Bobcat Love's Sense of Shame
2/12/2017 3:59 PM
I think this might have some relevance to the current discussion, since there have been allusions to Republicans being soft in racism:
http://tinyurl.com/zgaqzo7Does that make the right's racism better or worse? Or is the idea that you can justify support for the campaign Trump just ran and the vocally White Supremacist supporters he emboldened if some people on Twitter of uncertain race made racially charged comments at a black senator?
I mean, I think we can both agree racism is a problem in this country right? And that racism in this country doesn't adhere to party lines. So what purpose does "but they're racist too" serve here?
Most of the charges along these lines that I've heard in recent years have been the left saying that people on the right are racists or white supremacists. Senator Scott's experience just shows that there is real hatred with racial overtones coming back the other way. While I'm sure you can find some white supremacists who voted for Trump, to imply that that was a significant enough number to have made much of a difference I think is disingenuous. It's kind of like saying the some known Communists voted for Obama, therefore, he must be a Communist, or at least a Pinko. Racism, and specifically, slavery was our great national "original sin." Of that there can be no doubt and little argument. We are in totally agreement on that score. My major point, made somewhere up this thread (or in another related thread, hard to keep track), is that we all need to stop throwing around the words "racist" and "white supremacist" unless we have real solid, objective evidence. Here, I'm not really talking about any specific case, but just making a general statement that these terms are being overused to the point that when we need to confront real racism or white supremacism that a lot of folks will take a collective yawn because we've cried wolf once too often.
I understand your point, I'm I'm sympathetic to it to a point. For words to retain their utility, they must be used properly. No argument here.
But I also think the word policing on the right is often times nothing more than willful avoidance. It's true that there are many on the left who over-charge when it comes to racism, but at the same time, reasonable conservatives don't do nearly enough to push back against policies levied by the GOP that are obviously discriminatory.
It was the Republican party in North Carolina that pushed deliberate and purposeful voter suppression laws, and were caught doing so red handed. Simultaneously, other Republicans decided that the Voting Rights Act had outlived its usefulness and pushed to have it stripped. That's the party that nominated Jeff Sessions, a man with accusations of blatant racism hanging over him for the last 30 years. How many years did the President spend insisting Obama was born in Kenya? How does he speak about immigrants? Refugees? Context matters.
So while in a vacuum, it's easy enough to write accusations against Sessions off as Sessions' having a shitty sense of humor, politics doesn't exist in a vacuum. Any party serious about racism would be far more mindful of the optics of nominating Sessions in the wake of something as egregious as North Carolina. Suppressing minority voters is not a big yawn, and falling into a pattern of writing off accusations as crying wolf does America, and your own party, a huge disservice.
The left's accusations of racism don't come out of nowhere. Are they an unfair label to a huge chunk of the party? Absolutely they are. But there's a solution beyond calling protesters snowflakes and yawning accusations away: rid your party of the people that push things like North Carolina voter suppression.
Last Edited: 2/12/2017 4:07:20 PM by Bobcat Love's Sense of Shame