americans who don’t make enough to pay income tax, by calling them loafers, or “takers” (rather than makers) and suggest that they prefer government dependence to hard work. These are people who openly suggest that those who don’t own property or don’t make enough to owe income taxes — like millions of the working poor and elderly — shouldn’t even be allowed to vote anymore, and that poor kids should have to sweep floors in the schools in order to get subsidized lunches.

But something about this is even more disturbing. After all, that stuff is just rhetoric, however toxic. But this is deadly and concrete. Not words, but the policy equivalent of sticks and stones. It takes a special kind of evil to do what the right has done since the passage of the ACA. First, refuse to expand access to Medicaid for poor folks in your states, then resist setting up state insurance exchanges, and then when residents are forced to enter the federal exchange, sue in order to prevent those people from being able to get subsidies that would make care affordable for them. In short, tell the poor and working class, it’s too expensive for the states to cover you, and we’re not going to help facilitate private coverage for you in our state either, oh and by the way, we’re also not going to let you be covered by the feds. Thanks for playing: Go die.

There is only one reason someone would do this or support this.

Because they hate.

This is what evil looks like. Pure, unadulterated, irredeemable, cannot-be-worked-with-or-reasoned-with evil.

This is a kind of contempt for the have-nots unseen since the days of Charles Dickens. It was Dickens, remember, who crafted the unforgettable scene in A Christmas Carol, where Ebenezer Scrooge spurns the request for a charitable donation, wondering aloud if there were no longer workhouses or prisons for the poor and needy. In other words, why care for them? Put them to work, lock them up, or even let them die so as to “reduce the surplus population.”

But here’s the thing: When Dickens created Scrooge, it was clear not only to the author himself but to all of Victorian England that Scrooge was the asshole, the heel, the soulless, cruel and vicious villain. He was decidedly not the deep moral philosopher, the hero or the person to whom readers were supposed to look for political insights.

But today in America this is exactly where the right is headed: to a place where Scrooge is the genius, and Bob Cratchit an ungrateful employee, where Scrooge is the maker and Tiny Tim the pathetic taker; a place where hate and disdain for your fellow men and women — seeking health care or safety at the border for that matter — is allowed to overwhelm compassion.

A decent people would be ashamed. Which is why virtually no conservatives will be.

This is What Happens…When You Heckle the Child of a Stand-Up Comic (Tim Wise at U of Cincinnati, 9/13)

Just was tipped off to this video. I remembered the event but didn’t know anyone taped it,,,

Some Nazi punk thought it was a good idea to fuck with me at the University of Cincinnati last September. He saved up all his energy just to let everyone know that I was Jewish. This is a “secret” about as “secret” as the fact that “Captain” from the 1970s super-duo Captain and Tennille never actually piloted a boat. In other words, no shit…Way to go skinhead. You had one job: actually discredit Tim Wise in the Q&A of his speech, and you failed…miserably.

This is what happens when you decide to heckle someone whose dad was a stand up comic and therefore taught him how to deal with hecklers really damned early…please, show up again Nazis. I enjoy playing with you…

White Noise: Immigration, Antiracism and the Spreading of a Neo-Nazi Meme

Nazis like shortcuts. Maybe it’s because of their aversion to work, which is mighty difficult to do when you spend all day on the Stormfront web board, talking about your favorite Norse God, or newest tattoo, or how the reason you can’t find a job is because the blacks and Mexicans took them all; the same blacks and Mexicans who you think all live on welfare because they’re lazy. Because, ya know, lazy people are often known to take all the jobs.

Like I said, Nazis like shortcuts; and so, many years ago, rather than going to the trouble of exclaiming “Heil Hitler!” (because that takes 0.78 seconds — no really, I clocked it), they decided to shave a little time off the sentiment by just saying “88″ instead, or writing the number “88″ on everything: e-mails, signs, their leather jackets, whatever. Get it? Heil and Hitler both start with an “H,” and “H” is the 8th letter of the alphabet, so “88″ is like “H” written twice. Ah, yes, Nazi numerology. Very tricky, very master race-y. We see what you did there skinheads. Kudos, you.

Anyway, a few years later they stepped it up a notch with a new symbol, 14/88. Although 88 by itself still represented an allegiance to a certain German dictator, the combination of 14/88 referred to the literary work of Nazi terrorist David Lane. It was Lane who compiled the so-called “14 Words” and “88 precepts” while serving time for multiple felonies, including his role in the murder of Denver talk-show host, Alan Berg, in 1984. The “14 Words,” a simple sentence involving “securing the survival” of whites and their children has long been a favorite stanza among white supremacists, who are unbothered by the violent, psychotic and hateful persona of its author: a man whom they continue to revere, several years after the fetid chambers of his pathetic heart blessedly gave out.

