This sign, held by a tea party protestor, is a dog whistle. It means, "Obama is black, we are white, he is not one of us".
Welcome to any southern state you choose. The time is 1950 and the drinking fountains and restrooms are marked according to your status as a human, i.e. men’s room, women’s room, and colored. The front of the bus is free for the taking, as long as you are white. Housing is racially segregated, schools also. In some towns, black people cannot come to town except on Saturday.
Zoom ahead to today and you find that many things have changed in the last 60 years. Some have not. The advances our society has made to relax the tensions between the races made us more sensitive to our African-American population’s mistreatment, but efforts such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the diligence of civil rights leaders to remind us of our missteps, have not yet completely eradicated the hatred. Even though these efforts have demanded civility in its discourse, things are moving in opposition and even the civility we thought would grow to become enlightenment is taking a turn for the worse.
Today, racism is in the hearts and minds, and on the tongues, of many people. In what I call a role reversal from the dark days of Selma in the 60′s, white people are taking to the streets carrying signs in protest of President Obama with no legitimate beef other than the fact that he is different from presidents in the past.
These tea party, or teabagger, protesters are using the public protest and its subsequent media coverage as a technique to demean this black president with any notion they can think of regardless of the lack of any basis in fact. They do this to propel their ideology, or I should say, their backer’s propaganda. These protesters, funded by wealthy PR firms and right-wing Corporate CEOs, lack moral high ground, or the one central cause that would endear them to the masses. They instead use a jumbled mix of messages that they think will resonate with voters. The sad part is that it is working, mainly because the media has legitimized the teabaggers. The media coverage has gone from reporting the protests to becoming the teabagger’s cheer leaders.
There are some influential figures who use their pulpit as a means to try to rally to themselves these protesters who still carry the hatreds, the white-supremist notions, of yesteryear. One such figure, Glen Beck, has seemingly leaped from the past when talk of African-American people as “different” was accepted speech, has tried to become the spokesperson for their cause. What makes it so important to understand the intent of this bigot is because there are millions who listen to him regardless of the advances we have made with race relations. This makes him, and his nonsense that he spouts, very dangerous.
From my email yesterday:
Media Matters for America wrote:
Media Matters: The politically motivated selective-victimhood of Sarah Palin
From: Media Matters for America [action@mediamatters.org]
Sent: Friday, February 05, 2010 7:49 PM
To: Tom
Subject: Media Matters:The politically motivated selective-victimhood of Sarah PalinOther Major Stories
What’s in a name? For Glenn Beck, the answer, it appears, is everything
On Thursday, Beck was revisiting one of his favorite subjects: the hidden history of Barack Obama. Reflecting on how Obama had, as a young man, gone from calling himself Barry to using his given name of Barack, Beck said this:
He chose to use his name Barack for a reason — to identify, not with America — you don’t take the name Barack to identify with America. You take the name Barack to identify with what? Your heritage? The heritage, maybe, of your father in Kenya, who is a radical?
Beck’s history regarding discussions of race speaks for itself. He has said Obama possesses “a deep-seated hatred for white people.” Soon after, he defended those remarks, stating once again that, “I think the president is a racist.” He has suggested that Obama is seeking to become a “slavemaster.” He has pushed the idea that Mexican immigrants want to “reclaim” California and Texas. He called Justice Sonia Sotomayor a “racist” on at least three separate occasions. Beck has portrayed the Democratic health care reform effort as “the beginning of reparations,” a theme he has repeated on both his Fox News and radio shows, saying that Obama plans to “settle old racial scores through new social justice.” During a discussion of former White House green jobs official Van Jones’ past, he baselessly juxtaposed Jones’ picture with footage from a riot. He has claimed that India lacked “flush toilets” and said that the Ganges sounded like “a disease.”
All of these examples are from the last year. The deeper you dig, the worse it gets.
