Bill O'Reilly Confronting Evil

An outstanding "Talking Points Memo" from yesterday's O'Reilly Factor. And both Mary Katharine Ham and Juan Williams are excellent:

Nelson Mandela Outed as Communist Party Member After Decades of Denial

Of course he was a Communist. They always lie about their true affiliations. Progressives always lie about their ultimate aims. Their entire ideological program is predicated on deception and propaganda. That's just how these people work.

At Telegraph UK, "Nelson Mandela 'proven' to be a member of the Communist Party after decades of denial":

A new book claims that, 50 years after he was first accused of being a Communist, Nelson Mandela was a Communist party member after all.

For decades, it was one of the enduring disputes of South Africa's anti-apartheid struggle. Was Nelson Mandela, the leader of the African National Congress, really a secret Communist, as the white-only government of the time alleged? Or, as he claimed during the infamous 1963 trial that saw him jailed for life, was it simply a smear to discredit him in a world riven by Cold War tensions?

Now, nearly half a century after the court case that made him the world's best-known prisoner of conscience, a new book claims that whatever the wider injustice perpetrated, the apartheid-era prosecutors were indeed right on one question: Mr Mandela was a Communist party member after all.

The former South African president, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, has always denied being a member of the South African branch of the movement, which mounted an armed campaign of guerrilla resistance along with the ANC.

But research by a British historian, Professor Stephen Ellis, has unearthed fresh evidence that during his early years as an activist, Mr Mandela did hold senior rank in the South African Communist Party, or SACP. He says Mr Mandela joined the SACP to enlist the help of the Communist superpowers for the ANC's campaign of armed resistance to white rule.

His book also provides fresh detail on how the ANC's military wing had bomb-making lessons from the IRA, and intelligence training from the East German Stasi, which it used to carry out brutal interrogations of suspected "spies" at secret prison camps.

There's lots more at that top link.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Bill O'Reilly Interviews NBC's Bob Costas

Erika Johnsen and Ed Morrissey have the background at Hot Air, "Bob Costas: The timing of my gun comments was a mistake, but…", and "Video: Bob Costas on gun control … in the middle of an NFL game."

Most-Racial America

First read James Taranto's piece at the Wall Street Journal, with this conclusion:

The danger for the country is that a racially polarized electorate will produce a hostile, balkanized culture. In 2008 Obama held out the hope of a postracial America. His re-election raises the possibility of a most-racial America.

And then check Daniel Henninger, "The Racializing of American Politics":

This is the most violated saying in American public life:

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."

Martin Luther King Jr.'s acclaimed call in 1963 for a colorblind society has been displaced, at least in our politics, by an obsession with racial categories. That is the meaning of racialization.

It may be over four decades since the passage of the Voting Rights Act, but whenever America votes today, the exit polls can't move fast enough to divide voters by the color of their skin. Mere moments after the 2012 exit polls were released, a conventional wisdom congealed across the media that the Republican Party was "too white."

Let us posit that this subject wouldn't have been raised if the bottom hadn't fallen out of the GOP's share of the Hispanic vote. When George W. Bush attracted 40% of the Hispanic vote in 2004, there was no cry that the Republican Party was "too white." The GOP's problem with Hispanics today is a tangle of issues involving the law, labor and assimilation that is hardly reducible to the accusation that the party is too white.

In virtually every instance, the idea that the Republican Party is "too white" is dropped with almost no discussion of what exactly that means. The phrase is being pinned like a scarlet "W" on anyone who didn't vote for the Democrats' nominee. It's a you-know-what-we-mean denunciation. Its only meaning is racial.

The exit polls—asking voters to self-identify as white, black, Hispanic, Asian—inevitably drive any postelection analysis into this racial swamp. High-school seniors applying to colleges have been told for at least 20 years to define themselves inside a racial or ethnic box. Elizabeth Warren spent a lot of energy in Massachusetts attempting a Houdini-like escape from one such ancient box.

During the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton wrestled over race, first in January when Bill Clinton was accused of racial signaling during the South Carolina primary, and in March when Mrs. Clinton repudiated the late Geraldine Ferraro for referencing Mr. Obama's color. A New York Times report then said Mr. Obama was "puzzled" at this preoccupation with race and sex. It quoted Mr. Obama as saying: "I don't want to deny the role of race and gender in our society. They're there, and they're powerful. But I don't think it's productive."

A welcome thought. The truth is that no prominent Democrat since Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan has been willing to sustain opposition to this constant racializing of American politics and culture.

