Wigger Lover

"White trash beautiful, there's something you should know." Pt. 2

From today's LA Times

Cheney talks trash
The sordid history conjured by the vice president's joke about inbreeding between poor white people.
Gregory Rodriguez

Things are getting complicated. In the same week that a black man clinched the Democratic nomination for president, the current white, Republican vice president was forced to apologize for making a crack that played on the myth that poor white folks like having sex with their cousins.

It probably wouldn't have been a big deal had Dick Cheney not singled out West Virginia, the bluest of the red states. He was talking about having Cheneys on both sides of his family and, he said, "we don't even live in West Virginia." As director John Waters said in 1994, talking trash about "white trash" is "the last racist thing you can say and get away with." After all, there's no political action committee for hillbillies. (And no, the National Rifle Assn. doesn't count.)

It turns out that West Virginia officials did protest the vice president's remarks. Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd lamented Cheney's evident "contempt and astounding ignorance toward his own countrymen." But he and other politicians were clearly more offended by the targeting of their state than with the fact that Cheney was propagating the old canard that poor white Southerners were biologically tainted by inbreeding. That a generally humorless vice president would dare make such a joke in an election year shows how acceptable it really is to disparage lower-class whites from the South and beyond. But why?

Think of it this way: If a black politician made fun of poor blacks, or a Latino official made fun of poor Latinos, he'd likely be roundly denounced as a sellout. Indeed, politicians and all other upper-middle-class Latinos and blacks are generally assumed to bear a responsibility to improve the lot of the most downtrodden among them. So why do privileged white people like Cheney have greater license to distance themselves from poor whites? Aren't they also responsible for helping to lift their brothers and sisters up the socioeconomic ladder?

The term "white trash" seems to have emerged in the 1820s in Baltimore. It was slang, used by both free and enslaved blacks, to put down the poor whites with whom they sometimes found themselves in economic competition. Middle-class and elite whites then borrowed and popularized the term for their own purposes, one of which was to solidify their racial dominance.

That process started with the ideology of black inferiority, which emerged as a justification for slavery, and the concomitant ideology of white supremacy. In pre-Civil War Southern society, the presence of poor, uneducated and uncouth whites presented something of a problem for the advocates of slavery: They were living, breathing proof that whiteness and superiority were not the same.

By the 1850s, poor whites found themselves caught in the debate over slavery. In 1854, abolitionist author Harriet Beecher Stowe argued that "white trash" were the victims and byproducts of slavery, in which the planter class monopolized tillable soil and left poor whites struggling to survive. For their part, pro-slavery advocates retorted that the source of the white underclass was not slavery but the tainted blood that ran through these depraved people's veins.

In other words, in order to maintain the idea of white supremacy, white elites had to de-racialize their poor -- remove them from the group. They were "white" in skin color only. Just as the one-drop rule -- which held that any person with any amount of African blood would be considered black -- kept the white racial category "pure," so did the creation and disowning of "inferior" whites. "The term 'white trash' gave a name to people who were giving 'whiteness' a bad name," said Matt Wray, a Temple University sociologist and the author of "Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness." "It meant that they were behaving in ways that didn't suggest that they were the master race."

By the turn of the century, eugenicists were studying poor rural whites and documenting their social dysfunctions. They eventually made the fatuous connection between Southern white poverty and "consanguinity," or shared blood -- which meant incest. The accusation stuck, and many poor whites were labeled feeble-minded and became the victims of the forced-sterilization programs that began in the 1920s.

Cheney was probably not fully aware of the whole sordid history he conjured. But his casual joke suggests not only that political correctness does not apply to all groups equally but that there are corrosive, nonracial social divisions in this nation that are easily ignored and even tolerated. For too long, we've spoken of social tensions almost exclusively in terms of race. Perhaps the nomination of a black man for president will let that story line fade so that we can finally focus on the ever-present, easy-to-miss issues of class.

grodriguez@latimescolumnists.com

"Axe not what your country can do for you."

