Showing their horns
Can we finally agree now that racism is still rampant in the United States and ingrained with persons of influence? This past week gave us both Donald Sterling and Cliven Bundy. In the past, reactionaries could pass these incidents off as isolated, but this is getting harder to do.Sterling has been tolerated in professional basketball for so long that his example this week is one in which the comments and circumstances were so extreme that the toleration appears to have reached its limit. We're so used to giving rich folks a pass in this country that Sterling was even scheduled to receive the NAACP Presidents Award in June.
The Bundy case is the most instructive of the two, for me. The anti-government criminal rancher from Nevada was an inspired hero of the Tea Party until Thursday when he clued reporters to his opinion that the "Negro people" were better off as the property of white people because, according to his logic, they had gardens and chickens then rather than dependence on the government. Bundy's greatest sin, politically, was being too unsophisticated to speak in the accepted racist code of the modern Right. When he did, even his most breathless champions in Washington, like Sean Hannity, were forced to distance themselves.
Too late for them, though. The anti-government, pro-gun agenda of the reactionaries can't shake the racist label so easily. When the Black Panther Party championed gun ownership and self-defense against the government in the 1960's and 70's, that group enjoyed zero support from the Right, and there's zero retroactive support from the same groups today. Hannity and Co. jumped in immediately behind Bundy several weeks ago when the trespassing rancher and his neighbors started arming themselves against federal agents, not bothering to vet Bundy's position on the Second Amendment against his position on the Thirteenth Amendment. How could they be so foolish? Because of the color of Bundy's skin.
posted by CM @ 4:37 PM
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