contemporary Anti-Roma/Traveler depictions

My wife started watching The Riches, with Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver as Irish Travelers in the American South, on Netflix. Twenty episodes aired from 2007-2008 on the FX Network and got quite good critical response. I have to say, in many ways it's a fun show. It paints buffers (a word Travelers use for non-Travelers) as mean, hypocritical, selfish, cheats, and we enjoy watching the protagonists cheat them. But still, it's just a plainly racist show. Even if we enjoy watching the heroes scam and steal, it's a show predicated on the stereotypical depiction of Travelers as scammers and theives. There's a nice scholarly article by Peter Kabachnik from the journal Romani Studies.

Most revealing about The Riches is the decision to base the show on how Irish Travelers take on another family’s identity and become settled buffers, parking their caravan in the woods behind the house and ceasing their traveling way of life. Apparently the only way for Irish Travelers to live the American Dream is to steal it.

He also deals with the film Traveller and mentions a few other films, including Snatch. Add these to the standard "gypsy curse" plot from Thinner (the only thing here besides The Riches I've seen) and Drag Me to Hell, and despite the general invisibility of Roma and Travelers there's really quite a lot of plain racist depictions in high profile projects and big star roles.

topics on the radio

Today on the Brian Lehrer Show (starting in about half hour, as I write, though it will be available as a podcast after that) their series Thirty Issues in Thirty Days takes on race. The series so far has been serious and informative, and I'd recommend listening.

And, here's the specific segment.

Confirmation bias in the media (and in us)

They won't post audio until Wednesday, but if I didn't post this today, we'd both forget. Listen to this episode of Hearing Voices. Here in New York, the show's on at 7 am on Sundays. It's a shame because I only ever hear it when I'd rather be sleeping in. Actually, I missed half the show today. I'm guessing the first half is as good, but what I did hear is important in so many ways that I don't really want to describe it.

I will offer that it deals with how the media misheard Al Gore in a particular instance (Love Canal). That same process of mishearing is basic to our experience. We all go through life mishearing one thing after another.

On Rep. Steve Cohen

On a voice vote, late in the day on July 29, 2008, the U.S. House passed the historic resolution apologizing for slavery and Jim Crow, one sponsored by Rep. Steve Cohen, a Jewish American representing a majority-black Memphis congressional district.

That news has been all over the place, though that quote comes from racismreview.com which has the actual language of the bill.

Cohen made this comment: "I hope that this is part of the beginning of a dialogue that this country needs to engage in, concerning what the effects of slavery and Jim Crow have been, I think we started it and we’re going to continue."

I was going to reply there about the unfortunate aspect of Cohen being white. I doubt a black representative could have gotten something like that through, so the black community of Cohen's district seems to have benefited from a reformist attitude that accepts white dominance. (We're not a post-racial society, so I'm going to ignore the "colorblind" argument even though Cohen seems to be a great Representative and enjoys popular support in his district for good reason.) So, while it's a great bill, and Cohen is to be commended for it, it's very important to remember that this is only the beginning of the discussion to which Cohen is trying to contribute. But there's something else.

White and Jewish are not the same thing; Cohen is both. Jews have a long history of involvement in others' struggles. The obvious and most relevant example here is Jewish involvement in the Black Civil Rights struggle in America. It's something of which many Jews are very proud. Despite our failures to be the best allies at all times, I'm usually proud to be Jewish when stuff like this happens. But there's a reason for it that isn't purely altruistic. Jews are often hoping that by making a better world, it will also be a better world for Jews. It would be unfair to say that such behavior is tainted, but it is wrong that Jews feel the need to fight indirectly against antisemitism in this way. Especially when socialist Jews pit themselves against religious Jews or anti-war Jews pit themselves against "neocons" (often a loaded word, and I mean it that way here).

We should remain the best allies we can be (that includes recognizing that we're not "owed" anything in return), but we should also recognize that Jews are still oppressed. Our oppression has only sometimes (going back through history, all the way too the Inquisition and further back) included economic oppression, so the fact that Jews are doing okay financially shouldn't mislead us. We still have great difficulty talking about Jewish oppression. Usually, we get labeled as shrill neurotics if we're at all "uppity." See Abraham Foxman or Alan Dershowitz. Or we might be labeled as neurotically obsessed with past oppressions. I've seen that logic applied to Holocaust survivors like Elie Wiesel and to people born the 70s.

