Strange Flag-Bearers (and Burners) in Dayton

One thing that happened at the anti-KKK counterprotest in Dayton was that an Israeli flag was ripped to shreads and stomped on (after an unsuccessful attempt to burn it). How did this happen? Well, it's a weird story:

In an interview with The Observer, [Jen] Mendoza [of the Cincinnati Palestine Solidarity Coalition] said the incident occurred after she saw three young men with an Israeli flag and entered into what she described as a confusing discussion with them.

“And so recognizing the state of Israel as being of the same ideology (as) American capitalist imperialist settler colonialism, and seeing that flag on our side (counterprotesters area) was jolting,” Mendoza said of her reaction at the sight of the Israeli flag.

“One of them said that he was from Israel. And then the other two boys looked Arab,” she added. “The other kid, he was the one doing a lot of the talking, he made comments about God giving them the land, and at that point I was like, ‘Well, you’re on the wrong side of this fence if that’s what you believe.’”

Mendoza said that after the conversation went on and he said “some extremely Zionist, racist things,” he asked her if he should throw it on the ground and stomp on it.

She told him she’d be happy to burn it for him.

“And then he flipped and was like, ‘Yeah, let’s burn this flag right now,’” Mendoza added, “and he helped tear it apart — and then he told us that he was doing a social experiment to find out where people really stood on fascism. And then he began chanting ‘Free Palestine.’” 

So basically, somebody comes to an anti-KKK flag rally holding an Israeli flag and starts making racist comments wrapped in a Zionist guise. But wait: it turns out, he doesn't actually believe what he's saying -- he's impersonating an Israeli, enacting a stereotype designed to present Israelis as racist (though it's actually his words), in an effort to rile the crowd up and convince them to burn or mutilate the Israeli flag. Which the crowd then happily obliges. It's like a meat-world version of the Jewish impersonators Yair Rosenberg used to bust: "racists who pretend to be Jews—and other minorities—in order to defame them."

All at a rally that nominally was counterprotesting the KKK, which in turn was in large part targeting Dayton's Jewish community. Who then had to see a burning Israeli flag by people supposedly there to "protect" them; instigated by a person who (it seems falsely?) claimed to be Israeli in order to tar actual Israelis with his own racist performance. How lovely.

Not My President's Day Roundup

Our apartment's water heater is being replaced tomorrow. That means my one true joy in life -- long, languid, hot showers -- will also have to go for the day. It will be terrible.

* * *

China's crackdown on religious liberty threatens the tiny but ancient Kaifeng Jewish community.

One of the few Black mathematicians in American academia recounts the microaggressions and subtle racism which alienated him from his own discipline.

I think the tone of this column is a little off, but the broad point -- that leftist anti-Zionists have no friend more highly placed in Israel than Netanyahu himself -- is on the mark, and it's important that someone like Eric Yoffie is saying it.

Alabama newspaper editor urges the return of the KKK in order lynch Democrats (and insufficiently conservative Republicans). Yes, really.

Apparently, Louisiana has a bad habit of not releasing prisoners after they've finished serving their sentences.

"As a Jew, I’m either furious or eating. Sometimes both."

For all the talk of "creeping Sharia", the fact is that the American Muslim community is actually experiencing something very different: creeping liberalism. For a community that, for much of recent electoral history, at least leaned Republican (especially on social issues), the rapid embrace of feminism, gay equality, and sexual liberation among the younger generation is coming as a bit of a shock to the more conservative old-guard.

Nothing About Charlottesville is Shocking

People keep saying they're "shocked" by what's happening in Charlottesville.

Or they're shocked by the failure of the President to give a clear, unambiguous condemnation of White supremacist and neo-Nazi violence. I saw someone on TV say he "could not understand" how the President of the United States could sit back and keep quiet on vicious White nationalist violence done as part of his movement and in solidarity with him.

I don't find it shocking. I don't find it difficult to understand at all. It's only shocking, it's only hard to understand, if one cannot allow yourself to fathom racism as a live explanation.

We've made it so that "racism" is a charge so serious it cannot be spoken. It's so extreme that the very fact that an event is happening in America or a person of even moderate prominence is saying something automatically falsifies the hypothesis. And so when overt racism crashes to the surface, we're left dumbfounded -- unable to understand. This thing that by stipulation cannot be, is. And so we're shocked.

