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NBC's recent story on how 80 percent of Americans will be living at or near the poverty level in their lifetimes was accompanied by this photo of a "poor white family".
Images that feature human beings "work" in communicating political and social meaning because of how the viewer "reads" them. As such, there are stated and unstated assumptions which the person who is "seeing" applies to the "object" of their gaze.
For example, the White Gaze views a photo of a young black man wearing a hoodie and whose pants are sagging and sees a person who exists in a state of criminality, and is a social predator.
A photo of a white man wearing a suit and walking down Wall Street in New York will be seen by the White Gaze as representing a "respectable" person and a "hard worker" living the "American Dream."
In reality, the former may be on the way to his 3rd job, has never been in prison or arrested, and takes care of his aged parents and siblings. The latter could be a child-molesting murderer and rapist, who is also embezzling millions of dollars from his clients.
White and male--and Whiteness more generally--views itself as benign and harmless. Black and male--and Blackness more generally--is viewed by White American society as dangerous and pathological. The power of images is how they harness and channel assumptions about how various types of personhood find representation in, and are configured by, a broader system of dominance, subordination, privilege, inclusion, exclusion, and hierarchy.
NBC.com's photo is an example of those processes at work. There we "see" two overweight white women with a young child, and thus make social and political assumptions about gender and class. We see a small home and generalize from that visual about how "poor people" live, and more importantly, "what type of people" they are.
Images also give the viewer permission to empathize or to condemn the subject. Are these "good" people or "bad people?" What is my sense of obligation to them? Does my sense of community extend to people like them?
Stereotypes serve as cognitive short cuts which the viewer, and we as a society, use to categorize and evaluate the relative worth of whole groups of people. The way that images of white, "poor", female, "overweight", "unattractive", bodies are processed by the viewer is a reflection of how we as a society think about race, class, and gender. These concepts exist individually while also having meaning in relation to one another.
Moreover, in America, because of the Calvinist-Horatio Alger-Myth of Individualism and Upward Mobility, claims on poverty necessarily involve moral judgments.
The black single mother is a "welfare queen" who is "lazy" and has "bad morals". The poor white person is a "redneck" or a "hillbilly" with all of the stereotypes and assumptions implicit in such language.
Consequently, poor white people are one of the few groups which can me made fun and mocked in American culture without consequence or public sanction.
White elites and opinion leaders do not want to talk about poor white people because that would expose the defects of capitalism. These same elites also avoid discussing white poverty because it would undermine how they have historically been able to mine white supremacy to mask inter-class conflict and exploitation among whites in the United States.
"Race is how class is lived in America." Consequently, the leaders in the black and brown community care about poverty as a general issue because it disproportionately impacts people of color.
White privilege extends to all white people in America. Black and brown folks have to deal with both the colorline and other types of inequality in American society. Attending to our needs, while doing so with a respect for the struggles of all people necessitates a practical focusing of energy where the white poor are viewed as an interest group that should be attended to by the white community.
Moreover--and I do believe black and brown elites are more correct than not in this choice and instinct--there is a deep belief, one hard taught by American history, that poor and working class whites will consistently choose to serve the interests of rich white people because of the psychic wages that are paid to them by Whiteness. As such, why focus the limited political capital of the black and brown community in a time of crisis on solving a "white" problem?
Poor and working class whites may have much in common with poor and working class people of color. But, their greatest allegiance is doing the work of white racism against their own immediate class interests. From Bacon's Rebellion forward, with some notable deviations, this has been one of the key themes in American history.
However, the new white poor are not the stereotypes drawn from the exploitative TV show Honey Boo Boo.
They are the former middle class and non-college educated whites who worked in the skilled trades or as low-level municipal and public functionaries. Many of them are invisible as they couch surf with friends, or move back in with their aging parents or other relatives. The new white poor lost their homes and are living in motels (if they are lucky). Other members of the new white poor are sleeping in their cars, one of the last possessions that marked them as "middle class", after their IRA's and 401k's are drained, the credit cards maxed out many months ago.
The new white poor are the students in some of my classes who share with me how they are using their student loans to support their parents; thus they must pass their courses or the whole family will be homeless. The new white poor are those college students that universities are having to accommodate with showers, lockers, dorms, and other supports because many of them quite literally have no where to go when the school day is over, and when the academic year has ended.
The new white poor are not toothless rural folks sitting around smoking meth and making moonshine as they are depicted in the American popular imagination. They are your neighbors, in the suburbs, rural areas, and our cities, that are right next door, and trying to get by while maintaining their dignity.
The type of white poverty stereotyped by the lede photo on NBC's news item is a caricature that is easy to mock and deride. Those poor white people are an alien Other. "Respectable" white folks (and others) mock them, because poor whites represent a basement below which the white middle class imagines they cannot fall beneath.
It is much harder to minimize and ignore the now poor white folks who are the former members of the middle and working class that shop at Trader Joe's or Target with their SNAP cards and pittance of remaining unemployment monies, praying that no one they know sees them, and then get back into their paid off SUV and drive to a parking lot to sleep for the night with their kids, and who then wake up early the next day to wash up in the McDonald's bathroom.
The mainstream news media will likely not show you a picture of failed white suburban domesticity in the Age of Austerity and the Great Recession. The Fourth Estate are not truth tellers. They support the status quo and the powerful.
