Bad Apples: Dealing with Pools, Fools and Tools

It's been a busy WEEK IN RACE. As we move to recognize the 100th anniversary of the NAACP, we are reminded about how far we have come, but also how much work needs to be done. As we expected, we are seeing a noticeable backlash against racial justice since Barack Obama took office in January.

Pools

Most notably was the so-called "racist pool" incident THIS WEEK, where children from an inner-city youth summer camp was turned away by a suburban private pool, with several reports of racist language coming from the White swimmers and their parents. The video reports (watch here and here) are heartbreaking. There is no way that those kids will ever forget the feelings they had when they were insulted and discriminated against on that early summer day; as Dr. Melissa Harris-Lacewell reminds us, the event will very likely stick with them for the rest of their lives.

As some posters noted on the (new) RaceProject Facebook page, there is a long history of segregation and discrimination with respect to leisure in America, even though most of the attention is paid to workplace and education. The reported reaction of the children and parents is eerily reminiscent of stories and footage from the 1950s. Unfortunately, as you will read below, it's not the only connection THIS WEEK to that time.

Fools

Later in the week, it was discovered that readers of the conservative Free Republic blog unleashed a flurry of racist comments about Malia Obama after a picture of her in a t-shirt with a peace sign (left) was posted. The Vancouver Sun reports comments including: "A typical street whore." "A bunch of ghetto thugs." "Ghetto street trash." "Wonder when she will get her first abortion." We encourage you to read the article for more of the vitriol (though we recommend you do so on a empty stomach). It's important to note that Free Republic is considered to be a mainstream conservative site (unlike the White supremacist social networking site on which some U.S. military service members have apparently been participating). It would be difficult to dismiss this as rantings of a few fringe "wing nuts."

One of the commonalities, of course, between these two stories is that the racist resentment is directed at children. Imagine the power the (mostly anonymous) posters must have felt as they typed away within a mob mentality reminiscent of historic lynchings. Angry Whites (mostly men) who are convinced that their power is endangered because of affirmative action and a "radical" Black president who is either a radical Black Liberation Christian or a closet Muslim, must have felt a tremendous sense of satisfaction as they read, wrote and contributed to this assault on a little girl whose only crime was to signal her wish for (gasp!) peace.

Thoughtful conservatives, though, have not been taking this lying down. GOP insider Larry Gellman wrote a magnificent piece for Huffington Post THIS WEEK wherein he admonishes that the "hate speech" (his words) coming from the right is more dangerous than any radical language from the left because the former comes not from the margins of the movement but from the power source.

Hate speech is different. It's when you accuse the President of the United States of being a socialist, a terrorist, a Muslim, an anti-Semite, or a traitor based on lies and distortions. And it becomes particularly meaningful when the venom comes not from the radical fringe -- as it often does from the Left -- but from the heart of the party leadership -- as it often does from the Right.

His comments were written in the context of the election for the president of the Young Republicans of America, as the front runner was recently discovered to have permitted and (at least tacitly supported) hateful, racist language on her Facebook page by supporters.

In her weekly Daily Beast blog, Meghan McCain implored her fellow Republicans to "NOT elect a racist" (her emphasis). While we would have liked to have seen Meghan reflect the scholarly differences between "racism" and "bigotry" in her language, it was refreshing to see that she and Gellman both realize that endorsing someone who fails to stand up to bigotry is a tacit endorsement of the bigoted beliefs.

Tools

Frank Ricci, the most famous firefighter from New Haven, Connecticut, was exposed as a tool of the Republican Party this week. Some may have always believed that he and the other White firefighters who sued because the city decided that a test that resulted in only White promotions was invalid were tools, but as we noted when the case was decided, it was actually quite complicated. Of course, the case was all the more notable because the appeals court summary ruling was made by a panel that included Judge Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama's nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Republicans decided to call Ricci as a witness against Sotomayor in the hearings that will begin next week, though we wonder now if they might reconsider.

You see, it appears that Mr. Ricci got his job with the New Haven fire department by way of a lawsuit alleging -- wait for it -- discrimination. When he was not among the 40 selected from a field over over 700 back in 1995, he argued that the civil service exam was biased against him because he has dyslexia. The settlement included a job for Ricci as a firefighter (presumably keeping out a qualified firefighter who did not have dyslexia).