In the famous 2003 Supreme Court decision upholding the University of Michigan's race-based admission policies, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote in support: "The Court takes the Law School at its word that it would like nothing better than to find a race-neutral admissions formula and will terminate its use of racial preferences as soon as practicable. The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary."

In 2008's election, many Republicans and independents voted for Mr. Obama to put a final nail in the coffin of Justice O'Connor's racial anxieties...

Continue reading.

Entitlement America

An outstanding O'Reilly Factor from a couple of nights back, worth every minute:

And I think this is the WaPo editorial he's referencing, "Mitt Romney’s parting ‘gifts’."

And here's O'Reilly's election night rant, on video.

O'Reilly's politically incorrect. For progressives that's RAAAAACISM!!

Pastor Joseph Lowery: 'All White People Are Going to Hell...'

Well, it'd be one thing if folks were talking about Jeremiah Wright, but this guy marched with Dr. King.

Not good.

At the Washington Examiner, "Pastor who prayed at Obama’s inauguration says all white people will go to hell." (At Memeorandum.)

Also, from Diane Glidewell, "Civil rights icons pump Obama in Forsyth: Lowery, Don't think whites going to heaven."

That's how Democrats are transcending racial division, or something? Actually, I'm hopin' for some change.

Andrew Sullivan: 'You put a map of the Civil War over this electoral map, you’ve got the Civil War...'

Andrew Sullivan's ahistoricism is simply breathtaking. Just watch his stunningly ridiculous comments on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos," at Mediate, "Andrew Sullivan to ABC: If Romney Wins Florida and VA, It’s the ‘Confederacy’" (via Memeorandum):

PBS reporter Gwen Ifill said that “we can’t ignore” the possible factor racial animus may play in deciding the election, noting that the poll indicates that, on some level, people are still willing to admit “racial bias.”

Sullivan then added: “If Virginia and Florida go back to the Republicans, it’s the Confederacy. Entirely. You put a map of the Civil War over this electoral map, you’ve got the Civil War.”

Conservative panelist George Will rolled his eyes. “I don’t know,” said a skeptical Ifill.

Will then posited two possible explanations for Obama’s slippage in the white vote since 2008: “A lot of white people who voted for Obama in 2008 watched him govern for four years and said, ‘Not so good. Let’s try someone else.’ The alternative, the ‘Confederacy’ hypothesis is that those people somehow, for some reason in the last four years became racist.”

“That’s not my argument at all,” replied Sullivan. “It’s the southernization of the Republican Party. [Virginia and Florida] were the only two states in 2008 that violated the Confederacy rule.”

Sullivan's comments are perfectly representative of the left's hopelessly desperate and utterly despicable politics of racial fear-mongering. Progressives have been attacking conservative presidential politics as racist since at least 1968, when Republicans deployed the so-called "Southern strategy" in the election of Richard Nixon to the White House. The South has been in the GOP column for decades. It's just the way it is, not shocking and not a racist conspiracy. That's the 2004 map above, where George W. Bush was reelected with 286 votes in the Electoral College, winning all the states of the Old Confederacy, and some of the Border States as well. Mitt Romney could put together a similar coalition of states on election day. I mean, if the left is intent on attacking Mitt Romney's campaign as racist, it will only be in line with long-standing leftist research stressing inbred racist DNA in Southern voting constituencies, which I personally don't endorse. These kinds of attacks on Republicans aren't new. If race indeed plays a role in a Barack Obama's defeat on November 6th, it certainly won't be something that Republicans pulled out of a hat at the last minute.

But remember, it's decidedly not the current strategy of the Republican Party to run a racially divisive platform. No, that honorarium goes to the current White House, the bankrupt Obama for America campaign, and the left's pathetic race-baiting enablers in the press. We've been accosted with allegations of racist "dog whistles" for almost four years now. The progressive left is positively obsessed with race, as the nearly criminal initial reporting on the Trayvon Martin incident showed. And any reader of William Jacobson's Legal Insurrection blog is more than aware of the embarrassingly comic minstrel show the left puts on every week with race-baiting attacks on conservatives. It's utterly shameless, for example, "Saturday Night Card Game (If You Can Hear the Dog Whistle, You Might Be a Racist)."

