Where is Dave Chappelle when you need him?

Glenn Beck is a professional liar who has created his own alternate reality. For his fans and devotees, Glenn Beck is a messiah and truth-teller. Those who are not part of his media cult quite rightly see him as a carnival barker--and soon to be real estate mogul who is building his own libertarian theme park and gated community as a means to fleece and grift his public.

As part of his shtick, Glenn Beck is fond of channeling the legacy of Doctor Martin Luther King Jr..

Beck has trotted out that tired routine again, most recently suggesting that anti-immigrant Republicans are the moral heirs of Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement. Of course, Glenn Beck has pledged his support for their most greatest of "freedom struggles"--the right to harass, bully, and deport those "illegal" immigrants who are a threat to the United States and its way of life.

Glenn Beck is able to make this rhetorical move because Dr. King is part of a pantheon of American heroes who have been stripped and robbed of their radicalism in order to make them palatable for Middle America.

As a leading figure on the White Right, Beck is dedicated to stealing Doctor King's legacy as a way of legitimating the Tea Party GOP's political agenda. Ultimately, the legacy of Dr. King--and the broader civil rights movement--constitute a set of handy icons and images that work like a magical fleece for Republicans and conservatives.

By donning those vestments, the ugliness and anti-black and brown bigotry of the post-civil rights era Republican Party and conservative movement can be hidden behind their dishonest use of phrases like Dr. King's iconic "I have a dream" or the merits of judging a man "by the content of his character" as opposed to "the color his skin." The post civil rights era Right-wing in America can then call black and brown people the "real racists" who hate "whites" and practice "reverse discrimination."

The masterfully contorted logic of conservative populists then comfortably arrives at the conclusion that white people are oppressed in America. And moreover, Dr. King died to protect white folks from "racism" and "discrimination."

Liars lie. That is what they do.

Consequently, it is not surprising that Glenn Beck would repeatedly misrepresent Dr. King's legacy, life, and struggles. It is the brazen nature of the lie which demands comment: Dr. King stood for the exact opposite of the John Birch Libertarian herrenvolk white nationalist politics endorsed by Glenn Beck.

Dr. King and the broader civil rights movement would reject Glenn Beck's declaration of war on "illegal aliens" as an affront to the sense of shared humanity and commitment to social justice which drove the Black and Brown Freedom Struggles.

It was Dr. King and the Poor People's campaign that advocated for an Economic Bill of Rights for all Americans, and specifically called out how "newcomers" and "minorities" were being exploited and oppressed in the United States by rich elites.

The efforts to organize poor migrant laborers by Cesar Chavez and others is also a deafening rebuke to Glenn Beck's myth-making machine.

The Dr. King who said the following would be vilified by the Tea Party and Glenn Beck as a traitor, and a communist who hates the "producers" and is guilty of "class warfare."

We are coming to ask America to be true to the huge promissory note that it signed years ago. And we are coming to engage in dramatic nonviolent action, to call attention to the gulf between promise and fulfillment; to make the invisible visible.

Why do we do it this way? We do it this way because it is our experience that the nation doesn’t move around questions of genuine equality for the poor and for black people until it is confronted massively, dramatically in terms of direct action.
Ideas and claims on social reality do not exist in a vacuum.

Political claims are especially beholden and dependent upon a superstructure or architecture that gives them meaning and coherence. Some time ago, when I offered up my alternative history of the United States as believed by the Tea Party GOP, I was signalling to such a philosophical and meta-level concern.

In all, what is the vision of the world and of history that sustains the fictions which Glenn Beck offers up to his viewers? And do responsible people actually empower Glenn Beck and the Right-wing alternative reality media by responding to their propaganda and untruths?

Societies are stable when its members share a set of agreed upon values and norms about the nature of empirical reality. Societies come undone when its members cannot agree on those basic facts and truths.

Glenn Beck and his ilk are not harmless entertainers. They are propagandists who are helping to create a broken society where good governance (what is needed to invigorate and transform America forward) is impossible, and in which they can rail and chant against the very problems they are helping to create, all the while selling themselves as saviors.

The political and social polarization in the United States has created a crisis of legitimacy and failed governance. Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and the members of the Right-wing media entertainment machine are paradoxically both the problem and the solution.

They are poisoning the town's well water and then spontaneously and miraculously showing up the next day with a cure. I wonder, will the villagers ever wake up and see who their real enemies are?

Members of which political party have recently made the following suggestions?

The poor in America have it too easy because they have refrigerators and televisions. Poor black and brown children should be given mops and brooms and put in veritable work houses like Dickensian street urchins. Food stamps should be cut because the Bible tells usthat, “for even when we were with you, we gave you this command: Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.”

America is a country of “takers” and “makers” where “productive” citizens, the “53 percent”, are being exploited by the "47 percent" of the public who are social and economic parasites.