As such, a meaningful discussion of white poverty in the Age of Austerity is not an approved topic for the public discourse even while "we the people" are suffering everyday.
Ted Nugent is a "race pimp" and "race hustling" bomb thrower for the White Right. He is also a board member for the National Rifle Association. In his latest masterclass in white racism, Nugent told Nick Cannon on the latter's July 23rd podcast that:
I think that typically when you see the, I don't even remember the term they use, but the gangs of blacks lately that have been just been going down the downtown streets and breaking windows on cars. We played the Milwaukee state fair a couple years ago and these black mobs were just attacking white folks coming out of the fair. And over and over again I watch the news and here's a rape and here's a burglary and here's a murder in Chicago. 29 shot. 29 blacks shot by 29 blacks. At some point you got to be afraid of black and white dogs if the Dalmatian's doing the biting.
He also stated how:
Referencing July 19 remarks by President Obama that addressed issues of race in the country, Nugent said that a "little old white lady" who "clutches her purse tightly and shivers" when an African-American man joins her on an elevator has not wrongly "prejudged" in the same sense that "stormy clouds" are accurate predictors of a destructive weather event.Nugent elaborated on this point, saying when "we've witnessed a number of storms that have destroyed homes, and threatened lives, and tipped over cars, I don't think we're prejudging those storm threats. I don't think we are prejudging. I think we are taking evidence, and going, 'uh-oh black clouds coming in, wind is picking up, I think I better head for a shelter.' "
What do you do with a rabid or vicious dog? You shoot them dead. Nugent's implication that black folks should be dealt with in the same manner is so obvious that I am surprised more folks have not pointed it out.
Ted Nugent's comments do not surprise me. I am more interested in the double-standard at work where white conservatives such as Ted Nugent, Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh, and a panoply of others can make all manner of incendiary and white supremacist comments about people of color--blacks in particular--and there is no call for other white folks, or groups they are affiliated with such as the NRA, to publicly denounce them.
If a black person of any public standing makes a comment that is perceived as being "racially insensitive", i.e. telling the truth in a manner that hurts the feelings of White America, there is a demand by white opinion leaders that he or she be excommunicated from the black community.
White privilege is the freedom to be an individual and to not have any sense of group accountability. White racists such as Ted Nugent or Pat Buchanan are just "harmless" and "outspoken". The white racial frame transposes white supremacy by white conservatives into something that should be tolerated for the public good in the interest of a noble commitment to free speech and the free expression of ideas. In contrast, when black folks or other people of caller call out white racism it is perceived as being uncivil or somehow a type of "reverse racism".
I mock the white fear of black folks which tries to explain itself through appeals to the rationality of racial profiling, and tired talking points based on a piss poor understanding of the sociology of crime that is fixated on a lazy narrative of white victimhood and black criminality.
However, I do not laugh at Ted Nugent's comments.
Consider the following: he is a national board member for one of the most powerful lobbying groups in the country and whose members have millions of guns. Moreover, gun ownership is correlated with higher rates of anti-black affect and sentiment. The NRA and its current relationship with neo-Confederates and the White Right in the Age of Obama is an eerie parallel to the Southern Gun Clubs of Jim and Jane Crow that were used to commit extrajudicial murders and to practice racial terrorism against the civil rights movement and the African American community.
The NRA has not renounced Ted Nugent for a very good reason: in an era when racism and conservatism are one in the same, he likely speaks for a good number of its members.
The controversy over George Zimmerman's acquittal for murdering Trayvon Martin is Christmas in July for black conservatives. The professional best black friends for white conservatives who defend George Zimmerman--and by extension the White Right--are in high demand.
As such, Allen West has revealed himself to be a black man who would sell himself into chattel slavery and thank his white owners for the privilege. Shelby Steele, a brilliant man, demonstrates once more that he is psychologically damaged.
Even the D-List backbenchers, as seen in this video from Crooks and Liars, and who are the equivalent of a pee wee baseball league team, are getting a chance to show their teeth and gums as they work on their "self-hating black folks who buck-dance for the pleasures of white conservatives that watch Fox News" dance routine.
Many folks likely believe that these (and other) black conservatives are sincere. Why make such an assumption? In order for a person of color to so betray their community, serving as a human hose who ejaculates and sprays the befouled and racist talking points birthed from the Right-wing echo chamber out of their mouths, on a basic level one must convince him or herself that what they are saying is true.
Yes, money is an inducement for betrayal and foolishness. But, in keeping with my argument that politics is just like professional wrestling--where the latter is actually more honest--a person has to still sell the performance if they want to get repeat work.
Populist black conservatives in the Tea Party GOP mold have to be themselves "with the volume turned way up". However convincing they may be, said black folks are still playing a role for the pleasures and joys of the White Right. Black conservatives are also great "heels" who attract the boos and condemnation of the African-American community (and those others) who correctly see in them a betrayal of the Black Freedom Struggle.
Working through my politics as professional wrestling analogy, the Jesse Petersons and Pastor Mannings are not skilled mat wrestlers. They are great talkers who do "high spots" that involve the ridiculous and the unbelievable in order to "get over" with the audience. By comparison, Clarence Thomas is a master technician who likes to "stretch out" his opponents and put them in a submission hold that they are powerless to counter. He is silent and deadly; the smart marks and owners of the territory love him for it. Tara Setamayer and Crystal Wright are just jobbers trying to get a shot at a regular gig on the road.