Those white suburban kids yelling, "Fa sheez, yo" could be running the Department of the Interior in a few years. From CNN's full transcript of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's speech to the NAACP this weekend:

In the 1961, it's been all over the Internet now, John Kennedy could stand at the inauguration in January and say, "ask not what your country can do for you, it's rather what you can do for your country." How do you spell "esk"? Nobody ever said to John Kennedy that's not English "esk". Only to a black child would they say you speak bad English. Kennedy got killed. Johnson stepped up to the podium and love feel, we just left love feel. And Johnson, said my fellow Americans. How do you spell fellow? How do you spell American? Nobody says to Johnson you speak bad English.

Ed Kennedy, today, those of you in the Congress, you know Kilpatrick. You know, Ed Kennedy today cannot pronounce cluster consonants. Very few people from Boston can. They pronounce park like it's p-o-c-k. Where did you "pock" the car? They pronounce f-o-r-t like it's f-o-u-g-h-t. We fought a good battle. And nobody says to a Kennedy you speak bad English. Only to a black child was that said.

That section of Wright's speech alone got him a Haterade shower from the morning yokels at MSNBC's Morning Joe. While honoring a court order to stay one hundred meters away from an elementary school yard, Tucker Carlson commented on the above section, "What a mediocrity! I mean, that's the embarrassing thing here. It's not just that he's anti-white and anti-American, all the things that have gotten so much publicity!"

So fine. Let's not give Wright any more pub and street cred. If you want to read a great mind write on how whites have managed to butcher the English language, but still remain successful in politics, pick up a copy of The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder by Mark Crispin Miller. Or watch the Bill Moyers interview with Jeremiah Wright, and start a drinking game everytime Moyers butchers the word "Washington" with "Worshington." And if you drink that malt liquor you'll get fucked up quicker.

Note: There was a clip from BLACK AND WHITE which would have illustrated this whole blog entry perfectly, but it got botched. Instead, think that some of this fear of "Black English" and the dismissal of white folks in power butchering the language in terms of the video below:

"There's 41 reasons to blast back / No one, followed Diallo to the grave...fade to black."

Fuck it, no rhyme or reason on this one.  Just that people need to think more about Amado Diallou.  And even with rappers like DMX, Common, Pharaohe Monch, Talib Kweli, and Dead Prez givin' the man shoutouts in their tracks, Michael Moore brings the shit home to white cops in this video from a few years back. 

"Terrorists with etiquette who vote and kill their president / Their capacity for evil so evident and prevalent"

If you've ever protested or witnessed a Klan rally then you've seen this kind of irony firsthand: Frequently skinheads, Nazis, and other fascists will be decked out in LeBron James jerseys, bump Kanye West from their Toyota, or even plagiarize speeches from Louis Farrakhan. In other words, even those that reject black, foreign, or non-Christian ideas and cultures will end up being aligned with them in their actions. However, this shit with "Klansmen for Obama" takes it to a whole 'nother level. It doesn't exist, but seriously? He's not even" black enough" to hate!?

From The New Republic:

Post-racial

Even white supremacists don't hate Obama.

Michael Crowley,  The New Republic  Published: Wednesday, March 12, 2008

David Duke was on the phone, talking about Barack Obama. Yes, that David Duke: After a query lodged at his website, the infamous ex-Klansman had responded via a mysterious e-mail address--he appeared in my inbox as "info45." (Duke regularly changes address to combat hate mail--the kind he doesn't like, that is.) Duke said he was traveling in Europe, where he often meets with fellow Holocaust deniers, and agreed to discuss the possibility that the United States might soon elect a black president.

Putting it mildly, one would not expect Duke to applaud this development. During Jesse Jackson's 1988 presidential campaign, after all, Duke said Jackson's election "would be the greatest tragedy ever to befall this country." Warning that "the white majority in this country are losing their rights," Duke announced his own counter-candidacy, one whose main purpose seemed to be hounding Jackson.

Yet, far from railing at Obama's rise, Duke seems almost nonchalant about it. Self-described white nationalists like himself, he explained cordially, "don't see much difference in Barack Obama than Hillary Clinton--or, for that matter, John McCain." Sure, Duke considers Obama "a racist individual," citing his Afrocentric Chicago church. But soon the founder of the National Association for the Advancement of White People was critiquing Obama as overhyped and insubstantial in terms you might hear from, say, Clinton strategist Mark Penn. "They say he's for change. What change? He's become almost a cult figure. I don't see any shining light around Obama's head. I don't see any halos," Duke said.

