Hillary's Corrosive Conservatism

Hat Tip to Lauren S.

In the video above, which, no doubt, many have seen already, Liz Trotta, a conservative white woman commentator, was asked to comment on Hillary Clinton's suggestion that the word "assassination" is relevant in the 2008 presidential campaign. Trotta responds,

"and now we have what ... uh...some are reading as a suggestion that somebody knock off Osama ...uh..um..Obama [after being prompted by the FNC anchor]....well both if we could [laughing]"

Hillary Clinton's frequent allusions to assassination in the 2008 presidential election contest have opened a Pandora's box, effectively making assassination part of the public discussion while giving permission to radical Republicans to air their dirtiest mental laundry in public, thereby making the entire debate more conservative than it would have been otherwise.

In that sense, Hillary's contribution has once again been very "Republican", as when she repeatedly asserted that John McCain was more capable of leading the country than her Democratic Party opponent.

As with George Allen's "macaca" allusion (see video above), it is often the basest disrespect toward Black people that unmasks white politicians as simply to vile to be worthy of the public trust.

Among the 140 blogs of the AfroSpear, the Slant Truth blog captures a truth that must be heeded particularly now. He says,

I traverse a wide range of blogs, and there’s something that I’ve noticed concerning discussions of Sen. Hillary Clinton and her recent “assassination” remark. At the primarily white blogs, there is much debate over whether or not what she has said is offensive (I won’t bother repeating it here since it’s been posted everywhere) and yet when you look at black bloggers, and other bloggers of color, there is an almost unanimous agreement that her remarks were reprehensible.

I also noticed that in the links being provided by blog authors and commentators at the primarily white blogs, to support their agreement or disagreement with the offensiveness of Sen. Clinton’s statements, all are to other primarily white blogs and white bloggers. I find this problematic because I’ve seen a lot of comments on these blogs to the effect of “anyone who thinks that her statement was truly offensive is paranoid, a nut case, delusional, incapable of rational thought, etc,” and this leads me to think that a lot of people just aren’t taking into consideration, let alone even reading and listening to the black and other bloggers of color that Clinton’s statement has affected not only on a political level, but on a deeply personal level.

As a child, I once came home, after hearing the standard “if you work hard enough, maybe one day you can be President” spiel at school, and quite happily informed my grandmother that all I had to do was work my butt off and maybe one day I could be President of the United States.

( . . . )

Slant Truth

Slant Truth's story demonstrates that the Obama candidacy presents America with a challenge to make good on one of America's most fundamental promises to all of its citizenry, that the nation is "one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice [and opportunity?] for all."

And yet, Hillary Clinton's allusions to assassination are most corrosively Republican and conservative precisely because they open a Jeanie's bottle of backlash toward the aspirations of some Americans, based on their skin color. This backlash is a conservative backlash against the fulfillment of America's liberal promises of equality and hope.

And although some excuse-makers (see comments at MyDD, in the whitosphere) assert that this concern for Obama's (and Clinton's) safety are conveniently invented recently to hurt Clinton's campaign, this clearly is not the case. On July 31, 2007, one AfroSpear blogger wrote, (before Hillary had mentioned assassination at all),

"When I campaigned for Jesse Jackson back in 1984, Black children told me that Jesse could not become president because white people would never allow it. They might assassinate him or isolate him or otherwise refuse him, but they would not allow him to take the reigns of power.

In light of the tragic history of assassination of Black leaders in America, from the non-violent Martin Luther King, Jr. to the leaders of the "pick up the gun" Panther Party, I could not argue that these children's observations were unfounded. They were a matter of historical fact.

So, I could only argue that we had to continue trying, in spite of the forces arrayed against us, just as we had [done] during slavery and Jim Crow." July 31, 2007

Slant truth cites the following sources for his observation that afrosphere progressives' reactions to Hillary's comments have been far more critical than the reactions of the whitosphere's pseudo-progressives:

Electronic Village

Jack and Jill Politics

The Unapologetic Mexican

Pam Spaulding at Pam’s House Blend and Pandagon

My Private Casbah

African American Political Pundit

All About Race

Ultraviolet Underground

Brazil's Gays Stage Huge Parade Against Bias

One of the things that I so appreciate about living in Brazil (and not in the United States) is that hypocritical puritanism is much less prevalent here than in the United States. Respect for gays is more widely practiced, de jure and de facto, and gays' presence in Brazilian society is, to a much greater degree, and acknowledged and accepted reality of life.

For example, "More than a million gays and transsexuals paraded in Brazil's business capital Sao Paulo on Sunday in what was billed as the world's largest gay march to urge an end to violence and discrimination," says the New York Times.

According to witnesses, the event attracted at least 1 million participants. Police declined to give an official crowd count although one officer on the scene estimated more than 3 million people took part and the Sao Paulo Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals and Transgenders Parade Association said attendance was more than 5 million.

This is the 12th year the parade has been staged.

Sao Paulo authorities and Brazilian oil firm Petrobras backed the event, which has become a big money-earner for the city and for tourism in Latin America's biggest country.

"This is the diversity the country wants, the diversity that we have to foster as a country seeking a tourist niche among the gay community," Tourism Minister Marta Suplicy, a former Sao Paulo mayor, said aboard one of the trucks.

The parade association is also supporting plans by Sao Paulo's Commerce Federation, Fecomercio, to certify retailers and service providers who respect diversity of race, ethnic origin, physical difference and sexual orientation.

On a visit last year to Brazil, the world's most populous Catholic country, Pope Benedict attracted fewer than 1 million when he spoke out against homosexuality and called for traditional family values to be reinforced. New York Times

The Pope came here recently, railing against gays, abortion, birth control and everything but pedophile priests, patriarchal chauvinism and silly hats.

