“Basket of Deplorables”?
That’s what Hillary Clinton called tens of millions of Americans yesterday, claiming that those opposed to her were racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, xenophobic.
I know the current liberal PC definition of terms like racist or homophobic, and it's likely I'd be called these things by many an unhinged activist. So I'm with the deplorables myself. And I feel solidarity with them.
We see through you, Hillary. Play your PC “-phobic” card all you want. We’re not buying it. Over the past dozen years, liberals have thrown around the word "bigot" so much that the word has lost its meaning. It is debased. All one has to do is disagree with the robots of political correctness on any small point and one is a bigot. I disagree with them on many many points.
We Americans who see what's going on aren't afraid of your smear words because we see the illegitimate way you define these words. And the way you, Hillary, use them to distract people from their real problems. Namely: Corporate control of our government. Namely: You yourself and everything you stand for.
No. Just because we think Black America needs to officially condemn its gangsta rap culture and take more responsibility for its communities doesn’t make us racist. It makes us awake to what is happening.
Just because we think LGBT activists don’t have the right to dictate sex and gender norms for our whole culture doesn’t make us homophobic. It makes us, uh, sane.
Just because we call radical Islamic terrorism by its real name doesn’t make us Islamophobic.
Just because we don’t of approve our elected leaders (your party, Hillary) exporting our jobs to foreign countries doesn’t make us xenophobic.
We see through you, Hillary. We’ve watched official Washington, your party included, sell us down the river for two decades now. Everything we know about you tells us you’ll do nothing but sell the last bit of us left to be sold.
We see that you have nothing but scorn for our values and traditions. Your former boss, Barack Obama, has shown this scorn time and again. We know you are full of such scorn too. Your words yesterday prove it.
In our minds, Hillary, the real deplorables are those who imagine you will stand for working Americans. We know very well you will not. You will stand for your PC special interest groups on the one hand, and Wall Street and the corporate boards on the other.
We see through you. We don’t accept your insulting labels. We are not "racist", "homophobic", etc., etc. We are Americans with our own vision of what our country should be. And we aren’t going to give you our vote in November. Count on it.
5 comments:
Dear Eric:
I read your blog post with great interest. And I have a few things I would like your feedback on... Please forgive the length of this post in advance, as it might be extended.
What is or who is a racist? Can we identify them by sight? Are they people that are forthright about their beliefs, or have they been cowed into hiding what is in their hearts and minds by what some like to call political correctness? The dictionary.com definition of a racist is this: "a person who believes in racism, the doctrine that one's own racial group is superior or that a particular racial group is inferior to the others.".
So if a person believes such things, is it wrong? Can one race proclaim superiority over another race by some quantifiable measure, that is verifiable, and of substance, that is not a side affect of years of culture that the intermingling of race has created?
I dont expect answers to these questions, because frankly, the answers will be obtuse in some cases, and specific in others, depending on the situation, place, time and speaker.
But there are some notions of racism that white people can say pretty uniformly are 'racist' without ruffling any other white persons belief structure. For example, white folks can agree that denying someone a job, a cup of coffee, a bathroom, a home or apartment rental, on the basis of skin color is racist. So, as long as you sell coffee to a black person, on balance, you are not racist as far as white folks go. Marrying inter racially or spending time with people of color as friends (real friends), are higher bars of proof that one is not a racist in the white race crowd.
So lets take a look at stereotypes. Can a white person use a stereotype and not be a racist (when it comes to people of color)? For example, if a white person were to stereotype a black man in a fun, good hearted way, to his good friend who is of color, regarding 22" rims on a car, would this be racist? I think the answer is: "It Depends". It depends on the nature and manner of the stereotype. It also depends more than anything on the 'heart' of speaker. There is also the listener, the one who hears the words...and they too get to make a determination based on the words themselves, secondarily the intent of the stereotype, and then tertiaryly, perhaps on the manner of delivery and on what they intuit as the meaning and the heart of the speaker.... as to whether or not the statement was a stereotype or a racist comment.
A long time ago, it became illegal to be racist in action. You could no longer block the water fountain from people of specific color. This was expanded to lots of areas where the judgement of the 'deciders' (in whatever the new area of attempting ban racism is) was now held to a sort of moving decimal point of interpretive dance, wherein the lawyers were trying to find a way to write down a rule or a law, that effectively made the deeply heartfelt belief of racial superiority in some folks, illegal.
