You Don’t Say

by digby

Rod Dreher opens his eyes to the people with whom he surrounds himself. And doesn’t like what he sees:

Gang, some of you are going to crack on me hard for this, but I just took down the post from earlier today about the white kid being beat up on the bus by the black bullies. I used that incident to talk about black male violence and the reaction middle-class whites and blacks have to it, and how we don’t talk about that openly in our culture much. It has since come out that the police officer who initially described the beating as racial has changed his mind. It appears it was just bullies being bullies, which is bad enough, but not as bad as we first thought. But that’s not why I took down the item and the link to the video. I took it down because now we have Rush Limbaugh blaming Obama for black kids beating up a white kid on a school bus. This is what happens in “Obama’s America,” he said today on his radio show. How low will these people go? Look, I think it’s important to talk about black male violence, or at least as important as it is to talk about any other important social trend. I don’t think we should be squeamish about discussing it in a responsible and fair-minded way, despite what the politically correct say. But good grief, Limbaugh is up to something wicked. He’s plainly trying to rally white conservatives into thinking that now that we have a black president, blacks are rising up to attack white kids! Christ have mercy, what is wrong with these people?

That’s funny. We need to talk about the “important social trend” of “black male violence” (which isn’t ever talked about enough …) but he’s shocked, shocked! that people are using it to say that blacks are rising up to attack whites. Glory be.

I don’t know what it is about this subject that makes people unable to see the obvious, but it happens so often that you have to assume that they just don’t want to. Of course, that’s what Limbaugh is doing. It’s certainly not the first time. In fact, it’s what Republicans have been doing since Nixon and the boys devised the Southern Strategy.

Why it’s even remotely surprising that the election of the first black president would bring up this longstanding, racial paranoia is beyond me. Happening as it is at a time of economic crisis, I’m only surprised it has taken this long for Limbaugh and his minions to get really explicit about it. I guess that’s progress.

But not all that much. One of the most potent weapons the right has had over the past forty years was the “law and order” issue. And “law and order” most often was the thinly disguised fear of the black underclass revolting. I suppose when you treat a population as badly as America has treated African Americans, fear of retribution isn’t entirely delusional. (But if that’s the case, putting millions of them in prison seems not only excessive, but counterproductive.)

This is the oldest story in the American book and it should have been completely expected that some vestige of it remains and that it would be energized by our new president. Those who believed otherwise were naive.

And, by the way, it doesn’t end with African Americans. One of our other ugly racial stories is recurring nativism (in a country of immigrants, no less), which comes to the fore most strongly during times of economic stress or other social tensions. If there’s one rallying cry you can count on in this country is “send them back to … wherever,” when the going gets tough. So this shouldn’t surprise anyone either:

As Congress’s debate over health-care legislation lumbers toward a defining test for the Obama presidency, partisans on both sides of another issue — immigration — escalated their own proxy war this week, concluding that the fates of the two issues have become politically linked.

Trying to beat back a furor over whether President Obama’s centerpiece initiative would subsidize health care for illegal immigrants, liberal supporters of an immigration overhaul on Monday called a main proponent of that claim a “hate group,” citing its founder’s ties to white supremacists and interest in racist ideas, such as eugenics.

The counterattack comes as opponents of illegal immigration plan a Capitol Hill lobbying push, starting when 47 conservative radio hosts hold a “town hall of the airwaves” in Washington on Tuesday and Wednesday to highlight the costs of illegal immigration.

Strategists on both sides said the clash underscores how Republican activists have stirred populist anxiety against not only Obama’s health-care effort but also other parts of his agenda.

Yup.

And, by the way, the school bus is a long standing racist lizard brain symbol, right along with “law’norder”:

(Nixon’s ads were much slicker and safely targeted the hippies thus leaving the more explicit racial overtones to Wallace. But it all worked together quite nicely.)

Update: you really need to read this rundown of Rush’s comments on Tuesday. It’s pretty unbelievable, even for him. He calls for segregated buses.

h/t to bb

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