Were Right-wing Media Spokesman Tim Graham's Comments About Karen Finney's "Blackness" Influenced by White Supremacist Websites?

Last week, Tim Graham suggested that Karen Finney was not really "black." Thus, she did not contribute to the "diversity" of MSNBC, the network Finney was recently signed to as a TV personality.

Where did Tim Graham's concerns and attitudes come from?

Was Tim Graham just recycling an age old habit in America, where white folks get to decide if African-Americans were sufficiently black, and thus, fit for the auction block, to be sold as human property, uniquely vulnerable to wanton violence?

Was Tim Graham conscious of the ugly, racist, roots of his claim that a light complected black person was not a "real" African-American? Maybe Tim Graham was just playing the "innocent" race provocateur game as he tried to get attention for his employer the Right-wing Media Research Center?

Epistemic closure is a phenomenon best demonstrated by how the Right-wing media machine that failed the Republican Party during the 2012 election. This dynamic involves how conservatives and the Tea Party GOP media have been amazingly effective in their ability to create a self-contained reality that defies empirical reality on policies ranging from from tax policy, to evolution, climate change, and economics.

Epistemic closure has made the Right-wing media echo chamber a type of religion; its websites, talk radio shows, and TV programs, are its sites of worship. Consequently, heretics are driven out of, defamed, shamed, and proverbially burned at the stake for daring to defy the "truth."

The anti-intellectualism of contemporary conservatism finds comfort in the simplistic, binary, and closed worldview that is legitimated by the conservative news-entertainment complex.

Carl Sagan, the scientist, philosopher, and author, famously suggested that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof. In the Right-wing media machine of 2013, said rule has been modified such that paranoid delusions and fantasies are accepted as truths without proof. What the factually grounded and mentally healthy call "common sense", has been rejected a priori as some type of machination and trickery from the Left.

Racism is not an opinion: it is one of the most verifiable, recurring, and demonstrable facts in United States history from before the Founding to the Age of Obama. Serious people know this to be true; it is the day traders, dishonest types, "color blind" racists, and dilettantes who waste their energy debating the equivalent of gravity in the physical sciences.

Birtherism, the Southern Strategy, efforts at voter demobilization, and nativism of the contemporary Republican Party, are examples of how racism and conservatism in the post civil rights era are increasingly one and the same thing. Epistemic closure and the Right-wing echo chamber reinforce and legitimate white racial resentment and hostility towards people of color. Epistemic closure also does similar work in how the Right-wing media legitimates both anti-women and anti-gay attitudes.

New research demonstrates how the White Right (as well as White Nationalists) and "mainstream" conservatism are overlapping online. Here, through social media and other means, White Nationalists are finding ways to cross pollinate their hate with mainline Republicans and conservatives.

Tim Graham markets himself, and his organization, as watchdogs who monitor "liberal media bias."

In practice, when he questioned the racial identity and authenticity of Karen Finney he was drawing on the ugly history which created what historians and others call "the one drop rule"--a legal and moral framework that allowed white folks to bound and limit black humanity for the purposes of making the latter vulnerable to white racial terrorism and exploitation.

For a white person in America to be so profoundly arrogant as to dare to publicly define the boundaries of black humanity is an ugly union of white privilege and white supremacy. Such a move should be rejected as an affront to human dignity across the color line. Good and decent white folks most certainly know much better.

Tim Graham's questioning of Karen Finney's blackness mirrors and echoes what was recently posted on White Supremacist websites such as VDARE. Tim Graham's claims did not come out of the ether, born from nothingness.

Because conservatism and racism are one in the same in the Age of Obama, it is no surprise that the White Right and the Tea Party GOP would be so similar in their racial attitudes.

The Republican Party is spending 10 million dollars to improve its outreach to black and brown communities. This is wasted money. The Republican Party has demonstrated, repeatedly, that white racial resentment, bigotry, and xenophobia are its core values. Bigotry and racism are not "gaffes" for the Tea Party GOP. These values are core to the Republican Party in the Age of Obama. Repeated mistakes, long-recurring about the same thing, are not honest errors; they are signals about the party's core values.

Tim Graham's channeling of the narratives and memes of White Supremacist websites is not an accident. Such choices are the living face of the contemporary Republican Party.

The Republican Party is facing obsolescence. Its retrograde racial attitudes are driving its morbidity. Will conservatives adapt and change, moving into the 21st century, or will the Tea Party GOP clutch desperately to the ghosts of Jim and Jane Crow America?

The choice is theirs to make.