Reason Magazine - Topics > Racism

Lifting Up, Talking Down

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 17:17:00 EDT

Re: the latest Obama kurfuffle: Didn't Jesse Jackson spend the '70s giving "moral lectures" to black people? I'm reading Paul Cowan's invaluable The Tribes of America, first published in 1979 and reprinted earlier this year. It includes a fascinating profile of Jackson, who in those days mixed left-wing economic views with socially conservative ideas, and who frequently preached the importance of turning off the TV, giving as much attention to academics as athletics, and the rest of the self-improvement litany.

Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama are very different men, and I'm sure there are enormous divergences between Jackson's performances then and Obama's performances now. (Obama probably isn't prone to praising corporal punishment or denouncing abortion as murder.) But I'd like to hear more about what exactly was bugging the nut-cutting reverend. Is it personal jealousy? A difference in tone and style? A lingering feeling that Obama is an outsider in the black community? Or does Jackson feel that Obama's recent speeches to blacks are actually intended for white consumption -- that he's patronizing his audiences by using them as props?

The floor is open to alternative theories.

Dead on the Fourth of July

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 12:00:00 EDT

The first time I met Jesse Helms was in 1981. My fifth grade class had risen early, boarded a bus in North Carolina, and taken a five-hour trek to Washington, where we tried to pack a week's worth of civic tourism into a single day. Zipping through the U.S. Senate, we filed in for a photograph with our state's senior senator.

"So these children are from Raleigh?" Helms said to a staffer.

"No," came the reply. "Chapel Hill."

A hint of a scowl crossed the Republican legislator's face. Or maybe it just seemed that way to me, knowing as I did that he hated my hometown and the liberal-leaning university it contained. When the state was mulling a plan to build a zoo, Helms had cracked that it should just put a fence around Chapel Hill.

That would not be an appropriate comment for this occasion, so our host changed the subject. His eyes scanned the crowd of kids, and apparently they fell on my nametag. Before I understood what was happening, he was shaking my hand. "My name's Jesse, too," he drawled. "Maybe we're related!" I stood there dumbly, surprised and paralyzed; before I knew it, my namesake was gone and we were marching to the next stop on the tour.

One of the class chaperones fell into step beside me. "Thanks," he said, "for not spitting in his face." I got the impression from his tone that a part of him would have liked it if I had spat at the senator. If Jesse Helms hated Chapel Hill, then virtually everyone I knew from Chapel Hill hated Helms right back.

By the '90s that contempt had spread far beyond our city and state. If you asked the average liberal about Helms in 1995, there were two things he was likely to tell you: that the senator was a racist and that the senator was a censor. The evidence for the first charge, if you cared to ask, would be a TV ad he ran in his 1990 campaign, in which a white man crumples a job application after a racial quota keeps him from finding work. The evidence for the second charge would be Helms' crusade against the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal program that funded material he considered obscene.

In other words, the typical Helms-bashers were actually prettifying the picture. The man was a Jim Crow nostalgist who wanted to obliterate the line between church and state, and they were whining about his run-of-the-mill conservative stances on affirmative action and Robert Mapplethorpe. You'd think Helms was just another Republican, notable only for his accent and his ties to the tobacco industry. But he was much more than that. You needn't favor racial preferences or federal art subsidies to find Jesse Helms objectionable.

Helms was, almost literally, a child of the segregationist order. His father was a cop in Monroe, North Carolina; in his recent book Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism, the historian William Link writes that the senior Helms "was expected to maintain the racial hierarchy through intimidation and, if necessary, brute force." (Link quotes a black Monroe woman who said the officer used "his power to the fullest, in the wrong way.") The constable's son came to prominence as a defender of that racist regime, but he made those old arguments in a new medium, reading virulent editorials on WRAL-TV in the '60s. "Are civil rights only for Negroes?" he said in one 1963 broadcast. "White women in Washington who have been raped and mugged on the streets in broad daylight have experienced the most revolting sort of violation of their civil rights. The hundreds of others who had their purses snatched last year by Negro hoodlums may understandably insist that their right to walk the street unmolested was violated."

In the 1950s, an alliance emerged between free-marketeers and segregationists. It was not an inevitable union: Jim Crow laws were, in addition to all their other injustices, an intrusive array of restrictions on freedom of contract and freedom of commerce. But the alternatives suggested by the civil rights movement often restrained those freedoms from the other direction, opening space for a coalition that would have seemed much stranger a generation earlier. Thus, in 1964, the Deep South voted for Barry Goldwater, a man who had taken the lead in desegregating his family's department store, the Arizona Air National Guard, and the Phoenix public schools years before the law required any of those institutions to be integrated. He had also voted for federal civil rights bills in 1957 and 1960. But he shared the segregationists' hostility to two provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and that mutual interest allowed conservative activists to create a political realignment.

If Goldwater relied on the votes of racists he despised, then Helms was the other side of the alliance: a segregationist who could speak the language of liberty but never really adopted freedom as a principle. Helms realized early on that it looked better to position yourself as a foe of big government than as a defender of state-created privileges, so he preferred to talk about the new powers the federal government was claiming, not the old powers the state government had exercised for decades. In other words, he learned to talk like Goldwater. But there's little doubt that his sympathies lay with the larger system of legally enforced white supremacy. Helms maintained that the South had no racial problems until the feds "manufactured" them; according to Link, he established quiet ties to the White Citizens' Councils and similar groups.