The 14 Words served them pretty well for a time, but lately even they have been supplanted, much as with the simple “88″ before them. This time, the Nazis have become attached to a motto that, by comparison to its predecessors, is damned-near an epic poem, at least in terms of verbosity if not literary merit. “The Mantra” as it’s proudly known (by people who apparently remain unaware how cult-like it sounds to go around repeating something you actually call “The Mantra”) was penned by Bob Whitaker, a self-proclaimed genius who in his younger days admits to hanging a swastika poster in his room in opposition to the civil rights movement.

Since his stint as a Hitler fanboy, Whitaker claims to have worked as a CIA agent, during which time he single-handedly developed the propaganda strategy that brought down the Soviet Union. Because of course he did. Since then, he hasn’t done much of anything, which is odd, seeing as how someone who was responsible for ending the Cold War would (you’d think) be in great demand after such an accomplishment. But he wasn’t, and so he ended up with plenty of free time in which to craft “The Mantra,” a 222-word statement to the effect that anti-racism is just “code” for “anti-white,” and this we know because antiracists only advocate immigration and intermarriage in “white countries,” and are therefore engaged in a plot to commit genocide against white people by way of diversity efforts in the U.S. and Europe.

Whitaker devotees call themselves “BUGSers,” (for Bob’s Underground Graduate Seminar), or alternately, the “SWARM,” and apparently believe their savior has stumbled upon some divine truth about multiculturalism, antiracists and the left more broadly. This truth, to hear them tell it, is so explosive that we who fit the above categories are afraid to debate the matter. Exactly how one debates a mantra remains a mystery of course. It would be like “debating” the Lord’s Prayer with a Christian, or the Kaddish with a Jew sitting shiva, or trying to intellectually spar with a Buddhist Monk repeating Omkara or a member of AA right in the middle of the serenity prayer. You can’t really debate a buzz phrase, a ritualistic maxim or an article of faith. They are not developed arguments, but rather aphorisms, like those Successories you can buy at the mall for framing in your office, with slogans like “Believe in Yourself,” or “There’s no I in Team.”

But that doesn’t stop the BUGSers from trying to pick a fight. They post The Mantra everywhere, from YouTube comments to Amazon.com reviews to the walls of bathroom stalls. I’ve had it sent to me via e-mail repeatedly, and recently was apprised (by one of his most devoted disciples) of an upcoming Chat/Debate with Whitaker, to which antiracists like myself have supposedly been invited, but from which we have naturally run like scared cockroaches or mice, or some such thing. We’ve been exposed! Our plot for genocide foiled by the intrepid research of some old bigot with a few hundred hardcore followers who have nothing better to do than post the same 222-word message over and over again on anonymous comment sections of local newspaper sites and on Craigslist!

Yeah, exposed not so much. And although I can hardly believe I need to say this, none of us in the antiracist left support white genocide. In fact, The Mantra is so wrong on so many points that one has to assume its author and acolytes are either incapable of understanding basic political ideology, or they deliberately deceive so as to drum up racist violence against those of us whom they accuse of trying to actually hurt them.* This is, of course, an old Nazi tactic, and one Hitler used to great effect in the ’30s by whipping Germans into a frenzy about the evil designs of the Jews and their desire to strangle Aryan civilization. By demonizing Jews (and Slavs and Romani among others), the Nazis made it much easier to sell “pre-emptive” repression of these groups in Europe. It was, to the Nazis way of thinking, just a form of self-defense, see?

Anyway, although debating an actual mantra is virtually impossible, addressing the underlying premises of Whitaker’s mantra is quite easy, so let us turn to that task now.

The False Premises of “The Mantra” (Or How Nazis Get it Wrong, as Usual)

The premise of The Mantra is that antiracists believe in multiculturalism, immigration and assimilation but only in so-called white nations. In Africa and Asia we don’t mind racial or cultural purity or the domination of the racial locals, yet in the U.S. and throughout Europe we seek open borders and amalgamation. But in truth, no antiracist has ever said anything like this. Nor is it what we believe. Personally, I think that people should be able to live on whatever continent they wish, and in whatever country, within reasonable limits for matters of space. Obviously, not everyone who would love to live in St. Kitts, for instance, can be allowed to. There just isn’t room. But on a continent-wide level, antiracists and most of the left would endorse the general notion of the free movement of labor and people across borders, wherever those borders existed.

Secondly, the idea that antiracists accede to racial or ethnic purity in non-white countries while condemning the concept among whites ignores that Africa’s nations are, in fact, comprised of many different ethnic groups, as with Asia and its nation states. As such, the very notion of racial or ethnic purity in such places is by definition an absurdity. It is not something that exists, and it is not something that antiracists support existing. This is why, for instance, when the Hutu in Rwanda were slaughtering Tutsi en masse in 1994, the left and certainly antiracists were appalled and said so openly. Because that genocide — an actual one, involving mass killing and the attempted destruction of an entire ethnic/national group — was rooted in inhumane, ethnocentric and even racist notions of superiority/inferiority, manifested by the powerful against the powerless. Likewise, antiracists like myself are appalled by the mistreatment of ethnic Koreans or the Buraku caste in Japan, and for the same antiracist reasons. We do not support multiculturalism only in the U.S. or throughout Europe, but believe it to be important and valuable everywhere. In Africa, for instance, few who call themselves antiracist would deny the right of whites in South Africa to live there on equal terms with all others. What we would deny is the right of whites there to establish a system of government such as apartheid, which viciously restricted the rights of the black African majority and consigned them to second-class citizenship. That kind of system is inherently unjust. It is not the presence of whites in South Africa that was or is the problem — and many brave whites opposed apartheid and fought for its eradication — but rather, the system of white supremacy established by whites there that needed to go.