Sure, we may not see David Duke strolling around with The Audacity of Hope under his arm any time soon. But his mild tone is still a curious reaction to what white supremacists have long considered a sign of racial apocalypse. "Does Race Still Matter?" asks the latest issue of US News & World Report, which features Obama on its cover. Undoubtedly, it does. But, thus far, Obama is largely delivering on his promise as a post-racial candidate--and hilariously confounding the worldview of white supremacists at the same time.

After Obama won the Iowa caucuses last month, Mark Potok, a researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center, decided to survey the latest writings of the major right-wing hate groups he regularly monitors. How would America's vilest race-mongers respond to a black candidate's victory in a white Midwestern state? Again, the response was counterintuitive. "It was extremely weak," Potok says. "You could find people saying nasty words about Obama, but it wasn't red-hot at all."

That has remained the case even as Obama has become the front-runner. On several websites, forums, and online journals that promote the view of white superiority over blacks--the types of outlets that rejoiced over Hurricane Katrina and the destruction of the Lower Ninth Ward--there is precious little discussion of Obama's campaign. The day after Obama's blowout win in Wisconsin, for instance, the home page of the poisonous Vanguard News Network featured stories on Serbian nationalism, home schooling, Holocaust-denial, and Pat Buchanan--yet nothing about Obama. It turns out that, although the white right certainly has no love for Obama, its hatred of him is muted--and directed less at Obama himself than at other nefarious forces behind him.

To be sure, it's no challenge to unearth racist invective about the man. One bilious anti-Obama blog's URL, for instance, seamlessly conjoins his name with the N-word. Elsewhere, Obama is cast as a covert black-power agent. An essay by a David Duke compatriot compares Obama to Malcolm X and likens his slogan of "Si Se Puede!" to chanting "Kill the whites!" There are rumblings about mass slavery reparations (even though, in 2004, Obama said he opposes "just signing checks over to African Americans"). And some even see hints that Obama may be leading a national black uprising. "Are blacks becoming more hostile towards whites?" asked a recent entry at the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens website. The author, citing the early February rampage by a black gunman near St. Louis, Missouri, advised that "the success of the Obama campaign might be emboldening blacks to be more aggressive towards white[s] on a national scale." (No word on whether such hostility subsided after Hillary's New Hampshire and Nevada victories.)

Yet, for every instance of loony racist paranoia, one finds a countervailing explanation for why Obama's rise is not a story about black America rising up. White supremacists are less inclined to hate Obama than the white race-traitors who are enabling him. "If you are a white supremacist who is dedicated to a biological understanding of racism that says blacks are inferior, the only way [Obama] could be elected is with the conniving of unseen forces," explains Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates, a Boston-based expert on white supremacists.

Thus, a recent essay by one John Brown on the website of the racialist journal American Renaissance attributes Obama's rise to white liberals in search of an idyllic post-racist society (which of course they will never actually find): "The reality is that white America has more invested in this candidate than does black America." For Brown, Obama's success against Hillary should actually comfort anyone wringing their hands over a White House beholden to black America: "[I]f Clinton wins, she will be more beholden to African Americans than Obama will be if he wins. She will owe them in a way that Obama [never] will."

There's an even bigger culprit in this world than white liberals, however. Naturally, we speak here of the Jews. It turns out that what truly animates the white supremacist contingent these days is not racism but anti-Semitism. The black man is of trifling concern next to the "Zionist Occupation Government," or ZOG, a term that describes puppet regimes of the global Zionist conspiracy. As one commenter on the popular white-power Web forum Stormfront explains it: "The blacks would be a non-factor if it weren't for the ZOG's legislations and skullduggery (civil rights act, hate crime laws, affirmative action, welfare, forced integration, etc etc ...), allied with a compliant media that promotes black worship." Thus, when the Jewish Telegraphic Agency published an anodyne article on Obama's support among American Jews, white-power sites like National Alliance News ("your single source for worldwide pro-White news") quickly pounced. "Barack Obama: The Jewish Connection" came the breathless headline. (Never mind that Obama has had a rockier relationship with the American Jewish community than has Clinton.) "[U]ltimately he's just another Jew puppet," concludes another Stormfront commenter. "I look at his foreign advisers," adds David Duke. "[They're] Israeli supremacists. He's even got Dennis Ross!"