Helms' anti-statist rhetoric wasn't entirely a pose. As a Raleigh city councilman in the '50s, for example, he led a lonely fight against the federal urban renewal program. But anyone tempted to believe the right-wing direct-mail king Richard Viguerie's eulogy for the senator—sample quote: "It's the free market views, policies, and leadership of President Reagan, Jesse Helms, and Milton Friedman that have led the world to experience the greatest movement out of poverty in history"—should review Helms' record in office. As far as economic policy was concerned, his chief concerns were preserving and extending the trade barriers that protected North Carolina's textile industry and the subsidies that supported North Carolina's tobacco farms.

In social policy, Helms favored anti-porn statutes, "voluntary" school prayer, and—"in the best interest of public health"—sodomy laws. In international affairs, he pushed for U.S. aid to some of the most repellent figures on the world stage, from the Salvadoran death-squad organizer Roberto D'Aubuisson to the Mozambican terror group RENAMO. After the Cold War ended, some critics of American foreign policy hoped that Helms' hatred of the United Nations and nonmilitary foreign aid would transform him into an old-fashioned isolationist who eschewed foreign entanglements. That isn't how it worked out. Over the course of the decade, Helms sponsored bills to tighten the embargo against Cuba and to send $100 million in military aid to Bosnia. After some early dithering, he also came out for expanding NATO into Eastern Europe. By the end of his career, he couldn't even hold the line against the foreign aid he loved to criticize: Under the influence of his buddy Bono, Helms put his weight behind a $200 million assistance package for Africa.

In other words, the man was no more committed to limited government abroad than he was committed to it at home. But he maintained his reputation as a skinflint isolationist. And why not? A good politician knows how to lie, and Helms was an expert politician.

1983: another school, another field trip to Washington, another audience with the man who shares my name. Now a smartassed seventh grader, I set a goal for myself. Tired of receiving mass-produced deceptions via the newspapers and television, I would get a legislator to lie to me personally. I approached the senator. "Excuse me, Mr. Helms," I said in a deferential tone. "My name is Jesse Walker. I don't know if you remember me, but we met a couple years ago on another class trip."

The senator took the bait: "Why, of course I remember you, Jesse." He smiled warmly, looked me straight in the eye, spoke in a confidential tone, and gave me the heartiest handshake I had ever encountered.

It should have been a private moment of triumph. Instead it taught me what a born politician can do. For a second, I forgot the whole plan and believed him.

Jesse Walker is reason's managing editor.

The Social Construction of Race

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 09:47:00 EDT

The BBC reports:

The High Court in South Africa has ruled that Chinese South Africans are to be reclassified as black people.

It made the order so that ethnic Chinese can benefit from government policies aimed at ending white domination in the private sector.

Back in the apartheid days, South Africa classified the Japanese (and, even more curiously, visiting Maori rugby players) as "honorary whites." I suspect the court did not cite that as a precedent.

The FCC's Obsolete Quotas

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 10:39:00 EDT

The Federal Communications Commission, estabalished in 1934 to regulate scarce radio spectrum, is being pressured to block a merger involving two companies that use un-scarce satellite broadcast technology, on grounds that the federal government is not dictating enough of the would-be merged company's content.

Senior members of the Congressional Black Caucus yesterday criticized a compromise plan for the proposed merger of the XM and Sirius satellite radio companies, saying the deal does not provide enough opportunities for minority-owned programming.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin J. Martin said over the weekend that he would support the merger after XM Satellite Radio Holdings and Sirius Satellite Radio voluntarily agreed, among a series of other concessions, to lease 4 percent of their radio spectrums, or 12 channels, for programming run by minorities and women.
Members of the black caucus on Capitol Hill have been arguing for the merged company to lease five times that amount of spectrum to companies owned by racial minorities. [...]
"It's shocking to the conscience in this day and age, where the minority populations comprise a significant part of the satellite radio audience, that Mr. Martin would settle for what I deem to be crumbs that have fallen off the table," [Rep. Elijah] Cummings said. "We can do much better. I am hoping that this can be revisited."

Love the word "voluntarily" there.

In an era of unparalleled media plenty, and microscopic barriers to entry, what the living hell is the federal government doing setting up ownership quotas?

Jesse Walker talked about the FCC's disastrous central planning just last week.

Cigarette Flavoratism

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 13:00:00 EDT

For years I've argued that a bill authorizing the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to regulate tobacco products is bad for consumers. I've said the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, which Congress is once again considering, would stifle competition, raise prices, reduce variety, block the flow of potentially lifesaving information, and impede the introduction and promotion of safer tobacco products.

Such arguments have attracted remarkably little attention, given that consumer protection is the main rationale for FDA regulation. Now I realize my mistake: I should have said the bill was racist.

In my defense, I did not realize until recently that the bill was racist. Then again, neither did the people making that argument.

Take Joseph Califano, who has been a vociferous opponent of smoking since he served as Jimmy Carter's secretary of health, education and welfare. Despite his longstanding interest in the issue, it seems Califano never got around to reading the tobacco bill, which was first introduced in 2004, or at least did not notice a provision he now deems outrageously discriminatory.

Califano told The New York Times his eyes were opened by Louis Sullivan, secretary of health and human services under George H.W. Bush, who called him to complain that the bill bans all cigarette flavors except menthol. It's not clear why Sullivan only recently got riled up about this provision, which anti-smoking activists have been murmuring about for years.