Electric fences should be used to kill “illegal” immigrants.

Discussions of wealth and income inequality are “un-American” because they encourage “class warfare”against the rich.

Liberals, the poor, people of color, “illegal” immigrants, and any arbitrarily decided “Other” are not “real” Americans. As such they should be marginalized in—if not wholly eliminated from—American society.

They cheer death at their national meetings.

If you guessed that prominent members of the Republican Party have said (and done) such things then you would be correct.

The new movie The Purge takes this Right-wing fantasy one step further and depicts an America where for one night each year it is legal to kill anyone with impunity.

In all, The Purge is both a nightmare and a dream pulled straight out of the political imagination of theTea Party GOP and the Right-wing political entertainment complex. The Purge is far from a perfect movie; nevertheless, it is a crystal clear depiction of the politics of cruelty and Austerity that are the beating heart of Ayn Rand conservatism in the Age of Obama.

As depicted in The Purge, a night of cathartic violence has invigorated and reinvented a failing country. This evening has also somehow magically solved the budget deficit and raised America’s levels of self-esteem and patriotism--the country is even led by a single party called"The New Founders of America." Ultimately, and through processes mentioned but not fully explained in the movie, The Purge has created a very Ronald Reagan-like “new day in America.”

In this world, the poor and others who cannot afford private security, to live in gated communities, and arm themselves with all variety of weapons are “liquidated” wholesale on that night. The social contract that ought to promise safety and security between citizens and the State is broken with the agreement of the mass public. Consequently, the financial pressures on the social safety net are lessened precisely because “unproductive” citizens can be culled from the herd

The rich are safe—free or not at their own whim—to decide if they will participate in the country’s national bloodletting.

The plot of The Purge revolves around Ethan Hawke's character named James Sandin, a salesman who leverages the anxiety and fear of his neighbors for his own personal profit and gain. Predictably, his son, played by Max Burkholder, in a moment of mercy and sensitivity for a stranger in peril, disarms the home security system during that year’s night of wanton violence. This act of charity allows a nameless  and homeless black man who is fleeing for his life from a white lynch mob to enter their residence.

While The Purge is a high concept movie that in its later acts devolves into typical action fare, there are powerful moments where its writers took real chances, daring to explore provocative and potent questions of race, class, justice, and community.

For example, the homeless man seeking refuge in Sandin’s home could have easily been played by a white actor. By choosing to make him a Black American, The Purge brings to the forefront how questions of race and belonging intersect with fundamental matters of safety and security for people of color in the United States.

The black and brown poor would likely be killed in overwhelming numbers during the movie’s grizzly macabre evening celebration of national reunion and belonging. Our First Nations brothers and sisters would also be easy targets. The white poor in rural America would be killed too.

To their credit, the creators of The Purge did not shy away from how certain people—the poor—are marked as marginal and disposable. This fact is true both in the movie’s imagined reality and our own present.

From the spectacular lynchings of Jim and Jane Crow America to the Trayvon Martin case, the black body (while an object of fascination, desire, and simultaneous fear and loathing) is viewed as something foreign, an invader in the White community, assumed to be a risk as well as a threat until proven otherwise--and to the satisfaction of the White Gaze.

Here, the process of “niggerization” works through the creation of a type of contingent citizenship where rights are not protected or absolute for certain types of people. Thus, human rights can be violated at anytime by those identified with White authority and White power.

For more than one hundred years, white lynch mobs burned their black victims alive by the thousands, cut them up into pieces, made their victims eat their own genitals, shot black people dozens or even hundreds of times, posed with and photographed the bodies, and then sent those images around the country as postcards because such acts of racial terrorism helped to cement the bonds of Whiteness across lines of class in the United States.

As has often been seen with genocidal violence, historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen notes how if the primary goal is just to kill a person with maximum efficiency, then no ceremony is necessary to accomplish said goal. By contrast, "overkill" and the spectacle are important—as we see in The Purge—because the ritual has spiritual elements that feed the collective soul of the attackers. Ultimately, the body of the Other represents a pollutant that must be expelled from the body politic.

In The Purge, Sandin's family is offered a bargain: will they surrender a black body to the white lynch mob where the former will be killed for sport, and as a cathartic sacrifice that heals and brings peace to the (White) American political psyche?  Does Sandin's family’s safety matter more than protecting an innocent black man?

As we think through those questions, one cannot forget how The Purge is a product of the sensibilities of post racial America and the Age of Obama.

Consequently, while American history suggests that Ethan Hawke's character would readily sacrifice a black homeless man in order to protect his family, in The Purge the main character chooses to take up arms and fight off a lynch mob in defense of a black man. The White Racial Frame, and the companion lie that is “color blind” post civil rights America, imagines itself as benign: in this fantasy, “good white folks”,  more often than not, do the right thing when faced with racism and other types of discrimination.