We shouldn't be. Objectively, there's nothing shocking about a country which has been explicitly White supremacist in structure for far longer than it's even been nominally egalitarian seeing White supremacy manifest. There's nothing shocking about a people who have never been forced to seriously reckon with having committed treason-in-defense-of-slavery to proudly carry up that mantle today. There's nothing shocking about a political movement that was built entirely around "White racial resentment" showing the colors of "White racial resentment."

Likewise, there's objectively nothing shocking that a man who rose to political prominence via racist demagoguery and conspiracy-mongering being fine with racism. There's nothing shocking that a President who craves adoration and is adored by nobody more than White supremacists will side with his adorers. There's nothing shocking that Mr. "Obama was born in Kenya" and "grab 'em by the pussy" and "build that wall" and "total shut down of Muslim immigration" and "sheriff's star" will act exactly how he's always acted, every time he's had the opportunity to do so.

Nothing about Charlottesville should shock us. It is entirely in keeping with the character of the ascendant political movement in America, the one that currently helms the Republican Party, the one that currently occupies of the office of President of the United States. To be "shocked" at this is to be in willful denial of the reality in front of us. It is symptomatic of a sort of pale innocence that, as Baldwin put it, itself constitutes the crime.

As we saw the dead dimly through rifts of battlesmoke and heard faintly the cursings and accusations of blood brothers, we darker men said: This is not Europe gone mad; this is not aberration nor insanity; this is Europe; this seeming Terrible is the real soul of white culture—back of all culture,—stripped and visible today. This is where the world has arrived,—these dark and awful depths and not the shining and ineffable heights of which it boasted. Here is whither the might and energy of modern humanity has really gone.

-- W.E.B. Du Bois, "The Souls of White Folk," Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (1920).

I always found it a disservice that we only read Du Bois at his most conciliatory. His later work has more bite and more sting. Does his indictment hurt? Do you find it too simple or too sweeping? Well don't boo -- vote! It has always been in the power of White folks to falsify this hypothesis. We had the option in Reconstruction, and we didn't take it. We had the option in 1920, and we didn't take it. We had the option in 2016, and we didn't take it.

There are of course other moments when we came closer to taking it; Du Bois, sadly, didn't live to see them. We can be proud of those moments, but can we honestly deny that they were our aberrations? We can, actually, but it is up to us to supply the proof -- not by reaching back into a glorified history, but by stretching forward and crafting a future that is so consistently egalitarian, so bereft of racial strife and struggle, that we could justly say that a future Charlottesville is an act of madness. It's possible. Such is the virtue of democracy, that it always continues to be in our power.

But that is a possible future, and if present trend lines hold not the most probable. Right now, there's nothing shocking.

The Sun Never Sets on the Jewish Empire

The KKK went recruiting in Rhome, Texas. Their message is the usual mix of paranoid, racist, anti-Semitic conspiracy-mongering. I found it depressing -- but not for the reason you'd think:

The message informs callers that the United States government “is just like Al Qaeda,” and that it’s using “taxpayer money to fund terrorist acts in the Ukraine” so the U.S. can put in “a puppet government so it can protect the Satanic state of Israel.”

The new “main battles,” it continues, “will take place in Iran and Syria,” and “the Jew bitch behind this scheme is Victoria Nuland,” the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the United States Department of State.

Now, as a Jew, one thing that comes with the territory is the conspiracy theories. We're blamed for literally everything. It's a simple formula: take a social problem, identify a Jew in a position of power, and voila! Obviously it's their secret Jewish plan! And think of the cast of characters they had to draw on! Paul Wolfowitz. Richard Perle. Donald Rumsfield (not Jewish, but that never seemed to stop anyone). It was a list of Devilish World-Controlling Jews we could all be proud of.

And where are we today? The Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs? That's who we're relying on now? What happened to us? What happened to the ZOG?

Thanks a lot, Obama.

Civil Rights Roundup: 07/15/08

Your daily dose of civil rights and related news

This is a theme I've been seeing a lot of lately: Immigrants being mistreated at detention centers.

Obama continued to hit the responsibility theme in his speech before the NAACP. It was a message met with "loud applause" by the influential civil rights groups.

On that point, Ta-Nehisi Coates (who is a strong supporter of the "responsibility" meme) is sick of media coverage that acts as if this message is something new and transgressive for the Black community.

Though I doubt Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) is actually in any serious electoral peril, I do expect the new wave of African-American politics to start flexing its muscle against the old guard shortly.

The NAACP will continue to push to have South Carolina remove the Confederate Battle Flag from the statehouse grounds.