But, what if the black conservatives who are the darlings of the Right-wing media, and that are now shucking and bucking in defense of George Zimmerman, were revealed to be actors?
Politics is ultimately about performance, and the marshaling and manipulation of emotion in order to get "those people", i.e. the public, to do what you want...even when it is against their own interests.
If we destroy the pretense of sincerity in political communication and interpersonal dialogue in the public sphere would anyone really care? Would the "marks" who are being hustled and grifted find a way to rationalize their continued support for the con artist(s) on stage?
Magicians often have confederates in the audience to aid in their performance. Snake oil salesmen would have plants in the crowd that spontaneously testified as to how they heard the magical elixir--now finally available in their little hamlet or burg--cured all ailments. Evangelists fleece their flocks, laying hands on those who pretend to be sick, now magically healed by the touch of the chosen one.
In much the same way that the Right-wing establishment has been using bots and paid operatives to troll social media in order to advance the talking points of the Right-wing corporateocracy and the Tea Party GOP, Right-wing talk radio has actors and actresses on retainer whose job it is to legitimate the lying performances of Rush Limbaugh and his ilk.
And yes, some of these professional callers are "black".
In a moment where the United States has a black president, and is in the midst of a tired and moribund national conversation about race in the aftermath of the Zimmerman acquittal, these performers are in high demand.
The "black conservative" listener who calls into Right-wing talk radio is working a minstrel routine. On one hand, there are undoubtedly white conservatives who call into Right-wing talk radio programs and pretend to be the "ignorant" and "uninformed" "black liberal".
Like those who put on the cork, the pleasure for conservatives is that these faux black people are a fantasy projection that legitimates the scurrilous lie that Right-wing Whiteness has about African-Americans being politically naive, hoodwinked, stupid, and stuck on a "Democratic Plantation", where they/we are uniquely addicted to welfare, drugs, and the government tit.
They are complimented by the "real" black conservative who can call in and play the role as a noble defender of the White Right and the Tea Party GOP's racism, or works an angle as being "converted" and "saved" by the good work done by the Great White Fathers, those post racial saviors in Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, Savage, or O'Reilly.
Because politics is professional wrestling, these players are working an angle where they are being paid now, hoping to be paid in the future, or are refining their craft as professional "black conservatives", the real "race hustlers" and "race pimps" in the Age of Obama.
The smart marks who follow Right-wing media are fluent in the performance and routine: they can pick out a "good" black caller or a "good" female caller and explain what worked and resonated about the performance. The marks who believe that the Right-wing media are offering up the truth are amateurs. They are moved by the emotions, and how good it makes them feel to be part of the show. If asked, the populist foot soldiers of the Tea Party GOP cannot explain with any level of intelligence or expertise the policies they routinely shill for because all they want to do is cheer and boo on command from their propagandist cult leaders in the Right-wing echo chamber.
This is our America. And what do we do with her?
President Obama has spoken less about race than any other President in recent memory. Today's surprise speech on the Trayvon Martin case is a payment on that gross neglect against the debit on his account as the country's first black president.
Perhaps, President Obama just saw a private screening of the new Wolverine movie and felt especially heroic. Or maybe he simply woke up and realized that yes, he is President of the United States of America and has an obligation to speak on the national injustice that was George Zimmerman's acquittal. Obama is also a very smart man, one who is mindful of his historic legacy; history would not judge him kindly if he stood mute on the post civil rights equivalent of the Emmett Till case.
The divided response to Obama's speech will reveal what we already know. Black folks and others will be happy that for a few moments their shining black prince and superhero had arrived. The change we voted for was speaking to the White House press corps and the nation at large. Conservatives and the White Right will respond to Obama as though a leprechaun showed up at their private dinner party, took a crap on the floor, smiled at them, and then promptly exited the room without comment. Disbelief and rage.
For the Tea Party GOP, the very fact that a black man and his family are in the White House as something other than janitors or maids is unacceptable. Conservatives will rage against Obama's suggestion that he could have been Trayvon Martin and that the dead teenager could have also stood his ground against a stalking, vigilante, wannabe cop named George Zimmerman, the man who killed him in cold blood that rainy evening in Florida. The Obama derangement syndrome and mania of racism that has possessed the country's de facto White Political Party are a tired script which the White Right cannot escape.
Will Obama's speech on the Trayvon Martin verdict be all sound and fury signifying nothing? One more moment in the symbolic politics of the country's first black president which will ultimately not result in any structural or institutional challenge to white supremacy? The answer will most certainly be "yes". But, that does not mean that a little warmth, and a smile from the glow of the fantasy of what a Black President could have been--the brother who just spoke to the nation a few moments ago--is not appropriate and welcome.
The divide(s) between the response of black folks to the George Zimmerman "not guilty" verdict and that of his overwhelmingly white and conservative defenders (and those others who idolize him as a patron saint of white vigilantism and the way of the gun) are a function of a divergence in life experience, political attitudes, personalities, and values. What we see is often a function of where we sit.
The co-mingling of white conservatism, gun culture, and a Right-wing media which has legitimated a belief that white folks are oppressed in American by people of color generated a worldview in which a young black man shot dead by a white vigilante is a just act.
The White Right's vantage point cannot escape the shadow of black humanity as something its sees as violent and barbarous. Racism is a mania which they have normalized as central to their cognitive map. A fish does not apologize for swimming in the water; Zimmerman's supporters de facto see black men as criminals until proven otherwise to the former's satisfaction.