This of course, created what so many have criticized as something even more pervasive, which is the concept of "POLITICAL CORRECTNESS".
I look at Political Correctness (and perhaps this is naive) as the thing that is used as bludgeon to banish all discourse from those who have beliefs that are in fact deplorable. This concept was created because there were two choices for those who honestly felt black people were inferior and a sub-race or inferior and a separate species:
1. Either fix your heart and change your beliefs
2. Or stuff your feelings so deep inside your head that only in private (and better if never) will you speak of it.
So, that is how we get to 2016, on the issue of race. To some degree or another, the other "phobias" are related, some not so much, some very much so.
End of Part 1.
Steve Johnson
Part 2...continuing from Part 1:
Then one day, a man comes and no longer uses the key code words that signify to those who are black and to those who have ears to hear, I feel your dislike for black people and I understand it. That mans name is Donald Trump. It is very hard for anyone to deny (and indeed there doesnt appear to be anyone that is) that Mr. Trump has not been anything but blatant in his expression of his views as they pertain to race. It is not a big stretch to call Mr. Trump a racist.
So Trump is not the issue here.
The issue is that his opponent did the unpolitic thing of speaking a plain truth of her view. Now we also know a few things about racists and racism. We know that there are some people who are racists, and they only thing that is apparent, is that they wont admit it, specifically. There are also people who are racist, but on specific issues such as who their daughter can marry, but they in all honesty, are vehemently opposed to any other form of racism. So one might say there is a racist spectrum.
So how do we address that? How can anyone discuss it, when the politically correct thing to do, if you are not able to express it publicly, is to obfuscate and deny it? Is there really a voter fraud problem in North Carolina? Does the voting access changes that were deployed just coincidentally affect people of color, and people of lower income by huge margins? Or does the fact that when law makers were looking at how to craft a law, that the specific data sets they requested inform of us their intent?
Can a poll, can a survey, can any means of asking questions be instructive enough to suss out the racists from the non racists? Some say yes. Some say no. Some say that although a person may believe that a black person is more likely to be less intelligent, less able to do a work task, more likely to be late to work, and less likely to rise to management, and more likely to commit a crime.... is not being racist it is being honest about what we see in the world. Is it being honest? Are the statistics indicative of the truth, or are they merely a way of reinforcing social structures that created the beliefs and thusly the reality?
Are there actual answers to these questions?
So if we cannot address racism head on, and if we cannot solve racism by relegating it to be hidden deeper in the hearts of men... And if the other means of making people "better" by providing means for them to move in their hearts past being racist (such as churches, schools, education, science, many philosophies, many religions) then are we to have the majority of our planet (non-whites) live in the subjugation of uninformed prejudice? Of course not.
But we have to call it out, we have to say it straight. It might not be politically correct to call someone a racist, but if they are, it should be done. The problem is, defining what a racist is, and if someone is one.
There are polls that say that there is a huge percentage (upwards of 46%) of Trumps supporters who consider themselves "highly excited and very motivated" to vote for Trump. These same voters apparently also at the same percentages, believe strongly that non-white races are less 'able' and less 'capable' than the white race. The other 53% of Trump supporters? They are not happy with guy, not happy with what he says, but they have other exigencies that warrant supporting Trump, including anti-Clinton voting...so they are holding their nose. How do they score on the belief of the white race being superior etc.? They dont believe whites are superior. Maybe they are better poll/test takers? I doubt it.
Steve Johnson
Part 3....continuing from Part 2
So thing is, I get you are outraged. I imagine that you believe that your substantive views on each of the subject areas would be classified as a phobic, but anyone that has read any of your points and views knows that you are not a racist (or a phobic of any kind). But now you see...and perhaps now you feel....how difficult it is to make arguments of substance, when all around us are people who would use your arguments or mine, to further their own illegitimate intentions to reform a white supremacy.
So how does one call out the racists? Can it be done? Should it be done?
I think that Clinton said it well. Perhaps she shouldnt have said it. But she did. Good for her. The press is continuing to play it, without the second half of that 'thought', but the second half of that thought is actually even better. There are many millions of people Eric, here in the USA that do hate muslims because they are muslim. They do hate gays because they are gay. They do hate black people because they are black. And they are for an authoritarian figure who will restore the greatness of America they believe was in our recent past. A great, white America. They must be called out. Or we risk making it ok to be bald faced racist again.