It may have had something to do with a May 13 New York Times story headlined "Cigarette Bill Treats Menthol With Leniency," which reported that "some public health experts are questioning why menthol, the most widely used cigarette flavoring and the most popular cigarette choice of African-American smokers, is receiving special protection as Congress tries to regulate tobacco for the first time." The front-page article quoted William S. Robinson, head of the National African American Tobacco Prevention Network, who explained that his organization and other anti-smoking groups had gone along with the menthol exemption because it was necessary to placate Philip Morris, the only major cigarette maker supporting the bill.

Philip Morris sells a lot of menthol cigarettes, but the flavors forbidden by the bill are offered only by its competitors. The bill's flavoritism is of a piece with its general tendency to help the industry leader maintain its market dominance.

But Robinson was willing to live with the Philip Morris-favoring menthol compromise until two weeks after the Times story ran, when he announced that his group had withdrawn its support for the bill because "our constituents across the country are just livid." In a June 5 op-ed piece published by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Califano, Sullivan and Robinson explained the source of that anger.

"This loophole especially undermines the health of African-Americans," they said, since 75 percent of black smokers prefer menthol brands, compared to 32 percent of white smokers. "The bill blatantly discriminates against African-Americans."

In a June 4 letter that was also signed by five other former health secretaries and one former surgeon general, Califano et al. urged Congress to ban menthol cigarettes. Since the rationale for banning flavored cigarettes is that kids like them, the letter said, the menthol exception "sends a message that African American youngsters are valued less than white youngsters."

There are other ways to look at it. Given that white menthol smokers outnumber black menthol smokers by three to one, maybe this isn't such a black thing after all. Alternatively, since the bill allows blacks to smoke the cigarettes they prefer, a freedom it does not allow whites who like clove cigarettes or Camel Cremas, you could argue that it discriminates in favor of blacks.

People who want to ban flavored cigarettes, of course, believe that letting smokers have what they want is a hostile act. But if so, the fact that the bill allows tobacco companies to continue selling the non-mentholated cigarettes overwhelmingly preferred by whites suggests that it blatantly discriminates against European Americans.

Obama as the End of Identity Politics as We've Known Them

info@reason.com (Terry Michael) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 15:00:00 EDT

We are nearing the end of American identity politics as we know it.

Bearing that gift to those who prize the individual over the tribal is a messenger who shared a Hyde Park neighborhood with Milton Friedman, though with a public record that suggests he is more statist than classical liberal.

But Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), can’t be categorized that simply. He is, rather, an intellectual and ideological work in progress. Not stuck in cable-babble caricatured time, he may be traveling the circuitous path many “liberal-tarians”—or libertarian Democrats like me—treaded as we grew and found our way back to the self-reliant values that informed our pluralistic democracy. We lost those values in the Industrial and Progressive eras, when advocates of centralized planning prized society’s perfection over individual liberty. While Obama’s positions don’t exactly channel the Cato Institute, his departure from usual Democratic Party left-liberalism is reflected in the left’s suspicion of him for not having all the 162-point plans of Sen. Hillary Clinton, or spewing the syrupy populism of trial lawyer to the underclass, Sen. John Edwards.

To me, this suggests the beginnings of a journey away from the Great Society mind-set of the Democratic Party. I was a 1960s teenage political junkie who wanted to complete the New Deal, with wealth redistribution and “social justice” managed from Washington. I morphed into a 1980s DLC centrist, embracing mushy “progressive” politics as a halfway house from statist liberalism. Now in my own sixties, I have rediscovered the founder of my party, Thomas Jefferson, in an information era in which we are desktop-empowered to seek our own way and make our own choices, much like the agrarian age inventors of our political system.

I can’t claim to know exactly where Obama is on this ideological continuum. He may not even know. But in his personal evolution, he has moved from the white world of boy Barry in Hawaii and Indonesia, to left-liberal enclaves at Ivy League colleges engaging with young conservatives, to a kind of noblesse oblige organizer bearing the white man's burden (half, in his case) on the streets of Chicago. He went from a young state legislator too aloof, in too much of a hurry for his colleagues in Springfield, to a failed U.S. House candidacy against former Black Panther Bobby Rush, hobbled by an inability to translate the language of the Harvard Law Review to the vernacular of the street. From that latter experience, he drew lessons allowing him to grow as a politician, hearing and incorporating some of the style of the black preacher—including the one who was to later cause him so much grief. He returned to Springfield after that failed congressional bid a different man.

He seems to be a grounded but still searching, an intellectually curious 46-year-old, with a breadth and depth of life experience that will help him make informed choices in a pluralistic democracy that demands its leaders split a lot of differences.

Compromise is a word doctrinaire libertarians find more appalling than appealing. But there's a lot that is appealing in Barack Obama.

Look at his health care plan. While it certainly won’t satisfy free-market purists, it relies on private insurance coverage, encourages portability and choice, promotes competition, and allows purchase of prescription drugs from other countries. It wasn’t by accident he proposed fewer government mandates for purchasing coverage—and was pummeled for it in every debate by the politician who, back in 1993, seemed to seek personal control of a big chunk of our economy. Though drugs and crime can be political minefields for an urban black candidate who has acknowledged marijuana and cocaine use, Obama has no hard line positions in favor of neo-prohibition and has made promising comments about pulling back from America’s status as one of the world’s most prolific jailers. Immediately, his election will restore America's reputation around the world as an opponent of interventionist elective wars.

