Racism

Seriously overboard, don't you think?

Preceding the president's speech to a gathering of House Democrats, thousands of protesters descended around the Capitol to protest the passage of health care reform. The gathering quickly turned into abusive heckling, as members of Congress passing through Longworth House office building were subjected to epithets and even mild physical abuse.

A staffer for Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) told reporters that Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-M.D.) had been spit on by a protestor. Rep. John Lewis (D-G.A.), a hero of the civil rights movement, was called a 'ni--er.' And Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) was called a "faggot," as protestors shouted at him with deliberately lisp-y screams. Frank, approached in the halls after the president's speech, shrugged off the incident.

But Clyburn was downright incredulous, saying he had not witnessed such treatment since he was leading civil rights protests in South Carolina in the 1960s.

"It was absolutely shocking to me," Clyburn told the Huffington Post. "Last Monday, this past Monday, I stayed home to meet on the campus of Claflin University where fifty years ago as of last Monday... I led the first demonstrations in South Carolina, the sit ins... And quite frankly I heard some things today I have not heard since that day. I heard people saying things that I have not heard since March 15, 1960 when I was marching to try and get off the back of the bus."

"It doesn't make me nervous as all," the congressman said, when asked how the mob-like atmosphere made him feel. "In fact, as I said to one heckler, I am the hardest person in the world to intimidate, so they better go somewhere else."

As Clyburn went on to note, this is not about health care to these people. It's about their privileged status taking a hit, just like it did during the Civil Rights Movement. The best way to respond is to continue moving forward and expand what should be a universal right for all.

I just wanted to pass on a few good reads about the Haiti situation -- not so much the news, but some commentary on how elites, such as the media and organizational leadership (the UN), model institutional racism and classism.

First, Campus Progress published an interesting interview with Dr. Kathleen Tierney, professor of sociology and behavioral science and director of the Natural Hazard Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Dr. Tierney had some interesting things to say about the behavior of media outlets when reporting on large scale disasters.

And what did the early research discover?

If you go back to the 1950s and you look at some of those writings, a lot of it’s about disaster myths—what people say happens in disasters versus what really happens. What these researchers discovered was that the media—even way back in the 1950s and 1960s—approached huge disasters with certain frames. When the media reports on disasters, they’re inevitably going to focus on the dramatic and antisocial, even if it’s one percent of the population committing these acts. And even back then, the looting myth always came to the fore of media reports.

As it has in Haiti.

Yes. For example, the day after this earthquake in Haiti, it was reported that a prison had collapsed and prisoners had gotten away—the presumption being that they had escaped to go and loot. The prisoners didn’t go to check on their mothers or their sisters, they went to loot. And we presumably know this, because they’re bad people, they’re criminals. The bad people frame reached its nadir with Katrina.

It's really rare to gain exposure to a media outlet not run by a multimillion dollar corporation. Consequently, it's even more challenging these days to trust a media outlet's reporting on these larger events. With powerful corporations running these outlets, it's not hard to see how ratings and advertising drive sensationalism in our media. If the story's made more juicy, the idea is that more people tune in. But "juicy" apparently doesn't mean accurate. Tierney explains the looting fallacy the media reported in its coverage of Hurricane Katrina.

Do you think that because the victims of both Haiti and Katrina were poor and black, the media approached the stories with a certain perspective?

Definitely. There is an institutionalized racism in the way these poor black disaster victims are treated. The victims of Katrina were treated with so much presumption, as if you could assume they were going to loot, because they were black. Just like we know that the people in Haiti are bad because they’re black. Black men especially are demonized. During Katrina, the media picked up on every rumor—whether it was raped four-year-olds in the Superdome or people shooting each other. Actually, for a paper me and a couple of my graduate students wrote called “Metaphors Matter,” we found some transcripts of TV programs in which members of the media expressed regret. They were saying, “We really blew it during Katrina; we acted on all of these rumors.” I myself was on Jim Lehrer’s show, where they were asking about the looting [in Katrina], and I got into it with a police officer, and he ended up agreeing with me that it was a myth. It’s not real...

This institutionalized fear is also at play in the Haiti earthquake rescue efforts, only it might be a bit less based on race than class. To CNN's credit, it does a good job of shining a light on the questionable behavior of the UN leadership. Last night, a Haitian resident assisting those critically injured in the attack told CNN's Sanjay Gupta that the UN medical personnel had fled, ordered out by UN officials because of safety concerns. A retired Army Lt. General explained what was going on:

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, who led relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina in 2005, said the evacuation of the clinic's medical staff was unforgivable.

"We can't be leaning so much toward security that we allow people to die," he said Saturday.

"Search and rescue must trump security," Honoré said Friday night. "I've never seen anything like this before in my life. They need to man up and get back in there."

Honoré drew parallels between the tragedy in New Orleans and in Port-au-Prince. But even in the chaos of Katrina, he said, he had never seen medical staff walk away.

"I find this astonishing these doctors left," he said. "People are scared of the poor."

