Who we are
When Republicans take credit for the civil rights movement…
Arkansas gubernatorial candidate Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who previously served as Donald Trump’s press secretary, has released her first television ad, which is entitled “Who We Are”.
“I’ll never forget being a student at Little Rock Central High and watching my dad – a Republican governor – and Bill Clinton – a Democrat[IC] president – hold open the doors for the Little Rock Nine, doors that forty years earlier had been closed to them because they’re Black,” Sanders says in the ad.
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“Good triumphed over evil,” Sanders says of the Little Rock Nine in her ad. “That is who we are. The radical left wants to teach our kids America is a racist and evil country, but Arkansans are generous, hard-working people.”
What does she mean “that is who we are”? Does she think the people who resisted the desegregation of Little Rock Central High were Martians? Those people were Arkansans and Americans too, and there are millions more like them right now. They are the ones who will be voting for her.
What does she mean “that is who we are”? Does she think the 52 years that Little Rock Central High was all-white never happened? Does she think those years were simply nullified the day the Nine made it through the doors? Does she think the mob in the streets screaming at them were not “who we are”?
If she does think that she’s dead wrong. “Who we are” still includes a huge contingent of proud racists, including the evil ignorant racist man she worked for when he was squatting in the presidential mansion.
A great campaign add to use against her would one made up of clips of some of the lies she said while working for Trump. It would have to be some, as using all of them would fill hours, and ad time is expensive.
Yes, imagine being the poor hassled creative who has to select the best ones. That kind of thing always drives me crazy because I want to include them ALL.
There are plenty of people about who appear to suppose that since the slave-trade & slavery were abolished, or (if they are slightly more up to date) since the right to vote was given to African-Americans, or since the Little Rock High School admitted black students for the first time in 1957, or since, etc, etc, …,everything that went before these events was effectively nullified, and that the institutions, beliefs and attitudes that had supported such discrimination all somehow magically disappeared or, rather, were transformed into a general niceness. Yes, now there are nice people, like Sarah Huckabee Sanders, just everywhere, on both sides, on all sides, smiling nicely at all the niceness they see.
We’ve also got a host of people that think nothing whatsoever had been improved… The “both sides” are in good company as far as denying reality go.
I don’t think that’s fair. I don’t think the two sides are equivalent. I’m skeptical that a lot of people literally think nothing has been improved – and given the smug “aren’t we awesome” of Sarah Sanders I can’t much blame them for pointing out some basic facts, like the fact that former slaves were never compensated for the crime of enslavement, and that instead they were systematically prevented from accumulating any wealth at all for generations.
Ah, ‘both sides’. But it is surely not so simple. Yes, there are the ‘woke’ whom people like to complain about (and with many of these complaints I agree), but there are also people like Isabel Wilkerson, whose intelligent and perceptive book, ‘Caste’, is very far from being a horrid example of ‘wokeism’. I recommend it. I wonder whether those who assume that everything that can be done to improve things has been done and therefore that the simple answer is to ‘fix black culture’ have considered the fact that Maoris in New Zealand and, to a greater degree, Aboriginal people in Australia face, as peoples, much the same problems that people in minority groups who have been discriminated against for a great many years in other ‘Anglo’ societies face. I recall that in an essay Seamus Heaney wrote about some Englishman who unthinkingly remarked ‘These Irish!’ in connexion with the troubles in Northern Ireland, as though historical and present realities were of no significance and the only problem was the incorrigibility of the Irish ‘race’, whether Catholic or Protestant.
I should add, perhaps, that as I recall it was in Heaney’s presence that the Englishman, who was no doubt a kind, intelligent and civilised person, made the remark. Like most nice middle-class English people, I’m afraid (and I should include myself to an extent in this judgement), he had no real understanding of Irish history, nor of the factors, political, economic & otherwise that were at work in the troubles. And yet he thought he was in a position to make this sort of ready judgement, which was in fact only an expression of prejudice.
@Tim Harris – to this day there are those who try to dispute that there is any sort of systemic racism by pointing out that black kids fail even in the best funded schools. In DC. But, no, they aren’t racists. They’re just saying what liberals are afraid to admit.
The “both sides” aren’t the same; one holds the political power and the other cultural power (and the increasing cultural power is one factor in the motivations for grasping even more unearned political power); political power is stronger… But they’re both untethered from reality and any idea that liberal democracy does/should work.
As for “conservatives” on racial shit, keep in mind that they’re not simply evil, they believe in the just world fallacy. Sure there’s plenty of cynical bastards (Huckasanders almost certainly is) but if you believe that then the racial wealth/achievement gap is obviously a choice. Not Kendi’s broken system but things working just as intended.
Pace Blood Knight, I very much doubt that the ‘cultural power’ of one of the two sides that this dispute is being reduced to is anything like as important as it is being made out to be, for obvious and cynical reasons, by the other side. The reduction of this dispute to these two sides (one in the universities, the other very much claiming to be outside any academy and proud of it) strikes me as a way of obscuring the important activity of a politician like Stacey Adams in Georgia, the activities of the many other other social-democratic politicians who are seeking to change things by paying attention to very basic political matters, the activity of movements like Black Lives Matter, and the activity of, say, Marcus Rashford in the UK. To reduce what is at stake to a quarrel between airy-fairy ivory-tower leftists and ‘real Americans’ does not do the situation justice, though it is of course very helpful to one side if things can be misrepresented in this way.