Posted on 12/30/2013 8:55:19 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
From Phil Robertson to Megyn Kelly, peddling white grievance became a bigger, crazier, more lucrative racket.
Maybe it was the very fact of enjoying a wonderful Christmas with my family and friends, against the manufactured backlash to a nonexistent War on Christmas, that let me appreciate the perilous mental state of a small but noisy and paranoid swath of white America. Somehow over the holiday it became clear: 2013 was the year white grievance mongering became an uglier and even more lucrative racket.
Fox News has been peddling the phony War on Christmas for years, of course, but it took new Fox phenom Megyn Kelly to give it an explicitly racial cast. Not only did Kelly wage war against the menace of a black Santa declaring nonsensically that the fictional character of Santa Claus just is white but when she was called on it, she made herself out to be the victim of politically correct bullies, race-baiters and Fox haters. Suddenly it was clear: The imagined war on Christmas has become an equally farcical war on whiteness in the minds of those sad right-wing warriors.
The next week, Duck Dynastys Phil Robertson also became a martyr for the white right, after A&E briefly suspended him for holding forth on the nastiness of gay sex while insisting African Americans were happy in the Jim Crow South.
The new hysteria and hypocrisy was crystallized by one surreal fact: While paranoid white righties were fighting for their allegedly endangered right to celebrate Christmas (with their white Santa), they could watch a Duck Dynasty Christmas marathon on A&E, underscoring that theres neither a war on Christmas nor on bigoted pseudo-Christians like Robertson. But theres a lot of cash to be made, and fear to be stoked, by claiming both.
Kelly and Robertson and kindred spirits like Sarah Palin charted a bold new civil rights frontier in 2013: fighting for the right of white people to say false, stupid and bigoted things without facing criticism, let alone paying any real penalty. Palin has long made herself out to be a victim of mean liberals, but this year her anger-mongering took on a more explicitly racial tinge. She bashed Jeb Bush for casting aspersions on the fertility of white people Bush did make an admittedly stupid remark about immigrants being more fertile, but if you thought that would get him in trouble with immigrant groups, not whites, you thought wrong and later in the year declared her inviolable right to equate the federal deficit she wrongly blames on our first black president with slavery. She closed the year announcing she stands with Phil Robertson, even though she had to confess to Foxs Greta Van Susteren that she hadnt read the GQ interview that got him in minor temporary trouble.
2013 was also the year that George Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder of an unarmed black 17-year-old, Trayvon Martin, allegedly in self-defense, becoming a cultural hero to some of that same paranoid white right. If you have the misfortune of stumbling into the Twitter sewer that is TheRealGeorgeZs timeline, youll find an exaggerated sense of white grievance (please spare me the insistence that Zimmerman is Latino; he has seemed uninterested in identifying as such, at least publicly, and in any case his Latino heritage wouldnt necessarily erase his whiteness).
TheRealGeorgeZ alternates between tweeting Bible verses and attacks on his haters. Of course, like Sarah Palin hes a big Phil Robertson supporter, tweeting Dec. 20:
I guarantee everyone 1 thing, Phil Robertson is not losing sleep over getting to spend more time fishing, loving his family and The Lord.
George Zimmerman (@TherealGeorgeZ) December 21, 2013
Robertson has come in for more criticism of his anti-gay remarks than his inanity on race, although its a little hard to take any of it seriously. Apparently the Robertson boys are yuppies dressing up as rednecks for profit, and A&E is laughing with them all the way to the bank. But the way the right has made Robertson a hero for his crude racial and homophobic remarks shows the way victimhood has become a crucial part of the white grievance industry.
Of course the stoking of white grievance is nothing new. It was at the heart of the GOPs so-called Southern strategy, which always had a crucial Northern component: deliberately inflaming the anxieties of white working-class Southerners and Northern ethnics about racial and economic change. I have been someone who tried to see and point out the elements of those grievances that werent racial, but real: the genuine erosion of economic stability and opportunity for the white working and middle classes. (I wrote a book about it.) And early in 2013 I endured my own mini-backlash for suggesting, in How to talk about white people, that sometimes Democrats and social-justice advocates talk about race in ways that are unnecessarily divisive and punishing to whites.
