Yesterday I wrote a diary postulating that some of the "racist" behavior we're seeing from the Tea Party cohort derives from an irrational hatred not just of African-Americans or other ethnic minorities, but also of Democrats and "liberals" generally.
My purpose was to highlight a remark made by a right-wing troll over at HuffPo, who was arguing (with me and others) that the Marilyn Davenport email of the image showing President Obama and his parents as chimps was not racist, because inter alia "liberals" had depicted President George W. Bush as a chimp many times, and if that's not racist, then the Davenport image is not racist, and to suggest otherwise is to effect a "double standard." Unable to explain why a white person depicting another white person as a primate is "racist," he shifted into a strange, impromptu and utterly implausible argument that somehow the image was intended not to compare African-Americans to chimps, but to compare liberals to chimps. He then wrote the following:
But comparing 'liberals' to a lesser evolved species, well, that's just kind of reality. As long as 'liberals' are obsessed by race and controlling their fellow man, we'll consider them to be less evolved.
Although it's not directed at any racial or ethnic minority, this is nonetheless precisely the sort of thing that a racist would say. I responded to the comment and told him that, anticipating a firestorm of outrage and indignation in response.
What I got was even more revealing.
Right-wingers and Tea Party members who deny that they, or their cohort at large, are racist may be in denial, they may be deliberately lying, or they may have a distorted idea of what racism is, and what constitutes racist behavior and expression. They may also, in fact, have no conscious animus at all toward racial or ethnic minorities, and thus sincerely believe that they are not racists. However, they may very well be racist in a way that no one has ever suggested to them.
Here's the response I got when I told the right-wing troll that his remark about liberals being a "lesser evolved species" was the kind of thing a racist would say:
I do, however, believe that "liberalism" is a personality disorder with common attributes across virtually anyone who identifies themselves as "liberals". ... It's not a race, it's a mental issue. It's a deep-seated guilt which manifests itself as a need to control others and take their money to use "for the common good", rather than allowing people to have freedom and the ability to help out of the kindness of their own heart.
OK, we've all heard and read that before. Michael Savage says it on a daily basis. But this troll has no idea how much he revealed to the world by writing these comments.
This. Is. Racism.
This is what racists say, this is how racists think, this is how racists construct and organize their reality, this is how racists understand their own and others' place in the world. The only difference, if it is indeed a difference at all, is that our friendly troll is not explicitly talking about African-Americans or any other ethnic minority; he's talking about "liberals." Whether his assumptions about, and concomitant hatred of, "liberals" is somehow related to any connection he may be making, consciously or unconsciously, between liberals and ethnic minorities, is beside the point. In every other respect this, combined with the other remark I highlighted, is unmistakably racist expression.
What we're looking at here is the same kind of hate that courses through the veins of every hard-core racist. It's a hate based not only on ignorance, self-absorption and paranoia, but on a deep and unacknowledged desire to characterize people a certain way; to read their minds and "know" what motivates them. Our troll is talking about a caricature, a distortion, a fictional construct, one he has created and imagined to validate his own hate, not any real person, "liberal" or otherwise. And he has taken that distorted and false characteristic and applied it universally to any and every person who is, who thinks of himself as, or who could be identified or labeled (by him) as, a "liberal."
"Those people are all ___."
I don't know if this kind of hate makes me angry or sad. I still find it rather incredible that this troll managed to volunteer his own racism so baldly yet so unwittingly. And I'm still working on the question: If we augment our understanding of right-wing racism to account for this sort of, for lack of a better term, "non-racial racism," will we be better equipped to combat it?