Here is the latest from Mickey Kaus over at "Slate" on Dean.
Dean on 'Educating White Folks'
He's cluelessly pre-Clinton on race.
By Mickey Kaus
Updated Thursday, Jan. 1, 2004, at 8:50 PM PT
"Dealing with race is about educating white folks." Howard Dean seems to have said this. That'll bring in those Southern pickup guys! They love being singled out for 'education'! ... Yes, Dean was apparently pandering to Boston Globe columnist Derrick Z. Jackson. But that's hardly an excuse. Try to imagine Bill Clinton uttering the same sentence. It's pretty difficult. For one thing, Clinton was too smart a politician. And one of Clinton's major (and heavily-advertised) virtues was his occasional willingness to speak unpleasant truths to both whites and blacks. Here's Clinton talking at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York a few days after the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles:
Can we live in a country where too many people think that violence has a black face, that is, what is consistent either with their experiences or with they see on the news or the fact that they don't have any friends of other races. And where too many black people know that violence too often has a black face because it is their children who are shot, their schools which are savaged, their new neighborhoods which are war zones and they believe no one will make their streets safe simply because they are black. [Emphasis added.]
I would say Clinton was not merely "educating white folks" in this passage--it's from a speech in which he'd just responded to the King riots by saying "we must break the culture of poverty and dependence" and nobody thought he was talking only or even mainly about a culture of "white folks." Does Dean really believe you can talk honestly about race--including "hiring practices"--without talking about that culture (even though it enmeshes only a minority of African-Americans, and even though, thanks in part to the welfare reform Clinton signed, it's rapidly changing for the better)? I'm sure there are better Clinton examples I don't have handy.
More recently, here's hip-hopper Missy Elliott, trying to do what Dr. Dean says is unnecesary, in the song "Wake Up" on her most recent album:
If you dont gotta gun (its alright)
If yah makin legal money, (its alright)
If you gotta keep yah clothes on, (its alright)
You aint gotta sell yah lil phone, (its alright)
And yah wheels dont spin, (its alright)
And you gotta wear them jeans again, (its alright)
Yeah if you tried oh well, (its alright)
Now why would Elliott feel a need to say this--say that "makin legal money" is allright!--if "dealing with race" entirely involved educating white folks? (I know most rap fans are white. But the people who aren't "makin legal money" whom hip-hop often glorifies are mainly black. Elliott pretty clearly isn't worried here about suburban white hip-hop fans. One subtle clue: The phrase "Black wake up" turns up in the second verse. )
Is there really nothing in "dealing with race" that involves changing African-American attitudes along with white attitudes? Dean's comment would be more depressing if weren't also the sort of cluelessly pre-Clinton utterance that virtually guarantees he will never be president.
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