Recently in Race relations Category

Shephard Smith worries that anti-Obama violence is in the air, here in a clip from Fox. This won't be popular with those who feel that Obama's administration is planning on rounding them up for daring to oppose mandatory abortions. But Frank Rich argues that, just as it took McCain's best efforts to calm down the people calling the eventual US president a treacherous terrorist, the GOP's leaders must calm down the people who are signaling their intention to "put an end to the false prophet Obama." Camille Paglia, herself a critic of Obama, shares some concerns about the threats against him here.

I'll go back to TS's request for "evidence" of Mark Steyn's bigotry.

Before giving specifics, I'll note that Steyn's comments consistently, over time, show a strongly anti-Muslim view that stingily refuses to give Muslim civilization any credit for its past successes. While Obama is trying to tell Muslims that they should re-embrace their own best principles, Steyn says Muslims have no principles to fall back on. Um, that's not a good way to engage them. Even if you believe they should all come to Jesus, I'm sure Diane would agree that getting them all defensive and angry about their tribal identity is not a good way to "share the good news." The mission committee doesn't teach that approach -- I know, I used to chair those kinds of committees in a former life.

As Philip Jenkins has written, people like Steyn demonize Muslims in much the manner that Protestants once demonized Catholics as representing a peril to America a century ago.

Here are the passages I question:

In his Cairo speech, he congratulated Muslims on inventing algebra and quoted approvingly one of the less-bloodcurdling sections of the Quran...

That's what the president did with Islam: He added sugar and sold it...

Rich thought that the president succeeded in his principal task: "Fundamentally, Obama's goal was to tell the Muslim world, 'We respect and value you, your religion and your civilization, and only ask that you don't hate us and murder us in return.'" But those terms are too narrow. You don't have to murder a guy if he preemptively surrenders....

The nonterrorist advance of Islam is a significant challenge to Western notions of liberty and pluralism.

I've complained about Steyn before, notably here with my brother:

This "red-egghead" approach is exemplified by Mark Steyn, a hero of the religious right. "With every passing month," Steyn wrote in a recent column, there are more Muslims and fewer Episcopalians, and the Muslims export their manpower to Europe and other depopulating outposts of the West. It's the intersection of demography and Islamism that makes time a luxury we can't afford."

In his new book, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, he escalates his argument that Muslims are breeding fast enough to destroy all civilization within little Mariam's lifetime. Steyn is careful not to prescribe bombings, beatings or final solutions. He leaves that to the fertile imaginations of his rabid following. He has perfected the mixed message sent by America's leaders to Muslims: We will deliver democracy to your doorstep, and we believe that democratic institutions will speedily bring peace and enlightenment to your nations; but we so fear your irredeemable madness that we think your grandchildren will corrupt our own centuries-old democratic institutions and will bring the West to a new Taliban-like state.

If you want to read more unfiltered Steyn, try this, which strikes me as bigoted.

Again, while I write about this urgent effort on the part of Muslims to reclaim the best in their heritage, Steyn argues loudly -- against either evidence or good taste -- that they have nothing good in their heritage. That helps nothing except his own desire to be a rabble-rouser.

Finally, my brother and I concluded our piece with this: "Scratch a conservative, flag-waving intellectual, and under the surface you will see an America-basher -- one who complains that America lacks character and resolve, one who has no confidence in America 's transforming power, one who cannot trust America to defend its principles when they are truly threatened."

And Steyn proves that anew in his latest piece, with these silly words: "A wealthy nation living on the accumulated cultural capital of a glorious past can dodge its rendezvous with fate, but only for a while. That sound you heard in Cairo is the tingy ping of a hollow superpower."

I'm attempting to back away from this topic in the future. I never believed President Bush was a bigot, but I did believe he received fevered counsel from bigots. But I have no interest in giving attention to fading figures like Steyn, because I suspect they are like parasites that feed on attention and will straddle whatever line necessary to get it (which he proves by snidely citing criticisms like mine in his "Reader of the Day" section).

This New York Times piece is a fascinating look at an underreported aspect of the Mideast conflict.

Let me go out on a limb and guess that the now-famous "reverse racist" quote will not haunt Sonia Sotomayor to the degree that the media is implying. That quote is, "I would hope that a wise Latina woman, with the richness of her experiences, would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

Is that racism? Not to me. It's like someone telling you that, because he's traveled around the world, he hopes he has a broader perspective than someone like you who stays home all the time. It may be annoying, but there's truth there.

People who have grown up across cultures have a perspective that others don't. I don't think it's any more complicated or offensive than that.

Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker criticized Obama recently for a bad precedent in meddling in free enterprise when Obama pushed out the head of GM; that led to liberals deriding Corker for himself recently calling for blue-collar union workers to work for less than what they're accustomed to. Liberals' implication was that Republicans care less about the blue-collar workers than about executives.

Conservatives will deny this, of course. But should they? Think about the values and priorities that make us either liberal or conservative.

On average...

Don't liberals worry more about the plight of the poor than conservatives do?

And aren't conservatives more flag-wavingly patriotic and religious than liberals?

Don't liberals care more about racial equality than conservatives?

And don't conservatives dislike abortion more than those who make it "a choice"?

And so on.

When push comes to shove, don't liberals feel we must collectively consider every possible way to rescue the indigent, whereas conservatives are quicker to say that many potential solutions would only gum things up for the rest of us who think we have a fighting shot at getting wealthy? Don't liberals insist on racial and gender equity while conservatives say things will shake out fine by themselves? Don't conservatives detest every abortion and every flag-burning whereas liberals say that there are plenty of bigger things to worry about? Aren't conservatives willing to go to a war to protect what they consider to be the American way of life whereas liberals feel that approach is too imperialistic?