Third, and most importantly, it is simply false that antiracists promote mass immigration of non-white peoples to the U.S. or Europe. Antiracists (and most of the left) view mass migration as evidence of systemic economic failure; it is an unfortunate consequence of an economic order that produces misery in much of the global South, while enriching the global North, thereby prompting labor mobility by persons in search of greater opportunity. Alternately, we view it as the unfortunate consequence of political repression, prompting migration by desperate people seeking an escape from persecution. Far from desiring mass migration, the left (and certainly the antiracist left) wishes that the systemic conditions that give rise to mass migration did not exist, because these conditions and the polices that cause them are examples, in our estimation, of institutional racism and global white supremacy!

We desire a global economic order that does not rely on the exploitation of labor and resources in the global South for the enrichment of economic elites in the North. We desire trade policies that would reverse the current tendency for U.S. corporations to flood markets in Mexico with cheap agricultural products, thereby undermining the Mexican agricultural economy and creating the very pressures that result in large numbers of Mexicans seeking opportunity in the U.S.

In other words, if we had our way, the global economic system would be ordered in such a fashion as to reduce pressures for migration. We would prefer that people be able to remain in their homes, in the lands they have always called their own, in the places they know, surrounded by friends and family. Because that is what people prefer. No one really wants to pack whatever belongings they are able to carry out of their homelands and travel to a strange place, or a distant shore, not for opportunity or anything else. They would mostly prefer opportunity right where they are, food where they are, medicine where they are, education where they are, a job in their own town. The European ancestors of those of us called white didn’t want to come to the U.S. either, but they felt they had no choice. The same is true for Mexicans, Hondurans, Salvadorans, or anyone else. To celebrate that migration by our “white” ancestors in the face of economic or political desperation, but then shut the door on those of color facing the same thing, is hypocritical and morally indefensible. And to the extent much of the misery creating “non-white” migration is directly due to the policies of the West — including trade policy and military interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean — to block immigration by persons made desperate by our actions would be like setting someone’s house on fire and then blocking the exits to prevent escape.

Furthermore, to allow capital and goods to flow across borders in search of the highest rate of return or price, but to chain labor to its country of origin via restrictive immigration policies is to forever tilt the economic order in favor of elites and against workers, including white workers in the global North! Because so long as labor cannot move freely in search of the highest wage, companies will be free to move production to the lowest cost nation, where workers will be forced to remain and work for whatever the company seeks to offer. This bids down the value of labor worldwide, thereby harming working people generally. In other words, restricting immigration in the name of white nationalism will only work to benefit white elites, not white working class people, who would be better off joining with migrant labor to fight for better wages and working conditions.

Bottom line: none of our support for a humane and compassionate immigration policy concerns a desire to use immigration as a way to alter the demographic makeup of so-called white nations. If those who were economically destitute or fleeing political repression or war were mostly “white” — as was the case for many of our ancestors, and for many Central Europeans from the Balkans in the 1990s — we would (and did) feel the same way. What we oppose is using immigration policy as a tool of racial and ethnic discrimination, because we oppose racism.

As for why we don’t advocate such open immigration policies in non-white countries (many of which have quite restrictive barriers to entry), there are two answers, both of which should be obvious. First, to the extent migration patterns follow opportunity, and to the extent the global economic order enriches the so-called white world at the expense of most of the so-called non-white world, it simply stands to reason that most migrants will seek opportunity in “white” nations because they will enjoy more opportunity there at present. So the issue is moot. Fewer people seek to migrate to poorer countries than rich ones: shocking, I know. Ironically, if white nationalists really want to redirect some of those migration patterns, they would do well to support calls for a new global economic order, which produced greater continental equity between the West and the rest.

Secondly, and putting aside what non-white nations should do morally in terms of immigration policies, it should be expected that when Western antiracists speak about immigration or immigrant rights, we will focus on immigration to the U.S. and Europe, because that’s where we live. As such, that is where we can have the most impact and influence over public policy, and it is also where we have the most obvious right to influence such policies. In other words, and although I am horrified by ethnic/racial mistreatment in other nations, unless that mistreatment is something I am perhaps subsidizing through substantial foreign aid and U.S.-government assistance, it is not likely to get nearly as much attention from me. This is not because those other oppressions fail to bother me, but because my outrage will likely amount to very little. This is why during the Cold War (you know the one that Bob Whitaker personally stopped), most of us on the left believed in focusing on the crimes of the United States abroad, and our nuclear stockpile, and our military interventions around the world: not because the Soviets weren’t doing the same and equally evil shit, but because we believed (and still do) that we should clean up our shit first, and that because it is our shit, we might actually have a chance of cleaning it.