I am more interested in those good and decent white folks (and others) who simply do not get what the "big deal" is about Zimmerman's murder of Trayvon Martin, and how so many people of color are hurt, upset, and enraged both by the verdict, as well as how it took a national outcry to even bring the case to trial.
I would suggest that part of the indifference and perhaps even legitimate surprise at black pain and loss in the Trayvon Martin murder case by some white people is caused by a lack of empathy for non-whites. Recent experimental research supports this claim.
Social distance is a variable as well. Most white people do not actually know, in an intimate or personal way, any African-Americans. Black people are omnipresent in the mass media. However, most white folks do not know us as full human beings. Going to see a Denzel movie, hanging a poster of Lil Wayne or Lebron James on the wall, or "following" a person of color on Twitter, is not friendship. Embracing two-dimensional caricatures of black and brown humanity does not deeply humanize people of color for those who happen to be white.
The shock and surprise by some white folks in response to black folks' anger at Zimmerman's ability to now walk free after murdering Trayvon Martin--and how he is feted by the Right for gunning down a person "armed" with Skittles and iced tea--is rooted in willful ignorance.
As the essential BBC documentary Racism: A History observes, America is beset by collective amnesia in regards to the centuries of violence by the White State and White Society towards people of color. This is no accident.
Because the victors write the history, thus generating the dominant narrative, Whiteness is able to commit "intellectual colonialism" by quite literally white washing away America's long history as a racial dictatorship, and trying to destroy the connective tissue which reaches back from slavery, to Jim and Jane Crow, and into the present.
The Whiteness of memory works through historical erasure. Black folks' justice claims and upsetness about the George Zimmerman case are robbed of their continuity. The slave patrol, the lynching tree, and the extrajudicial killing of Trayvon Martin by a white Hispanic who over-identifies with White Authority and white racism are part of a larger continuity in American history and life.
If one does not know this history, then black folks are made to look as though they are hysterical and irrational. Such a frame is not accidental: it does the work of white racism by marginalizing black and brown people's concerns as irrelevant because our citizenship and full humanity are not to be respected by the white racial frame and a dominant culture which, as Sister Jane Elliot has pointedly described, is still sick with racism.
Sister Jane Elliot also observed how white people's number one privilege is the luxury and ability to remain ignorant of racism and the life experiences of people of color.
Will Trayvon Martin's murder and George Zimmerman's exoneration (what is a de facto endorsement of extra-judicial murder by whites against black men and boys) be a moment where those white folks who are willfully ignorant of the realities of white racism in the Age of Obama will now have their eyes opened to some plain on their face truths, or instead will they double down on a narrative of black hyper-emotionality and white innocence?
It is difficult if not impossible to have a "teachable moment" about race when the parties most in need of being educated are content to remain ignorant--or have decided they know more about the subject matter than those who are unfairly asked to educate them.
The United States government has historically worked to protect and serve White people and their interests. The jury's decision in the George Zimmerman trial is one more data point in a centuries-long trajectory of racism in this country.
The jury looked at the narrative of a white Hispanic stalking, hunting, shooting, and killing a young black man and found it a simple one to litigate. When in doubt defend the right of white vigilantes to kill and murder black people.
Moreover, the jury bowed down to the power of the gun. The gun protects "us" from "them". The Zimmerman "not guilty" verdict is a reinforcement of the reality of the colorline, and that the jury intimately and deeply understood from their cultural training and political socialization, that when in doubt side with the white shooter against black "criminals".
The Zimmerman "not guilty" verdict is proof that black life is cheap again. There is a paradox proven once more about black life in the Age of Obama. We can have a President who happens to be black, but black people are under existential threat, in a near state of "social death", and once more must prove that we have a right to exist--a right to life that can be nullified at will by those like George Zimmerman who are in bed with White Authority.
A year or so ago, I predicted that George Zimmerman would be found innocent. If police can shoot and kill innocent black people for the "crime" of holding house keys, wallets, cell phones, and other harmless objects, Zimmerman's walking away from this show trial spectacle was a given.
The jurors have to return home to a community with a long, deep history of white supremacy and anti-black racism. The shadows of Jim and Jane Crow were in George Zimmerman's ear that night, telling him to shoot and kill those "fucking punks" "who always get away". Those punks weren't vague chimeras or generic "bad guys". They are black men. Zimmerman did the (White) community's will of being a 21st century slave patroller hunting down and killing black human chattel.
The Zimmerman jury simply agreed with their own racial "common sense" about black people, our inherent criminality, and threat to white civilization and order. The jury bowed down to their community norms. They could not, nor would they go home, to their white peers in a very conservative, segregated community, and justify how could they send one of their "defenders" to prison for the "petty crime" of killing a black person.
The Zimmerman jury also validated the day-to-day life experiences of how race is lived as a series of small slights, micro aggressions, institutional discrimination, and pointed stabbing reminders--as in this decision--of the semi-permanence of white supremacy as a social force in American life.
The "niggerization" of black Americans by the American legal system continues unabated with the George Zimmerman "not guilty" verdict.
