race – Page 2 – Hank Kalet

The race question and the judiciary

The hearings concerning Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, are a bit anticlimactic — as Sen. Lindsay Graham pointed out the other day — but that hasn’t stopped the Republican Party from descending into the pit of racial and ethnic bigotry.

In their attempt to hobble the nominee, painting a comment she made about how our personal histories affect our ability to respond to information, they have betrayed their own biases and the party’s retrenchment into an apartheid of irrelevance.

Consider the repeated references to other Hispanic judges and nominees, especially the failed Bush appointee Miguel Estrada — as if all Hispanic nominees are judged to be the same and support for one automatically insulates a senator from charges of racism.

The most salient commentary on the first two days of hearings came from Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post in his Tuesday column — written before yesterday’s Estrada-fest:

Republicans’ outrage, both real and feigned, at Sotomayor’s musings about how her identity as a “wise Latina” might affect her judicial decisions is based on a flawed assumption: that whiteness and maleness are not themselves facets of a distinct identity. Being white and male is seen instead as a neutral condition, the natural order of things. Any “identity” — black, brown, female, gay, whatever — has to be judged against this supposedly “objective” standard.

Thus it is irrelevant if Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. talks about the impact of his background as the son of Italian immigrants on his rulings — as he did at his confirmation hearings — but unforgivable for Sotomayor to mention that her Puerto Rican family history might be relevant to her work. Thus it is possible for Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) to say with a straight face that heritage and experience can have no bearing on a judge’s work, as he posited in his opening remarks yesterday, apparently believing that the white male justices he has voted to confirm were somehow devoid of heritage and bereft of experience.

The whole point of Sotomayor’s much-maligned “wise Latina” speech was that everyone has a unique personal history — and that this history has to be acknowledged before it can be overcome. Denying the fact of identity makes us vulnerable to its most pernicious effects. This seems self-evident. I don’t see how a political party that refuses to accept this basic principle of diversity can hope to prosper, given that soon there will be no racial or ethnic majority in this country.

We are one people, but we have different vantage points. That the GOP refuses to acknowledge this is something destined to condemn them to historical irrelevance.

The darkness in our souls

Stories like this are puzzling, not because the specifics make no sense — they unfortunately do — but because in the year 2008 in the United States there are still people who do harm to others for no other reason than racial, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation.

I don’t mean to sound naive, or to come off as some pie-in-the-sky type, but what gives? Perhaps I am just more sensitive to these things than others, having been subjected to it while growing up. As a Jew, I have heard the slurs, some of them unconsciously offered by well-intentioned people. I remember a friend in high school telling me he could tell who was Jewish and who was not just by looking people. I remember getting into a fight with a friend, a Puerto Rican kid who lived down the street, just because he used one of the standard anti-Jewish pejoratives — which led me, in one of those moments that I can look back on in sorry and embarrassment, to call him some pretty nasty, ethnic-based names in return.

That was in the 1970s and one might think that we wouldn’t have to deal with this stuff anymore. And by we, I mean all of us. But the coded language used during this presidential campaign against Barack Obama — and not just by John McCain, Sarah Palin and the right wing, but by Hillary Clinton and her camp during the primaries — is just one very public example of how much work still needs to be done.

As is the way too many people speak when they are in what they might view as their comfort zones — among family and friends, for instance — the way whites they use the “n-word” around family members, the names they call Muslims, Hindus, Latinos, Jews, gays, or even Italians, the Irish and Poles. This kind of nastiness remains an epidemic, a festering wound that can only be cured by exposing it to light.

We’ve continued to allow this atmosphere to exist, an atmosphere that is conducive to the violence that has struck Carteret in recent weeks. We have a responsibility to change this atmosphere and make it unacceptable for this kind of nonsense to continue.

Thoughts on race and the race

There was a good piece by Nicholas D. Kristof in Sunday’s Week in Review section of The New York Times on the impact that race may be having on this campaign.

Kristof writes that Barack Obama’s race has probably cost the candidate about 6 percentage points in the polls, though not because of outright racists.

Such racists account for perhaps 10 percent of the electorate and, polling suggests, are mostly conservatives who would not vote for any Democratic presidential candidate.

Rather, most of the votes that Mr. Obama actually loses belong to well-meaning whites who believe in racial equality and have no objection to electing a black person as president — yet who discriminate unconsciously.

“When we fixate on the racist individual, we’re focused on the least interesting way that race works,” said Phillip Goff, a social psychologist at U.C.L.A. who focuses his research on “racism without racists.” “Most of the way race functions is without the need for racial animus.”

It’s not hate, necessarily, but a lingering distrust born of a long and terrible history of racism and discrimination. It is racism, but a racism based not on individual prejudice but on cultural attitudes.

I mention this because of a conversation my wife had tonight with a friend who said she distrusts Obama. Annie asked her why, which elicited one of those vague answers — “something about him,” “I just don’t know him,” etc. — that lacks substance, that comes from someplace other than a well-reasoned exploration of the candidates’ backgrounds or stances on the issues.