As a side note, however, when other countries engage in ethnic or racial oppression and do so with substantial support from my country, I do make an issue of that. So, for instance, I am very clear about my opposition to the State of Israel constituted as a “Jewish State” (rather than as a state of the nation’s citizens), and whose oppression of Palestinians and newly-arrived Africans is appalling. In part, I make noise about this matter because, as a Jew, I believe it is important to raise my voice in opposition to Zionism, as both a practical and philosophical matter, but also because, as an American whose tax dollars help pay for that oppression (and without which it could not continue), I feel directly implicated.

From the Stupid to the Psychotic: The Myth of “White Genocide”

Whitaker then ramps up the crazy even further, claiming that not only are antiracists seeking to “flood” white nations with non-whites, but that we are doing so as a way to commit literal genocide against white people. Because he must know how silly this sounds to most people — and how most would logically see it as the fevered delusions of a white supremacist, perhaps even neo-Nazi — he naturally seeks to insulate himself from the charge, even making fun of it. And thus, at the end of The Mantra he insists:

…if I tell that obvious truth about the ongoing program of genocide against my race, the white race, Liberals and respectable conservatives agree that I am a naziwhowantstokillsixmillionjews.

See what he did there? He lampooned the actual genocide of European Jewry and the crimes of Hitler as if they were just a punch line to a joke, or something antiracists throw out there for the hell of it to defame people like him (cuz, ya know, why would anyone think a man who hangs a swastika on his wall and whose work has been spread around almost exclusively by open Hitler-admirers might be a Nazi?)

Of course, to claim that whites are facing genocide thanks to immigration trends suggests the BUGSers are unfamiliar with the definition of the term.

According to the official United Nations definition of the concept, genocide refers to:

“any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

Putting aside the question of intent for a second — in other words, the absurd notion that immigration is a weapon calculated by antiracists to destroy white people — there is the simple reality that even in effect, migrant flows cannot possibly produce a genocidal or even significantly hurtful outcome for whites. It is not connected to widespread killing of white people or bodily harm to whites (in fact, immigrants to the U.S. have lower violent crime rates than native born citizens, according to every scholarly piece of evidence on the subject); it is not linked to serious mental harm (unless white people are so weak that we are mentally destroyed by the presence of others in our midst, in which case the problem is ours, and no one is morally obliged to cater to our neurosis); it does not impose conditions that would bring about the physical destruction of whites or prevent us from making babies, or forcibly transfer the babies we do have to others.

Immigration, to the extent it alters the demographic makeup of the nations to which migrants flow, does not constitute genocide because it does not destroy others or prevent others from existing. It only takes away their ability to dominate and exercise hegemony. It only prevents them from using their superior numbers to dictate policy for others. But the preservation of hegemonic dominance and numerical superiority is not protected by the UN Convention on Genocide, and its preservation is not implied under any rational interpretation of the word’s meaning. Were it so protected, white nationalists could argue for limiting births among non-whites (which actually would meet the definition of genocide) as a way to preserve white numerical superiority in the U.S. and thus prevent “white genocide.” But obviously that would lead to an infinitely absurd regression, in which one would have to advocate genocide to prevent genocide, a formulation that would render the entire meaning of the term, well, meaningless.

The notion that the end of white hegemony is tantamount to white genocide is anti-intellectualism bordering on paranoid delusion. A people are not the victims of genocide simply because they cease to be a majority in a particular land. This is especially true when such a group will retain a disproportionate share of power, wealth and influence even as it diminishes in raw numbers to the level of a mere plurality.

To believe that whites in the U.S. will be the victims of genocide once we fall to a mere 45 percent of the national population (the lowest numbers projected by anyone, at any point in the foreseeable future) requires a fundamental ignorance as to what genocide is — such that it horribly disrespects those who have truly been the victims of it, all around the world and in many different eras — and suggests that far from believing whites to be superior, the white nationalists who sound these alarm bells have a well-rooted inferiority complex. After all, why would whites, at 45 percent of the population (or even 35 percent for that matter) be unable to preserve ourselves, physically, culturally or otherwise? Blacks have been able to do that at just 12-13 percent of the population; Latinos at anywhere from 10-18 percent; and Asian Americans at 4 percent. More to the point, even indigenous North Americans — though surely subjected to genocidal policies by the U.S. and Canadian governments — have managed to survive, at incredibly small population percentages, and well below anything that any sane observer could project for whites on the continent. If those who are not white have been able to survive and maintain their cultures and traditions, even when representing population shares one-third to one-twentieth that predicted for whites at our lowest possible percentage, but we will be unable to do so, just because we no longer represent 50 percent-plus one, then whites must rank as among the weakest and most pathetic groups of humans ever to walk the Earth. If a group cannot survive without its ability to dominate others and to control the world, it is not superior, but inferior, and it is not worthy of the power it has wielded for so long.