During the 1950s, two white sheriffs discover a black man's body hanging from a tree and shot through the heart. The first sheriff is befuddled. He is looking at the body and is very confused. The second sheriff asks him "what is wrong?" The first sheriff takes off his hat and starts scratching his head. He looks up at the body and turns to his friend, "I don't know how this niggrah hung himself from this tree and also managed to shoot himself through the heart?" The second sheriff starts to laugh. "Hell of a thing. That nigger must have been one hell of a gymnast or Harry Houdini type!"
I am unsure as to the origin of the above story. But, it does capture the essence of the George Zimmerman trial for his killing Trayvon Martin perfectly.
The trial has all of the combustible elements of race in America--guns, crime, violence, and the law. The Zimmerman trial is also an example of how attitudes about race and politics are intimates. Defenders of George Zimmerman automatically assume that Martin is a black male "thug" with no right to life. Defenders of Trayvon Martin see a person guilty of the crime of walking down the street while being black and male.
As others have pointed out, a thought experiment is helpful in exposing just how messed up this race business is in America.
If people were told a story about a teenager walking home carrying only a bag of candy and a bottle of iced tea, and a person who was a self-appointed defender of the neighborhood/failed wannabe superhero cop shot and killed them, the standing prior would be that the latter committed a crime. Public opinion would sympathize and favor the former. If the public was also told that the shooter did a national TV interview in which he showed no remorse and said it was "God's will" that he took a life, he would be even less popular as his guilt would be utterly transparent and all but admitted to.
However, when these events are viewed through the white racial frame, with the victim being African-American and the shooter being white, the narrative immediately changes.
How perverse. Justice is apparently not race neutral. Given that America was founded as a white republic by law, and that people of color for four centuries in this country have had no rights that whites are bound to respect, such an outcome should not be a surprise.
Race is also a story of contradictions.
The United States can elect a black man as President. This moment can coexist with an increase in white racial animus towards black people since Obama's election, a fictive belief that white folks are oppressed in the Age of Obama, and research which demonstrates how white people are generally not empathetic towards the pain and suffering of black people.
I like to share readers' comments when they are particularly sharp and insightful.
In the following comment on my site We Are Respectable Negroes, CSM summed up the national spectacle around the murder of Travyon Martin by George Zimmerman perfectly:
If ever there was a test to determine if what motivates the tea bagging/right wing/GOP is racism, the Zimmerman case is it. They support Zimmerman, even though he clearly is someone who they would normally hate as a "Mexican." Yet he's been taken up as a cause celebre by the racists not so much for who he is, but for who he shot. Before any of the latest Zimmerman story came out about Martin ambushing him from non-existent bushes, when all we knew was Zimmerman saw Martin, followed and shot him, while he was minding his own business coming back from the store, they were already calling Martin a "thug" who deserved to be killed on the basis of nothing else but his race. If this were 1955 they would be cheering on Emmett Till's killers. If it was 1963 they'd be cheering on the killer of Medgar Evers. They would have said no need for a trial in those cases. And if it was 1869 they'd be cheering on the Klan for destroying Reconstruction.
I am in agreement with CSM. As I have said previously, Zimmerman's supporters and the Tea Party GOP racial reactionaries would probably not commit the personal act of murder at a spectacular lynching. However, they would cheer it on, buy souvenirs, and make sure that their kids and grand kids are in attendance to learn the lessons of Whiteness as an identity predicated on domination and authority over the Other.
The comments on Twitter, right-wing websites, and other spaces defending George Zimmerman as a "victim" work through a twisted logic, one predicated on a foundational assumption that black people have no right to safety and security in their own persons--especially when faced with White authority.
The two cops who pondered how a black man can lynch and then shoot himself would be perfectly at home as news commentators on Fox News, or some other part of the Right-wing echo chamber. They speak not in isolation; their supporters are (unfortunately) legion; they are still with us decades after the Civil Rights Movement.
Republicans are continuing their war on women. Their latest engagement consists of Ohio Governor John Kasich signing into law a set of draconian guidelines that restrict women's abortion rights in his state.
Racism and misogyny are political personality traits which overlap. The same personality type which is fearful of social change, upset about people of color seemingly gaining more power by the symbolic act of the United States' electing Barack Obama, and how women, gays, and other historically marginalized groups have been asserting their rights from the 1960s onward, is now mired in anxiety, and a sense of existential threat.
Conservatives are ostensibly "colorblind" while being deeply color aroused; they do not "see" gender, but are deeply paranoid about being forced into social and political equality with women.
Prejudice involves a sense of psychological advantage and superiority over the out-group and the Other. When this sense of group position is threatened the dominant group lashes out.
Is there no better example of this dynamic and its politics of racial resentment, hostility to women's rights, gays, the poor, and immigrants than the faux populism of the Tea Party GOP in the Age of Obama?
The Right's recycling of the language of States Rights, Secession, Nullification, and Birtherism is not coincidental to the Republican Party's efforts to restrict women's reproductive rights. Those attitudes are commingled such that they are not easily separated for the members of Tea Party GOP.
I earlier described the Right-wing's obsession with Kermit Gosnell in Philadelphia as a type of addiction to "torture porn." John Kasich's (and other's) insistence on invading women's bodies in order to win their crusade against female reproductive rights is part of the same imaginary.
In all, John Kasich and his kind are practicing a type of "gyno-porn" in the political sphere:
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So here you will find including lesbian actions with nude nurses and strict doctor. Particular attention is paid to the various procedures, physical exam, gyno exam, with using of special equipment such as electric stimulation, syringes, needles, acupuncture, catheters, vacuum pumping, asphyxiation, and much more.
