THE ORWELLIAN LEFT'S RAINBOW HYPOCRISY
Two good articles follow:
Victor Davis Hanson on the Sotomayor nomination:
Conservatives are flummoxed about the Sotomayor news, and have been warned by the likes of Chris Matthews and David Gergen that the nomination is a shoo-in, regardless of Justice Sotomayor’s statements about the less desirable characteristics of white males as judges, and the desire to enact policy from the appellate bench.
I think we are in an Orwellian time, and it is not just explainable by identifypolitics. Remember the grilling of Alberto Gonzales and the hysteria over Miguel Estrada. So the point is not just having a so-called minority profile, but having one compatible to the ‘progressive’ left. If an African-American nominee (cf. Justice Thomas) or Hispanic proves to be conservative, then race can often count against them, inciting a sort of furor on the left that such independent thinking individuals are not suitably deferential to liberals for their trail-blazing work.
Or perhaps the liberal mind feels that de facto it is beyond racial reproach, and therefore can engage in a sort of viciousness that exceeds even that shown non-minority conservatives. In short, the inspirational story of a Hispanic is relevant only to the degree that the nominee favors an agenda of the elite progressive left-without that requisite ideology, the candidate is reduced to an ingrate or a victim of false-consciousness, or a traitor of sorts. (Emphasis mine)
Precisely the point that I made the other day. The Sotomayor nomination is just one more example of the the left's "rainbow hypocrisy."
If you have respect for a person or a cause, it seems obvious that you wouldn't consider those people or that cause to be something to smear someone else with. So, it is always illuminating to discover what the "champions of the oppressed" REALLY think about the handicapped, women, blacks, gays and other minority groups they supposedly champion (i.e., by helping them remain victims for life).
Here are a few examples that exemplify the "compassionate" bigotry of the left and how that bigotry expresses itself when it is politically expedient to do so; i.e., when they want to smear someone with whom they disagree, particularly members of those groups who are not suitably deferential to them.
Racist and other insulting images at the articles site.
This is the cover of a flyer distributed by Tennessee Democrats in the 2004 election that shows how they are willing to exploit the handicapped for political gain:
President Obama has also had a "Special Olympics" moment.
Next are two rather thuggish attempts to demean Condi Rice, an amazing woman who is considered by the left to be a "race traitor" simply because she is an independent thinker who doesn't require their victimhood pimping to be successful; and, of course, because she dares to be a Republican.
We all know what the Left and Democrats think of Blacks and other minorities who don't agree with their ideology: they are not REAL Black people; or REAL gays; or REAL Hispanics.
First, an incredibly racist cartoon by Jeff Danziger:
Then there's this one by Pat Oliphant:
Nice racial stereotyping, huh? I use these cartoons because pictures are often "worth a thousand words," and believe me, much more than a thousand words were used to denigrate and racially stereotype Rice throughout her tenure in the Bush Administration.
She, along with other Republicans and conservatives who happen to be members of the left's identified "victim groups" are considered fair game for the left, who become absolutely vicious toward any of the member of those groups as soon as it is realized they are insufficiently deferential toward the left's ideology.
It's really cute how Obama has framed the debate about identity politics.
First, during the election it became clear (and the MSM helped him in this process) that if The One didn't win the election, then it would be definitive proof of the latent racism of America. Would could only be redeemed by doing the right and proper thing--i.e., vote for him.
This is the kind of casual racism and sexism that has become the modern foundation of the Democratic Party. By manipulating Blacks, women, the Gays, and [insert your favorite victim group here] they have fashioned for themselves a 'rainbow coalition'--or to put it another way, a' politically correct' path to power that actually actively promotes racism, sexism--and any other prejudice they can think of--all in the name of eliminating or opposing racism, sexism and prejudice. Wow! Again, you have to marvel at the power of the unconscious. Their rhetoric says one thing, but their policies end up doing the opposite.
In other words, they bring about and make worse the very thing they claim to be opposed to; but at least in the process they temporarily enhance their faux self-esteem and reinforce their sense of superiority and virtuousness.
