May 09, 2021 "Information
Clearing House" -
America
is not a racist country,” Republican senator Tim
Scott of South Carolina said in his party’s official
response to President Biden’s address to the nation
on April 28. There are reasons that should have been
a laugh line: Biden did not say America was a
“racist country,” the Black senator was rebutting
the president’s call for racial justice across all
ethnicities, and the reality is that America was
founded as a country in which owning and selling
Black people was justified and legalized on the
basis of the racist doctrine that they were part of
an inferior race. Scott didn’t get a laugh. He
wasn’t trying to be funny. He was being
intellectually dishonest and uttering a coded racist
call to the white supremacist cohort of the
Republican party that he is tolerant of their
different, racist point of view. That’s
where denial takes you, into crazy-land. That’s
where partisanship takes you, invoking unreality to
pander to polarization.
Scott’s maneuver is
a variation on the same racist denial that’s
worked for Republicans at least since Reagan.
Countering the “not a racist country” argument is
tricky, since it sets a trap for saying “America is
a racist country.” There’s no such thing as a
“racist country.” Countries contain racists and
tolerant people, just as they contain dishonest and
honest people.
Vice President Kamala Harris tried to evade the
“America is racist” trap by adopting Scott’s
framing, then trying to sidestep it and turn it to
her own partisan advantage:
I don’t think America is a racist country….
But we also do have to speak truth about the
history of racism in our country, and its
existence today…. we know from the intelligence
community, one of the greatest threats to our
national security is domestic terrorism
manifested by white supremacists.
Harris is right about the threat
of “domestic terrorism” from the white right, but
she’s engaged in threat inflation here. Worse, she
uses an inflated threat to distract from the core
realities of racism in America. Daily race realities
are much less dramatic than “terrorism,” but just as
lethal: they keep a crowd at bay watching a police
murder, but they don’t protect a teenager with his
hands in the air.
President Biden talked about racism this way:
We’ve all seen the knee of injustice on the
neck of Black Americans. Now is our opportunity
to make some real progress. The vast majority of
men and women wearing a uniform and a badge
serve our communities and they serve them
honorably. I know they want to help meet
this moment, as well.
My fellow Americans, we have to come together
to rebuild trust between law enforcement and the
people they serve, to root out systemic racism
in our criminal justice system and to enact
police reform in George Floyd’s name that passed
the house already….
The country supports this reform and Congress
should act. We have a giant opportunity to bend
the arc of the moral universe toward justice,
real justice, and with the plans outlined
tonight, we have a real chance to root out
systemic racism that plagues America and
American lives in other ways….
This is not demagoguery built
around some notion of a “racist country,” this is a
reality-based appeal to Americans to demonstrate
their goodness by addressing the systemic racism
that ebbs and flows through American life every day,
and always has. The nation has made progress, some
progress, but daily justice is a far cry from
reality.
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Denying this reality, or minimizing it, is a
habitual Republican tactic (or possibly a sincere
belief, perhaps). Like Scott, Republican senator
Lindsey Graham of South Carolina doesn’t acknowledge
that systemic racism is part of the fabric of
American life.
On Fox News, Graham denied any racism, arguing
that, because the country elected a Black president
and a Black vice president, “our systems are not
racist. America is not a racist country.” Fox host
Chris Wallace did not ask Graham to interpret the
country’s election of a white bigot president in
between the Black officials. That strikes me as a
pretty clear example of systemic racism at work,
although it could just be the familiar intellectual
laziness of American journalism. Or both.
The day before the
Derek Chauvin guilty verdict on April 20, CNN’s
Chris Cillizza contributed to a multi-faceted
example of
the way systemic racism works. In Cillizza’s
view, with the country “on knife’s edge” awaiting a
verdict, “elected officials … need to urge calm and
restraint.” He then falsely accused a congresswoman
of inciting violence, with a headline reading:
Maxine Waters just inflamed a very volatile
situation
Cillizza chose not to acknowledge
that the volatility of the situation, whatever it
actually was, was the result of a long history of
juries failing to convict guilty cops, possibly even
a stone-cold killer like Chauvin. In advance of
events he could not know, Cillizza was not only
anticipating a racist verdict, he was preparing to
scapegoat Maxine Waters for whatever reaction
resulted from such a travesty of justice. Actually,
he was scapegoating a Black congresswoman in advance
on the basis of things she did not say in the way
that he reported them:
“I hope we get a verdict that says guilty,
guilty, guilty,”
she said in response to reporters’ questions.
“And if we don’t, we cannot go away. We’ve got
to stay on the street. We get more active, we’ve
got to get more confrontational. We’ve got to
make sure that they know that we mean business.”
Cillizza went on to editorialize
based on his cherry-picked misquote:
… That sort of rhetoric — at a moment of such
heightened tensions — is irresponsible coming
from anyone. It’s especially irresponsible
coming from an elected official like Waters.
By strong implication, Cillizza
was accusing Waters of inciting violence. No matter
that the violence had not happened (and, as it
turned out, would not happen). Cillizza has been
around long enough to know that Maxine Waters is
constantly demonized by the right, so why is he
jumping on that particular lynchwagon with such
careless abandon?