I was honestly unprepared for the criticism, but I understand it better now. To suggest that theres any way that the rhetoric of either people of color or racial liberals is to blame for white paranoia and racism seems like the essence of victim blaming. Of course that wasnt my intent; I would argue that it stemmed from a very human impulse to try to feel you have some kind of control over forces you dont. Sadly, or not, I realized this year that liberals have very little control over the way white people respond to racial change (though I will always argue that economic populism has more power to build cross-racial coalitions than the pro-Wall Street, multiracial neoliberalism practiced by too many Democrats over the last 20 years.)
Im optimistic nonetheless. A little under a year ago I wrote an obituary for former New York Mayor Ed Koch, outlining how the formerly liberal Democrat rode a wave of white fear and grievance into Gracie Mansion in 1977. I couldnt know it at the time, none of us did, but New York was about to elect its first Democratic mayor in 24 years, a staunch progressive on racial issues with an African American wife and two biracial children. An ad that tried to depict Bill de Blasio as an anti-police lefty whod lead New York back to the crime and chaos of the 70s and 80s backfired; so did the ravings of Rupert Murdochs New York Post, which did so much to help elect Koch.
De Blasios landslide win, among every racial and ethnic group, showed that white New Yorkers are ready to embrace the citys multiracial future and tackle its lingering racial and class inequities. The mayor-elects influential tale of two cities is largely, though not exclusively, a tale of white and non-white New York. Red state demagogues can mock New York as a lonely blue island irrelevant to the rest of the country. But the city helped invent both liberalism and the backlash that tore it down. Im going to bet that the de Blasio coalition has more influence, in the end, than Phil Robertson or George Zimmerman, Megyn Kelly or Sarah Palin. A noisy, paranoid white backlash against racial change may be inevitable, but it will also pass. Thats what scares them.
**********
Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large and the author of "What's the Matter With White People: Finding Our Way in the Next America."
Little Joanie sounds like one of those pervert “progs” who has a lot of “issues” with having been born white. LOL! Poor Joanie.
I read part of this....was losing too many brain cells, so I quit....
Joan Joan Joan..your WHITE..isnt it hilarious how white liberals always talk like THEY are the ones who are the minorities
What da b!tch be smokin, yo dude!
LOL! I realized this post was going to be a brain cell killer after reading the first sentence, so I skipped to the comments. I read your remark, and figured I should at least skim a bit more. I actual found one jewel in the pile of manure:
I guarantee everyone 1 thing, Phil Robertson is not losing sleep over getting to spend more time fishing, loving his family and The Lord. George Zimmerman (@TherealGeorgeZ) December 21, 2013 <\i>
I did not realize George had made this comment. Good for him. I know he's made some bad choices (in his relationships primarily), but good for him on this remark.
What’s really killing her is that FNC’s ratings are beating her channel MSNBC’s so badly.
Joan, no one would watch your whiny ass over Megyn Kelly.
Hey Joanie. You want to put your "Pajama boy" up against one of those "yuppies"? LOL! Take your pick. I'd stay away from Uncle Si though, we'd like to see it go at least ONE round.
Happy Festival of Self-Hatred, Joanie!
Lose the “allegedly,” Joan. George Zimmerman was acquitted. Forever.
Spec. 5 Si Robertson and recent photo
Specialist 5, 6 and 7.
OK, Joanie. I'm in for a hunnert. The problem with betting with liberals is that you have to find someone honest to hold the bet because if not, when they turn out to be wrong, they'll only try to redefine the terms.
What no barf alert? I’m tasting bile. Phony war on Christmas? That’s gotta be why Happy holidays is what people say nowadays. Can’t make this s-— up
The knockout game didn’t work for Trayvon. Get over it idiots.
Joan Walsh is its own barf alert.
Damn! There’s 5 minutes of my life I’ll never get back.
There isn’t any magic in melanin, Joanie. Skin color doesn’t matter. Stop obsessing over it and worshipping the ones you were raised to avoid.
I couldn’t even Evelyn Woods this hormonal unbalanced screed.
“Crazy aunt” Joan Walsh decrying the supposed sins of ‘noisy paranoids’?
Commie moonbat witch, heal thyself first before pointing your gnarled fingers at others...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.