The Tea Party GOP are not traditional conservatives. No. They are political radicals who are invested in forcing their political paraphilia and fetishes on the American people.
Republicans' efforts to restrict women's rights are a type of slash porn made real through public policy:
“Okay, Joan, I’m going to begin the digital vaginal examination now. You’ll feel my two fingers go inside you and press all around the entrance first. We don’t use any lubrication for this part of the exam but you shouldn’t have any discomfort. Just relax.” Joan paid close attention as Doctor Welch took his index and third finger and introduced it into her vaginal opening about an inch, moving it in a slow circular motion. “Let me know if anything feels uncomfortable or like anything more than light pressure,” he instructed her as he pushed his fingers in another inch and made the same circuit, being careful to make a complete circle and not miss any area. Joan enjoyed the sight of the doctor’s fingers entering her and circling around, and yet the specific motions were not sexual at all and what she was feeling wasn’t exactly sexual either, just diffusely pleasant under the circumstances.Doctor Welch was also enjoying the sensation of palpating Joan’s vaginal entrance, his fingers sure and thorough as he made his exacting circuit of her inner flesh. It was exciting, he knew, but somehow that sounded lame to him, and it was more of an awestruck experience to do this, and mere excitement seemed too blasé a word to describe it. Part of the intrigue was being able to take as much time as he cared to in this slow examination, being able to look and touch as much as he had always wanted. The female genital anatomy was fascinating and never more so than under this close scrutiny, the structures close at hand and open to his gaze. Was he getting sexually stimulated? Sure, that was a part of this whole fetish, but wasn’t the point of it. He knew instead that the mental pictures he was storing up now would be much more exciting days, weeks and months from now as he thought back on this play exam. Right now his only indulgence was the thorough examination of the patient.
Doctor Welch’s fingers were now inserted about three inches into Joan’s vaginal entrance. “Joan, I want to test your vaginal tone now. While my fingers are inside your vagina, I need you to tighten the muscles when I say so. Let’s start first with those near the entrance, if you can isolate those. Okay, please squeeze, hold for a count of three, release and continue until I say so.”
Joan concentrated on the sensations emanating from her vagina and tried to tighten the muscles nearest the entrance first. Doctor Welch both saw and felt Joan’s vaginal introitus contract around his fingers in a strong squeeze, hold for several beats, then relax. She repeated the movement, very conscious of the effort it took to isolate the specific muscles and also of Doctor Welch’s fingers as they shifted inside of her to assess the tone in a 360 degree sweep of her vaginal entrance. Joan also watched in the mirror and could see the contraction of her muscles around his gloved fingers.
“All right, Joan. I can feel that you’re able to isolate the introitus muscles fairly well. Very good. Now I’m going to push my fingers in further and then I want you to tighten all your vaginal muscles as much as you can, hold and repeat as before until I say stop.”
Ultimately, anti-choice conservatives are disgusted by the female body while simultaneously being fascinated by it.
Would you expect any different from the American Taliban?
There is an odd mix of disgust, titillation, quite literal invasion, violation, and yes penetration, that ties together the Conservative Right's prurient obsession with women's reproductive processes, and a version of the pornographic male gaze, which mates with Christian Dominionism to legitimate the very sexual deviancy that the Tea Party GOP so desperately yearns to stand against as a way of (ironically) validating their own "morality."
Conservatives who support procedures such as "vaginal ultrasound" (and other cruelties) are the voyeur who lurks in the shadow of the tea room, the video booths, the orgy, and the glory holes. They watch from the shadows--or maybe even the bushes while engaging in onanism and self-abuse--wanting to be included, but afraid to step out and own their sexuality. Scared and ashamed, they skulk off, cowards who are unwilling to admit their of desires, yet committed to condemning what they have just witnessed.
A trial should be a crucible for the truth. While the legal outcome remains much in doubt, George Zimmerman’s murder trial is a reminder of the semi-permanence of race and the reality of the color line in post civil rights America.
The Zimmerman trial has revealed several truths so far. Young, dark-skinned, black women testifying in court about life and death matters--and who happen to be “working class” or “poor”--are to be savaged and mocked. The myth of the welfare queen lives on; black, female, and “poor” is to be less than a human being. She is most certainly not due the most basic amount of human respect or dignity.
White America is fascinated by black vernacular speech and how people of color talk in private spaces and among ourselves, as opposed to in public spaces or other interactions where we are subjected to the White Gaze.
The comments on Twitter, other social media, and the Internet at large, have revealed how one’s relationship to the truth is also very much a function of racial attitudes and political orientation.
Zimmerman’s supporters believe that he is a “victim” and black folks are existentially obligated to submit to white people (and those who identity with White Authority) at all times and in every situation. Most of Zimmerman’s supporters do not know about America’s long history of slave passes, white slave patrollers, or Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney’s infamous ruling in the Dred Scott case that black people have no rights that whites are obligated to respect. Yet, they echo such sentiments across time and space with ease.
Trayvon Martin’s advocates see in his killing one more example (among many thousands) where in the United States, black life is deemed to be cheap and expendable; African-Americans are presumed guilty until proven innocent—even while walking down the street and minding their own business.
While ostensibly a means of getting at the truth of what happened that rainy and dark evening, Zimmerman’s trial has also been a spectacle and a carnival sideshow in America’s centuries-long racial theater.
