More Fun With "Colorblind" Racism Online: "What Did Pressure for Obama to Release His Birth Certificate Have to do With White Privilege?"

Before I go watch the remaining hours of the Chicago Air and Water Show, I wanted to share the following gem with you. 

Apparently, my open letter to black conservative Kira Davis got the attention of some of her supplicants and handlers. I am not that into Twitter--apparently my friend Gordon Gartrelle is doing his thing there, so do check him out--but they sent me some "tweets" that I proceeded to respond to here. 

Kira is a lost soul. Her website features a cabal of semi-professional black conservative Right-wing race hustlers. Much of their writing is bad comedy. Alas, I could not save Kira from her quest to be the next Michelle Malkin; but if another young person of color takes my advice, I will count that as a win. 

Also, she and her peeps won't respond to my simple request for an interview. Funny. Too bad. 

Last week, I wrote about how I am collecting examples of colorblind conservative racism from political websites and blogs for use in one of my classes on "race in America" (as well as for an article that I would like to write in the near future). In tracking down some of the links from Kira's site, I came upon this gem by Chuck Morse who writes for the blog, "A Whig Manifesto". 

It is always fun to see yourself quoted, and one's arguments filtered through the prism of talking point Tea Party GOP conservatism. The distortions can be epic, what are a type of low rent political cubism or amateurish surrealism.

Moreover, the standing priors and worldview of talking point conservatives are so fundamentally disconnected from political and social reality, that the whole mess would be funny, if not for what it suggested about the health of our civic culture and educational system. 

I will leave you all to annotate and deconstruct the following passages (Morse's essay is here in its entirety). Whenever I encounter work such as this, I marvel, truly I do, at the effectiveness of the Right-wing propaganda machine at disseminating information, crafting an alternative reality, and then reinforcing their talking points through repetition. 

As Chomsky and others have deftly pointed out, the Right-wing propagandists created a lie that the media is somehow "liberal" or "biased" against them. This untruth is accepted as fact. Therefore, it encourages (and legitimates) a willful misrepresentation of the facts by conservatives because such distortions are now reframed as being somehow "fair and balanced." 

Because the Right-wing media machine also circulates and creates conspiranoid fantasies in the Age of Obama, the more you try to correct those who are part of this cult--that word is used intentionally; the New Right and populist conservatism share many of the traits common to a religion--the more a belief in their righteousness and truth-telling is reinforced. In total, the populist Right is a closed community whose political worldview is prefaced upon tautological, closed circle, reasoning.

Ultimately, the Right-wing media industrial complex rivals that of the official state media in China or the former Soviet Union. Impressive. Most impressive.

Chauncey DeVega, a columnist for the left-wing online publication AlterNet, wrote an article on April 29, 2011 entitled 10 Ways That the Birthers Are an Object Lesson in White Privilege. This article, written in response to President Obama’s release of his birth certificate, serves as a rich illustration of a left-wing view of race in America, and how race is used as a political football by the left. Significant portions of the article are reprinted here with commentary.

DeVega begins with the highly sarcastic assertion that: In an era of racism without racists, the Tea Party GOP Birther brigands provide one more lesson in the permanence of the social evil known as White privilege. The author defines our era as one of racism without racists and at first glance this appears to be a sarcastic rejoinder to the assertion by conservatives that they are not racists. Yet this comment raises the question of whether America is a society of racism without racists. Going one step further, this comment begs the question regarding how racism is defined in America today. Who is a racist? What did pressure for Obama to release his birth certificate and other classified information have to do with White privilege?

Of course there are racists in America today as the term has been classically defined. There are still KKK men who parade around in white sheets and who burn crosses on lawns. There still are fringe organizations, neo-Nazi groups come to mind, which adhere to white supremacy which was mainstream in America before World War II and even into the mid 1960’s in some quarters. The image of George Wallace, the Democratic Governor of Alabama, blocking the school door to stop an African-American child from attending school comes to mind as does the Birmingham Alabama police chief Bull Connor turning water hoses on civil rights protesters. In 1968, the Republican civil rights leader, the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, was brutally murdered, shot down in the prime of his life and at the peak of his creativity, by a white supremacist. Lynching was a not an infrequent practice in America until the 1950’s.

As a bonus, here is Morse's analysis of Sarah Palin and her "real talk," "I am not an elitist" appeal to the Right-wing mouth-breathing classes: 

Sarah Palin is an easy target for scorn from the left and the ugly attack against her has more than a whiff of sexism. Palin didn’t attend an Ivy League College and she doesn’t talk like, walk like, or look like your typical liberal eastern seaboard liberal establishment type. President Obama, on the other hand, has the Ivy League College cred, the language, the look, and the walk of the liberal establishment type down to a tee. Like many conservatives before her, Palin is marginalized by the left as “stupid” and therefore as a person who is not to be listened to or taken seriously.

With the type of scorn that has been heaped upon her, it is easy for the left to take the next step and label her as a racist and DeVega performs this hit is classic left-wing style with snide and indirect references to her engaging in racial resentment while calling her a witch on a broomstick to boot. The very idea of actually taking what Palin has to say seriously is not considered as she is instead denounced in classic left-wing agitprop fashion. Palin, who in her at times awkward way is a plain spoken truth teller, poses as a threat to the edifice of left-wing ideology. The populism that she at times espouses is universal to all Americans and that is socially conservative values, limited and honest government, low taxes, and national sovereignty. 

Wow, that last sentence is rich with semiotic and discursive possibilities: it is a political burrito wrapped up in bacon, battered, refried, and then slathered with cheese.