Posted on 10/09/2012 2:29:29 PM PDT by marktwain
I have an alert set in Google that sends me an email whenever my name is mentioned somewhere on these Internets. Little did I know that I was part of a vast conspiracy to take away white people's guns, and also to deny said firearms to poor African-Americans.
In a dark corner of the gun nut Right-wing blogosphere, I have been elevated to the level of Nikki Giovanni (god, I wish I had 1/100th of her talent or success). I am also apparently an "intellectual" (I wish), a well-funded operative of the Left (I wish I had those duckets), and breathing rarefied air as one of those hateful, elitist, academics (negro please!).
Despite the foolishness of David Codrea's essay "Black intellectual bigotry endangering poor urban blacks by disparaging guns," there is something useful there.
It is fascinating when conservatives who live in one of the most heavily armed countries in the world, one that is literally awash with guns, imagine themselves as somehow being under siege. Their mania feeds itself in a vicious cycle--"They" are coming for our guns, we must therefore get more guns to protect our "liberty." When white racial anxiety and hostility towards people of color is introduced into this phantom peril nothing good can come of it. As such, in the Age of Obama we must all be extremely cautious about white domestic terrorism.
Codrea's essay is a prize of overwrought writing, right-wing smart people sounding scary words, and overuse of a thesaurus. Beyond its title, which also demands deconstruction as an object lesson in unstated assumptions and the white racial frame, there are several passages which are especially dense with the Right-wing talking points of the post civil rights era. Consequently, David's effort has done the service of providing a teachable moment.
For example, in the following passage he argues that white people are oppressed. Uppity black liberals are troublemakers. Black achievement is to be disparaged. Racism is caused by people of color, and those others who dare to talk about social inequality and power. And working towards social justice and forcing America to live up to its democratic creed is somehow a threat to "the individual."
Two separate statements from prominent black intellectuals made Tuesday, one from Chicago and one from Virginia Tech, reveal anti-gun bigotry with foundations that include chronic dismissal of whites through negative stereotypes. Writing for Open Salon, commentator and editor of the “We are Respectable Negroes” blog Chauncey DeVega, and poet and “distinguished professor of English” Nikki Giovanni, both with an established history of fixating on race, used their positions of influence to advance the collective at the expense of the individual, widen the racial divide, and disparage guns and gun owners.
The troglodyte plebes of contemporary conservatism are also factually and historically challenged, possessing a deep habit of misreading facts to serve their own purposes.
That he understands the importance of the right to bear arms is evident when he writes “[T]he systematic disarmament of black men in this country after the Civil War was designed to make the African-American community especially vulnerable to white mob violence…”What he doesn’t acknowledge in his bigoted and fundamentally dishonest and hateful screed are the “White men with guns” who ignore being lumped into a collective and work to get such knowledge widely understood by the black community, from presenting groundbreaking research, to challenging black political overseers to tell their constituents the truth, to advocating educational efforts and promoting black leaders for the right to keep and bear arms, both historic and current.
It’s not us trying to disarm people of color...
Many conservative bloviators have taken up the claim that it is the Democrats who have always wanted to take guns from black people because they are the "party of the KKK" and white supremacy. These claims are absurd on their face: the Dixiecrats are now the base of the Tea Party GOP; The Republican Party is a Southern Party that has inherited the ghosts and demons of Jim and Jane Crow; The GOP is the country's de facto White Party and has been dependent for at least four decades on a strategy of ginning up white racial resentment and overt bigotry to win elections.
These same conservatives ignore how Republicans have packaged themselves as the party of "law and order" which will do anything to keep the black and urban poor in jail (and "under control"). The last thing the party of Willie Horton wants is to have more "urban blacks" with guns. The contradiction is deep here: for the Right, white gun ownership is a means of protecting those good white voters from those rampaging black flash mob hordes which every good white suburban family lives in dread of. Save for some crude political calculus of fueling white racial fears, why would white conservatives want to see blacks armed with more guns?
The Right and its foot soldiers are full of rage; anger is an existential condition for them. They are upset at liberals, elites, the media, the poor, people of color, Democrats, intellectuals, gays, those in evil liberal America and on either coast, and big Hollywood.
The Culture War has caused much fratricide on the Right. While a flag to rally around, one that has given the most intellectually challenged on the Right a set of code words and talking points with which to frame their own version of reality, its long term impact has been to encourage "conspiranoid" fantasies, and tired, stale thinking. In all, many of the populist Right are re-fighting the Cold War. Others even want a do over for the Civil War too.
What Giovanni and DeVega and the countless opportunistic hate mongers milking it for all its worth don’t seem to realize is the Boy-Who-Cried-Wolf-desensitizing to the new scarlet letter (“R”) their screaming “Racism!” every chance they get has produced. If everything conservatives say is racist, right down to “code words” like “Chicago” and “the,” the sting of having that accusation leveled is gone for those who simply will not suffer fools, and with it goes the fear to engage and fire back with merited ridicule and scorn. Anyone with an ounce of self-confidence will simply not care what such morally and intellectually irrelevant misfits spew.When screamed by privileged dilettantes without…discrimination, it loses its meaning and its power, and does an obscene disservice to those who have suffered and endured true racist oppression. It also leads to the nagging suspicion that the color preoccupying those doing the exploiting has a lot less to do with blacks than it does with Reds.
Apparently, the commies who were manipulating Dr. King are coming to get White America in the Age of Obama. Those privileged black and brown folks in this society--you do know that white people are systematically disadvantaged in America didn't you?--are the real hate mongers because we dare to make some white people, conservatives especially, uncomfortable. One can never forget that racism (or sexism, classism, or homophobia) does not really count unless we allow white white folks to define it in terms that are most agreeable to them.
In total, racism is a fiction spun out of the ether because of all the advantages which it gives to black and brown folks.
[I lost 10 IQ points just writing such a foolish statement--nevertheless such fictions are truths for those who are taking hits of political meth from Fox News and the Right-wing media. No wonder their minds are so damaged, and their ability to reason so impugned.]
Ultimately, I do wish black folks were organized enough to be part of a vast conspiracy. We are not hive minds or the Borg. For all of the Right's opines about individual freedom and liberty, they are incapable of seeing people of color as individuals who simply do not like them, and find contemporary conservatism most disagreeable and problematic.
I musk ask, where do people like David Codrea come from? Are they just spawns and afterbirth of Fox News and the Right-wing echo chamber? Are they they just the new/old face of petit authoritarianism in an era of colorblind racism?
Most adults find it nearly impossible to change their basic assumptions about reality.
No doubt he sincerely believes that "colorblind racism" is real. It is simply a construct of the left to extend the idea of racism to multiculturalism, in order to keep dividing the country into groups that must be placated, instead of having one rule of law for all.
Chauncey DeVega is clearly a RACIST!!! saying such things as:
“Uppity black liberals are troublemakers.”
You'd think someone with a name as pretentious as Chauncey would be able to spell "ducats."
Who and who?
Republicans are Dixiecrats. LOL! Another idiot that believes the Democrat Party is the negro salvation.
Maybe it is just for “uppity negroes”
I don’t have patience for a blog with such a demeaning name.
Poor fool. He admits he is not a well paid flak. Therefore he must be a useful idiot.
“The troglodyte plebes of contemporary conservatism”.
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