Entries associated with the tag "Racism":

Rick Pearlstein, who wrote the book on Barry Goldwater and his movement, reminds us in his blog that some significant roots of present-day conservatism lie in the white racist crowds who tried to keep black kids from integrating the schools of Little Rock, Arkansas.

"The people who first boosted Goldwater for the presidency, and arranged for his manifesto Conscience of a Conservative to be ghostwritten, chose Goldwater only for second choice as their preferred conservative presidential standard bearer. Their first choice was...Orval Faubus," Democratic governor of Arkansas who brought out the state's national guard to try to prevent integration 50 years ago.

Jim Johnson, "founder of the Arkansas White Citizens Councils and one of the organizers of the Little Rock mob" and a Faubus-for-president booster, is another connection. "He returned to the forefront of national conservative movement politics in the 1990s as one of the chief conspirators against the presidency of Bill Clinton, and narrators of the notorious smear video (distributed by the Rev. Jerry Falwell) the 'Clinton Chronicles.'"

Of course, times have changed in ways Pearlstein doesn't mention in his post. Just as the Catholic Church has had to admit that the earth revolves around the sun, today's conservatives have had to admit black people to leadership positions. In both cases it's a real concession that neither friends nor foes care to acknowledge as such.

The good old days weren't. Matthew Yglesias at the Atlantic:

"It really is remarkable that for all the bellyaching about the decline of bipartisan behavior in DC there's very little attention paid to the fact that there are actual reasons this has happened beyond Newt Gingrich being a meany and bloggers being too shrill. The Jim Crow South gave rise to an odd structure of American political institutions whereby both of the parties contained substantial ideological diversity. This had the benefit of setting the stage for a wide array of cross-cutting alliances. It came, however, at the cost of consigning a substantial portion of the population to life under a brutal system of apartheid ruthlessly upheld through systematic violence."

Hat tip to Brendan Nyhan, who elaborates with graphs and everything: "In short, the rise in bipartisanship was driven by Southern Democrats. Now that they are an endangered species, we've returned to the historical norm of sharp partisan conflict."

In the world of American politics, you don't have to walk very far in any direction to find yourself up against racism and the comfortable ability of white people to forget about everyone else.

Elatia Harris at 3 Quarks Daily has a world-class blog post of stories that the Roberts "Plessy v. Ferguson was too liberal" Supreme Court needs to hear:

"A century before I was born in a large Southern city which shall be nameless, my mother’s family left Murfreesboro, Tennessee, where until the Civil War they raised cotton. Their house and everything in it had been garrisoned by Union soldiers before the war’s end, so when the family left, they left with nothing, and I was almost grown-up before I understood that that was as it should have been. Heading west, they joined a cousin in a not-so-distant state, a Methodist minister who wrote them there was pretty good cotton land to be had thereabouts. They got back on their feet – farming, ranching, banking.  There was, briefly, prosperity – my grandmother had a white Shetland pony, and was the fanciest little girl she knew – and then the Depression, which put paid to any notion of a real comeback.

"A Southern family with a plantation background is a family keenly aware of dispossession, of what it is to be on the wrong side of history. This is different from an awareness that one’s ancestors were participants in and beneficiaries of a crime so vast and systematic that one’s nation is rocking from it still.  I cannot say that in childhood I found 'plantation tales' charming and innocent, but the full horror of them was not yet available to me.  Here’s one.  When in 1860 my great-grandmother, Eleanor W., turned 6 years old, she was presented with her sixth slave, having already been given one for each previous year of her life.  Like little Eleanor, the slaves were children.

"Coming along a century later, should I have felt personal guilt for this?  Well, it didn’t make me proud.  But my imagination, including my moral imagination, was affected by this story in a way that I have the sense to be grateful for.  I can only have first heard it in the spirit it was told – by my grandmother, little Eleanor’s daughter, owner of the white pony -- as a testament to the lost paradise of plantation life.  It would be dense years of child-time before I could judge my grandmother for reckoning up the family’s glories this way, years more before I could understand the link between her own disappointments and her luscious memories of the subjugation of others."

Don't miss the one about her childhood visit to a country club the summer she'd tanned well.