All this contorted rationalization suggests that white supremacists feel compelled to explain away the confounding notion of an immensely gifted and appealing black man. Yet it also reflects the fact that, unlike Jesse Jackson, Obama simply lacks certain cultural signifiers--not to mention an urban-centric policy agenda--that would viscerally threaten racist whites obsessed with maintaining "white rights," ending affirmative action, and cutting off nearly all non-European immigration.

But there may be one more factor at work: hatred overload. It's a testament of sorts to Hillary Clinton that, by virtue of her cartoonish image as a leftist man-hating shrew, she manages to arouse more vitriol among white supremacists than a black man. Meanwhile, white racists absolutely despise John McCain for his support of George W. Bush's immigration reform plan, which they view as a dire threat to America's European-based culture. "I don't think Obama will be any more negative for the United States than Hillary or John McCain," explains Duke. "In fact," he added, "we probably have less preference for a European like a John McCain or a Hillary who has betrayed our interests, our heritage, our rights."

Edward Sebesta, a Dallas-based expert on neo-Confederate groups, says that, in a match-up against Obama, McCain might wind up suffering the brunt of the hatred: "They really hate McCain," he says. "They're suffering from emotional exhaustion. They might not have the energy to be infuriated by two candidates at the same time." Amazingly, some commenters on racist websites are already debating the grim choice between Obama and McCain. Who knows, maybe David Duke can form the oddest MySpace group of all time: Klansmen for Obama. Now that would be post-racial.

"Cause my money's spent on the goddamn rent / Neither party is mine, not the jackass or the elephant."

Yesterday morning consumer advocate Ralph Nader announced his candidacy for President on NBC's Meet the Press. Nader illustrated that all three major candidates (Obama, Clinton, and Mccain) share similar beliefs on issues such as single payer health insurance, military budget, and labor law reform and re-iterated that all voters should, "take this opportunity to have a much broader debate on the issues that relate to the American people." He also squashed advanced criticisms of his "spoiler" tag by predicting, "[if] the Democrats can't landslide the Republicans this year, they ought to just wrap up, close down, emerge in a different form."

His announcement came almost four years to the day of a press conference in Washington D.C., where spoke on the issue of reparations for African Americans:

I think a lot of Americans aren't aware that there are corporations today, pursuant to mergers or even actual corporations, that were profiting from slavery, such as the Aetna Corporation, before the Civil War, and there's a payback there. I think if white people had great grandparents who were slaves, they would be very concerned about that. There's got to be justice here. And all John Conyers is asking is a national commission to inquire into it to see what the responsibilities of governments are.

After all, slaves built a good part of the U.S. Capitol. They built a lot of public buildings. And I think the money is not designed to go to individuals; it's designed to amplify the budgets that are now being squeezed to rebuild the lower-income areas in our cities, for example; to expand health care to African American children, to reduce their exposure to sources of deadly asthma and lead poisoning. That is something that we should all discuss.

After all, you know, there were other genocidal or vicious treatments of ethnic minorities that have gotten some justice in recent years. And of course the tragedy of slavery in this country is one of the two worst tragedies in North American history, the other being the genocidal annihilation of the first Native Americans. And we should always remember.

"[A] white boy bustin ass til they put him in his grave/ He ain't gotta be a black boy to be livin like a slave"

"We got Americans with families that can't even buy a meal/ Ask a brother who's been downsized if he's getting any deal/ Or a white boy bustin ass til they put him in his grave/ He ain't gotta be a black boy to be livin like a slave/ Rich people have always stayed on top by dividing white people from colored people/ but white people got more in common with colored people then they do with rich people"

Former Senator John Edwards will appear on the Tyra Banks show this Friday in his ongoing publicity and campaign to be the Democratic nominee and eventual next President of the United States. Check your local listings for time and channel. A clip leaked out earlier this week and is gaining buzz on the politico blogs as Edwards is asked, what it feels "like to be a minority?" (The video is embedded below).

