Racism 101?

Rev Wooden at Aside From The Obvious , in a post entitled "Racism 101", says, "OK, at the risk of offending some of you who get this, but with the sincere hope that this will be news to others, let me tell you a simple fact: Racism is not about bigotry. I say this because the intense hostility to our president, yes ours and I do mean all Americans, is profoundly racist."

This makes no more sense to me after the election than it did before. If you recall, before the election many UU bloggers were saying that racism was the issue because then-Senator Obama wasn't poling as well as they thought he should have. The fact that he was poling better than President Clinton had been during either of his campaigns didn't impress them; any opposition to Obama showed institutional racism. And now people seem shocked that there is intense hostility to the President... as if there hasn't been intense hostility to the President- any President- for decades now.

Let's take Rev. Wooden's points in order: "Would we ever question the natural citizenship of a white person running for president?" Yes, we would. We have. Surely some others out there are old enough to remember that some people claimed that JFK couldn't count as a citizen for the purposes of running for President because he was Catholic, and his obedience to the Pope would run afoul of the "...abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject..." portion of citizenship? The same accusations were leveled at Republican candidate Mitt Romney, though for a different church. Politics is politics... President Obama is susceptible to the citizenship thing because he was a complete unknown before the primary season, a distressingly high percentage of Americans weren't even aware that Hawaii is a state, and many of those who did know didn't know when it became a state.

"Did we ever call Richard Nixon socialist (when it meant something) when he imposed wage and price controls or even tried to reform health care?" Yes, many did. Nixon may have been popular among Republicans, but not among conservatives. Here is an article calling Nixon a socialist in 1971- before he imposed wage and price controls or tried to reform health care! After those things, libertarians and conservatives left the Republican party in droves- Nixon was a great recruiter for the Libertarian party. Even those who stayed were disaffected; that's how Reagan almost knocked off Ford in the primaries.

"Did we question the integrity of Bush 1 when he addressed the nation's schoolchildren and asked them to write him telling how they would help him?" Yes, we did. In fact, the Democrats held Congressional hearings about it. There was plenty of uproar about it. If you don't remember, read When Bush spoke to students, Democrats investigated, held hearings from Beltway Confidential. "The day after Bush spoke, the Washington Post published a front-page story suggesting the speech was carefully staged for the president's political benefit. "The White House turned a Northwest Washington junior high classroom into a television studio and its students into props," the Post reported. With the Post article in hand, Democrats pounced. "The Department of Education should not be producing paid political advertising for the president, it should be helping us to produce smarter students," said Richard Gephardt, then the House Majority Leader. "And the president should be doing more about education than saying, 'Lights, camera, action.'" Democrats did not stop with words. Rep. William Ford, then chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, ordered the General Accounting Office to investigate the cost and legality of Bush's appearance. On October 17, 1991, Ford summoned then-Education Secretary Lamar Alexander and other top Bush administration officials to testify at a hearing devoted to the speech."

Come on now, people, it's hard enough to fight racism without having the word stripped of all meaning by claiming that anyone who disagrees with you is racist, or that any speech or essay you don't like is full of "code words", or that perfectly ordinary partisanship is racist.

Episcopal Church repudiates Doctrine of Discovery

From Indian Country Today "ANAHEIM, Calif. – In a first-of-its-kind action in the Christian world, the national Episcopal Church has passed a landmark resolution repudiating the Doctrine of Discovery and urging the U.S. government to endorse the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Organizers of the bill hope it will lead to the overturning of a 19th century U.S. Supreme Court ruling and Congress’ assumption of plenary power over Indian nations they say are illegitimate and immoral, and continue to strip American Indian nations of their inherent sovereignty."

The "Discovery Doctrine", also known as "The Doctrine of Christian Discovery", is a concept based on Papal Bulls from the 15th century giving Christian nations legal title to all parts of the world populated and governed by "saracens, pagans, and other enemies of Christ" This meant that land "discovered" by Christians belonged to the government of the discoverer, not the people who were already living there when it was "discovered". This doctrine was enshrined in US law by the Supreme Court decision Johnson v. M'Intosh . This decision is the legal basis for everything the US Government has done to Native Americans since 1923. An excellent article on the history of the Discovery Doctrine by Steve Newcomb can be found here

The Episcopal Church is to be commended for bringing this issue to public attention.

Are some Anti-Racism, Anti-Oppression programs really another form of racism?

I have long thought so, and a recent news story reminded me of a lively blog discussion that touched on this. The blog discussion (here and here)concerned the definition of cultural racism used by a public school system:
Cultural Racism:Those aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value and normality to white people and Whiteness, and devalue, stereotype, and label people of color as “other”, different, less than, or render them invisible. Examples of these norms include defining white skin tones as nude or flesh colored, having a future time orientation, emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology, defining one form of English as standard, and identifying only Whites as great writers or composers.

Cut to the news story that reminded me of these discussions: First Lady Michelle Obama Reflects on Talking 'Like a White Girl' . I was particularly struck by this exchange between Ms. Obama and a grade school student:"And when one student asked her, "How did you get to where you are now?" she credited, in part, her command of the language.
"I remember there were kids around my [Chicago] neighborhood who would say, 'Ooh, you talk funny. You talk like a white girl.' I heard that growing up my whole life. I was like, 'I don't even know what that means but I am still getting my A.'"

In other words, she got where she is by "...having a future time orientation, emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology, defining one form of English as standard,..." What if Barack and Michelle had grown up with more enlightened teachers who knew that defining one form of English as standard was racist, and encouraged them to keep it real with ebonics? What if Michelle had been told to conform to a more collective ideology with her peers, rather than adopting the white ambition for individual A's? What if they had been told that "a future time orientation"- things like punctuality and delayed gratification- were white concepts, and it was racist to expect it of them? While they are both so talented they'd have succeeded at something, there's no way in hell she'd have been a corporate executive, and he the President of the United States. How many minority children have been kept from being all that they can be anti-racism programs, using modern definitions of "racism", that result in the child being totally unprepared for real life after leaving the public schools? And isn't any program that results in real harm to minority children racist, regardless of intent?