But perhaps most important to libertarians, his election will put the Jesse Jacksons, the Al Sharptons, and the white identity politics liberals out of business. No longer will they be able to peddle victimology or mau-mau their way through the political landscape, demanding diversity training, minority contracts, or other tribal reparations from bigots they find behind every bush. The myth of unassimilable “minorities” dies when a majority white nation selects a leader “of color,” just as religious social distance was diminished when a majority Protestant country chose a Catholic a half-century before.

There is no perfect leader in the wings. I'll settle for one whose election will signal the end of the world of racial politics as we know it. And, with a nod to R.E.M., I'll feel fine about it.

Terry Michael is director of the non-partisan Washington Center for Politics & Journalism. He came to Washington in 1975 as press secretary to newly elected progressive Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.), was a press spokesman (1983-87) for the Democratic National Committee, and now offers “thoughts from a libertarian Democrat” at his blog.

Michelle, Ma Belle, These Are Fears That Go Together Well

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 14:27:00 EDT

Our own Dave Weigel has said most of what needs to be said about the latest Michelle Obama rumors, but Robert A. George has a post worth reading as well:

This is the '08 version of a really weird conservative urban legend that pops up every four years. The names change, but the basics remain the same: 1) It always involves the wife of the Democratic presidential candidate; 2) It always portrays the wife -- not the candidate -- committing some anti-American, unpatriotic act.

I was first exposed to this during the 1988 campaign when the line was, "There's a picture out there of Kitty Dukakis burning the American flag...just wait til that comes out..." (that one got out of hand when a GOP senator actually believed it and called a press conference to say he would soon produce the evidence -- which never materialized). Four years later, "There's a picture out there of Hillary Clinton burning the American flag...just wait 'til that comes out..." In 1996, the Hillary thing repeated itself. In '04, there was a similar one about Teresa Heinz Kerry.

Differences this year: Because of the racial angle and Jeremiah Wright, Michelle Obama -- and Louis Farrakhan, for good measure -- are blaming "whitey." Because of YouTube, it's a clip, not a photo. Oh, and it's also real early: This urban legend isn't supposed to start making the rounds until September or so. Perhaps it's because this one has "crossed over" -- Larry Johnson is a lefty blogger partial to Hillary, so he's caught up in the feverish wish that this might be true. Sorry, Larry, don't hold your breath.

George's last paragraph gets to why I never found this rumor credible. There was too much in the story; it felt like someone's racially charged imagination got carried away. Michelle Obama denounced "whitey" -- and Farrakhan was there! And it was at Trinity Church! And remember that stuff Sister Souljah said about black-on-black crime? Obama said it too! (In other news, I hear there's a dynamite tape out there of John Kerry, Jane Fonda, and Dan Rather sharing a laugh after they spit on a Swift Boat veteran.)

Jim Geraghty has more:

Just as Robert George wrote this post on Ragged Thots about urban legends and Democratic nominee's wives, I was talking to someone who spent a good chunk of the 1988 campaign trying to track down a long-rumored photo of Kitty Dukakis throwing feces at the American flag in the 1960s. He never found it, and doubts that it ever happened, but he kept running into people who were convinced they saw it....

If we come out and see the tape, I'll be happy to say that I was wrong, and that I was too skeptical. But the Internet is full of these kinds of vague stories and rumors, stories where the evidence "will be revealed at the right time," which is always some unspecified point in the future, never today.

Final thought: You know those people who think any attack on Hillary Clinton just has to be a sign of sexism? What do they think of these attacks on Michelle Obama?

The Birth of Hillary Nation

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 10:39:00 EDT

Sam Stein collects some comments from Clinton's die-hard supporters at last weekend's Rules & Bylaw Committee meeting:

"[Obama] is a cult. His campaign is an anti-woman cult."

"I will actively campaign against him."

"You know who is backing him is George Soros. It'll be George Soros, not Obama, who is running the country."

"South Dakota is totally rigged for Obama because of Tom Daschle. Obama's going to win South Dakota because he's buying it and rigging it."

"[Obama] is a socialist! You know what the Nazi Party was before it was the Nazi Party? It was the Socialist Party."

The intensity of this fear and venom shouldn't have blindsided me -- I'm the guy who says paranoia appears everywhere on the political spectrum, including the center -- but it did. It makes me take Hillary more seriously, not as a probable president but as a cultural phenomenon: Anyone who attracts that sort of passion is innately interesting. Even if it turns out that the passion was already floating around before it attached itself to a politician.

Bonus video: A rabid Clinton supporter is thrown out of the RBC meeting. On her way out, she calls Obama "an inadequate black male who would not have been running if had it not been a white woman that was running for president."

On a related note, here's a sneak peek at the Clinton campaign's next commercial:

The Drug War in Black and White

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 08 May 2008 15:29:00 EDT

In yesterday's column, based on a recent report from the New York Civil Liberties Union, I noted how racially skewed the Giuliani-Bloomberg anti-pot crusade has been. Two studies published this week highlight the racially disproportionate impact of the war on drugs generally. Between 1980 and 2003, the Sentencing Project reports, the rate of drug arrests rose by 70 percent among whites and 225 percent among blacks. Looking at data for 34 states, Human Rights Watch finds that "a black man is 11.8 times more likely than a white man to be sent to prison on drug charges, and a black woman is 4.8 times more likely than a white woman."

