I was just working a on story where I referenced a video where two people are angrily discussing the issue of racism from opposite ends. As it normally plays out this isn’t a “You’re Racist/No I’m Not” argument, it’s a “Racism Continues to Exist/No It Doesn’t” fight. During the video Dan Joseph of the conservative Media Research Center being the nay-sayer in the argument claims that accusations of racism have become so commonplace that they “lost all meaning” and that “we all know where the line is drawn: Donald Sterling.”
Don Sterling is the test of “true” racism? Do tell.
The thing is that just like Donald Trump who says he’s “the least racist person on earth” and Paula Deen who denied she was racist after admitting to repeated uses of the N-word and making racist jokes, and Cliven Bundy who denied he was racist by trotting out a new special black friend after making his “let me tell you something about the negro” rant, and Phil Robertson who denied he was racist after he essentially said black people were “happier and more godly” during segregation and Jim Crow in Louisiana, even Donald Sterling denied that anything he said was “Racist.”
V: It's like saying, "Let's just persecute and kill all of the Jews."
DS: Oh, it's the same thing, right?
V: Isn't it wrong? Wasn't it wrong then? With the Holocaust? And you're Jewish, you understand discrimination.
DS: You're a mental case, you're really a mental case. The Holocaust, we're comparing with—
V: Racism! Discrimination.
DS: There's no racism here. If you don't want to be... walking... into a basketball game with a certain... person, is that racism?
Well according to Don Sterling, no, it’s not. And if saying you specifically don’t want your hot young trophy girlfriend to come to your basketball games with hot young black guys on her arm isn’t racist, exactly what the frack is?
Also note It wasn’t just the tapes where Sterling demanded to control who his girlfriend showed up to his games with that was the only issue with him.
Former Los Angeles Clippers say the owner would barge into the locker room to berate players, offer awkward praise or — according to testimony in a lawsuit filed by his fired general manager — tell guests to check out his players' "beautiful black bodies."
...
Opponents say the racially incendiary remarks attributed to Sterling and leaked to TMZ last weekend publicly show a side of the 80-year-old real-estate mogul that has been ignored and rationalized for years
Sterling has faced extensive federal charges of civil rights violations and racial discrimination in business, making shocking race-related statements in sworn testimony before reaching multimillion-dollar settlements. He has also been sued for sexual harassment by former employees, and the court proceedings detailed an outlandish list of Sterling's personal proclivities.
[Elgin] Baylor, the former NBA great who served as the Clippers' GM for 22 years, left the franchise with rancor and an unsuccessful lawsuit alleging race and age discrimination. Baylor claimed Sterling has a "plantation mentality" about the Clippers, envisioning a team of "poor black boys from the South playing for a white coach."
So this had been going on and on for decades and it was only because his girlfriend released a tape to TMZ that it suddenly became a real issue. And if you recall one of the first persons to come to Sterling’s defense was Donald Trump.
“He got set up by a very, very bad girlfriend, let’s face it,” Trump opined on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” Monday. “Let’s face it, that whole thing is — she’s called the girlfriend from hell,” Trump said.
“He could be out of it in terms of his actions,” Trump observed. “The way she led him along. He should know, if he were there, if he was with it, he would know after one or two of those questions that she was answering and asking that there’s something going on here.”
“You look at the way he’s being baited, just constantly being baited,” he added. “I read part of a transcript and it was ridiculous.”
So right, the words coming out of his mouth are somehow all her fault.
The Paula Deen situation was also much worse than just a few off-color jokes.
When asked by Lisa’s Atlanta-based attorney if she’d ever used the N-word, Paula responded, “Yes, of course,” and gave examples of times she used the offensive term.
In terms of telling racist jokes, Paula said, “It’s just what they are — they’re jokes…most jokes are about Jewish people, rednecks, black folks…I can’t determine what offends another person.”
And when 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.”
In the case of right-wing darling Phil Robertson, patriach of the Duck Dynasty clan, Fox Hosts all came out in his support, but that wasn’t enough for Geraldo who went so far in his defense against charges of homophobia following his GQ article that he actually said that “Cock-Sucking Faggot” was not a slur.