In fact, Cillizza has quoted her
out of context – whether out of malice or laziness,
who’s to say?
The full transcript of her remarks offers no
evidence that she was calling for any violence.
Although Cillizza acknowledges that Waters made her
comments in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, in the
context of another incident of cop violence, the
killing of Daunte Wright in the driver’s seat of his
car, Cillizza makes no effort to distinguish between
those contexts.
Waters was addressing the Brooklyn
Center killing when a reporter change the subject
and asked about Derek Chauvin. After some overlap
and confusion, Waters answers the question, “What
should protestors do?” for which the context is
ambiguous, but the only protestors were there in
Brooklyn Center, where the case is far from
adjudicated or resolved. Waters seems to answer in
that context, informed by America’s systemic racism:
Well, we’ve got to stay on the street. And
we’ve got to get more active. We’ve got to get
more confrontational. We’ve got to make sure
that they know that we mean business.
After the Chauvin verdict,
variations on this answer became a common response
(including Biden’s call for passing the George Floyd
Act). There is no call for violence in the call to
confront ongoing, systemic racism. But Cillizza in
his lily-white political correctness feels free to
lecture a victim based on his projection of her
nonexistent call for violence. Even so, not a big
deal if it stops there, with a casually racist slur
from another veteran journalist. But it didn’t stop
there, the story had legs.
As The Washington Post reported:
Republicans have highlighted Waters’s
comments as having the potential to lead to
violence, but they have also faced accusations
of hypocrisy over their lack of action over
former president Donald Trump’s frequent
inflammatory comments, or on members of their
own party who have been accused of egging on
violence.
Eric Nelson,
one of Derek Chauvin’s defense lawyers, promptly
tried to take advantage of the offending Waters
quote. On April 19, with the jury out of the
courtroom, he used it as
the basis for a motion to declare a mistrial. He
claimed that Waters:
… an elected official, a United States
Congressperson, was making what I interpreted to
be and what I think are reasonably interpreted
to be, threats against the sanctity of the jury
process, threatening and intimidating a jury,
demanding that if there’s not a guilty verdict
that there would be further problems….
After a brief colloquy with the
judge, Nelson concluded:
And now that we have U.S. Representatives
threatening acts of violence in relation to this
specific case, it’s mind boggling to me, Judge.
Immediately,
Judge Peter Cahill responded with extrajudicial
commentary:
Well, I’ll give you that Congresswoman Waters
may have given you something on appeal that may
result in this whole trial being overturned. But
what’s the state’s position?
The state’s position was that the
motion for mistrial was based on “vague statements”
and that the basis of the motion was tantamount to
hearsay:
If there’s a specific statement that a
specific U.S. Representative made, then there
needs to be some formal offer of proof with the
exact quotes of the exact statement or some kind
of a declaration. And I’m sure Mr. Nelson can do
that if he thinks that that’s something that’s
appropriate. I don’t know that this particular
Representative made a specified threat to
violence. I don’t know what the context of the
statement is….
And so I just don’t think that we can muddy
the record with vague allegations as to things
that have happened without very specific
evidence that’s being offered before the court….
And so without any specific offer of proof or
information in the record, without any specific
evidence that this particular jury was
influenced in any particular way, I believe that
the defendant’s motion should be denied.
This is precisely the sort of
analysis that Cillizza and others should have made
before accusing Maxine Waters of inciting violence.
The evidence isn’t there. Attorney Nelson
acknowledged that the best case is only
interpretation – in other words: speculation,
projection, predisposition to think the worst of a
demonized Black congresswoman. Prejudiced people
tend not to stop and think.
Before denying the motion for
mistrial, Judge Cahill took the time
to excoriate Rep. Waters and other unnamed
elected officials for commenting on the Chauvin case
in ways that, he implies, violate their oath of
office. He concluded his brief diatribe by saying:
“A congresswoman’s opinion really doesn’t matter a
whole lot.” But if that’s the case, why rant on
about it?
Elsewhere in the jungle of
American racism, Republicans in Congress set about
once again trying to censure Maxine Waters for
the things they wished she’d said. This time,
Republican leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy
introduced a two-page censure resolution that
selectively quotes Rep. Waters out of context. The
bulk of the resolution relies on extensive quotes
from Jude Cahill’s comments, also selectively and
out of context.
On April 20, the House voted
216-210 (4 members not voting) along strict party
lines
to table McCarthy’s resolution, effectively
rendering it moot. The previous motion to censure
Rep. Waters was sent to the Ethics Committee, never
to be seen again.
Following the vote on her censure motion, Rep.
Waters said:
I love my colleagues and they love me. I
don’t want to do anything to hurt them or hurt
their chances for re-election. I will make sure
that they are comfortable with my kind of
advocacy so that we can all be sure that we can
do the right thing.
Even though America is not a
“racist country,” far too many Americans,
consciously and unconsciously, behave in racist
patterns.
And sometimes they don’t.
Sometimes they convict guilty cops. Sometimes they
defend their Congressional colleagues. Sometimes
they acknowledge that combatting racism requires
endless, nonviolent confrontation.
William M. Boardman has over
40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print
journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in
the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from
Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public
Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy
Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts
and Sciences.
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