Drug warriors presumably would argue that such disparities reflect blacks' greater propensity to be involved in the illegal drug trade. Human Rights Watch is a bit evasive on that point. "Although whites commit more drug offenses," it says, "African Americans are arrested and imprisoned on drug charges at much higher rates." Or as the group's senior counsel, Jamie Fellner (who wrote the report), puts it, "Most drug offenders are white, but most of the drug offenders sent to prison are black."

It's true that blacks and whites are about equally likely to use illegal drugs. Whites, being the majority, therefore commit "more drug offenses" and account for "most drug offenders." This comparison is directly relevant in evaluating the fairness of New York City's crackdown on pot smokers: As I noted in my column, blacks are much more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana possession in New York even though they are no more likely to be pot smokers (and therefore, presumably, no more likely to be carrying small quantities of marijuana in public). But comparable drug use rates do not mean that blacks and whites are equally likely to commit the sort of drug offenses for which people tend to go to prison. For a variety of reasons, including a lack of appealing economic alternatives in inner-city neighborhoods, blacks are disproportionately represented among the low-level drug dealers who are most conspicuous and easiest to catch. That's the main reason they're disproportionately represented among drug offenders who get arrested and go to prison.

If, instead of going after street dealers, police raided homes at random throughout the country, the drug offenders (including users) they nabbed would be more representative of the general population. Needless to say, this is not a change in strategy anyone should be advocating for the sake of racial justice. As Fellner says, "The solution is not to imprison more whites but to radically rethink how to deal with drug abuse and low-level drug offenders."

In a 2006 review of Nate Blakeslee's book about the Tulia, Texas, drug bust scandal, I argued that the drug war's racial impact is just one aspect of a broader injustice.

Addendum: Bill Piper of the Drug Policy Alliance points out that a 2000 Human Rights Watch report cited data on the prevalence of drug dealing among blacks vs. whites:

During the period 1991-1993, SAMHSA [the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration] included questions about drug selling in the annual NHSDA [National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, which has since been replaced by the National Survey on Drug Use and Health]. Although the responses are best seen as a rough approximation of drug selling activity, they are nonetheless highly suggestive. On average over the three-year period, blacks were 16 percent of admitted sellers and whites were 82 percent.

So it may well be that whites (currently about 80 percent* of the U.S. population) are just as likely to sell drugs as blacks (about 13 percent of the population) yet much less likely to be caught doing it, perhaps because they are less likely to do it frequently (the survey question asked whether the respondents had sold drugs at all in the previous year), less likely to do it in public, and/or less likely to do it in neighborhoods with a heavy police presence.

[*This figure includes Hispanics who do not identify themselves as black or African American.]

Ron Paul Un-endorses White Supremacist

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Thu, 08 May 2008 13:57:00 EDT

Bill Johnson, who is running for Superior Court judge in Los Angeles (with the help of campaign manager Holly Clearman, who is a California coordinator for Paul's presidential campaign), was the author of the 1980s Pace Amendment to the Constitution, which read in part:

No person shall be a citizen of the United States unless he is a non-Hispanic white of the European race, in whom there is no ascertainable trace of Negro blood, nor more than one-eighth Mongolian, Asian, Asia Minor, Middle Eastern, Semitic, Near Eastern, American Indian, Malay or other non-European or non-white blood, provided that Hispanic whites, defined as anyone with an Hispanic ancestor, may be citizens if, in addition to meeting the aforesaid ascertainable trace and percentage tests, they are in appearance indistinguishable from Americans whose ancestral home is in the British Isles or Northwestern Europe. Only citizens shall have the right and privilege to reside permanently in the United States.

"Thought-tormented Ron Paul fan" Tim Cavanaugh extracts a statement from Paul chief of staff Tom Lizardo:

Over the past several weeks, I have also been involved in assisting Dr Paul with the consideration of candidates who are seeking his endorsement for their campaigns. We have gone through the process of setting up a method by which candidates are to be considered for such endorsements. During that period, we have also received and reviewed requests from dozens of candidates.
Although Bill Johnson's name ended up on the endorsement list, he did not go through this process. In light of this fact, and in light of the revelations regarding his past statements and associations, Dr Paul has retracted the endorsement and hopes that, in the future, the process that has been put into place will mitigate the likelihood of similar errors.

Cavanaugh spars with angry Paul supporters here; Paul supporters argue amongst themselves here; other coverage of Johnson by the Metropolitan News-Enterprise and the L.A. Times' Opinion L.A. blog.

Dave Weigel has been all over the ongoing Ron Paul Republicans story, including a forthcoming column in the July issue.

Now Playing at Reason.tv: Mississippi Drug War Blues—The Case of Cory Maye

Thu, 08 May 2008 07:00:00 EDT

...

Obama and Wright...

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 01 May 2008 09:52:00 EDT

Atlanta-based columnist Ron Hart on Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright:

I am no stranger to what is said in a black church, which, since revealed by the Rev. Wright, can shock and amaze most whites. It is the same feeling of disbelief that blacks and whites grappled with when O.J. Simpson was acquitted in his trial in Los Angeles.

The Rev. Wright is simply ripping the scab off race relations, yet to be reckoned with by political leaders. Politicians pander to race for their own benefit, but they don't intend on getting past it because it is an effective tool. Without race and class envy, the Democrats really have no campaign tools.