Which is to say, to the extent Whitaker and company are correct that whites will disappear if we are not allowed to retain our majority status in the U.S. and Europe, then such a fate will merely represent our lack of genetic and cultural fitness — the very kind of thing that biological determinists like the white nationalists normally believe in — and to the extent we will survive, despite demographic change, then the only thing being lost is hegemony: a status never deserved to begin with.

Whites and White Supremacy are Not the Same

Whitaker’s final salvo in The Mantra — which is the only part that some especially lazy Nazis occasionally post, rather than the whole thing (like I said, they like ‘em some shortcuts) — sums up his position in a particularly pathetic and ill-conceived fashion:

They say they are anti-racist. What they are is anti-white.

Anti-racist is a code word for anti-white

This, more than anything, indicates how far from understanding the antiracist position Whitaker and others in the white nationalist movement really are. Antiracists are not anti-white, and opposing racism is not “anti-white.” We are anti-white supremacy. We are against whiteness as a social/political and economic organizing principle. We believe that whites do not exist, biologically, because the genetic and biological differences between “whites” and “nonwhites” are simply too small to suggest sub-speciation. Even those differences that can be seen at the genomic level are not sufficient, quantitatively or qualitatively, to indicate that the human race has sub-speciated into actual scientific races. So when we speak hopefully of the end of whiteness, we do not mean the end of the people currently called white; we mean the end of a social order than provides privilege and opportunity to such persons on the basis of that designation.

There is a difference, and it is not a small one, between white people and whiteness. There have always been white people who opposed white supremacy and domination (and for that matter, people of color who upheld and defended the system of white supremacy). Although people make up systems and exist within them, we can also transcend them. It is we who are antiracists who take the more optimistic view about those persons called white. We believe that such persons — and that includes many of us personally — are better than the white nationalists apparently believe us to be. They appear to believe that racially oppressing others is our natural state of being, that we can’t help it, that we are compelled to dominate and control and injure, and that we should embrace those tendencies.

Antiracists say no: there is more than one way to live in this skin, and we intend to prove it.

_____

*I’m actually pretty sure it is this — the desire to stoke anger and paranoia among white nationalists, such that some might seek to do violent harm to antiracists — which animated Whitaker’s decision to formulate The Mantra, and spurs the devotion with which others have spread it. If you can make white people believe that antiracism is a plot to literally destroy them and their progeny for all time — the popular understanding of a concept like genocide — you can get at least some among those whites, imbued with this mentality of victimhood, to attack the source of their injury. What would be justifiable in the face of attempted genocide, after all? Most of us would say, pretty much anything. If I really think you’re trying to kill me and wipe out my group, I am morally justified in preemptively attacking and destroying you first. At least, that would be what most would likely say.

Since mantras by definition are not meant for conversion or persuasion — they don’t function like arguments to convince, but rather like prayers to center the devoted — it makes little sense to believe that this particular mantra was meant as a typical propaganda tool. Rather, it is intended to gin up resentment and hostility among the initiated, in the hopes that some among them will take matters into their own hands and stand up to those they accuse of attempting to kill them. It is a call, directly or indirectly, for bloodshed. And given the willingness on the part of these provocateurs to distort what many of us have said and believe, it is reasonable for us to believe they are especially hopeful that violence will be visited upon us.

So, for instance, the folks who run the White Genocide Project — affiliates of Whitaker and propagators of The Mantra — deceptively edited a portion of an essay I wrote back in 2010. They did so in a way that was calculated to give the impression that I was calling for (or at the very least happy about the prospects of) white genocide. So whereas my “Open Letter to the White Right” made it very clear that I was only gleeful about the fact that within a few decades there would no longer be white people left in the U.S. who could nostalgically remember the pre-civil rights era — and thus pine away for those “good old days” in a way that I feel is dangerous for the cause of human justice — the white nationalists edited my words so as to suggest that I had predicted (happily) the end of white people altogether.

Here is what I said:

“…in the pantheon of American history, conservative old white people have pretty much always been the bad guys, the keepers of the hegemonic and reactionary flame, the folks unwilling to share the category of American with others on equal terms.

Fine, keep it up. It doesn’t matter.

Because you’re on the endangered list.

And unlike, say, the bald eagle or some exotic species of muskrat, you are not worth saving.

In forty years or so, maybe fewer, there won’t be any more white people around who actually remember that Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best, Opie-Taylor-Down-at-the-Fishing Hole cornpone bullshit that you hold so near and dear to your heart.

There won’t be any more white folks around who think the 1950s were the good old days, because there won’t be any more white folks around who actually remember them…

Obviously, the reference is to the passing of old white reactionaries with a segregation Jones.

