Thursday, March 20, 2008

Southerners know exactly what this is


Andrew Sullivan, over at his Daily Dish, thinks the above anti-Barack Obama video is an instance of GOP "swift-boating" of the Democratic presidential candidate in the wake of the hullabaloo over his ex-pastor's sometimes-incendiary sermons.

It's not that.

"Swift-boating," named for the ginned-up controversy over 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry's days as a Navy "swift boat" commander in Vietnam, is an ideological assassination. The above hit on Obama is racial.

That makes it race-baiting, not "swift-boating." Down in Oxford, Miss. -- home of one of the video's creators, former Laura Ingraham Show producer Lee Habeeb, now an executive with the right-wing Salem Radio Network -- there is a more "colorful" term for the tactic, which is as old as Jim Crow.

The difference between "swift-boating" and race-baiting boils down to what we don't see in that odious little YouTube offering -- a single white face.

IF HABEEB and his cronies merely meant to send the message that the U.S. senator from Illinois is a wild-eyed, unpatriotic lefty, why not juxtapose the video of Obama's interviews and Wright's red-hot rhetoric with egregious clips of at least a few egregious white people through the ages?

You know, like hippie anti-war protesters from the '60s waving Viet Cong flags. Like Abbie Hoffman. Like Jerry Rubin. Like Jane Fonda in Hanoi. Or Sean Penn with Saddam.

Like the Dixie Chicks on foreign soil cracking on the neocons' lord and savior, George W. Bush.

No, instead we get "unpatriotic" images of "ingrate" black men -- Tommie Smith and John Carlos, fists raised at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City . . . Malcolm X . . . all to a Public Enemy rap soundtrack. All we needed to make the argument ideological and not racial was just a single honky.

Somewhere.

We didn't get one.

And Habeeb and his fellow anonymous White Citizens' Council wannabes aren't fooling this Southern boy with bull hockey like this. From Jonathan Martin's blog on the Politico web site:

Asked directly if he believes Obama is a patriotic American, Habeeb said "absolutely." But he added that "his patriotism is not my kind of patriotism."

"I believe he is hiding his Marxism from the American people," Habeeb said.

And despite the inclusion of Malcolm X, the black Olympians and a rap song by Public Enemy, Habeeb claimed he was not being suggestive.

"I didn’t do this to make him like a scary black man."

LOOK FOR the head fake. The White Citizens' Councils were all about fighting commies and pinkos . . . whose tactics, we were to believe, centered on wrecking America from within through the mixing of the races.

This YouTube video was all about the "scary black man." And you can blame it all on some scary white men.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

All right, enough self-flagellation here. Join Opus Dei if you go for that sort of stuff, but don't give the fringe racists so much power.

From what I can glean, I grew up just across Florida Boulevard from you and am 2 years your junior. Unless Florida Boulevard is the Great Divide for racism (it isn't), the racism in our hometown and most of the South is not as caustic and direct as the racism you are describing in these last entries.

Most of our mamas would have slapped us silly had they heard us hurl a racial epithet at the deliveryman. We usually appreciated him more than that. Most of our mamas and daddies would have scolded us for using the 'n' word even in private. My friends would not have thought it "cool" to use the 'n' word.

Were there sins of omission and exclusion? You bet. Were there equal opportunities? No way! Is any of this benign? Not in the least! Does it still occur? Yes, just look at the Rolfe McCollister country clubbers who have abandoned public schools if you want proof.

Nevertheless, the racism you are describing was on the fringes during most of our lifetime. At least that has been my experience.

Yes, there was a time when it wasn't. I was astonished to discover that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black had connections to the Klan. I remember an apologist for him saying that it just wasn't uncommon.

Still, the "scary white men" during our lifetime are an aberration, not the norm.

The Mighty Favog said...

I learned the epithet from listening to Mama and Daddy. And the N-word was not uncommon in any way among my relatives and schoolmates.

That's just the way it was growing up blue collar -- really blue collar in Baton Rouge.

I'm not making this stuff up.