You begin to get an inkling of what the left REALLY thinks of their rainbow base of support and "diversity"--particularly when they don't toe the party line. Wouldn't you imagine that if the left really meant what they say about "diversity" that they might have celebrated a talented Black woman who was appointed to one of the highest political offices in the land? Does Condi Rice deserve to be ridiculed for her achievements because she is Black AND a Republican? What about if she had been Black and Democrat?? Would she then be shown some "respect"? Would Clarence Thomas have been shown that respect? How about Miguel Estrada? Or Alberto Gonzales?
But, as Hanson says above, the minions of the left considers itself de facto... beyond racial reproach, and therefore can engage in a sort of viciousness that exceeds even that shown non-minority conservatives. By thier own standards, they routinely fail the test of compassion and humanity. Their rainbow coalition is nothing but a rainbow of hypocrisy and self-serving rhetoric.
The rhetoric surrounding the Sotomayor nomination is just one more hypocrisy. Kimberly Strassel captures the duplicity and the cognitive dissonance (not to mention the emotionalism) of the left, as personified by it's most messianic representative:
The president, after all, had taken great pains to explain that this is more than an American success story. Rather, it is Judge Sotomayor's biography that uniquely qualifies her to sit on the nation's highest bench -- that gives her the "empathy" to rule wisely. Judge Sotomayor agrees: "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion [as a judge] than a white male who hasn't lived that life," she said in 2001.
If so, perhaps we can expect her to join in opinions with the wise and richly experienced Clarence Thomas. That would be the same Justice Thomas who lost his father, and was raised by his mother in a rural Georgia town, in a shack without running water, until he was sent to his grandfather. The same Justice Thomas who had to work every day after school, though he was not allowed to study at the Savannah Public Library because he was black. The same Justice Thomas who became the first in his family to go to college and receive a law degree from Yale.
By the president's measure, the nation couldn't find a more empathetic referee than Justice Thomas. And yet here's what Mr. Obama had to say last year when Pastor Rick Warren asked him about the Supreme Court: "I would not have nominated Clarence Thomas. I don't think that he was a strong enough jurist or legal thinker at the time for that elevation."
In other words, nine months ago Mr. Obama thought that the primary qualification for the High Court was the soundness of a nominee's legal thinking, or at least that's what Democrats have always stressed when working against a conservative judge. Throughout the Bush years, it was standard Democratic senatorial practice to comb through every last opinion, memo, job application and college term paper, all with an aim of creating a nominee "too extreme" or "unqualified" to sit on the federal bench.
Mr. Obama knows this, as he took part in it, joining a Senate minority who voted against both Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Sam Alito. Mr. Obama also understands a discussion of Judge Sotomayor's legal thinking means a discussion about "judicial activism" -- a political loser. In a day when voters routinely rise up to rebuke their activist courts on issues ranging from gay marriage to property rights, few red-state Democrats want to go there. Moreover, a number of Judge Sotomayor's specific legal opinions -- whether on racial preferences, or gun restrictions -- put her to the left of most Americans.
Which brings us to Ground Rule No. 2, which is that Republicans are not allowed to criticize Judge Sotomayor, for the reason that she is the first Hispanic nominee to the High Court.
Read it all to discover Obama's new ground rules that take identity politics (and its latent bigotry) to even higher levels of Orwellian absurdity and political correctness.
As Rosslyn Smith at American Thinker says, "And to think some people actually thought that by voting for Obama this nation would be put identity politics behind us."
HAH! On the contrary, the election of Obama has made identity politics--and the left's rainbow hypocrisy-- front and center in American life.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity
drsanity.blogspot.com
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Lost in the Labyrinth of Race
The Sotomayor Nomination and the Politics of Racial Identity
One of the unexpected results of the Sotomayor nomination is a refocusing on the politics of racial identity and the fossilized institutions of affirmative action-or the belief that the U.S. government should use its vast power to ensure an equality of result rather than a fairness of opportunity.