So I began by positioning Cohen as white and privileged and moved to position him as Jewish and oppressed. (His black constituents may even sometimes collude in Jewish oppression.) Both descriptions are true, though neither are the complete truth.

Romanticizing Minorities: Jews conceived in Power and Powerlessness

I recently wrote a little bit about (my experience learning about) the "Magical Mystical Negro." It's a pattern in which (1) blacks are relegated to secondary roles in Hollywood films (often, unfortunately, by liberal, Jewish filmmakers) and other literature at the same time (2) they seem to be exalted with patronizing stereotypes about how they're not subjected to the problems of modernity that whites face. In other words, they're portrayed as different from "us," reinforcing the very idea of essentialism. Because whites don't immediately recognize it as racist, the discussion (in which white privilege dominates the same as everywhere else) tends to get immediately sidetracked into attacks on blacks who are offended by the portrayal. While it does have its own particular features, the Magical, Mystical Negro is a subgenre of films that romanticize and relegate all sorts of oppressed people. (I'd like to direct your attention to Immortal Kickboxer.)

For Jews, the portrayal has often been one where 'Jewish exceptionalism' derives from oppression. Since liberals see Jews as simplistically white, we're not always relegated to supporting role, though those may be filled by Holocaust survivors or the Orthodox while an assimilated Jew plays the lead. But the oppression of Jews is seen as a good thing, producing the circumstances by which we can be a moral people. If we achieve any sort of power -by getting our own country, perhaps- these "exceptional Jews" become a Jewish cabal of world-dominating power. The Jewish Partisans, who fought the Nazis in the ghettos, are romanticized. The Zionists who actually saved lives, though, are demonized. Gandhi's call for Jews to commit suicide perverts morality to defend genocide.

It's not uncommon among contemporary leftists -who are vulnerable on this to the sorts of charges they regularly hurl at liberals- to thus emphasize a false solidarity with Jews while fighting against the pragmatic solution to oppression which Jews favor in overwhelming numbers.

This weekend, I attended Nextbook's Festival of Ideas on "Jews and Power". Leon Botstein admitted to finding the exceptional Jew an attractive figure (and one he believed to exist) that he would be sad to see disappear. Yet he did recognize that the ordinary, commonplace vulgarity of the contemporary Jew, made possible by Zionism, was for the best. If Israel is not the Jew among nations but a nation like any other that happens to be Jewish, good. Yet Aaron David Miller, as he suddenly realized in the middle of his conversation with Paul Berman that US support for Israel might actually disappear if we look further out than fifteen years, seemed ready to demand of Israel a moral standard worthy of support. (Perhaps I misread him, and he will come to a view like mine here. He's recording an interview with Charlie Rose today, so check it out.) But this is incompatible with the Zionist project as one creating a country like any other. It is, of course, good to expect of all nations, Israel included, moral behavior and to chastise them for their failures. I don't think anyone at the conference, speaker or attendee, would disagree with that. But that is a standard that falls far short of the existential demands commonly placed on Israel. No other nation is thus threatened with dissolution (though Germany was divided into East and West for decades) regardless of human rights records. The demands made upon Israel are too often that it not defend itself, that it never do the wrong thing. If Israel is to be a nation like any other -and not the exceptional Jew among nations made possible only by Jewish oppression- it must be understood that Israel will do the wrong thing from time to time. Perhaps often. Like any other nation. We can and should criticize it when it does without introducing or ignoring existential threats, without romanticizing Jews as victims.

Sean Bell verdict

This morning I heard the verdict in the case of police officers charged for the shooting death/racist murder of Sean Bell. Not guilty. The coverage below is quite good - listen if you're not familiar with the case. At first, I was surprised. I heard cars honking outside and hoped it was the city rising up against injustice. No, just New York.