But in the hands of lying Neo-Nazis, this — as written on the White Genocide Project website — is changed to read as follows:

“[White people] You’re on the endangered list. And unlike, say, the bald eagle or some exotic species of muskrat, you are not worth saving. In forty years or so, maybe fewer, there won’t be any more white people around.”

That anyone would so butcher a statement suggests their dishonesty and venal commitment to their political ends of fascism, no matter the deception they must practice in order to achieve it.

Tim Wise and Melissa Harris-Perry on “All In With Chris Hayes” on MSNBC, 6/26/14: Cross-Racial Organizing and the Implications of the “Moral Mondays” Movement in North Carolina

My appearance (along with Melissa Harris-Perry) on “All In With Chris Hayes” (MSNBC), June 26, 2014, to discuss the implications of current cross-racial organizing in North Carolina, as part of the “Moral Mondays” movement for economic and social justice. This segment followed a longer piece on the movement in NC, which can (and should) be viewed, here.

Tim Wise Discussing White Privilege on the David Pakman Show – 5/29/14

My appearance on the David Pakman Show, 5/29/14 to discuss white privilege. Sorry about the loud wallpaper in the background…you can thank the Indianapolis JW Marriott for that visual effect.

Tim Wise on News One Now (With Roland Martin), 5/27/14: Mark Cuban, Internalized Bias and Race in America

Part of my appearance (via Skype) on News One Now with Roland Martin. Here we discuss comments by Dallas Maverick’s owner Mark Cuban, regarding his own internalized fears of young black men, and what the matter says about race in America and the way we discuss racism as a national problem.

The entire discussion (around 16 minutes) can be listened to as well below:

Of Platitudes Facile and Persistent: Reflections on the Predictability of a Right Wing Robot

Sometimes one has to wonder: are conservatives really that obtuse, or do they deliberately distort facts and data for political effect?

Either way, let there be no mistake, Crystal Wright, who blogs under the moniker “Conservative Black Chick,” is possibly the most unadulterated prototype of a reality-challenged right-wing zombie ever to take up bandwidth, and that is no small accomplishment. Her almost complete separation from that sometimes useful commodity known as “evidence in support of one’s argument” is no doubt why she has been such a regular on FOX News, where asininity is churned out like buttermilk for those all too happy to ingest it, and it probably explains why she isn’t much used to having her foolishness pointed out. After all, in the echo chamber that is FOX, misunderstanding or misinterpreting things like statistics, or the difference between, say, weather on the one hand and climate on the other, is pretty much normative. Indeed, it’s what pays the bills.

But on Friday night on CNN (see the full video below this essay), I had the honor of confronting Ms. Wright with facts, a happy circumstance about which she was none too pleased, and in response to which she came entirely unglued, to the point where she couldn’t even get my name right, even after being corrected on that rather simple detail multiple times. Needless to say, if you can’t get the name of the person you’re debating right, you aren’t likely to do too well with the facts being discussed.

The segment we were on together — along with Natalie Jackson, who is one of the attorneys for the family of Trayvon Martin* — was to discuss the admission by Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, that he is prejudiced, and crosses the street out of fear when he sees a young black kid in a hoodie, as with a white skinhead covered in tattoos. Cuban’s comments — part of the discussion sparked by the bigoted remarks of his fellow owner, Donald Sterling — were problematic, as Jackson pointed out, because they implicitly equated a black kid in a hoodie (like Martin for instance), with someone who belongs to a violent hate group. So too, Cuban’s statement amounted to saying that a black kid in a hoodie (like Trayvon) is rationally feared, thereby reinforcing the prejudice that ultimately brought about the confrontation between Martin and George Zimmerman, and without which race-based suspicion, Martin would still be alive. The clumsiness of the remarks was unfortunate, because the underlying point — that we all have biases, learned over many years, and which we need to work on challenging — is a valid one.

But naturally, when race is the issue, and a professional conservative is asked their opinion, it isn’t enough to simply say that Cuban’s remarks were an unfortunate or unwieldy way of making a larger and valid observation. No, it is axiomatic that right-wingers will virtually always seek to rationalize prejudice against black people whenever given the opportunity. And so Wright’s rejoinder was as predictable as it was tragic.

First, she offered a standard soliloquy on the evils of hip-hop culture and the hoodies associated with it (check!), then a line or two about the criminality of young black men (double-check!) and finished with the claim that although people have a right to wear whatever they like, she (and others) have the right to fear them and cross the street to avoid them, without being made to feel like racists for doing so (triple-damn-check!). In other words, black folks are basically dysfunctional and dangerous (a view that conservatives somehow fail to recognize as inherently racist), and white people like Mark Cuban are completely justified in fearing them.

