I was listening to Sarah Palin’s interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday when she dropped a racial slur. You didn’t hear it? She referred to Rep. Paul Ryan as “articulate.” As I’ve noted before, that’s racist.
Now she didn’t take any flak for that, but she’s taking it for her latest racist comment. In her speech at the Tea Party Convention, she said the following:
“Treating this like a mere law enforcement matter places our country at great risk because that’s not how radical Islamic extremists are looking at this,” Palin said to thunderous applause. “They know we’re at war, and to win that war we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern.”
Ugh. That’s so racist.
Ogletree, founding and executive director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, says he sees the “professor” label as a thinly veiled attack on Obama’s race. Calling Obama “the professor” walks dangerously close to labeling him “uppity,” a term with racial overtones that has surfaced in the political arena before, Ogletree said. Describing his divisive confirmation hearings as a “circus,” Justice Clarence Thomas called the proceedings “a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas.…” It is perhaps ironic, then, that Ogletree, who represented Anita Hill when she made harassment allegations against Thomas in 1991, now sees a bit of the “uppity” label being placed on Obama.
“The idea is that he’s not one of us,” Ogletree says of the professor label. “He has these ideas that are left wing, that are socialist, that he’s palling around with terrorists — those were buzzwords, but the reality was they were looking at this president as an African American who was out of place.”
Thomas L. Haskell, a professor emeritus of history at Rice University, agrees that racial bias may be implicit in the attack on Obama’s professorial past.
“For me and a lot of other academic types, we identify with Obama precisely because he is an intellectual,” Haskell says. “But what does that mean to John Q. Public? I don’t know. John Q. Public may be frightened of these people, especially because this particular intellectual is a black.”
Someone needs to make a list. I’ll go ahead and start it.
Articulate=racist.
Left wing=racist.
Socialist=racist.
Palling around with terrorists=racist.
And now, because they said so, condemning an approach to terrorism as a criminal act rather than an act of war=racist.
This is nothing more than an attempt to flip the script and put the right on the defensive. They can’t defend Obama’s handling of the Eunuch-bomber or the decision to bring KSM to New York. Instead, they cry racism and wait for the right to start backtracking.
It should be noted that for eight years, Bush was attacked as an “uneducated chimp.” No racist attack there, because that wasn’t ever a stereotype or putdown applied to whites.
Well, not to be a dick about this or anything, but “overeducated and effete” is not really a stereotype routinely applied to blacks. Jews might complain on this score a bit, but a black guy? You can’t cry racist stereotype about a stereotype that doesn’t exist. (And, in fact, it’s sort of a good stereotype, you know?)
They evade this problem by postulating that racism is now only the act of deeming someone “The Other.”
But, see, in politics, everyone who disagrees with you is pretty much “The Other.” It’s standard politics to try to convince independents and swing voters that your political opponent doesn’t “share their values” and isn’t “just like them.”
But we’re not allowed to do that anymore, I guess.
That’s the whole point, Ace. Don’t discuss the facts. Cry racism to shut them up.
Hat Tip: Weasel Zippers
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