In the last fifty years, United States has evolved into a complex multiracial state. Race no longer is necessarily an indicator of income or material success-as the record of, say, Japanese-Americans or, indeed Asians in general, attests.
And what criterion constitutes race itself nowadays, when almost every family has someone who is half-Hispanic, a quarter-Asian, one-half black, or part Pakistani? What percentage of one’s lineage ensures purity of race, or qualifies for minority status? Are California Hispanics minorities, or so-called whites that are now a smaller percentage of the state population?
And what constitutes racial authenticity? Lack of income? An absence of success in the American rat race? Is the fourth generation upper-class Cuban an “Hispanic” who should qualify for affirmative action because his name is Hillario Gonzalez? Does the one-quarter aristocratic Jamaican qualify for American redress on account of his partial blackness?
And how does affirmative action-or even the fuzzy notion of “diversity”- adjudicate all this without mirror-imaging the statisticians of the Old Confederacy who could precisely calibrate the 1/16 drop of black blood? The university where I taught was full of South Americans and Europeans with Spanish surnames that allowed their various departments to be considered “ethnically diverse,” while others, having Russian émigrés, or the foreign born from New Delhi, Israel, and Egypt, struggled to satisfy the dictates of diversity czars.
In other words, affirmative action, and the racial identity politics that fuel it, are swamped by their inherent racialist contradictions-and made irrelevant by the dynamism of popular culture of the last three decades in which intermarriage, assimilation, and integration have challenged the notion of racial fides itself.
What are we left then with?
A mess. And a rather mean and nasty mess at that.
So It Is Past Victimization?
Consider the growing Orwellian logic of affirmative action. Is it based on the notion of past grievance? Apparently to make up for historical bias, we are to give a nudge to the present generation of minorities to overcome generations of discrimination.
But wait, the University of California system has been caught in the past trying to dream up ways of reducing Asian representation while bolstering the numbers of Hispanics and blacks. Yet some Asians had parents who were put in camps during World War II by Earl Warren, FDR, and the efforts of the liberal McClatchy newspapers. Asians in the 19th century were denied housing, zoned out of cities, and treated terribly as laborers.
So the reason a Melinda Tanaka might not receive a boost surely is not because she cannot claim victim status in the past. Indeed, why should a Barack Obama qualify for special consideration in college? His mother was white; the grandparents who raised him were as well. His absent father was African-and not part of the historical American trauma of racism and discrimination accorded African-Americans.
Again, a first -generation African immigrant from Jamaica or Nigeria in theory should not tap into special treatment on the basis that his parents or grandparents had suffered in America.
So It’s Present Racism?
All of which leads us to the second pillar of the new discrimination. If it is not necessarily always a claim on historical suffering in the past, then the defense for special consideration must be present racism and lingering discrimination?
But here again we get lost in the labyrinth of race. I know dozens of Punjabi immigrants who are far darker than South Americans. Many Filipinos I taught were more easily identifiable as minorities than many half-African-Americans in my classes. Yet none qualified under the racial rubrics of affirmative action. Indeed, if a Bobby Jindal were to be President, I don’t think the Left would be much interested in his “special” story, at least as much as they are now with that of Sonia Sotomayor’s.
If America is still a racist country, and if we still overtly discriminate on the basis of physical appearance at odds with supposed white norms, well then it is a funny sort of racism. Are we to assume taxi drivers, landlords, and employers supposedly examine nearly-black Indian-Americans, dark southeast Asians, or Spanish-speaking Cubans, and say, “Hmmm, you’re OK,”-and then make it hard for Costa Ricans and Guatemalans because they have accented names or trill their r’s, or more closely replicate the status of Mexican-Americans?
Is there a racial Czar somewhere who has clay tablets that say:
“Only those with 51% demonstrable African-American blood or Mexican-American heritage-or those from Africa, the Caribbean, and South America who can best emulate them-whose present incomes are less than the American mean, and who can cite three recent examples of racial discrimination, are equal for preferential treatment”?
