In case you needed a reminder of how awesome literary journal n+1 is, their new issue has a good, hard look at the willfully ignorant racism in the Tea Party and how it has roots that stretch all the way back to the Civil War.
The present blooming fantasy of white victimization has roots in the peculiar violent institutions of the 19th-century American South. In the distant mirror of history, it’s easy to spot the irony and the guilt: even before the Civil War began, whites worried that their slaves would rise up and repay their masters in kind — filch the fruit of their labor, rape them, and beat them, sometimes to death. As soon as the balance of power shifted and news of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse circulated throughout the former slave states, those fears ran amok. Mark Summers, a historian of the disastrous “Reconstruction” that condemned recently freed blacks to another century of oppression, has observed that the South, unlike the North, had no truly independent newspapers or magazines. What fair and balanced organs then existed reported rumors and falsehoods, like the arrival of a “liberating” French army sent by Napoleon III the same week of Lee’s surrender, or the forced seizure of former plantations by mobs of roving blacks. In Summers’s telling phrase, “the white south saw with dreadful clarity things that did not exist.”
Topics discussed include Lee Atwater, the Confederate flag, Sarah Palin, and much, much more.
thanks for posting this!!
That n+1 piece was unusually weak. Even Atwater said that by the end, the racism had drained out of the Southern Strategy, leaving only bad policies and residual angst. That’s not racism.
The perpetual failure of the left to actually make policy arguments, instead of name-calling people who disagree with us, is a total embarrassment.
How hard is it, at this point, to argue against Reganomics? Why even bother pissing people off by calling them racists?
I don’t see the tea party espousing racist ideas. I don’t see the opposition to bailouts and healthcare reform having a even a racial component, like welfare reform did. I see a couple nuts with signs, some ugly nativism, some embarrassing paranoia, and a lot of sad ignorance.
But what can you expect when we, the people who aren’t ignorant, instead of making arguments and informing the tea partiers, just call them racists?
There are a whole bunch of people on the left who are hateful and lazy. The only thing they know how to do is call people racists. They don’t care if the left keeps losing, as long as they get to feel superior. It’s pathetic.
YOUR MOM was born in the Confederacy.
WFMU’s Too Much Information is currently doing a three-part series on the Tea Party called “Beyond The Fruited Plain”; the third episode runs tomorrow.
http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/TI
Default position for arguing against those for less government and adherence to constitutional law (or anything the far left disagree with) is to shout ‘racist!’ – the new cry wolf.
No one cares any more.
They can’t be racist–they have this one African American guy leading the “Tea Are The World” musical extravaganza: http://vimeo.com/15571221
Robert E. Lee at Appomattox: “If we’re counting on the fucking *French* to pull our biscuits out of the fire, I guess we’re through.”
Apparently you weren’t watching the rally on Saturday then?
The Tea Party isn’t racist. Sure, there’s a few racists among them, but that’s all; the majority aren’t. The rest are just ignorant / misguided / selfish / stupid (or some combination of the above). Why resort to inaccurate namecalling when there’s so many valid things to criticize them for?