As the movie concludes, The Purge offers up two transparent moments that exemplify its dualism as a stinging critique of Right-wing ideology while also channeling some of the Tea Party GOP’s anxieties and fears in post racial America.

First, the leader of the white lynch mob is a hybrid preppy, yuppie, country club, preacher, Christian Nationalist evangelical who would find his natural home as president of the College Republicans.

His rhetoric, rage, and channeling of American exceptionalism as reimagined through The Purge is a mix of Right-wing talk points and religious zealotry.

Second, the Sandins' neighbors betray them in the final act of the movie. They are jealous of his financial success: murdering the Sandin family is their act of cathartic violence during the annual Purge event.

Class envy has resulted in violence and chaos. In The Purge (and in contemporary Right-wing American politics more generally) the rich and other elites are "victims" who are to be pitied and empathized with.

While this is of course absurd, it resonates for those addicted to the mix of White identity politics, racial resentment, and identification with the banksters and plutocrats, who form the base of the Tea Party GOP. And of course, guns save us all in The Purge. They empower women, fight off attackers, and help a family return to a normal state of safety and security.

One does not need to have read authors such as Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler, Stuart Hall, or Naomi Klein to understand and “read” the politics of The Purge. The movie rewards deep viewing and looking beyond the foreground to the subtext, symbolism, story-telling choices made by its creators, as well as the radio and TV broadcasts in the background, that add richness and context to the film's setting.

Movies such as Batman: The Dark Knight Rises, The East, and Now You See Me, demonstrate how the public and the elite classes’ anxieties about the Great Recession and the future of the United States’ economy are being negotiated and resolved on screen. The Purge captures “the spirit of the age” quite well.

It is a work that reflects the neo-liberal national security state, a politics of meanness and cruelty where budgets are balanced on the backs of the poor, and the ways in which certain segments of the American people are marked as disposable human refuse.

Films talk to us, to each other, and as such, reflect a society’s worries, fears, and insecurities. The Purge, while not a perfect film, is wonderfully ambitious in its efforts at being socially relevant and politically provocative.

On those merits, The Purge is a scathing indictment of contemporary American politics, the mass media, and  Right-wing politics in the Age of Obama.

These changes were not random, as one might expect if the interviewers were just hurrying to finish up or if the data-entry clerks were making mistakes. The racial classifications changed systematically, in response to what had happened to the respondent since the previous interview.

All else being equal, including how they had been racially classified before, respondents who were unemployed, had children outside of marriage, or lived in the inner city were less likely to be classified as white and more likely to be classified as black. Having been incarcerated, unemployed, divorced, or impoverished each reduced the chances by a percentage point or two that someone who was recorded as white by an interviewer one year would be seen as white again the next year.

Race is a way of distinguishing between different types of bodies, and how societies locate them relative to one another.

Some people are naturally understood to be poor and marginalized; other types of bodies and peoples, are through common sense, understood to be dominant, "middle class," or "normal."

As featured in The Boston Review, new research from Aliya Saperstein and Andrew Penner would seem to support how race is a type of cognitive map that people then use to determine their social location relative to others. Apparently, for all of the fictions about "post racial" America, race--and by implication other markers such as gender, class, and ethnicity--are useful heuristics for deciding who has power in the country.

How do we parse out causality in thinking through the finding that white folks who have fallen down the class hierarchy are then perceived to be "black?" Which way do the causal arrows go?

Race is a social construct and a fiction. Yet, it does powerful work in determining life chances and opportunities. Race is a lie, a type of property, protection, and resource that individuals, communities, and to which the State, assigns meaning and value.

Thus, is it that white people who fall down the class and status hierarchy are channeling some type of "blackness" because they associate and have internalized certain behaviors with poverty and diminished life chances?

The Boston Review continues:

The studies we have conducted show that while race shapes our life experiences, our life experiences also shape our race. Race and perceptions of difference are not only a cause of inequality, they also result from inequality. Americans’ racial stereotypes have become self-fulfilling prophecies: the mental images Americans have of criminals and welfare queens, or college grads and suburbanites, can literally affect how we see each other.

Or are outside observers drawing conclusions based on how people of color--blacks and Latinos specifically--are more likely to be poor and economically disadvantaged, and then making an error in inference?

Habitus is real. Race and class intersect. People of color are increasingly becoming less hopeful about their futures in the Age of Obama and The Great Recession. White folks are also feeling an even greater sense of diminished hopes, dreams, and possibilities.

What does it mean then that those white folks who have suffered diminished life chances are then perceived to be "black" by researchers? Is this a hopeful possibility for the potential of productive alliances across the color line?

Or alternatively, are these findings about the "blackening" of unemployed white people a powder keg ready to erupt, as the wages of whiteness when handed a check labeled insufficient funds and "black" erupt in defiance and rage?