The problem is that Ricci was correct in the first place. Whether he was correct enough to have been awarded a job as a result of his lawsuit is beyond our ability to know, but he certainly had a point that a seemingly "objective" timed written test is not fair for someone who has a reading disability if the position in question is not directly related to one's ability to read or write quickly. He was discriminated against, and he deserved to have that case heard. What he apparently cannot cannot see, however, is that an otherwise "objective" test that relies on knowledge and skills that Whites and persons of color do not have the same opportunity to acquire is similarly unjust. The fact that he went crying to the courts instead of seeing the similarities is what justifies cries of hypocrisy.

Bad Apples

In The Political Mind, cognitive linguist and progressive political writer George Lakoff notes that a conceptual frame that is consistently employed by conservatives is the "bad apple" frame (chapter 10). This is where we come to resolve problems by pointing to the one person (or handful of people) who are caught and feel comfortable that we have solved "the problem." Lakoff mentions the Enron scandal, for instance, where we made ourselves feel as if we took care of the problem by collectively (and metaphorically, of course) pointing fingers and chanting "shame, shame on you" to Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling as criminal proceedings commenced. But the problem of corruption in corporate America is systemic. That doesn't mean that everyone in corporate America is corrupt; it means that there is something about the system that facilitates and even encourages such behavior.

The same is true with racism. As we argue regularly in this space, changing people's conscious attitudes about race (which as been largely successful over the past 50 years) will not solve racism. It reduces the number of bigots (though they're popping up like whack-a-moles lately!), but it does nothing to deal with the root causes of racial inequality and injustice.

So we can demand that the president of the suburban Philadelphia pool be fired, but who cares? All that does is let the racist members of the community feel as if he was the problem instead of looking at themselves. We can refuse to elect Audra Shay, the Young Republican presidential candidate, but so what? The attitudes that exposed her unwillingness to stand up against bigotry are still firmly in place. We can hold up the Free Republic posters out as examples of horrible people, but the context in which they felt empowered and encouraged to air such feelings is the real issue.

As Larry Gellman so elegantly put it, "There is nothing wrong with criticizing people in power. It is essential in a democracy and our ability to do so has helped make our country great. But there are ways to do it hatefully and ways to do it with dignity. It is the hatred and anger that seem to ooze so effortlessly from the leaders of the Republican Party that are so disconcerting."

That anger is not only oozing effortlessly, it's oozing more frequently and with more vitriol as the weeks roll by. It will be up to conservatives and Republicans to decide how to handle such attitudes and language. If they follow Gellman and Meghan McCain, they will move toward the Jack Kemp model of conservatism that we heralded on the occasion of his death a few months ago. If not, they will continue to spiral into political irrelevance as younger voters reject such messages and gravitate toward other electoral options (either Democrats or Libertarians, we suspect).

In other news. . .

While we do not have the space to elaborate, we wanted to note a couple of other important stories from THIS WEEK.

First, Illinois U.S. Senator Roland Burris, the nation's only African American Senator, has (wisely) decided that he will not seek reelection in 2010. We argued upon his initial nomination that he was a bad choice because of his close ties to impeached (and now removed) governor Rod Blagojevich, and revelations about his ties to "Blago" since Burris was seated have done nothing to alleviate concerns. To date, none of the prominent names on either ticket is a person of color.

Second, it appears that the Southern Christian Leadership Council is ousting the president of its Los Angeles chapter, Rev. Eric Lee, because he supports gay rights. We agree with Rev. Lee when he said of Martin Luther King, Jr., who founded the organization, "Dr. King would be turning over in his grave right now." Dr. King would have been appalled by the politics of intolerance, hate and division being advocated or accepted by his organization, which has a history and a mission of fighting against injustice.

Finally, we want to join those who have expressed disgust about a disrupted graveyard in the Chicagoland area where some 300 caskets of mostly African Americans have been disturbed in a scheme to re-sell the burial plots. (All four suspects are also African American). It's poetic that one of the caskets (though empty) was the original resting place of Emmett Till, the young man whose murder helped to spark the modern Civil Rights movement in the 1950s. Till's body was exhumed in 2005 as part of a federal investigation, and he has since been buried elsewhere. (Charlton has written extensively about cultural differences with respect to death and dying.)

So here we are: The 100 year anniversary of the NAACP, the first African American president, and millions of Americans walking around feeling proud to live in a "post-racial" nation. Yet it's little Emmett Till who has surfaced again, 54 years later, to remind us that we're not done. Not by a long shot.

As usual, the kids (whether from the pool, Malia or Emmett) have a lot to teach us adults.