But ultimately I find the verdict credible. The judge did call the police officers negligent, but felt that their negligence didn't rise to the standards of the criminal charges, even to the level of Reckless Endangerment. The verdict is credible to me because it is legal in this country to shoot a black man over 30 times. They even reloaded.

In other words, what I'd like to see is a discussion of how racism can be subtle and unconscious and still have dramatic, tragic consequences. Even in this time of heightened consciousness and arguably lessened (public) racism, racism still kills. All the time.

Damn-straight post of the year!

Read Kate Harding's guest post at Racialicious:

Some people, though, are still not only not getting it, but insisting that those of us who do get it are hypersensitive, overreacting, “looking for racism everywhere,” etc.–the usual, in other words. For the most part, I can just roll my eyes at that, because it’s all so familiar. Anything short of someone saying on national TV, “If you see a black man, you should shoot him in the face, and let me be perfectly clear that I mean you should shoot him in the face because he is black,” might not be racism after all, because some white people can’t see it. And if not all white people can see it, then the benefit of the doubt should automatically go to whomever made the racist statement/took the racist action/produced the racist image, not to the people identifying it as racist–because there is NOTHING WORSE IN THE WORLD than being a white person unfairly accused of racism! You lucky people of color have NO IDEA how horrible that is!

In France the sky is blue. In Germany the sky is blue.

I do have to recommend this (h/t Engage). But while my overall position is one of gratitude to Fadela Amara for making me feel more comfortable in this world, I'll take this opportunity to criticize her for doing too good a job at it.

Anti-Semitism is a fact and we know exactly what it has led to in our history. It can't be compared to anything else.

This is absolutely true, except how she means it. To her, antisemitism must be compared so as to diminish every other atrocity and injustice. But there's no need. The horrors of the Holocaust aren't forgotten just because we also recognize the injustice of the French occupation of Algeria. I certainly would argue against the suggestion that the Holocaust was no worse, but I see no reason to indulge in any comparisons in the first place.

Here in France, I get looks. To the French, I'm not very 'French.' We're living here under a dominant culture. When your name is Francois and you're white with blue eyes, it's one thing. But when your name is Fatima and you've got a little color, the look you get is different. In Israel - because of the variety of people, I didn't feel that. In fact, I met a lot of young people there and it happened more than once that I was talking with a Palestinian and thinking he was an Israeli or vice-versa.

Here, this is great stuff.

Obama and Farrakhan are not related

I'm getting a fair number of hits from google searches on Obama and Farrakhan leading to this article. I wasn't as adamant as many people who attacked journalist Richard Cohen when he wrote an article called "Obama's Farrakhan Test." Partly, I focused more on objecting to the ways in which Cohen was being attacked, which often centered on his Jewishness. Also, I wasn't as adamant because the situation was a bit different then. Obama's pastor had just endorsed Farrakhan, and I thought there was some room to disagree on how strongly that linked Obama, even though no one seriously thought they hold similar views, to Farrakhan. But, since it was clear that Obama didn't share Obama's opinions about Jews, I did side with those who said Cohen's article smacked of McCarthyism and racism.

At this point, there is no further excuse for asking Obama about Farrakhan, and to do so is no longer understandable. It's just plain racist.

Yes, Farrakhan has a terribly ugly side. He's a bigot. But he is a more complicated figure in the black community (where his good and bad sides are understandably weighed a bit differently than I would), and it is unfair to ask anyone to denounce the entirety of his being. It is especially unfair now that Obama has made his own views crystal clear and even gone so far as to speak out specifically against antisemitism in the black community.

On the most basic level, Obama and Farrakhan have only two things in common. They're both black, and they're both opposed to racism against blacks. To insist on an inability to distinguish between them based on just that is to insist that all blacks are alike. And that's just plain racist.

Rediscovering Barbara Jordan

Radio show, available here.

Who should be polite?

