The Race Is On And It Looks Like Heartache

Lately I've engaged some teabaggers in "debates" about race. By now, we've all read Virginia Republican Governor Robert McDonnell's contention that he didn't mention slavery in his recent proclamation because

there were any number of aspects to that conflict between the states. Obviously, it involved slavery. It involved other issues. But I focused on the ones I thought were most significant for Virginia.

Most significant for which Virginia? At the onset of the Civil War, half of Virginia's population was African-American. (I've taken the liberty of counting each slave as a full person and not the 3/5's prescribed by the Constitution.) Today, the state is 20% African-American.

This neatly summarizes the contemporary conservative attitude toward race: It's so unimportant that it doesn't even bear mentioning as a factor in the Civil War.

They've adopted a typically sneaky tactic that involves code words, white resentment, and turning the question back against anyone who calls them on it. Thus, when they say that President Obama is arrogant, they mean arrogant. When they say that the son of single mother who grew up in straitened circumstances is spoiled, they mean spoiled. (What George Bush was, they don't say.) Anyone who says that "arrogant" is a code word for uppity or that "spoiled" signifies a black man who has risen above the station that God meant for him is an obsessed liberal guilty of living in the past and of being the real race baiter.

When it comes to the nastier elements of the picture, well, they didn't happen. A 50-second crowd level videotape proves that no one called John Lewis the N-word. If he says that someone did, the septuagenarian who suffered a merciless public beating as a Civil Rights activist is a liar who apparently doesn't know the N-word when he hears it. And if anyone did say it, that person was a liberal plant who wants to unfairly malign teabaggers as racists.

It would take a field sociologist to prove this point, but I suspect that when the 'baggers refer to liberals, they mean white liberals. At some level, I doubt that they believe African-Americans capable of political thought beyond radical, misplaced resentment. Which, of course, describes where the 'baggers come from, except that the resentment is reactionary. I've said this before of the right: Whatever opprobrium they heap on others is exactly what they are guilty of themselves.

Thus, anyone who raises the topic of race in debate is guilty of playing the race card, except that the card has already been played by the right -- just as it has been doing since first laying it on the table during the constitutional debates over 220 years ago. At least back then the reactionary right had the courage of its convictions. Today, it's merely craven and duplicitous...

Frank Rich offers his take here. Among the many responses was this stunningly myopic comment:

There are citizens in the South who celebrate the courage and independence of their forebearers [sic] in waging war to uphold the self-determination of the sovereign states. Some outside the South, like Mr. Rich, impute base motives to those soldiers -- which were sometimes present and sometimes not.

Likewise, within the civil rights movement of the 1960's there were citizens who marched and struggled for the self-determination and independence that comes from voting rights and equal access to public commodities. Some of those citizens also had hate-filled and base motives for purusing [sic] their own version of the new racial order.

Many Southerners are proud of their great-grandfathers and relatives who gave their last full measure of devotion for the cause of self-determination, and we celebrate that character on Confederate Memorial Day. If you wish to rejoice with us, you are welcome -- if not, you are entitled to your aloofness.

We do not disparage your own celebrations of family and individual virtue by calling your attention to the evil which attended the social movements of which you are proud. It is a common courtesy, that if you cannot celebrate with someone who rejoices in kith and kin, that you remain silent.

Slavery no longer exists in America. There is no "movement to remove it from the history books" as Mr. Rich seems to suggest. If you wish to wallow in the recitation of its misery, you certainly have that right. But to play the part of a moral elite, who knows better than the common man what is the the significance of our common history and the human character of the Southern soldier, is an affront.

I pray that your own family history is never subjected to such unnecessary scorn.

Assuming that this is serious and not a belated April Fools' prank, there's apparently no need to study the causes of the Civil War because they are no longer relevant and to do so might offend someone's sense of family history. Moreover, the basely motivated Civil Rights Movement headed by Martin Luther King was morally no better or different than the glorious Confederacy led by Jefferson Davis (work out that one out, if you can), and both were about free access to public facilities. The Movement of John Lewis was as hate-filled as the opposition of Bull Connor. And the writer even had the gall to quote the Gettysburg Address in support of his position!

I would really like to hear what he supposes the hate-filled and basely motivated "new racial order" to have been. Whatever it was or is, we're meant to live in terror of it, I have no doubt...

These notes on the 2010 Tulane Engineering Forum include an amazing aerial photo of a breached levee (thanks, Editilla)...

This is cool: A rare 1913 silent film about Abraham Lincoln discovered in a New Hampshire barn (thanks, Foxessa)...

Now you know the answer to this question: What material is used to restore books and fly zeppelins?...

Sometimes, the world is a heartbreaking, sad place. The parents who pull this off are heroes, but the ones who don't aren't villains...