Our friend is not a racist, but I think that race is playing a part in her reaction to Obama. I fully believe that a white candidate with Obama’s resume, a white candidate named Smith or Johnson or Petty, would be getting quite a different reaction.

Race and the race in New Jersey

This is a disturbing report from The Star-Ledger:

Some neighborhoods in Roxbury were blanketed over the weekend with campaign literature from a white-supremacist, anti-immigration group that bluntly raised the issue of race regarding presidential candidate Barack Obama, offending some recipients and angering Democratic leaders.

A flier left on driveways in a neatly packaged plastic envelope questioned, “Do You Want A Black President?” and stated, “Black Ruled Nations most unstable and violent in the world.”

The material was distributed by a group called the League of American Patriots, which has a Butler mailing address.

The black-and-white flier featured “unflattering photos of Obama, including a doctored one portraying him with a long beard and turban.”

“Why should we seal our fate by allowing a black ruler to destroy us?” said the flier, which also detailed what it contended were facts on unemployment, poverty, HIV and crime rates among African Americans, while pointing out woes of a couple of predominantly black-populated countries.

I’ve seen this kind of thing before — in Princeton, where an area hate group distributed anti-Semetic literature in the same manner — and my hope is that this kind of nonsense is ignored.

But given the kind of ugliness that arrives in my e-mail Inbox almost daily and the comments I’ve heard from otherwise sane and humane people at parties, I can’t say I’m all that optimistic that this kind of assault on reason will fall on deaf ears.

Republicans unleash their code words

Jonathan Capehart’s blog item on The Washington Post’s PostPartisan blog is one of the better dismantlings of Sarah Palin’s — and the GOP’s — attack on community organizers that I’ve seen. Palin (who gave her speech immediately following Rudy Giuliani, who also dissed community organizers) compared organizers and small-town mayors, using a dismissive tone that made the delivery of the punchline — “except that you have actual responsibilities” — a painful bite.

Capehart points out, however, that the remark shows an incredible ignorance of what community organizers do and betrays her ignorance of the kind of difficulties faced by people in distressed urban areas. Community organizers, as he says, are the ones who fight the placement of incinerators in poor areas, who help rally the community to take back the streets from drug dealers and violent criminals, who work with residents to help them navigate government bureaucracies that often are designed to keep them at a distance.

One would think that the up-by-the-boot-straps Republican Party would celebrate the work of community organizers like Torres-Fleming and Shepard. They are doing work that government can’t or won’t do. They are helping people in a world that might seem stacked against them.

Palin was mayor of a town of about 9,000 people. It’s a safe bet she didn’t encounter the grinding issues that urban communities deal with daily. Shepard and Torres-Fleming have faced down more challenges and have been responsible for more people than Palin could possibly imagine. They deserve to be celebrated not dissed.

The key to understanding the community organizer line, I think, is to understand the larger dynamic that the Palin speech attempted to create. The idea was to create a idyllic small-town past that can serve as a kind of racial code when juxtaposed with the unstated connotations that urban conjure. Basically, small towns are filled with hard-working whites who have tradional American values; cities are filled with the other — blacks, Latinos and other ethnic minorities, the poor, crime, homosexuality. Take your pick.

This is the argument that New York Gov. David Paterson made Monday:

“I think the Republican Party is too smart to call Barack Obama ‘black’ in a sense that it would be a negative. But you can take something about his life, which I noticed they did at the Republican Convention – a ‘community organizer.’ They kept saying it, they kept laughing,” he said.

Paterson referred to McCain’s running mate Sarah Palin who compared her work experience to Obama’s.

“So I suppose a small town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except with real responsibilities,” she said at the convention.

Paterson sees the repeated use of the words “community organizer” as
Republican code for “black”. “I think where there are overtones is when there
are uses of language that are designed to inhibit other people’s progress with a
subtle reference to their race,” he said.

He’s not the only one who views the GOP attempts to turn “community organizer” into an insult. Even Chris Matthews saw the comment in this light — and no one has ever accused him of being the deepest of thinkers.

Chris Matthews, on Monday night’s “Hardball,” speculated that Republicans were playing the race card, when they made fun of Barack Obama’s experience as a community organizer, even going as far to say they’re using the phrase like a “bullwhip.” In a segment with NBC’s Chuck Todd and pollster Stuart Rothenberg, Matthews suspiciously noted that Republicans like Sarah Palin and Rudy Giuliani, at last week’s GOP convention, were “giggling” over the “community organizer” title as he pondered: “Is this the new ‘welfare queen?'”

Then a little later in the program, in a segment with the Financial Times’ Chrystia Freeland and the Independent Women’s Forum’s Michelle Bernard, Matthews returned to the subject as he declared: “It seems to me that the use of the word, ‘community organizer,’ is almost like a bullwhip.”

“Bullwhip” is a perfect word, given the racial undertones and it is time that the GOP be called on their willingness once again to take us down this ugly road.