See, in the end, being a racist is a problem a person has in their heart. There are no laws that can change that. There are no rules that can stop it. It is up to them. And the closest we have come to figuring out how to do it, is to make it unacceptable for them to express how they feel publicly. Perhaps that hasnt solved anything, but it has given people of color the ability to speak their truths to that white power, without fear of reprisal.
Steve Johnson
I think you separate out some of the problems pretty well, Steve, but I don't think political correctness, as it's currently practiced, is the answer. In fact I see PC excesses as themselves largely responsible for Trump's rise. And it didn't have to be this way.
The arrogance of the PC commissars, their knee-jerk jump to define wide swaths of discourse or topics of debate as forbidden, their bullying insistence on their solutions being the only valid ones--all this has made Middle America deeply distrustful of their goodwill. Which is no surprise. The PC left has spent the last thirty years demonizing Western culture (i.e. white American culture) as inherently "colonialist" and violent, demonizing white people, especially white men, as the enemy par excellence, demonizing the country's majority religious tradition as bigoted and backward and hateful. So all those folks in "flyover land", while their livelihoods are bartered away for corporate gain, they are supposed to have their traditions repeatedly insulted as cause of all the world's ills and not react? No, betrayed economically by the GOP elites, and now betrayed both economically and culturally by Democratic Party elites, they have reacted in a predictable way. I believe it is not so much racism per se as it is "Enough is enough."
Yes, I know very well racism exists, as does Islamophobia, etc., etc. But I don't think these account for the anger that propels Trump, or the glee that his followers feel when he breaks PC codes of discourse. I think rather that millions of Americans just want to see these codes of discourse broken. These very codes themselves have gotten out of hand, they are animated by hatred, and the culture at large (the largely white culture of Middle America) is sick of being bullied by privileged PC elites. I suspect much of Middle America is smart enough to see that this is exactly what is now happening: they are being bullied by a media and a political elite that is supposed to represent them. What used to be a left-leaning party for workers is now a party for corporate shills and graduate-school educated PC ideologues. Many struggling middle- and lower-class people no longer have any faith in this party, or in its current nominee. And they're right to have no faith.
I think you can see clearly enough why they're right not to trust Washington any longer on economic policy. But we're focused more here on the other side--on cultural policy--because that is what Hillary's remarks addressed. Millions of Americans now understand that this PC cult with its arsenal of "phobias" to accuse people of cannot be trusted to care for American pluralism. Millions find the excesses of this cult offensive. In this I agree with them. In fact if most of the folks in Middle America knew just how FAR out of hand the normative PC codes have really gotten, they'd be even angrier than they are. The gulf between 1) the shrill authoritarian nonsense that SJWs are getting away with on our campuses, and 2) the necessary give-and-take that's needed to make life in a pluralist society even possible--if most Americans could see how wide this gulf now yawns, they'd likely be all for closing down the humanities. [a part 2 follows]
Part 2
So, in my mind it is not so much racism or homophobia per se that is driving many to Trump, but rather the growing disgust with the un-American, in-your-face social engineering projects that are coming out of our universities and getting mainstreamed by the media and implemented by the Obama administration. And that will certainly be implemented by a Hillary Clinton administration too. Because it's only with such PC identity politics that this so-called left justifies its claim to being left. There's certainly nothing left about either its economic or foreign policy.
Yes, some of the people cheering Trump want to bash gay folks or black folks, but I think his supporters MOSTLY want to bash the Washington-media elites who make hay from constantly pushing identity issues front and center when there are bigger issues on the table, such as: "Who, at the end of the day, are our politicians really working for--citizens or the corporate boards?" It's this last question that Bernie focused on. Hillary no. She is clearly content to ride a wave combined from three things: 1) her gender; 2) her PC cred; 3) fear of Trump. That wave might be big enough to carry her into the White House, but she's not getting this American's vote. I sympathize with the anger people felt upon hearing her "deplorables" comment, because, not agreeing with the PC agenda, I'm one of these deplorables. I am guilty of thought crime in a country that should have no such concept.
Finally, Hillary's comment was simply not accurate, it was more than anything just another example of PC virtue signaling, this time by the head of the whole PC juggernaut. She was speaking to an audience of LGBT supporters, who of course love nothing more than to hear people throwing around the word bigot. So she was tempted to play the "-phobia" card and she did. But consider. Trump's supporters count in the tens of millions. I don't think it's fair or reasonable to suppose that even half that number of Americans is motivated by hate. Except perhaps by a hatred of Hillary Clinton and what she stands for. Which I myself share.
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