The media continue their fascination with Obama, but this new religious stumble toward Obama's coronation clearly troubles them. Politicians bring religion into politics at their own peril. Yet somehow the media will spin it for Obama, and probably tie it to their belief that Obama was born in a manger.

Whole thing here.

You Wait Right Here, I'll Go Get Warren

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 14:40:00 EDT

Ilya Somin joins the ranks of Harding revisionists:

In Sunday's New York Times, Yale historian Beverly Gage has an interesting article suggesting that Harding may have been the first "black" president in the sense that it is possible that he had a remote black ancestor. Unfortunately, Gage's article about Harding and race relations completely ignores the fact that Harding made a well-known speech advocating full legal equality for southern blacks in 1921, in Birmingham, Alabama. As W.E.B. DuBois pointed out at the time, Harding went farther in advocating equal rights for blacks than any other post-Reconstruction Republican president (the Democrats, at that time the party of southern whites, were even worse). Indeed, no president went as far as Harding in advocating equal rights for southern blacks for several decades thereafter. Harding also lobbied hard for a federal anti-lynching bill to curb the rampant lynching of blacks by whites in the South - again, the first post-Reconstruction president to do so (the bill passed the House, but died in the Senate due to the threat of Democratic filibusters). As DuBois pointed out in the linked article, Harding was not wholly free of the racism common among whites at the time. But he was a lot better than the vast majority of his contemporaries.

Nor were these Harding's only positive aspects. As Gene Healy discusses in his interesting recent book, The Cult of the Presidency, Harding is also notable for reversing the severe violations of civil and economic liberties that had proliferated under his predecessor Woodrow Wilson. It's easy to belittle Harding's campaign slogan - "Return to Normalcy." But Harding's notion of "normalcy" included an end to the imprisonment of political dissenters (such as Wilson's notorious "Palmer Raids"), abolition of wage and price controls, and the reversal of Wilson's numerous illegal seizures of private property.

I think the most palatable presidents of the 20th century were Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, and I believe Wilson was the worst chief executive in U.S. history. So I'll nod in general agreement, though I think Somin understates Du Bois' criticisms of Harding.

An aside: Harding's alleged black ancestry is a plot point in one of my favorite novels, Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo.

Another aside: In the comment thread beneath Somin's post, some readers are talking up the merits of James K. Polk. Me, I don't believe that history can be reduced to simple "turning points," but if I did, I'd say the day everything went to hell came when that landgrabbing bastard beat Van Buren at the 1844 Democratic convention.

Hillary's Southern Crossroads

info@reason.com (Jeff Taylor) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Even though its current focus is on the battle for Pennsylvania, the Democratic presidential race is certain to tilt on the results of North Carolina's May 6th primary. It is there that Hillary Clinton must show that working class, Southern, white voters will balk at supporting Barack Obama come November.

Clinton is not so much trying to win the nomination outright—neither candidate will secure enough delegates to do that—as she is auditioning before the party's superdelegates to be cast as the nominee most likely to beat John McCain. This requires offering some kind of proof that Obama is—pick your focus group: too black, too scary, too liberal, or too scary-black-liberal—to win enough white votes to beat McCain.

This is where North Carolina comes in. Ringed by three states that Obama won handily just weeks ago, a Clinton win would show that Obama's race relations talk didn't work, and that not even in a state with a significant black Democratic base can he overcome the suspicion that he is a crypto-Black Panther. Not only did Obama win South Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia, he crushed Clinton in those races, displaying the twin aspects of what has made his campaign so formidable. In South Carolina it was a huge black turnout with significant new voter participation, while in Virginia he pulled in huge numbers of white votes, finishing with 48 percent. A similar pattern prevailed in Georgia, where 43 percent of the white vote went for the Obama.

Only Tennessee, which gave Clinton a 13 point win, has resisted Obama's march across the South, not counting Clinton's "home" state of Arkansas, of course.

That was then, pre-Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Has the "landscape changed," as politicos like to say, after the electorate's introduction to Wright's fiery sermons? Maybe. The trouble for Clinton is she has considerable baggage of her own.

In North Carolina, especially in small and mid-size towns denuded of 250,000 furniture and light manufacturing jobs, NAFTA might as well be the Hitler-Stalin Pact. If both Clinton and Obama had to run from the treaty in Ohio and the Rust Belt, they'll have to be in dead sprint across the Tar Heel State. And Clinton simply has more—much more—pro-NAFTA weight to carry.

She tried to shed that burden in Winston-Salem the other day by calling for a "re-negotiation" of NAFTA, which just seems to be a fancy way of saying she was wrong for ever supporting the treaty. She also promised some $2.5 billion in workforce training programs to help make up for it all, one supposes.

Meanwhile, Obama was in Greensboro patiently explaining for the umpteenth time that he is, in fact, a Christian while bashing Clinton for being too tied to special interests. Obama also beat Clinton to the state's TV airwaves, putting up 30-second spots promising not to ship jobs overseas like you-know-who.

The early commitment of ad dollars shows that the Obama camp does not put much stock in one recent poll showing him with a 20-point lead in the state. The poll's methodology almost certainly overstates the pro-Obama turnout for the primary. The consensus view is that Obama now holds a lead, but of, at most, 10 points—and possibly little as five points among likely primary voters.

Because the race is relatively close, Clinton will no doubt soon move to counter the Obama ads in the state's metro cores. When she does, it may well be with the most direct and forceful attacks on Obama the campaign season has yet seen. Hillary, in point of fact, has nothing to gain by holding back. She must, to borrow Bill's old phrase from the Ken Starr days, "just win."