It's all fun and games and shooting ducks in a barrel for poli-sci students who want to laugh at a guy who may have (as Chris Rock puts it) picked the worst time in history to be a white dude running for President. But those who have been following the career and politics of John Edwards for a while know that he's onto a lot of issues that touch all Americans (white or black) ravaged by injustice and inequality. Even Martin Luther King III (son of Martin Luther King Jr.) has stepped up and commented that his father would be proud of Edwards' dedication to economic and social justice--issues pushed by the civil rights leader heavily towards the end of his life. Here's an excerpt of a letter that MLK III wrote to Edwards earlier this week:

I appreciate that on the major issues of health care, the environment, and the economy, you have framed the issues for what they are - a struggle for justice. And, you have almost single-handedly made poverty an issue in this election.

...

I am disturbed by how little attention the topic of economic justice has received during this campaign. I want to challenge all candidates to follow your lead, and speak up loudly and forcefully on the issue of economic justice in America.

From our conversation yesterday, I know this is personal for you. I know you know what it means to come from nothing. I know you know what it means to get the opportunities you need to build a better life. And, I know you know that injustice is alive and well in America, because millions of people will never get the same opportunities you had.

I believe that now, more than ever, we need a leader who wakes up every morning with the knowledge of that injustice in the forefront of their minds, and who knows that when we commit ourselves to a cause as a nation, we can make major strides in our own lifetimes. My father was not driven by an illusory vision of a perfect society. He was driven by the certain knowledge that when people of good faith and strong principles commit to making things better, we can change hearts, we can change minds, and we can change lives.

So, I urge you: keep going. Ignore the pundits, who think this is a horserace, not a fight for justice. My dad was a fighter. As a friend and a believer in my father's words that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, I say to you: keep going. Keep fighting. My father would be proud.

Sincerely,
Martin L. King, III

"You have to get with it; the robot went out ten years ago!"

This is from yesterday's HuffingtonPost.com and the video of the incident mentioned is at the botom of the page:

Obama, Clinton, and the Spectre of the Culture Wars

by Jeff Chang

In Iowa last Tuesday, a man--a good friend and a brilliant professor named Kembrew McLeod, actually--dressed up as a robot--yes, a robot--to heckle Bill Clinton on, of all things, the infamous 1992 Sister Souljah incident.

You may remember that one: at a crucial moment in his presidential campaign, Clinton seized on a decontextualized quote by the rapper about the Los Angeles riots to reassure white voters that he was solidly on their team. (Then he went on Arsenio Hall to play a disastrous sax solo.)

So against the round booing of 400 FOBs--none of whom, it may be safely presumed, had ever been forcibly detained like Wen Ho Lee--my-friend-the-robot dropped a club promoter's amount worth of flyers that detailed Clinton's disservices to racial justice while, at the top of his lungs, demanding on behalf of all robots that the Great Triangulator apologize to Souljah.

It's true that a lot has changed since then. A rap group even won an Academy Award. And I'm still not sure why my man needed to be in a robot suit. But he had a point.

The resentments that made it possible for Bill Clinton to summon race, class, and generational divides to scold youths of color into behaving properly towards nice middle-of-the-road voters haven't disappeared. Think of how the Don Imus firing turned into a referendum on rap earlier this year. (And think of how much money Imus received to return to the airwaves.) Think of the 50 noose incidents in the two months since the march on Jena in September.

The culture wars have never really ended.

...

So we now live in a country where racial and economic segregation of students and teachers approach pre-Brown vs. Board of Education levels. Campuses allegedly overrun by tenured radicals remain ivory towers where 80% of faculty are white. Young women and men of color are being disappeared into prisons at historically high rates. Black and Latino poverty rates remain twice that of whites.

Perhaps Sullivan's and other conservatives' battle fatigue may actually be the key to a progressive turn. He notes that, of all the Democratic candidates, Obama attracts the most support from Republicans. Could it be that they too are tired of the nonsense? And it has been a conservative Supreme Court that has undone the excesses of allegedly "centrist" lawmaking that criminalized vast numbers of youths of color--striking down anti-loitering ordinances and the death penalty for those under 18, and rolling back the effects of mandatory minimums.

But although Obama has gestured toward a platform that takes up some of these problems, the larger discussion remains off the table for most candidates and reporters. Clearly, it takes a certain kind of robot to see that the end of the culture wars will have to come through addressing the schisms of race, class, and generation.

Jeff Chang is the author of the award-winning Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of The Hip-Hop Generation, and covered Barack Obama for Vibe Magazine. His next book is on the selling of American multiculturalism.
www.cantstopwontstop.com