While talking on the phone to his friend Rachel Jaentel, Trayvon Martin apparently called George Zimmerman, the man who followed him in a vehicle, exited it with a gun, and pursued him against police instructions, a “creepy ass cracker.” In a twist of thinking, and an inversion of what studied, learned, and reasonable people understand about the realities of race and power in America, for colorblind conservative racists, George Zimmerman has been magically transformed into a victim of “reverse racism.”
Such a troubled relationship to the truth would be the stuff of a great comedy sketch if these serious matters did not involve a young person shot dead by a wannabe cop who imagined himself as possessing a license to kill.
The truth can also be inconvenient: by virtue of his actions and character, George Zimmerman is in fact a "creepy cracker."
The origins of the word cracker are uncertain. What we do know is that Trayvon’s use of “cracker” drew on a long history of mass racial violence by whites against African-Americans that began with the transatlantic slave trade and the plantation system in the “New World.”
“Cracker” is evocative of the sound of the whip, wielded by a white overseer or slave owner, as it lashes and tears black flesh. Cracker is a word that embodies white on black racial violence and tyranny.
Cracker is in no way equivalent to the word nigger.
Were millions of white people killed and enslaved by blacks holding the lash and calling them “crackers?” Were there signs that segregated whites from blacks that read “no crackers need apply” or “crackers sit in the back of the bus”? Were white people burned alive, their bodies defiled, postcards taken of their corpses, and public gatherings where blacks killed “crackers” by the thousands? Were there racial pogroms where blacks running amok, pillaging, raping, murdering and destroying property at will, yelled out for the blood of “crackers” in places like Tulsa, East St. Louis, Chicago, and Rosewood? Were there sundown towns that had signs on their outskirts which told "crackers" “not to let the sun set on them here” or they will be killed?
No. To suggest that the words "cracker" and "nigger" are at all similar is an act which is both intellectually dishonest and a lie.
History is rife with cruel coincidences and ironies. For decades, Sanford, Florida was a sundown town. Blacks were not welcome in its city limits. White racism was so potent in Sanford, Florida that Jackie Robinson, the trailblazing hero who broke the color line in baseball, was not allowed to train there.
When Trayvon Martin called George Zimmerman a cracker he was channeling a sense of existential dread and fear of white racial violence. Trayon’s worries were prescient. George Zimmerman would later shoot and kill Trayvon after racially profiling him.
George Zimmerman is also a creep.
George Zimmerman stalked and followed an innocent person on a rainy night. Strangers with loaded guns following innocent people around in the dark are almost by definition “creepy.” George Zimmerman has been accused of sexually molesting a relative. He has been visited with a restraining order for domestic battery. Zimmerman has also been in a fight with the police. On the evening he shot and killed Trayon Martin, he was taking a medication which can cause anxiety, violent impulses, aggression, and hallucinations.
As demonstrated by his many phone calls to the police, George Zimmerman is obsessed with harassing and confronting black people who he feels do not “belong” in his neighborhood. Zimmerman is such an extreme Negrophobe that he has even called the police on a black child who was walking down the street.
The throaty rasps of his call to the police and anger that “fucking punks. those assholes they always get away” was that of an obsessive, one whose exhalations were more suited for a phone sex line than a 911 call. George Zimmerman’s obsession with black people and vigilante-ways were that of a deviant, and yes, a creep.
The efforts by colorblind racists, the White Right, and Zimmerman’s defenders to invert reality so that he is a “victim” of “black racism” in the guise of the word “cracker” is part of a larger social dynamic in the Age of Obama. Recent public opinion research has revealed how white folks now believe that “anti-white” "racism" is a bigger problem than systematic discrimination against people of color in the United States.
Fantasies of white oppression are not just the product of disinformation circulated by the Right-wing media. They do serious political work by legitimating the gutting of the Voting Rights Act and affirmative action, as well as distracting the public from how white racism and white privilege continue to systematically disadvantage people of color to the detriment of the country’s economy.
A yearning for a belief in the lie of “white oppression” also fuels the rise of the militia movement and domestic terrorists who believe that Obama is not a legitimate and democratically elected President. The logic which tries to falsely equate “cracker” and “nigger” is also operative in the Herrenvolk dreams of the Tea Party and the Republican Party’s efforts to resuscitate the Confederacy and Civil War era controversies about secession, nullification, and “states rights”. Ultimately, the lie of “reverse racism” and “white oppression” is a means to rewrite history in order to legitimate White power and dominance.
The simplest definition of racism is that it consists of power plus prejudice. On the night when George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin, it was Zimmerman with both the power of the gun and who prejudged an innocent person walking down the street by virtue of their skin color as a threat.
Such behavior has been the modus operandi and habit of “creepy ass crackers” in the United States for centuries.
According to the court documents, Jackson states that she was appointed by Deen to handle the catering and staff for Bubba’s wedding in 2007, and she asked Deen what the servers should wear: “Well what I would really like is a bunch of little niggers to wear long-sleeve white shirts, black shorts and black bow ties, you know in the Shirley Temple days, they used to tap dance around,” Jackson alleges Deen told her. “Now, that would be a true Southern wedding wouldn’t it? But we can’t do that because the media would be on me about that.”
Scholars and students of film often use the phrase “breaking the fourth wall.”