To that end, the political class in North Carolina is bracing for a heavy dose of Rev. Wright's oratory, offered up by pro-Hillary ads. It might not be pretty or artful, but the rough road is the only one left open to her.

Jeff Taylor writes from North Carolina.

You Make the World Seem Fresh and Clean

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 14:25:00 EDT

I thought one of the nice touches in Barack Obama's race speech the other day was how he basically absolved Geraldine Ferraro of racism, and (rightly, in my judgment) painted that particular kerfuffle as ultimately trivial in the course of human events. How did Mondale's better half return the favor?

"To equate what I said with what this racist bigot has said from the pulpit is unbelievable," Ferraro said. "He gave a very good speech on race relations, but he did not address the fact that this man is up there spewing hatred."

Awesome. Whole thing here; found through L.A. Observed. Bonus link: Tim Cavanaugh's oddly prescient yet perceptively strange political Me-a culpa (which, if nothing else, illustrates how daily exposure to a big city's politicos and activists will blast you cause you to break on through the doors of perception). Excerpt:

Perhaps it was hubris to touch the third rail of American politics. I freely admit my Achilles' heel was that I ignored the elephant in the room. But I could not let a rogue actor continue to thumb his nose at the international community, while handing money hand over fist to the same old tunnel vision and short-term thinking. This is not about politics; it goes to who I am. To understand my decision, you'd have to go back to my recently discovered Jewish ancestor Madam Valdez, who arrived on the Mayflower. Those are the kind of deep roots and local values I brought to the Capitol. At a hastily called prayer breakfast, I consulted my deeply held beliefs, and mistakes were made.

Obama Speech -- the View From Elaine's

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 11:03:00 EDT

I happened to catch Barack Obama's big race speech yesterday morn in the odd environs of the Columbia University Journalism School, where I watched it with some of my fellow judges at the National Magazine Awards. The collective verdict of the nation's glossiest editors? Somewhere in the loamy middle between fan-fucking-tabulous and history-changing, once-every-half-century OMG. People were excusing themselves to call their wives ... did you watch that? Though the award judging is legendarily secretive, I can exclusively confirm to Hit & Run readers that one person told me that the room was so quiet where he was watching it that even Jacob Weisberg stopped using his Blackberry.

Hopping into an elevator together, a bunch of us agreed that it was a pretty terrific speech*. "But," said one, "we're not exactly the Real America."

This brings up an intriguing point -- Obama essentially punted the ball back into America's court yesterday, which is interesting on its own, but all the more so because his Republican opponent will probably not use any kind of code-word race-baiting in this campaign, and in fact will likely condemn his own allies if they do so. That could leave both the dirty political work and the cleansing national conversations to happen outside the realm of high-level presidential campaigning. (It will also probably lead to two candidates bashing the free speech of 527 groups, and competing with one another to see who would ban them quickest.) All else being equal (which it never is), I prefer my vicious and/or clarifying racial arguments taking place from the ground up, not stoked cynically from the top down.

* I thought The Speech was captivating and -- yes! -- audacious, up until the point he started committing the stump-fallacy of "once we solve X, then we can unleash Y." Especially when moving beyond Culture War race tensions would unite us ... uh, against corporations? And in favor of a throw-more-money-at-it approach to the lousy public school system? There's a time and place to empty your gumbo pot of campaign promises; a world-historical race speech doesn't seem to me to be one of them. Though maybe that's just because I disagree with many of his ideas.

Gaining Ground

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 13:52:00 EDT

Charles Murray on Barack Obama's speech:

I read the various posts here on "The Corner," mostly pretty ho-hum or critical about Obama's speech. Then I figured I'd better read the text (I tried to find a video of it, but couldn't). I've just finished. Has any other major American politician ever made a speech on race that comes even close to this one? As far as I'm concerned, it is just plain flat out brilliant -- rhetorically, but also in capturing a lot of nuance about race in America. It is so far above the standard we're used to from our pols.... But you know me. Starry-eyed Obama groupie.

I suppose it's only a matter of time before some Clinton surrogate pulls out The Bell Curve and demands that Obama distance himself from Murray.

The Audacity of Friends

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 11:20:00 EDT

Am I out of step with the country or just out of step with the pundit class? The things I'm told to like about Barack Obama's persona turn me off, and the things that are supposed to be disturbing seem appealing.

I got my first inkling of this during the debate season, when the conventional wisdom had it that Obama was at his best when giving a speech and that he suffered when he had to share a stage with someone else. Whereas I always thought his speeches were platitudinous mush but enjoyed his debate performances, where he proved himself able to think quickly on his feet and crack a few unscripted jokes. The Obama of the speeches is a bore; the Obama of the debates seems like a man with whom I'd enjoy a friendly political argument over lunch.

Now we have the Jeremiah Wright "scandal," which frankly makes me like Obama more. If you don't have a friend -- a real friend, someone who means something to you and sometimes influences your decisions -- who occasionally expresses a nutty opinion ("The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color") or an impolitic truth ("a country and a culture controlled by rich white people"), then you really, really need to get out more. Obama's connection to Wright is like his cigarette habit, his willingness to talk about his past drug use, his fondness for gritty TV shows -- it's a sign that there's an actual human being in that suit after all, no matter how empty it may seem when he's blathering about "an insistence on small miracles" and the like. It's a sign he might know a thing or two about the real America after all.