When it was my turn, I pointed out that just because one has a right to be biased against people doesn’t mean it’s right to be biased, or that having expressed a bias or acted on that bias, one should be immune to criticism for it. And so, in the instant case, the problem with Mark Cuban’s comment was that he didn’t sufficiently interrogate the rationality of his expressed biases. As I noted, it actually is not rational for white people like Mark Cuban to fear black males, in hoodies or not. Why? Because, as I have explained by examining the data closely in previous essays, especially this one from last year, only a very small percentage — around 2 percent — of black males will commit a violent crime of any kind in a given year, and fewer than 1 percent will violently victimize a white person annually. In other words, to believe that the black kid in the hoodie is going to victimize you is a belief that is going to be wrong almost every time. And in fact, as I noted, whites like Cuban and myself are about 4-5 times more likely to be victimized by another white person than by a black person: this, also noted in the Justice Department’s statistical tables on violent crime victimization, referenced in the above and previous essay.

When asked to respond, Wright went into entirely predictable deflection mode, offering the statistic that black males are about 7 times as likely as white males to commit homicide, as justification for fear of black men, presumably on the part of folks like Mark Cuban. Although basically accurate (actually, the ratio is more like 7.6 to 1, as I’ll show below), her recitation of this number as if it were some kind of argumentative trump, reminded me of nothing so much as Inigo Montoya’s line in The Princess Bride, which I shall now paraphrase:

“You keep using that statistic. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Indeed, it does not. After all, just because the homicide rate is higher among blacks than whites does not mean it is rational to fear every black male you see, nor even any particular black male you see, for the following reasons.

1. Even though the black male homicide rate is much higher than its white counterpart, it is still the case that only a very small percentage of black males will commit a murder in any given year. In 2010, for instance — the last year for which we have comprehensive data — there were 5,705 black males who killed someone, in cases where the race of the perpetrator was known, out of a black male population that year of over 20 million.** That means that in a given year, less than 3 one-hundredths of one percent of black males will commit murder. So the question of whether someone should fear being killed by a black person is one best answered by reference to that statistic, which better signifies the real likelihood of being such a victim.

Even if we were to estimate the number of black males among the roughly 4,251 murderers whose race was unknown to authorities that year, and add them to the totals (likely a little less than half of those murderers, as with the black and male percentage of murderers whose race was known), this would still only mean that in 2010, there were perhaps around 7700 black male killers.*** Out of a population of 20 million black males that year, this would still represent less than 4 one-hundredths of one percent of black males who will commit murder in a given year.

2. Even those numbers for black homicide cannot reasonably explain white fear, since only a small percentage of that already small percentage will involve murders with black perps and white victims, and especially white strangers encountered on the street, as with Mark Cuban’s scenario. In 2010, for instance, there were 214 white strangers killed by 305 black males in the entire United States. That is 214 too many of course, but of the roughly 200 million non-Hispanic whites in the population that year, this represented roughly 1 ten-thousandth of one percent of whites who were victimized in this fashion by a black person. This means that a white person’s odds of being murdered by a black male stranger is about one in a million. So for Mark Cuban’s fear to be rational — or for any white person’s — we would have to assume that it was rational for white people to fear a crime that will only happen to 1 in a million of us, and will be committed by only 1.5 one-thousandth of one percent of black males, which is about 1 in every 75,000 black males in the country.

3. The fact that black males commit criminal homicide at a rate that is 7.6 times higher than that of white males is not enough to justify fear of blacks because 7.6 times a ridiculously small number is still a ridiculously small number. So, just to make it clear: The black male homicide offending rate in 2010 was at most (assuming the addition of those from the “race unknown” category who were likely black), 38 per 100,000 black males (7,700 black male murderers divided by the roughly 20 million black males in the population) Yes, this is 7.6 times the maximum white male rate of 5 per 100,000 (about 5,000 white male murderers as a share of roughly 100 million non-Hispanic white men, once the likely white portion of “race unknown” offenders is added in), but in neither case does the number rise to the level that should justify random terror at the sight of a black male walking down the street.

4. And for whites this is especially true because however much black males may have a higher rate of homicide offending, whites as victims are far more likely to be murdered by another white male than by a black male. In 2010, overall there were 685 whites (men and women combined) murdered by black males, but there were 2,924 whites murdered by white men that year: a number that is more than 4 times larger.

So when it comes to Cuban’s fears, if those fears are of a violent, homicidal attack, the fears are plainly absurd. And as I pointed out above, even if we’re looking at overall violent crime (including assault or robbery, for instance), it is still a very tiny share of black males who commit such crimes, especially against white strangers, and as such, his fear would be irrational, even if only about being mugged.

To this argument (which obviously I had to make in truncated form and to which Wright had no reply), “Conservative Black Chick” pivoted again, to the favorite meme of right-wing commentators; namely, the tried and true, “black babies are being born out of wedlock” argument. Ah yes, those irresponsible black baby daddies who impregnate black women and then run out on their kids. This, Crystal implied, is why black male crime is so high, and why it’s rational for whites to fear black males in hoodies. But this is an argument so stupefying for its sheer mendacity as to boggle the rational mind. Which is no doubt why it’s Bill O’Reilly’s favorite argument — well, next to the one where he blames Beyonce and Jay-Z for all the problems of the black community — and is likely why Ms. Wright finds it so inspiring, having clearly studied the craft of conservative scapegoating well.