Is it that bad now? No. Was everybody that bad then? No.

Did this kind of crap happen A LOT? Hell, yes. At least in the circles I ran in.

The first really and truly "integrated" school I went to was Baton Rouge High. And we generally got along well, though I remember a time or two when things were tense.

So far as I see it, you've got to take on the monster direct, or he's gonna clean your clock. Because psychologically speaking, conditioning is a hell of a thing to undo.

Anonymous said...

On this Good Friday, I've been fretting about what you wrote and what I wrote. Am I idealizing things a bit? Maybe so. And I'm a bit inconsistent on these subjects.

I started out at Bakerfield Elementary. My Dad taught in Baker early in his career, and that's where I started out. It was about 50/50, and I saw black poverty as "up close and personal" as a Southern white boy was gonna. Saw some white poverty also, and it really didn't look so different.

A year ago, I moved to Shreveport. At their Mardi Gras parades, a number of folks fly the Confederate battle flag. Now, that IS in your face and caustic. I was totally offended. I made a lot of noise about it to anyone who cared to listen and some that didn't.

The people up here, though polite to me, gave me the impression that I could go back "home" if I didn't like it here. For the most part, they did not fly the stars and bars, but neither were they interested in talking about it. Polite people just don't do that.

So there's your sin of omission. As long as white people don't speak out, Bubba will continue to fly his battle flag. But Bubba is still a small minority.

We may not be saying, "crucify Him," but we stand back and let it happen.

And though blacks make up the majority in Shreveport, they make up less than 10% of attendance at the parades on Clyde Fant. They have their own parades. Fancy that!

So, am I offended because I saw better or am I idealizing my home town and pining for home?

But I go back to my assertions of self-flagellation. Ok, that was strong. But you make a very good point--conditioning is hard to overcome. Forgive yourself and your parents for that. They likewise learned epithets from their parents.

Also, you came to be repulsed by racism. Don't you think it is because your parents taught you right from wrong? So well that you began to see their own inconsistencies? I'm just wondering.

Maybe I'm lucky that I didn't hear much in the way of epithets at home. One day at Bakerfield in the late 60's, a black classmate called me a "white honky." I returned fire by calling her a "black honky," and she and her friends thought that was hilarious. The joke was pretty much lost on me.

Happy Easter!

The Mighty Favog said...

FWIW, as hard as I am on my hometown sometimes, and as nice a place as Omaha is to live . . . I want to go home, too.

Objectively, in many ways it makes no sense. On the other hand, it's home, and I feel a lot more comfortable in my own skin there.

Oftentimes, BR drives me nuts, but -- dammit -- it's home. And those are my people.

Perhaps the difference in our perceptions are ones of class. I would suspect the kid of a plantworker -- like I was -- would have a somewhat different experience than the kid of a teacher. The elementary schools I went to were by and large blue-collar and overwhelmingly white.

As in two black kids between two elementary schools, and that was only starting in 1970-71, when all the schools finally were "integrated" by the neighborhood-schools plan.

Before that, the children of the one black family in Red Oaks -- their land was there before the neighborhood was -- had to go all the way to Mayfair, I think.

Never had a black teacher until I got to Villa del Rey in '71, and the couple of black teachers at that all-white school caught hell.

I heard Mrs. Hawkins get called a "nigger" to her face once or twice. And that was BEFORE the North Street riot the next year.

Things got so bad in my fifth-grade class, that my second black teacher, Mrs. White, called a parents meeting to try to stop the racial stuff that was going on. My mother is still resentful that the poor woman had the "nerve" to do that.

With backup like that from some parents, imagine the respect those teachers got from the kids.

And that leads into the sad fact that my relatives were overwhelmingly racist -- sometimes vociferously so. There wasn't anything unspoken about it. That is, unless you were around blacks to whom they felt the need to be polite.

But when it was an all-white crowd . . . Katie bar the door.

Anyway, here's a link to an old post that might flesh out some stuff:

http://revolution-21.blogspot.com/2006/12/yes-martin-luther-king-jr-was-great.html