It's very interesting to me that there's constant talk of the world uniting together to support Haiti, yet the very people charged with the responsibility of assisting the Haitian people bail when they stereotype the poor and imagine the bad things that might happen. In fairness, the rescue teams did return to Haiti this morning as the article noted, but the time they were gone last night is telling. As Dr. Tierney points out in her interview, it invalidates the "We're all Haitians" sentiment. Even though it sounds nice, realism tells us we're not. This fear of the impoverished and subsequent withdrawal from the area by UN forces is a display of cultural ignorance. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's something that should be recognized. The reality is that the wide majority of non-Haitians has no clue what it's like to be Haitian, to live in such deplorable conditions.

I'm not writing this because I'm pissed off that this is going on. I simply think it's important that as many people as possible dig deeper than the glossy, convenient stories today's newscasts offer us. There's some compelling sociology and anthropology existing underneath the reporting. Once we become aware of that, I believe we can improve our responses -- both in the rescue work and reporting work -- to similar disasters in the future.

Wow. It's unbelievable to me that people like this not only exist, but are leaders of the young conservative movement. This is the type of stuff that will consign Republicans to the electoral graveyard as Millennial assume an larger and larger role in American politics and the electorate:

From Think Progress:

The Republican establishment has often appeared worried that attacks on Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina nominated to the court, could appear racist. But the activists of the conservative movement are less concerned. In May, blogger Debbie Schlussel called Sotomayor “Justice J-Lo.” Now, the Washington Independent’s Dave Weigel reports that Jason Mattera, the spokesman for Young America’s Foundation, has posted a blatantly offensive message about Sotomayor on his Facebook page:

I am a young amateur filmmaker from Canada who, after becoming increasingly frustrated with the political system and lack of action among his peers has made a short video aimed at George W Bush, John McCain and the conservative/religious right. The result is a hilarious but deadly serious message of anger and a call for mobilization.

Watch, laugh, think, maybe die a little inside, and then spread the message.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iw88vPtMR40

Update: Go read Ari Melber's take over at The Nation.
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Yesterday I mentioned that Nas, Color of Change, and MoveOn were holding a rally outside Fox News to protest the network's racism. Fox ignored them, but Colbert made them the feature of his program last night. Here's the whole thing. Watch it.

A few weeks ago I posted about a Greenberg Quinlan Rosner poll (pdf) which found that the only youth demographic in which the Republicans still held a slim advantage over the Democrats was among white youth. That poll also got picked up in other places around the blogosphere, notably by David Frum who used it to go on a nativist rant about the failures of our immigration policy and the decline of white power.

Well, GQR released a memo (pdf) yesterday that in part clarifies the Republican "edge" among young white voters. Here's what they had to say (emphasis mine):

• The Democrats are getting landslide margins with voters under 30; they are even winning whites under 30 by 14 points.
• Instead of losing younger white non-college men by 19 points as in 2004, the Democratic Presidential candidate now is losing them by only 2.
• One of the key blocs of ‘base’ voters for Democrats is unmarried women – who could comprise a quarter of the electorate. The Democrats are winning them by two to one; they are winning white unmarried women by over 20 points.

Yeah, winning whites under 30 by 14 points coupled (probably in part fueled by) a massive, 17 point swing among non-college men and a huge advantage among single (and probably young) women. Rearrange the deck-chairs all they want, deport all the undocumented workers they want, there is nothing that can save Republicans from this demographic shift except for Democratic incompetence. (So don't screw it up).

I am slightly confused as the two GQR memos seem in part to contradict each other. In the first poll report, GQR notes that Democrats are losing among "white" youth by 2 points. The most recent memo seems to indicate that the 2 point deficit is purely among non-college males, but the poll didn't make that distinction. It could be that the 2 point deficit in both memos are coincidence. The poll is measuring support in a presidential trial heat, and yesterday's memo may just measure overall party support. If anyone can help clarify, I'd appreciate it.

In either case, you really can't argue with the 14 point lead Democrats hold among all whites under 30. Here's some more interesting findings in the memo:

Earlier this week I posted about a new Democracy Corps report showing that the Republican brand had crashed among Millennials. Well the conservatives are starting to respond, and the racism is flying like mad:

Read the report in full, however, and you come across an interesting nugget on page 6: White young people continue to favor Republicans by a thin but real margin of 2 points. The Democrats owe their advantage among youth to a huge lead among young African-Americans (78 points) - and a very large lead (43 points) among Hispanics.

In the past, Republicans could win elections despite their unpopularity among ethnic minorities. But with the huge surge of immigration since 1980 - and especially since 2000 - the voting map of the United States has been redrawn in ways inherently deeply unfavorable to the GOP. If Republicans face an inhospitable future after 2008, we will hear much of the dreadful legacy of George W. Bush on social issues, the war, the environment, etc. But Greenberg's own work makes clear that these issues matter relatively little.

(Only 28% of young voters would respond positively to an anti-religious-right message, for example: see page 11.)

No, the legacy that will damage his party is the legacy of immigration non-enforcement. This has imported a large new community of people who are both economically struggling (and thus open to Democratic arguments) but who lack deep attachment to the American nation (and who are thus immune to the most potent of Republican appeals). It is these voters who will sway elections in future. And thanks to this president's immigration policies, there are going to be a lot more of them than there might otherwise have been.

Awesome idea. Kick those anti-American wetbacks (read: naturalized citizens and first generation Americans who vote Democratic) out so the white man can rule supreme one more.

Great strategy. Let me know if that pans out for ya.

Update: Rick Perlstein tears Frum apart on similar grounds.