Do we need to be more honest about our priorities, rather than the "methinks she doth protest too much" approach to claiming that we worry about things that we don't really worry about?

Maybe Dallas Police Chief David Kunkle forgot this:
Texas Code of Criminal Procedure, Article 2.131,
"A peace officer may not engage in racial profiling. Law enforcement-initiated action based on an individual's race, ethnicity, or national origin rather than on the individual's behavior or on information identifying the individual as having engaged in criminal activity."

After the ordeal straight out of Hell that Houston Texans running back Ryan Moats went through the chief may have had a memory lapse. Moats who is African-American gets word that his wife's mother is near death at Baylor Regional Medical Center in Plano, Texas (a Dallas suburb). He and his wife rush to the hospital to be at her side in her final hours. But Dallas police officer Robert Powell (white) has other ideas. He corrals Moats, his wife and another female passenger in the medical center parking lot and in what can only be described as a surreal scene, pulls his gun on them, waves it around at Moats, his wife, and orders them to stand down. He then turns two tone deaf ears to Moats's frantic efforts to explain that his mother-in-law is inside dying. Instead he mouths off at him. Moats won't say it he's got too much class for that, but no matter how profusely the Dallas chief apologizes, which to his credit he did, Moats and his wife were racially profiled.

The bone head stop of Moat's did more than give Dallas police a black eye and cause city official to scramble for damage control. It also cast suspicion on just how serious police agencies are in wiping out racial profiling. They all swear to the heavens that their officers don't profile. They have to; they've taken to much heat for it. In fact, the Texas statute that forbids racial profiling mandates that all Texas police departments file annual stats on motorist stops--by race. Dallas patted itself on the back in a city report in 2008 for seriously addressing all areas of concern about racial profiling and evaluating department procedures to insure that it doesn't happen. But the Moats stop proves that what the department puts on paper and what happens in the streets means it still has a long way to go to achieve its stated goal of providing "public service that is effective and fair."

Powell in his weak kneed half hearted defense, wailed that he thought he was following procedure, and just doing his job. In a twisted way he's probably right, and that's even more reason to doubt that Dallas and indeed other departments are really doing all they say they are to root out racial profiling.

Even by the jaded and dumb action of far too many cops who still think good law enforcement is pulling every twenty something young black male that they eyeball on the streets over, Moats's ordeal was extreme.

Moats should slap the Dallas and its police department with Mt. Everest dollar size lawsuit. That won't bring back his mother-in-law or erase the pain of knowing that the moments he spent being hectored by Powell were moments that he should have been at his mother-in-law's bedside. But Dallas still must pay, and pay dearly for that. An apology for what he went through is simply not enough.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His weekly radio show, "The Hutchinson Report" can be heard weekly in Los Angeles on KTYM Radio 1460 AM and nationally on blogtalkradio.com

Interesting stuff from an article here:

BARACK Obama is facing escalating death threats from white supremacists, according to senior law enforcement officers, prompting severe security restrictions in Washington DC.

The inauguration of the first black US president increases the danger, "particularly stemming from individuals on the extremist fringe of the white supremacist movement", says an intelligence assessment by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI.

CNN reported that interest in racist ideology was so high right after the November 4 election that computer servers for two white supremacist websites crashed.

I've mulled this issue on and off. We've clearly made incredible gains as a society on the racial front; indeed, we as a nation have been better than other societies at working at getting better. That's why many conservatives argue passionately that it's high time for everyone to stop claiming that racism is still a problem in America.

But this article reminds us that we still have a ways to go, doesn't it? In a funny way, many Americans and many conservative Muslims overseas sound similar -- "Look, don't claim that the actions of a few nutcases taint the rest of us." Maybe, but that still means that both Americans and overseas Muslims have some work to do to take on the nutcases. A healthy society must always take responsibility for its extremes, rather than than getting defensive at a public relations level.

Some conservative and libertarian pundits, white and black and other, claim that Obama's inauguration proves we are in a post-racial America. But they would have claimed that if McCain won too.

The inauguration isn't the full realization of Martin Luther King's dream, but it's a foretaste of the fully realized dream. Everyone's worst friend Ann Coulter railed the other day about how people such as the Obamas act like victims by emphasizing their blackness and not their whiteness; what irked me was how a relatively sane local radio host agreed with her -- as if Obama could easily pass himself off as white.

Yes, the elephant is still in the room, but it doesn't take up as much space as it did before. It's a nice step forward, but let's keep moving.

Looks like the GOP still struggles to be inclusive, as can be seen in this story about a GOP operative who mailed out a CD of such holiday hits as "Barack the Magic Negro."

Of course, most Republicans will frown on such behavior. But the reason such behavior hasn't yet evaporated altogether is because the GOP's leaders have for decades exploited racial resentment and, um, "Southern srategies," just enough to squeeze out an electoral win here and there. We seem to be moving past that now, although this story seems to show that not all of us are moving at the same pace.

Those are powerful points, Paula. But actually, Earl's photo may well be relevant here. African-Americans, and supporters of other ethnicities, found various ways of working for black freedom in the slavery and civil-rights eras. It seems fair to say that some of the more, um, vigorous and hostile approaches spurred backlashes that were counterproductive.

When al-Zawahiri jabbed at Obama for being a "house negro," he was attempting to invoke Malcolm X's militance. But history has shown that X's anger, while cathartic, was not nearly as efficacious as MLK's grace. Is there nothing to be learned there....?