This morning Obama delivered a speech on the subject. It goes on endlessly, as his speeches often do, but it makes the essential, obvious point:

As imperfect as he may be, [Wright] has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions -- the good and the bad -- of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother -- a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

I guess you either understand this instinctively or you don't. And then, of course, there are the people who understand it but will continue to pretend they don't, the better to smear Obama as a secret jihadist, Weatherman, or Farrakhanite.

And If You Freeze the Frame at Just the Right Moment, You Can See a White Robe and Pointy Hood Hanging on the Back of the Door

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 11:56:00 EDT

Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson has watched Hillary Clinton's "something is happening in the world" ad so many times that he has lost his mind. Spurred by "an uneasy feeling that something was not quite right," he found that "repeated watching of the ad on YouTube increased my unease." Eventually Patterson realized what was bothering him:

I have spent my life studying the pictures and symbols of racism and slavery, and when I saw the Clinton ad's central image—innocent sleeping children and a mother in the middle of the night at risk of mortal danger—it brought to my mind scenes from the past. I couldn't help but think of D. W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation," the racist movie epic that helped revive the Ku Klux Klan, with its portrayal of black men lurking in the bushes around white society. The danger implicit in the phone ad—as I see it—is that the person answering the phone might be a black man, someone who could not be trusted to protect us from this threat.

Patterson concedes that the Clinton campaign might not have had a racist intent, but he's pretty sure that the candidate benefited from the support of voters spooked by the idea of a black man answering that red phone. And if that was not the plan all along, why on earth would the ad's creators have put a blond child in it? True, "two other sleeping children, presumably in another bed, are not blond, but they are dimly lighted, leaving them ambiguous. Still it is obvious that they are not black—both, in fact, seem vaguely Latino." Just like the children menaced by lurking black men in Birth of a Nation?

I hate Hillary Clinton more than the next guy, and I thought the red phone ad was moronic and demagogic. But Patterson's take on it is even stupider.

Put Down the Book and Step Away From Your Co-Workers

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 11:39:00 EST

At Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis (IUPUI), the image to the right is considered Not Safe for Work. Can you guess why? Hint: It's not because the statue of the Virgin Mary atop Notre Dame University's dome is considered risqué. It's because—well, I'll let IUPUI Affirmative Action Officer Lillian Charleston explain (italics added):

The Affirmative Action Office has completed its investigation of [redacted]'s allegation that you racially harassed her by repeatedly reading the book, Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan by Todd Tucker in the presence of Black employees...
We conclude that your conduct constitutes racial harassment in that you demonstrated disdain and insensitivity to your co-workers who repeatedly requested that you refrain from reading the book which has such an inflammatory and offensive topic in their presence. You contend that you weren't aware of the offensive nature of the topic and were reading the book about the KKK to better understand discrimination. However you used extremely poor judgment by insisting on openly reading the book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject in the presence of your Black co-workers. Furthermore, employing the legal "reasonable person standard," a majority of adults are aware of and understand how repugnant the KKK is to African Americans, their reactions to the Klan, and the reasonableness of the request that you not read the book in their presence.
During your meeting with Marguerite Watkins, Assistant Affirmative Action Officer, you were instructed to stop reading the book in the immediate presence of your co-workers and when reading the book to sit apart from the immediate proximity of these co-workers. Please be advised, any future substantiated conduct of a similar nature could result in serious disciplinary action.
Racial harassment is very serious and can result in serious consequences for all involved. Please be advised that racial harassment and retaliation against any individual for having participated in the investigation of a complaint of this nature is a violation of University policy and will not be tolerated.

That's from a letter (PDF) that Charleston sent on November 25 to Keith Sampson, a middle-aged member of IUPUI's janitorial staff who is working toward a communications degree and likes to read scholarly books like Tucker's (about a 1924 brawl between Notre Dame students and Klansmen) on his breaks. He didn't realize that sort of provocative behavior could "result in serious disciplinary action."

After thinking about it for a couple of months, Charleston evidently decided her threat was unwarranted. In a February 7 letter (PDF) to Sampson, she said she wanted to "clarify that my prior letter was not meant to imply that it is impermissible for you or to limit your ability to read scholarly books or other such literature during break times." Charleston, of course, never implied that; she stated it explicitly. But now she wanted Sampson to know it was never the book that was the problem; "it was the perception of your co-workers that you were engaging in conduct [i.e., reading the book] for the purpose of creating a hostile environment of antagonism." She contrasted that perception with "your perception," which was that "you were reading a scholarly work during break time, and you should be permitted to do so whether or not the subject matter is of concern to your coworkers." Faced with the clash between these two equally reasonable perceptions, Charleston threw up her hands, saying, "I am unable to draw any final conclusion concerning what was intended by the conduct."

To clarify, then, Sampson was not in trouble because of the book he chose to read. He was in trouble because of what he might have been thinking while reading the book.

Still confused? You can reach Lillian Charleston at lcharles@iupui.edu or 317-274-2306 and ask for further clarification. If you have any suggestions for books that Sampson should add to his reading list, please offer them in the comments.

David Hoppe covered Sampson's run-in with IUPUI's thought police in Nuvo, a local alternative weekly.

Addendum: I've fixed the email address and Amazon link.

[Thanks to Nicolas Martin for the tip.]