IUPUI has finally apologized for disciplining an employee for reading a historical book about the KKK in his break room. At one point, the university said his actions constituted "racial harassment".

The DREAM Act is really in my opinion a no-brainer piece of legislation. John McCain, on the other hand, appears to be of many minds on the subject.

A White talk show host called Barack Obama an "oreo" the other day. Is it just me, or are Whites as much if not more invested in the view of Black culture as anti-achievement than the stereotypical arbiters of "authentic Blackness" are?

The Chicago Police Department has failed in its bid to fire an officer who beat a man handcuffed to a wheelchair.

Some federal agencies are looking to expand Title IX beyond sports, and into an even more macho realm: Science (Carleton College can show you how it's done).

A growing set of discrimination claims are centered around employers' beliefs that women with young families can't be good workers.

Italian driver forced to re-take road test because he's gay.

A Chicago Tribune editorial responds to the question: Why are there "Black" groups out there like the NAACP or the Black fraternities and sororities, but no comparable White groups? The answer: Because Blacks historically weren't allowed to join the "just-plain-American" groups.

In related news, my review of the upcoming movie "Bama Girl" is up on the LCCR's website. I say related because anybody who thinks there are no all-White sororities anymore has no experience with the University of Alabama.

An affirmative action success story responds to Stephen Carter.

We Don't Know What Happened in Jena Until We Ask The White Folk

In the latest rendition of "White southerners are the most credible sources about racial going-ons in the south", we get this article by Jena local Craig Franklin alleging several "myths" about how the story has been coverage. It's really rather pathetic, but unsurprisingly it sounds "entirely believable" to Jonah Goldberg. Essentially, the warrants for the "myths" are that this resident has Black friends. Indeed, "Jena is a wonderful place to live for both whites and blacks," and soon they will go back to their idyllic state of integrated happiness and light, "Just as it has been all along"(!!!) Honestly, who could believe this claptrap? This is a town that voted overwhelmingly for Klansman David Duke as recently as the 1990s.

The mendacity of this is unbelievable. Myth #4 is that of the "DA's Threat to Black Students." How do we know its a myth? Because the DA denies it, of course! Who you gonna believe, a respectable member of the community, or Black people? Myths #5 & 6 similarly appear to rely on (probably White) eyewitness testimony as definitive proof that Black folk are lying. The first sentence of Myth #9 ("Mychal Bell's All-White Jury") is a concession that it isn't a myth after-all, his jury was, in fact, all White. In Myth #2, we're supposed to believe that a White high schooler in Louisiana doesn't know the racial history behind a noose. I can scarcely think of a claim that strains credibility more. And so on and so forth. It stuns me that this is being accorded any credibility whatsoever.

Taking a class on civil rights history this term, one thing that is being impressed upon me quite clearly, from reading a wide variety of sources (primary and secondary) is that when it comes to racial politics and policy in the south, Whites have no credibility. Not because Black people never lie, but because Whites have been historically near-pathological in their willingness to deny racism in the south. They did it because they knew any assertion they made in opposition to a Black person would automatically be accepted as true, no matter how outlandish. This was a key brick in the wall of White supremacy, and it conditioned White folk to feel comfortable rewriting reality, secure in the knowledge that they'd never be called on it. It was a general corruption of the entire idea of truth, and it is embedded in America's racial discourse in the form of Derrick Bell's "rules of racial standing":

SECOND RULE
Not only are blacks' complaints discounted, but black victims of racism are less effective witnesses than are whites, who are members of the oppressor class. This phenomenon reflects a widespread assumption that blacks, unlike whites, cannot be objective on racial issues and will favor their own no matter what. This deep seated belief fuels a continuing effort - despite all manner of Supreme Court decisions intended to curb the practice - to keep black people off juries in cases involving race. Black judges hearing racial cases are eyed suspiciously and sometimes asked to recuse themselves in favor of a white judge - without those making the request even being aware of the paradox in their motions.

I'm not saying every Black charge is right and every White denial is wrong. I'm saying that, given a clash of story, Blacks should be accorded presumptive validity barring clear evidence to the contrary. There is precisely no grounds, when hearing a Black account and White account of a given racial event in America, to default in favor of the White view. There is a lot of grounds for doing the opposite. Extreme position? Perhaps. But historically, it's been borne out time and again. And I can see no other explanation for why someone like Mr. Goldberg would find such an absurd apologia to be even remotely compelling.

Clowns 1, Klan 0

This is awesome (via AAB)