 

This is a follow-up to my earlier post on Barack Obama's speech at Morehouse College.

As I wrote there, Obama ought to be quite popular with conservatives given his race-blind approach to public policy. Unfortunately, Obama is a black man, and the political points to be scored through continuing their addiction to the politics of white racial resentment far outweigh the merits of an adherence to traditional conservatism from not too many decades ago.

Obama's speech at Morehouse was a bone to the "colorblind" conservatives of the Reagan era. The Washington Times took this opportunity and summarized Obama's speech at Howard with the following links on their site:

Obama at Morehouse: Black men cannot use racism as a crutch
Obama to black graduates: Don't use racism as an excuse

One would think this would be enough to satisfy their readers. Of course, the maw of the White Right is insatiable. I would think that the site administrators at Right-wing news websites would close down the comment sections whenever Barack Obama is mentioned in a story. Their readers further an obvious narrative of white racism which validates what reasonable folks have always known about the Republican Party in the Age of Obama. Ultimately, this is a bad look. The opinion leaders on the Right remain undeterred.

However, for the contemporary Right-wing in American politics conservatism and racism is one in the same. Instead of running away from this stain, the Right-wing echo chamber embraces it. Product branding is powerful. One does not run from what appeals to loyal customers about the nature of one's product.

Again, I dip my hand into the sewer of the Right-wing media, and its comment sections, so that you do not have to do so. Obama gives the White Right exactly what they want--a speech at the country's leading black college that can be easily read as overly critical of black achievers and strivers--and they cannot resist their most prurient bigotry in response to his gift.

What follows are some choice comments from The Washington Times. This is boilerplate white racism; what is very much a "paint by numbers" operation by Right-wing trolls online. However, given what we know about how racism is over-determining political attitudes in the post civil rights era, these remain instructive examples.

"They" hate Barack Obama. "They" hate you too.

313Kriss

I hope he remembers that it was "white folks" who raised him the next time he gets around Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

Maranyika

Spot on!! The President talked about responsibility the choices we make today shapes our future. Refrain from crack do more readings.

Chris Behme

Later in a private meeting Barack told students to "keep the race card ready, just in case".

ags4ever

"Don't use racism as an excuse" from this president? What a laugh!This president and his defenders use racism at every opportunity to excuse his lack of ability to govern and deflect any criticism leveled at his policies. If obama really wanted to point to people who didn't use racism as an excuse, he would point to Allen West, Herman Cain, Condoleeza Rice, Clarence Thomas, and columnists Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams.

coolercoleman

Clarence Thomas would be ab excellent example to these young men. He has done wonderful things in his life. He has overcome adversities such as poverty, and racism in his early life and then the loss of his ability to speak in latter life.

fnfal308

Obama say, "as an african American, you have to work twice as hard." This is hilarious. I suppose except for the set asides, affirmative action and guaranteed lawsuits if someone looks at you sideways. Not to mention the fact that it is virtually impossible to get fired - no matter how obnoxious you are, or no matter what a lazy fork up you are. Yup, you have to work twice as hard. Obama is a prime example. The boy has never done an honest days work in his life and look at him.

ohmama

Obama tells blacks not to use "racism" as an excuse? Obama counted on the black population to vote him into office and counted heavily on his skin color. Over 95% of blacks voted for Obama because of his skin color. That isn't racism? Racism is a two way street.BTW- That "Nobel Prize" that he received within days of taking the oath of office in 2009? What a joke! And his "heroic" single mother was hardly ever there. His Grandparents raised him in the shadow of his Muslim father that he barely knew from the time he was 10 years old. Notice Obama does't mention successful conservative black men such as Thomas Sowell, Justice Clarence Thomas, Allen West, Herman Cain or Dr. Ben Carson to name a few that actually worked hard on their way up to get where they are at. Barack Obama is a condescending, arrogant, narcissistic, sociopathic, spoiled brat that has relied on his skin color and his grandparents money for his entire life.

Francis

It is horrifying and disgusting to think that we have this kind of trash in the WH. Thank you, Obama, for keeping the pot of racial hatred boiling and intensifying the revenge of blacks against whites. You talk about holding the black man down. Actually, it is you, Obama, who is keeping people down on the government plantation, as you try to get more and more people on foodstamps and welfare checks.

chuckinva

"sometimes I wrote off my own failings as just another example of the world trying to keep a black man down.” Why would a half black man who grew up as a privileged kid make such a statement. Because the he is telling them what resonates with young blacks in our society. Racism isn't dead in America it just jump sides and is now a major tenant of political correctness. "Trying to keep a black man down", we as a country have spent more money to assist the black community to catch up with the rest of society with no better than mixed results. Why would the "Great Uniter" even mention race at this graduation. He needs to keep blacks for seeing the Democrats for what they really are, a detriment to real progress for African-Americans