Roswell Beacon Article Highlights American Schizophrenia: Equality Opportunity or Assassination?

Because of a front-page image of Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama's image within the sites of a rifle, an article from the Roswell Beacon, Roswell GA (pdf), has become national news. But the article itself, underlying the photograph, is actually informative and necessary. It shows that, even though most whites believe that Obama would be an acceptable president, including Jimmy Carter effectively endorsing Obama and urging Clinton to cede the race by June 6, there nonetheless remains a fervent wish among a small percentage of white Americans that Barack Obama be assassinated before he can assume the US presidency.

Even Hillary Clinton has made repeated comments which some believe are suggestive of her membership in this small minority of Obama assassination proponents. (Sen. Hillary Clinton has repeatedly suggested that if Sen. Barack Obama were assassinated then her campaign would be given new life.)

Hillary Clinton's assassination comments must be taken seriously.
There is beginning to be a pattern developing here.
Pastor Kyev Tatum, AfroSpear Member Blog

One speaker at a white supremacist rally cited in the Roswell Beacon article says, seeming to be thinking along the lines of Senator Clinton,

We should remember to be law abiding, but we will remember that what they won’t allow at the ballot box can be won at the bullet box. Roswell Beacon

The front-page image is shocking, but it brings necessary attention to a reality of American life: Black people risk our lives when we endeavor to improve our status in ways that were previously off-limits to us, based on our skin color. This was so when Blacks integrated the Jim Crow lunch counters of the South and it remains so as Barack Obama seeks to become the first Black presidential nominee of the Democratic Party and the first Black president of the United States.

Blacks have always whispered, as have whites amongst themselves that in this "one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all," Blacks' liberty was strictly limited by the threat of white violence, as we see when Obama has to run for president knowing full well that the most recognized Black presences of the previous generations were assassinated, including Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X.

On the other hand, the most recognized Black presences of subsequent generations have not been assassinated, including Jesse Jackson and Colin Powell. And so we don't know who we are as a nation: a terrorist nation in which Blacks' accomplishment is limited by the threat of violence or an increasingly free nation where the threat has passed?

State Blogging: The Birth of a New White-Privilege

What we see in the virtually all-white state blogging corps
is the birth of a new "white privilege".

Since the first Democratic National Conventions, national newspapers such as the Washington Post and the New York Times have covered conventions by visiting the convention floor and then reporting to their newspapers. In no previous convention have reporters sat directly beside their interviewees for the entire convention, effectively receiving a direct benefit from the very Party which the public expects should and will be covered objectively and disinterestedly.

What, then is the original need, in the year 2008, to seat a corps of 50 virtually all-white state blogs corps on the convention floor for the entire length of the convention them? Certainly, this concept is unprecedented, but is it valid and beneficial?

The new state blog corps constitutes an arrogant new assertion of a white right to enjoy a privilege that others will not.

They insist, incredibly and contradictorily, that this is NOT a new privilege and does NOT accord special rights based on skin color, but also that the admission of Black bloggers to this new group is impossible, for reason they still have not explained. The reason is obvious. The state bloggers' corps is a new privilege that was conceived as a perk for them alone, and sharing this perk with others would defeat the color-based exclusivity that the new status was meant to confer.

If there is another reason why ONLY white state bloggers should be seated on the floor, the white bloggers and their allies in the DNC have yet to explain what that reason is. Unbelievably, the white blogs selected for the state blog pool are authorized to bring as many additional bloggers to sit on the floor as they wish, while virtually all Black blogs will not be authorized to sit on the floor at all.

Like white skin itself, the state floor blogs system is intended as a badge of superiority, a "star upon thars" in the words of the late Dr. Seuss, which will entitle whitosphere bloggers to participate in political "weenie roasts" that will be off-limits to others, as much as an assertion of their belief in their own superiority as a new class system that will increase and reinforce the privileges that they already enjoy.

White bloggers' insistence, in coalition with the DNC, that this new state blog corps must BOTH be (a) authorized to spend the entire convention seated next to elected delegates, and also (b) must be virtually all-white, can only be understood as an arrogant new assertion of white privilege, white supremacy, white separatism and American apartheid.

Although they insist that the state bloggers seats might NOT be all-white, because white blogs can authorize Black bloggers to sit on the floor as well, yet this is analogous to the "pass system" that governed the movements of South Africa's Blacks during apartheid, where Blacks could only travel to the cities when and for so long as whites gave them a pass that authorized them to be there. Whites were there by right, and Blacks only as employees at will, to be hired and dispensed with as whites saw fit.

Obviously, no Black blogger could exercise self-determined editorial freedom as a Black person, because his very presence on the floor would be subject to the pleasure of his white employer. Thus, the new state blogging system creates new businesses for 53 white blogs, but only a feudal surf class status for one or two Black bloggers.

Has the DNC consulted with the 20% of the Convention delegates who are Black to determine whether they approve of this color-based caste system? Of course not! However, unless the floor blogging caste system is either immediately scrapped or broadened to include a representative number of Blacks and Latinos, then many afrosphere bloggers will continue a determined and concerted nation-wide campaign to bring this new color and ethnicity-based blogger caste system to the attention of all of the Black and Latino delegates to the Democratic National Convention, as well as state Democratic Party elected officials, the media and the public, so that the entire nation can participate in deciding what should be done to rectify the virtually all-white "Jim Crow" floor blogger corps of the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

If so, this promises to be a long, hot summer for all concerned.