Yes, really.
This shouldn’t be surprising. RIght-wing operatives essentially gas-lighted Shirley Sherrod and the NAACP with a falsely edited video simply because they had said some signs and messages used by the Tea Party “appeared” to be potentially racist.
Today, NAACP delegates passed a resolution to condemn extremist elements within the Tea Party, calling on Tea Party leaders to repudiate those in their ranks who use racist language in their signs and speeches.
The resolution came after a year of high-profile media coverage of attendees of Tea Party marches using vile, antagonistic racial slurs & images. In March, respected members of the Congressional Black Caucus reported that racial epithets were hurled at them as they passed by a Washington, DC health care protest. Civil rights legend John Lewis was called the “n-word” in the incident while others in the crowd used ugly anti-gay slurs to describe Congressman Barney Frank, a long-time NAACP supporter and the nation’s first openly gay member of Congress.
Rather than repudiate things like signs with watermelon on the White House lawn, and Obama as a witch doctor, or in white-face as the Joker, the NAACP’S criticism was enough to get former Tea Party Express head Mark Williams to cyber-cosplay as a racist member of the NAACP to tragic effect.
We Colored People have taken a vote and decided that we don't cotton to that whole emancipation thing. Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves, and take consequences along with the rewards. That is just far too much to ask of us Colored People and we demand that it stop!
And of course, he claimed he wasn’t a racist, just as he claimed “no one in the Tea Party could possibly be racist." Nor was Sarah Palin supposedly racist when she defended Dr. Laura’s open and repeated use of the N-word while talking to a black female guest on the phone.
This we get from the same guy who claimed “Allah is a Monkey God” and that President Obama was an “Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug”, but no…. he’ s not the slightest bit racist. According to him it was the NAACP that was racist.
"We are dealing with people who are professional race-baiters who make a very good living off this kind of thing. They make more money off of race than any slave trader, ever. It's time groups like the NAACP went to the trash heap of history where they belong along with all the other vile, racist groups that emerged in our history."
…
"A false charge of racism is itself, racist," New York tea party organizer David Webb said. "This resolution shows they no longer serve the black community's interests to advance people of color within American culture. Instead, they exert their power to isolate and control people of color."
Right, they’re just a group that gins up and hypes false fear of a false problem to remain in power in order to manipulate people and increase profits — hm, and just where have a seen that tactic applied before? Oh and the NAACP is actually a volunteer non-profit organization, they don’t make any money.
In each of these cases the argument was made that the problem wasn’t the racist statements, the problem was the “political correctness” of those who complained and criticized those statements as if free speech really means complete freedom from criticism and comment on your speech.
And now on the caboose of this run-away train of ID we have Donald Trump.
A longtime birther, and Benghazi truther is now leading the Republican Presidential pack because of his incendiary statements that Muslim mosques should be closed and/or illegally surveilled — even though that totally failed for the NYPD and is now the subject of a lawsuit — that we should have a database of Syrian refugees, that Muslims should be visibly marked and identified with badges as if the hijab, robes and beards weren’t already a bit of a hint, that not just refugees but all Muslims should be banned from immigrating into the country possibly even including U.S. citizens returning home until we “know what’s going on” even though domestic terrorists have killed more Americans in the country since 9-11 than have Islamic terrorists, who’d previously said we shouldn’t let any Ebola victims back into the country even though all but one of them was completely cured and there was no “outbreak” from trying, who claims he’s not in any ISIS videos even though they do use his rhetoric and image on social media to recruit just as Hillary Clinton stated, who says we’re losing the war against ISIS even though their territory has shrunken by 25% and the Iraqi army just took back Ramadi, who claimed “Mexico is sending us Rapists” when in reality it’s the migrants themselves who are being raped and trapped into the local sex trade in southern Mexico, who claims they “bring crime” even though the crime rate for immigrants is less than it is for citizens, who thinks as noted by Bernie Sanders that we should re-implement President Eisenhower’s tragically failed Operation: Wetback to deport millions of undocumented immigrants even though that program deported far few people than President Obama has and resulted in dozens of deaths from heatstroke and massive human rights violations, who casually retweets insanely bogus anti-black crime stats that originated on white supremacist websites, who says wages are too high when he’s not saying wages are too low, who said we should “never condone violence” when his supporters beat a homeless man bloody with bats then urinated on him because they wrongly suspected he was an undocumented immigrant, yet who said his supporters “were right” to beat up a #BlackLIvesMatter protestor, while other supporters of his have body slammed a protester who said Trump was a “fascist” — so much for “free speech” there — and still others spit in the face of immigration advocates.