Don’t get me wrong: Wright was correct when she noted that 72 percent of births in the black community at present are out-of-wedlock. And yes, I am fully aware that this is double the percentage of black births that were out-of-wedlock in the 1970s. But there’s a problem — and it is not a minor one — with Wright linking that fact to crime rates and suggesting that there is some kind of bright line correlation between the two subjects. As I pointed out in another essay last year (after examining data from 1978 and 2008), during the very same period that the share of black births that are out-of-wedlock was increasing by nearly 100 percent, the black violent crime rate was plummeting by roughly half! In other words, one trend was going up while the other was coming down, which means the correlation between the two factors is negative not positive. Now obviously I would never argue that black crime dropped because the share of out-of-wedlock births had risen. But frankly, the data would more justify that obviously absurd conclusion than the completely concocted one floated by Crystal Wright.

Oh, and not to put too fine a point on it, but ya know what else was getting bigger at the same time black crime rates were being cut in half? Yeah, well, that would be hip-hop, that other supposed cultural poison blamed by the right for all the problems of the world. As I noted and demonstrated in the essay mentioned above from last year, back in 1978, before the emergence of a broad-based hip-hop culture with national traction, there were nearly 1.5 million violent crimes committed by blacks, but by 2008, long after hip-hop had become the dominant musical and artistic culture in the U.S., that number had fallen to 1.3 million. So despite the explosion of this supposedly destructive influence, and despite an increase in the black population of about 11 million people over the thirty year period, there were roughly 200,000 fewer violent crimes committed by blacks in 2008 than there were in 1978: a drop of about 14 percent, numerically, and a massive drop in the violent crime offending rate, from 75.3 violent offenses per 1000 black people in 1978 to 41.7 per 1000 by 2008: a decline of 45 percent in the rate at which blacks commit violent crimes.

As I was trying to explain the fallacies in her use of data, Wright again inserted a non-sequitur, asking me “who’s in our prisons?” and suggesting that I should check the stats on who’s in federal prison, presumably to again demonstrate that whites have every right to fear black people. That she apparently doesn’t understand that most federal prisoners are not incarcerated for violent offenses (like the ones we’d been talking about) — indeed only 2 percent are violent offenders — and that virtually none are there for murder, as most all murders are state level offenses, was fascinating. That she was once again missing the point I had been making — and the only one relevant to the discussion of Mark Cuban’s fears, which was that very few blacks, be they incarcerated or not, had or will have white victims like Mark Cuban — was maddening. It was like I was speaking to a literal wall. Which is to say that Crystal Wright should perhaps consider changing her nickname to “Conservative Black Brick.” After all, given the way she spews data out of context and without even the faintest grasp on what that data does and does not indicate, she is clearly and quickly becoming just another brick in the right-wing wall of anti-intellectual shame.

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*On the show Friday night, and because I could not see the video as we spoke, but only had an audio feed (and not a great one at that), I mistook a brief and supportive interjection from Natalie Jackson as a challenge from Ms. Wright, and replied tersely, “let me finish.” I apologize for being rude to Ms. Jackson, as I did not know it was her speaking. Ms. Wright, on the other hand, having offered bogus data interrupted repeatedly when I tried to note how and why it was bogus and would not let me finish my point. For my terse replies to her, I offer no apology whatsoever.

**The most recent data I could locate for the numbers of black males in the population was from 2009 and is located here. Note, as of 2009, there were roughly 19.99 million males classified as black, either alone, or in combination with other ethnicity. Obviously by 2010 — the year I was using for the homicide data — those numbers would have bumped above 20 million, thus the estimate I am using here.

*** The large and adjustable dataset on murder compiled by the Wall Street Journal is the one I used for these calculations. To estimate the numbers of “race unknown” killers who were likely black, white, etc. I simply assumed that the share of that group that would match each racial category is likely similar to the percentages of each racial group in the category of murderers whose race was known (a reasonable guess it seems). I then did multiple calculations to arrive at the numbers presented here, all of which one can easily perform using the tables linked in the article by adjusting the different variables. If anyone would like a detailed breakdown of my calculations I’ll be happy to provide them, via e-mail at timjwise@mac.com.

Here is the full video of the discussion on CNN, via Mediaite.

Tim Wise on CNN with Don Lemon, 5/14/14: Donald Sterling, Racism and White Denial

Short clip from my May 14th appearance on CNN, in which I argue that the most disturbing thing Donald Sterling has said is not his blatant bigotry towards folks of color (specifically blacks), but his statement to Anderson Cooper that racism really isn’t a big problem in America anymore. It is this view, shared sadly by most white Americans, which actually makes progress on racial inequity harder. Condemning white supremacy in the guise of bigotry is easy. Confronting the white supremacy that comes in the form of white denial, and tells people of color “I know your reality better than you do,” is far more difficult.