If neither past collective, nor present individual, racism is a logical guide in adjudicating who receives affirmative action, then perhaps we can consider three other criteria. And here we begin to find our way a little through the frightening labyrinth of race.
There are, I think, some unspoken rules of race and racial advantage in America today.
Does Poverty Qualify?
One, you must have some claim, even if the most flimsy one, to a minority group whose average per capita income is below that of the so-called white norm-on the theory that racism, not cultural practices, entirely explains success or failure in contemporary America.
Indians, Basques, Greek-Americans, Arab-Americans, Japanese-Americans, and Chinese-Americans-regardless of their appearance or superficial distance from the dominant “white” tribe” -are probably not going to receive special consideration to trump strict criteria like GPAs and test scores when applying to medical or law schools. American-Indians, Mexican-Americans, and African-Americans are. That any individual of the former group might in fact be far poorer than any member of the latter group matters not at all. That any of the former cadre may also be more instantly recognizable as non-white matters likewise not a whit.
Is It Politics, After All?
How else can we explain why the son of a light-skinned African-American general or orthodontist receives extra consideration and the dark daughter of a Kurdish taxi-driver does not? I had a Coptic student with an Egyptian name from a poor family who tried to suggest that he really was “African-American”-and was laughed out of the university’s affirmative action office.
Second, the claimant at some point during his cursus honorum should clearly identify himself as proud of his tribe and liberal in persuasion. The conservative TV newsreader named Joe Lopez, who does not trill his r’s, and is politically inconspicuous, will not be given as much preference as the ‘Latina’ who pronounces Spanish-names with Spanish accents, adds accents to her own name, and is prominent in liberal causes. Consider the antithetical treatment accorded to a Miguel Estrada versus Sonia Sotomayor, or a dark conservative Clarence Thomas versus an Eric Holder of Barbados ancestry. Estrada, remember, was targeted by the left precisely because he was Hispanic.
Leftwing minorities apparently are seen as authentic-in the sense of being thankful and obliged to their liberal patrons for their heroic efforts at ‘leveling the playing field’. Right-wing minorities who do not consciously embrace racial identification are typecast as being bitter, unappreciative, and perhaps a little crazy.
Do We Just Make This Stuff Up?
I had half-Mexican-American students who had Hispanic first names and fathers-something like a Horacio Dominquez or Jacinta Guzman-who were fully assimilated, upper-middle-class, did not speak a word of Spanish, but were active in La Raza-like groups and, presto, were seen as authentic enough to be given the benefits of unspoken affirmative action. In turn, I also had trouble convincing graduate schools to give affirmative action consideration to those like a Bill Smith or Larry Butler, who had Mexican-American mothers and spoke Spanish. In California-given the mixed ancestry of Cherokee intermarriage of many in the Oklahoma Diaspora-a sort of parlor game among white students was to claim, often accurately, 1/4, 1/8, or 1/16 “Native-American” racial heritage.
Churchillism-As In Ward…
So affirmative action, as the chameleon-like scoundrel Ward Churchill demonstrated, can easily devolve into a conscious and often artificial construct of careerist self-identification. Take away his locks and beads, and his mumbo-jumbo chants, and Churchill was more or less a poorly educated white male teacher that had no refuge in the university as recompense for his questionable scholarly pedigree.
Half-Hispanic and very affluent William “Blaine” Richardson, former Presidential candidate, had he a Hispanic pedigree on his father’s side, or had he used his mother’s name, or, better, had Latinized his first name, could have much more easily reinvented himself as Guillermo Marquez-a more authentic minority -despite his family money and rather exclusive prep-school background.
Had Barack Obama kept his assumed name Barry, and used his mother’s maiden name-logical, given the Dunham family’s exclusive caretakership of young Barack-a Barry Dunham might have appeared far less exotic and authentically black than Barack Obama.
Do the ‘Okies’ Count?