These are the things that people like about Trump.
Trump’s rhetoric is so so horribly bad he even has the support of the former grand wizard of the KKK.
Washington (CNN)David Duke, the anti-Semitic former Ku Klux Klan leader, praised Republican front-runner Donald Trump for his immigration policy proposals and said Trump is "the best of the lot."
After ranting about "Jewish supremacy" and Jewish domination of the media, Duke took time out of two of his radio programs last week to talk up Trump's candidacy as a "great thing," praising the Republican candidate's plan to deport the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S.
Yet even that guy also says Trump’s rhetoric is “Too Radical”.
As far as what I see, according to the candidates that are out there now, Republicans and Democrats, I think he’s head and shoulders right now above the rest. I don’t agree with everything he says, he speaks a little more, actually he speaks a little more, a lot more radically than I talk. And I think that’s a positive and negative.
But we’re told by Trump that he’s not a racist. Nope, not a bit. The “least racist person on earth.” He just seems to be the absolute top favorite candidate of racists. Coincidence?
And neither is Dr. Laura, or Sarah Palin, or Paula Deen or Mark Williams or was Andrew Breitbart or is convict James O’Keefe, or Phil Robertson, or Cliven Bunden, or Donald Sterling — cuz he said so didn’t he? — or anybody in the Tea Party or even those Trump supporters who want to stamp little yellow “Muslim” stars on people and deport 11 Million Latinos, and beat people up, spit on them and urinate on them.
Right, not a single racist in the batch.
Ok, so I have to wonder, if Trump and all the rest aren’t racists even after all the above, even after all they’ve said and how their rhetoric justifying and rationalizing direct and clear violations of the Constitution and civil rights act, from illegal surveillance to out-and-out religious and racial persecution which has clearly inspired more and more intimidation, harassment, vandalism, firebombings and violence against immigrants and minorities…
In the days since Donald Trump proposed banning Muslims from the US in a December 7 speech, there has been a wave of anti-Muslim attacks across the US, with some being prosecuted under hate crime laws. Because all of these incidents took place just in the past week, none of the alleged perpetrators mentioned here have been convicted. And while not all of the victims mentioned are Muslims, they were undoubtedly targeted due to the perpetrator’s false perception that the victim was Muslim.
2015 has been the deadliest year on record for American Muslims, with 63 recorded attacks on mosques. The previous high was 2010, with 53 attacks targeting Islamic worship centers. 17 of those attacks took place in November. That’s also three times as many Mosque attacks when compared to last year. In 2014, Muslims were the target of 154 hate crimes. The number for 2015 hasn’t yet been tallied, although this year’s hate crime number is expected to surpass the 2014 total.
I have to ask : what exactly do they think “being racist” actually is? Where is the line drawn?
How many millions more people do you have to defame and slander, how many more people do we have to made to fear, how many people have to surrender their civil rights to that fear, how many more hundreds of unarmed black men have to be shot down in the streets by police, how many more people have to end up on the receiving end of threats, violent attacks and arson before we finally and at long last get to triumphantly say — “Yes, THAT right there is true Racism?”
Because it seems to me we crossed that line years ago. And it keeps moving further and further in the wrong direction.
Trump is just dancing all over the line to push up his poll numbers because even he knows the racists are out there, somewhere, and he wants them all on his side and frankly I think that’s worse than being a racist.
It’s being a racism booster.