Naamen Gobert Tilahun has a wonderful article on The Privilege of Politeness, to go along with one of my favorite articles, Be Quiet and Listen by Christopher Christopher MacDonald-Dennis). Tilahun writes:

When someone is accused of racism/prejudice and they don’t want to address the concern or even think about it, well then the POC accusing is too loud, too angry. But that ignores the fact that we have every right to be loud and angry. If I were to say something sexist/classist/racist/ablist/etc. I would not expect my friends to say “Well I’m offended by what you said and let’s have a calm discussion of why.” (especially with my friends) I would expect their first and most visceral reaction to be “Listen up, what you just said is fucked up and you better research and correct yourself!” Hell, I’d expect the same response from strangers because I don’t expect them to teach me or help me work through my unconscious prejudices. If I have some fucked up unconscious thoughts it’s my job to break it down and deal with it, no one else’s. Sure there are friends I could turn to but I don’t expect people to help me. For clarifications sake in my mind asking friends for help is not the same as expecting people to teach you. A white friend coming up to me and saying ‘Hey I’m writing this story with a black main character can you read it over?’ is completely different from putting some prejudiced writing/thoughts/beliefs out there and expecting me to be nice and teach you when I run across it. It’s the expectation not the asking that is privilege.

And it is privilege. And it is an excuse to discriminate against or exclude people of color or Jews or any already oppressed group while falsely claiming it isn't because of their racial or ethnic status but because of their "impolite" reaction. If someone tells you what you just said is racist, that "impolite" reaction has everything to do with their race!

MLK Day

The Brian Lehrer show's annual celebration of MLK Day asks callers for short reading about any ethnic group but their own. Of particular note, there are some wonderful speeches from a Sunday event thrown in, especially one by Brown Universirt professor Tricia Rose, starting at about 4:20 in the recording.

Richard Cohen, Barack Obama, and Louis Farrakhan

As political campaigning and campaign coverage seem to have become less and less about issues -more about haircuts, more about whether it is fair for the press to focus on the candidates haircuts, more about whether the press should be writing stories about whether they should be writing stories about haircuts- I've become increasingly hostile to anything that removes the debate further from the issues. The biases of journalists (especially when journalists are viewed as a mass) are, of course, an important topic, but you're not likely to find me debating the relative merits of any one journalist. Even though I have a particular fondness for editorials, I've come to largely ignore them. Others, it seems, pay special attention to journalists.

And so I'm late to the debate over Richard Cohen, having taken some time to read a few (just a few) of his articles. But it is - on the sorts of blogs I read, in the sorts of circles I hang round in - a debate over Richard Cohen. And I take issue with some of the ways in which Cohen has been treated.

Here's what I read, after getting introduced to the matter by Jeff Weintraub. From dnA at Too Sense:

"Mr. Obama, have you now or ever been a member of the communis--er, BLACK MUSLIM PARTY?"

Henry at Crooked Timber:

There’s something else going on here. I strongly suspect that Barack Obama is being asked to condemn Louis Farrakhan not because there’s some bogus two-degrees-of-separation thing going on, but because Barack Obama is black, and because black politicians are supposed to condemn Louis Farrakhan before they can be trusted.

At this point, I have to agree that the criticism of Cohen's article is pretty appropriate. There is a tendency to ask black candidates to denounce Farrakhan that's unreasonable and probably in most cases racist. Whether this particular instance was racist is debatable, I think, in that it isn't a game of "6 degrees of separation" as the CT headline suggests, and we could debate how close the association is or has to be before we legitimately ask questions. But anyway, I started wondering if perhaps that's why I always felt weird about Lou Reed's song "Good Evening Mr. Waldheim," which calls on Jesse Jackson to denounce Farrakhan. (Although the song is from 1989, and maybe my response was to it's dated material.) And, as a friend of mine points out regarding Farrakhan, "Yes, he is a bigot, but his place within the African-American community is more complex than you (and some of the bloggers) seem to be allowing."

Then I came across this:

I will not be suprised that if Obama gets the nomination if right wing Jews and liberal Jews that like to denounce black leaders will be making these BS implications that not only is Obama a Muslim, but a Black Muslim, a group that all right-thinking Jews despise or at least find questionable(and, because of Farrakhan, with at least some good reason).