This is the moment when suspension of disbelief is removed, and the film “winks” at the audience in a moment where the latter are made to realize that what they are seeing is not real, and its creators (and actors) are choosing to obey—or break—genre conventions.
Scholars who study race and racial ideologies often talk about how in the post civil rights United States racism has moved from what they call “the front stage” (the public and the readily seen) to the “backstage” (what is more hidden and private).
Consequently, being called a “racist” is the impetus for public shaming and exile. In response, white racism has moved to private spaces, uses humor and comedy as a shield, and takes refuge online.
Food celebrity Paula Deen’s admission in a recent anti-discrimination lawsuit that she routinely uses racial slurs such as “nigger”, and how she yearns for a return to Jim and Jane Crow America, is an almost perfect moment where she broke the metaphorical fourth wall of racism in the Age of Obama.
In her deposition she explained how:
[W]hen asked if she wanted black men to play the role of slaves at a wedding she explained she got the idea from a restaurant her husband and her had dined at saying, “The whole entire waiter staff was middle-aged black men, and they had on beautiful white jackets with a black bow tie.
“I mean, it was really impressive. That restaurant represented a certain era in America…after the Civil War, during the Civil War, before the Civil War…It was not only black men, it was black women…I would say they were slaves.”
Such images remain potent in American popular culture. And for some white folks of a certain age, as well as those possessed of a conservative, Right-wing political orientation, such images embody “real America”, and a "simpler" time before black and brown folks "forgot their place", the gays and lesbians came out of the closet, and women embraced feminism.
Paula Deen also embodies the moment of “race and reunion” that occurred after America’s Civil War. In the aftermath of a conflict which took at least 750,000 lives, whites in the North and former Confederacy had to find a way to come together as a whole and intact political community.
The solution: reimagining the Confederacy’s illegal acts of treason and secession as a noble lost cause.
North and South were both invested in White Supremacy and creating a society wherein African-Americans were a subordinated and dominated class of people.
Race and reunion involved a rewriting of American history such that slavery was remade into a benign and civilizing institution: the plantation was an idyllic and wonderful place. In this twisted vision, African-Americans, especially men, would descend into idleness, rapine behavior, and be a threat to white civilization unless they were controlled by violence and lynch law.
This lie of a noble and idyllic South, with its happy loyal slaves, continues to cast a shadow over post civil rights America.
For example, movies such as Gone with the Wind remain popular. Civil War reenactors march off as members of the Confederacy; they see themselves as good men involved in a futile struggle—not as agents defending white supremacy and racial terrorism. Award winning music groups such as Lady Antebellum channel a nostalgic view of the pre-Civil War South through the white racial frame in order to depict a historical milieu of white supremacy that ought to be yearned and pined for by their audiences.
Ultimately, Paula Deen’s desires are White yearnings for black subordination and submission.
As the Jim Crow Museum details, the black mammy maid figure is a lie which does the social and political work of convincing white people that black women (and other people of color) live to serve them. The black butler or Tom figure does similar work. They are both two-dimensional characters who are asexual, robbed of their full humanity, and eager to serve white people.
Such figures remain iconic. See the caricatures Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima in almost every American supermarket.
Stories of resistance to these White fantasies are also removed from the dreams of Paula Deen and the White conservatives who yearn for a return to “real America.”
Those happy smiling black maids were also peeing in food and taking their monies to help support the nascent Civil Rights movement. Nameless black butlers and Pullman Car porters—those men named “George”—were freedom fighters readying to resist and mobilize against White Supremacy.
The election of the country’s first black president is symbolically potent. Paula Deen’s desire for a return to Jim and Jane Crow is a reflection of a broader anxiety among the White American body politic and collective subconscious.
There, black and brown folks should be maids and butlers. A black family is in the White House. America’s demographics are changing because of immigration. Therefore, a particular type of Whiteness feels particularly imperiled in this social and political moment. Whatever one thinks of Obama's policies, for a good portion of Red State America, it is the fact of his personhood and blackness that is the real affront and crime.
What is the result? Movies and TV shows that emphasize the destruction of America and the White House since the election of Barack Obama. There are also forthcoming historical biopics such as The Butler about a noble black servant who served a series of presidents in the White House across several decades. TV shows such as Devious Maids fulfill the type-casting and stereotype of Hispanics and Latinas as natural servants.
Paula Deen’s fantasy of black and brown compliance, surrender, and subordination has connections to some of the country’s most ugly moments since the election of Barack Obama.
Birtherism, and Republican Joe Wilson's heckling of President Barack Obama during his State of the Union Address in 2009 is a parallel to Paula Deen’s fantasy.
Conspiranoid fantasies of Secession and a second Civil War are also part of this national derangement on the part of the White Right and Tea Party GOP. The murder of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, and how Republicans have rallied to Zimmerman's defense, is a reflection of a foundational assumption that black people must always be subservient, and surrender to White authority--as well as those overly identified and enamored with it--in any circumstance.
Projecting forward, at the end of her saga Paula Deen will be forced to publicly apologize for her racism. In that moment, and keeping with script, she will also channel some tears in order to get back into the good graces of her fans.
I believe that Paula Deen should be given an award for being so real and transparent about her racial attitudes. She exposed the backstage of white racism in post civil rights America.
Paula Deen is not alone in her feelings; Paula Deen's biggest sin is that she was just too honest and forthright for her own good.