And yet, when Media Matters accused Beck of racial insensitivity, he responded indignantly that “nothing could be further from the truth.”
“If you don’t see why some people would get upset that you accused the president of adopting his African name in order to repudiate his American identity and connect with his father’s radical Kenyan heritage, “wrote Media Matters’ Simon Maloy yesterday, “then I’m afraid you might be a lost cause.”
Indeed, he is — and he’s not interested in being saved. Though he portrays himself as an average Joe just trying to make sense of the world, Beck is actually a wildly successful broadcaster with decades of experience. Everything he does and says is deliberate, and by now, it should be overwhelmingly obvious that he routinely crafts his rhetoric to appeal to the worst impulses in his audience. He insults minorities, and uses racially provocative language and imagery, because he wants to stir resentments among viewers and listeners. There is simply no other way to explain the racially charged content he has made a staple of his work.
Is it any wonder why at least 80 advertisers have fled his Fox News program and civil rights groups have condemned him over his latest comments?
Beck says that something is wrong with Obama, that Obama is somehow fatally flawed. He does this by using any piece of conjured up nonsense he can grasp to prove his point. His talk is nothing more than covert signals, or “dog whistles”, to other racists to use this particular lie as justification for their hatred. This has happened before when southern slave owners tried a thousand different justifications and explanations for slavery.
Beck needs to be called out. We need to keep talking about these angry white people who protest nothing at all. We must continue to define these protestors and expose them for the race baiting bigots that they are. In order to continue toward enlightenment the discourse cannot go chasing nonsense claims from Beck like Alice after a disappearing rabbit down the hole. Instead, we must resolutely shine a light of truth and reason on Beck and his followers. Kudos to Media Matters for America.
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Many Levels of Blame And A Harbinger of Things to Come
Amy Goodman, on the set of Democracy Now!
Re: Journalists sue over 2008 GOP convention arrests, Steve Karnowski, Associated Press, May 5, 2010 10:27 AM EST
The law enforcement teams from the city of Minneapolis who were involved with the brutal assault on Goodman and her staff are directly responsible for the abuse that was doled out on these innocent victims.
Indirectly responsible for the mayhem are the organizers, the movers and shakers within the GOP who coordinated with the Republican Party bosses in Minneapolis and contracted with them for the riot police. It was here that decisions were made as to the level of security and the rules of engagement for the police and to set the limits of their behavior, which was apparently left up to officers on the ground to decide to be as physical and threatening as possible.
Above that, the responsibility is also shared with the McCain campaign and the GOP who decided and coordinated ahead of time how the security would be handled.
Rush Limbaugh stirred the stink. During the run-up to Minneapolis, there was talk in the air of looming riots at the Democratic National Convention in Denver which preceded the GOP convention and that talk is partially responsible for the hysteria by the Minneapolis authorities at the GOP convention.
And above all that, the root cause of this fiasco could be blamed on the right-wing’s insistence on military might as the answer to our nation’s ills. They promote an atmosphere of Nazi-like domination first, then ask questions later. If the GOP had their way, which they might if they regain the White House, then there will be an era of neoconservativism in this country that will push us into more confrontation both domestic and worldwide and more suppression of thought and speech than we could have ever imagined possible.
The new conservatism that is promoted by the likes of Sarah Palin is violent, selfish, warmongering and hatemongering, unable and unwilling to understand the perils that face our environment, corporatist, and unintelligent. If this country goes sideways down this path of dumbed-down ultraconservatism, disaster is eminent. Look at what they did to the economy under Bush.
If the new right gains power, we will all be in a hand basket welcoming newcomers saying, “Come on in, were all headed to hell!”
I hope that Amy Goodman and her associates are successful in their quest for justice. It will go along way in staving off the militarism of America.
From MinnPost.com, By Marisa Helms | Tuesday, Sept. 2, 2008:
And more will come.
Here’s the video:
On the Net: Democracy Now! website: http://www.democracynow.org
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