And, following a link there, I came across this:

But I don't think any campaign is behind this round of swiftboating because it bears all the markings of the Jewish far right, the camp that cheered Rabin's assassination.

So it's Cohen's Jewishness that's responsible for his column? And, though the articles I read by him regarding Israel were not particularly pro-Israel (one, that I came across via a Wikipedia article, in which he calls Israel a "mistake") he's associated with the most rabid of right-wing bigots who cheered Rabin's death. It isn't maybe the same sorts of biases that led reporters, Jews and gentiles alike, to savage both Gore and Kerry? Not the same sorts of biases reporters constantly show as they try to prove they don't have liberal biases?

And I started reading some of the comments on the CT thread:

I used to like Richard Cohen but some time ago, I think it was right after 9/11 but cannot really pinpoint it, he started writing columns that I thought seemed completely driven by his pro-Israel views. He reminds me often of Senator Lieberman, who is quite progressive on almost all issues except those dealing with the Middle East. I would read this column in that vein.

or

So since Richard Cohen is a good Jewish boy, some advice from Deuteronomy:

Or

I think Cohen is a joke, as is the Washington Post. And it’s not just the lying propagandist f#@ks on the editorial pages either, unfortunately. We need to discount almost everything they say, at least when it comes to foreign policy and the Middle East.

This is antisemitism. Racism directed at Obama does not justify racism as a defense. And in a conversation about racism, it's a shame people weren't sensitive to that. Are these people significant or is this just a rant about my personal experience? If it is just my personal experience, I still think it's worth my writing it. But, as for the ugliest thing said:

M.J. Rosenberg works in Washington supporting US efforts to advance an Israeli-Palestinian agreement. Previously, he worked on Capitol Hill for various Democratic members of the House and Senate for 15 years. He was also a Clinton political appointee at USAID. In the early 1980s, he was editor of AIPACs weekly newsletter Near East Report. After the signing of the Oslo Accords, Rosenberg broke with the AIPAC position and became a strong advocate of the "two-state solution" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Btw, as you all knew before I wrote this, Obama did, in fact, repudiate Farrakhan. Whether it was right for anyone to demand of him that he do so, I'm appreciative that he did. And, while I was writing, I came across this article at Jewsrock.org which deals with Reed's song as well as with Bob Dylan's "Neighborbood Bully." What it says about Dylan is great -"Everybody felt it was preachy and had no subtlety, completely black and white. They said it’s a non-Dylan song. But it is a Dylan song. That’s the beauty of it. You have to deal with it as a Dylan song."- and I've been listening to the song as I wrote.

Remember Cosby (and his really expensive sweaters)?

Bill Cosby may be right about African-Americans spending a lot on expensive sneakers—but he's wrong about why.

At Slate (via Racialicious)

Of course, blaming blacks for not being equal to whites is just really stupid.

Links for the day

This interview (links to .mp3) with David Hirsch on the relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism is smart. In particular, when Hirsch attacks the defense that "Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism." While it's true that they're not the same thing, it's just bad logic to assume that therefore no anti-Zionism is antisemitic. I've seen such sophistry presented in two ways. Sometimes it's like saying that not all dogs are dachshunds, therefore dachshunds aren't dogs. Sometimes it's worse, like saying cats aren't dogs, therefore Dachshunds aren't dogs. Talking about a Jewish conspiracy with a "stranglehold on Congress" (M&W's words there in quotes) is not legitimate criticism of Israel because it isn't criticism of Israel at all.

SPLC on FAIR.

Day in and day out, FAIR is taken seriously as a mainstream commentator on the immigration debate.

It shouldn’t be. The founder, chief ideologue and long-time funder of FAIR is a racist. Key staff members have ties to white supremacist groups, some are members, and some have spoken at hate group functions. FAIR has accepted more than $1 million from a racist foundation devoted to studies of race and IQ, and to eugenics — the pseudo-science of breeding a better human race that was utterly discredited by the Nazi euthanasia program. It spreads racist conspiracy theories.

dnA at Too Sense deconstructs a peculiar bit of contemporary, Christian antisemitism:

The reason the above excerpt makes my skin crawl is because when someone says they *love* Jewish people, or black people, what they're really saying is they love the racist shorthands that have come to represent us in public consciousness. They don't love you; they don't even see you as a person. They see you as a cartoon, a caricature, a cosmic joke to which your ethnic or religious background is the punchline.