There are even more absurd incongruities. Poor white grandchildren of the Oklahoma Diaspora in paces like Ceres or Bakersfield have still not attained parity with other groups. Yet, the fact that they are “white” ends discussion. Their race ensures that they are not due any of the exemptions accorded other minorities-despite the fact that poverty, grammatically poorly-spoken English, and cultural stereotypes against “Okies” , can ensure that they are discriminated against as much as Latinos and blacks-especially from the white elite classes. The abjectly poor, straight-A son of Oklahoma-accented cesspool-pumper Travis Thornberry from Tulare, California will probably find it far harder to get into Stanford than the B+ children of affluent, highly-educated African-Americans.
Instant Victimhood
Illegal immigrants likewise reveal the absurdities of the government entry into racial spoils. A Yolanda Trevino who crosses the border at sixteen illegally; by eighteen is eligible for federal affirmative action when applying for college-even though she has had no prior pernicious experiences in the United States-on the dubious theory that entering America in 2009 guarantees the same subordinate status as those who came in 1920. Again, the illegal alien will get deferential treatment not shown the second-generation Chinese-American.
What Are We Left With?
Note here I am not arguing that in many cases affirmative action, the diversity industry, and identity policies do not result in some sort of understandable corrective action, or draw on the logic of recompense. Instead, I suggest that in far too many cases they simply do not-and that the exceptions, distortions, and inconsistencies associated with affirmative action and identity politics have now reached enough of a critical mass to end this once utopian experiment once and for all.
Elite White Guilt
Indeed, creating, recreating, and emphasizing racial identity, especially among elites, currently involves so many contortions that it has descended from the absurd to the outright pernicious-and is becoming a sort of racism itself. One gets the uncomfortable feeling that the perpetuators of the present system-mostly elite whites-find some sort of psychological absolution in such a system that allows them to alleviate guilt without living among poorer people of color, or sending their own children to the “diverse” public schools-two concrete steps that might quickly indeed ensure better neighborhoods and better education for the “other.” In any case, most white elites count on their own connections, wealth, and education, to find exemptions from the unfairness of racial identification. A Ted Kennedy, after all, had affirmative action well before it was based on race.
Unfortunately, unlike a Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, or Alberto Gonzales, President Obama has embraced identity politics in unprecedented fashion-and we are reaping what he has sown. In these first days of the Sotomayor nomination, we are not discussing Justice Sotomayor’s judicial competence as much as her Latina identification-and the political ramifications of such tribalism.
But then only in these race-conscious times could a Barack Obama have entered the racial labyrinth as a well-educated youth of mixed and foreign ancestry, and middle-class prep school lineage, and exited as a representative totem of the African-American underclass.
By virtue of that metamorphosis it matters not at all that he once subsidized the racial hatred of Rev. Wright’s Church, carelessly tossed out the epithet ‘typical white person’, stereotyped the white working class as ‘clingers,’ had his privileged Attorney General call Americans “cowards” on matters of race, and nominated a candidate for the Supreme Court who, despite all the tortured exegeses of exculpation, declared that white males could not possess the judicial wisdom and temperament of someone of her own race and gender.
You see, in matters of racial politics, we deal now only in fantasies rather than reality.
pajamasmedia.com
From the comments to the Hanson article - amazing what racism can get printed in liberal college papers - as long as the butt of the joke is selected appropriately:
Dave the Kapampangan:
American citizens and residents of Asian descent are routinely held to higher college admissions standards than citizens and residents with non-Asian last names. This is a blatant example of undermining equal opportunity for hardworking people to ensure “racial equality” of outcome.
On January 17, 2007, the Daily Princetonian, in its annual “joke” issue, published the following:
“I so good at math and science … I the super smart Asian. Princeton the super dumb college, not accept me … My dad from Kung Pao province…. I love Yale. Lots of bulldogs here for me to eat.”
Ho ho ho. Very classy, Princeton. The next thing you know, some Asian firemen will be taking an advancement test, and their results will be discounted by a kangaroo court on the theory that the fire department test questions were “racially” biased against non Asians who did not do well on the test. Nah…. that could never happen in America. |