Via the left-wing, Evangelical magazine Sojourners, comes the Burger Scrooge campaign and this editorial from Eric Schlosser:

THE migrant farm workers who harvest tomatoes in South Florida have one of the nation’s most backbreaking jobs. For 10 to 12 hours a day, they pick tomatoes by hand, earning a piece-rate of about 45 cents for every 32-pound bucket. During a typical day each migrant picks, carries and unloads two tons of tomatoes. For their efforts, this holiday season many of them are about to get a 40 percent pay cut.

Growing up, my mother wouldn't let me eat grapes because of Cesar Chavez's boycott. These days, I don't eat meat (except in peculiar circumstances, like meeting apaneem), but I still support unions. I've been known to spontaneously sing Billy Bragg's "There is Power in a Union." And if you find it odd that a more-or-less atheistic BuJu gets emails from Sojourners, maybe it is.

Not really about the Amis Affair

From Shiraz Socialist, which I've at other times found insightful, I came across this article by Martin Amis, entitled "No, I am not a racist." I'm afraid I'm not as up on the Amis/Eagleton affair as a lot of others. Perhaps because it's played out mainly in the British press, or perhaps because I'm not well read enough. In any case, at least one aspect of the article is worth discussing.

What I found most striking about Amis's defense is that he tells an anecdote about how his father first introduced him to a black man, how he first learned about diversity. He goes on to quote himself on his anti-racist views. Given that Amis (along with his father!) has been, as I understand, characterized as a racist this story and those quotes weigh in as evidence of his overall character. But he precedes them with, "Well, this is what's new about the new racism: it isn't racist." If his story is a defense of the statement he's been criticized for, then it's rather strange that it has nothing to do with what he said in that statement:

There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suff­­er­­­ing? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan… Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.

Amis is right to point out, that statement doesn't actually advocate discrimination, and anyone who has said that he has advocated that (based on that statement) is clearly wrong on a simple factual matter. The honesty is admirable, even, given that some people are sure to take the statement for more than it is. And since I can't honestly claim to having gone through my life without ever having said or thought anything racist, I'm not certainly going to criticize Amis for his honesty. The urge may well be there. I'd be surprised if only a few people shared Amis's urge, and we certainly ought to acknowledge such impulses so that we can address them. But it does strike me that the statement ties Islamism (or Jihadism, or terrorism masquerading as Islam, or takfirism, or whatever you want to call it) to the whole of Islam in a damaging way. I do think it's racist. He writes that his urge "not racist but simply retaliatory," but I'm curious how he selects the group (which is not limited to radical, violent fundamentalists) to retaliate against.

If Amis is opposed to racism (in principle), if he's written and worked against racism (as he understands it), if he's opposed to Islamophobia even (strange that his proof that he isn't Islamophobic is about how he learned not to hate black people) that doesn't make his statement less racist. It's completely backwards to characterize a statement by who utters it. I'm sure many awful racists have uttered, "My, what a wonderfully blue sky" during their lives - such a statement isn't racist, regardless of who says it. And Amis's statement is racist regardless of who said it.

Rather than looking into the hearts of people to determine what it is that they've said, as if our ears weren't sufficient, we ought to look simply at and debate what people have actually said. When we assume that such a discussion revolves around someone's character, as if each of us were so one-dimensional that everything we've ever done or said must be equally racist/anti-racist, we lose sight of a far more important discussion of what sort of statement actually hurts people.

In this world, as a Jew, I've increasingly found myself trying to explain to various people that something they said hurt me because it echoes the same lies that have led to the deaths of too many Jews in history. Too often the response has been that I must be lying since that other person "isn't a racist." Of course, how could they understand what's hurtful to Jews - how could they even know if they're racist - if they start exclude everyone who disagrees (especially Jews, who are the ones most likely to express their disagreement) with them from the discussion on those grounds.