If Obama loses it will be because Americans have had it with his administration's failures and incompetence. The progressives will cry racism until the cows come home. But the rest of us have long tuned out the race-baiting. People who're genuinely concerned about the country will simply get to work rebuilding the economy and repairing the damage of four years of atonement in foreign policy. It's not a matter of if but when. And as recent polling increasingly indicates, 2013 is looking like a big restoration year for American conservatism.

BONUS: More at NewsBusters, "Andrew Sullivan Makes a Fool of Himself on ABC's 'This Week' With George Will and Gwen Ifill's Help."

UPDATE: Michael Zak on Twitter reminds us that the Democrats were and remain the party of racial segregation, as he pointed out in his book, "Back to Basics for the Republican Party."

And Ed Driscoll links at Instapundit (thanks!), and Glenn Reynolds updates at the post:

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Andrew knows even less about American history than he knows about American culture and politics, something he’s demonstrated repeatedly. He should stick to his core area of expertise, forensic obstetrics.

John Sununu Walks Back Racial Comments on Colin Powell Obama Endorsement

It's just not a big deal. Sununu's comments were nothing more than common sense. The only thing stupid about them is that he wasn't bright enough to know that the despicable progressives would pounce on them faster than a strung out pimp on a crack pipe. Here's a clip from the leftist fool Ed Schultz on the socialist network MSNBC:

And more on the MSNBC hacks at London's Daily Mail, "'My party is full of racists': Former Colin Powell aide blasts GOP after Romney adviser says ex-Secretary of State is only supporting Obama because he's black."

And see the Washington Post, "John Sununu steps back from race observation on Colin Powell endorsement."

John Sununu: 'When you have somebody of your own race that you're proud of being President of the United States...'

Sununu's comments are perfectly reasonable and totally obvious, but here it comes, "Sununu cites race as factor for Powell’s Obama endorsement" (via Memeorandum).

Link-Starve BuzzFeed!

Man, that'd be harsh, although Professor Reynolds denies he was going to starve BuzzFeed for traffic.

See Althouse, "Instapundit threatens to link-starve BuzzFeed."

And Instapundit replies, "I WASN’T “THREATENING TO LINK-STARVE BUZZFEED”":

I don’t do boycotts, generally. But they seem to have wider ambitions than being a poor man’s ThinkProgress, and if they convince everyone to the right of Kos that they can’t be trusted, that’s what they’ll become. Lost trust can cost.

Keep in mind this is all about that "dog-whistle" Photoshop I blogged previously. The commentary on this was up over the weekend and I missed it, but it's worth updating. (And Doug Ross and The Other McCain both linked. Thanks!)

And remember, conservatives have exhaustingly repudiated racism, seen again and again in signs like the one above. Althouse has more, "Shameful, lowly race-baiting... but who's doing it?"

That said, Dan Riehl has this, "In Defense of Buzzfeed."

I'll have more later, so tune back in...

That So-Called Racist Mitt Romney 'Dog-Whistle' T-Shirt is Almost Certainly Photoshopped

I personally don't believe that someone would wear a shirt like that to a Mitt Romney rally. I attended dozens of tea parties on 2009-2010, and I only once saw controversial posters, at the protest against Nancy Pelosi at the Orange County Airport --- and I denounced those in a series of posts identifying the San Diego organizer, Roger Ogden, who later apologized for the misunderstanding and claimed his posters were not racist.

This story was all over Memeorandum yesterday, most conspicuously at Crooks and Liars, where the hopelessly idiotic Dave Neiwert claims this one, utterly suspicious t-shirt "proves" Mitt Romney's running a "dog-whistle" campaign. But the photo, which is licensed to Getty Images, got traction at more reputable outlets, such as New York Magazine, "Check Out This Mitt Romney Supporter’s Horrendously Racist Fashion," and originally at the much-less reputable BuzzFeed, "Man At Romney Rally Wears Mindblowingly Offensive Shirt."

Well, it goes without saying that some folks aren't having it --- Robert Stacy McCain, for example, "False-Flag Troll, IRL":

I can pretty much guarantee that this man photographed at a Romney rally in Lancaster, Ohio, is not in fact a Republican, but rather is a plant sent out by the Democrats as a dirty trick.

Clue #1: Wearing a “Romney/Ryan” sticker on the back of his T-shirt. Nobody does this. Nobody.
Clue #2: It’s kind of chilly in Ohio this time of year, and the guy’s wearing only a T-shirt, while those around him are wearing coats.
My guess is that this guy also wore a coat when he entered the rally, then stationed himself toward the back of the crowd (in front of the riser where the press photographers are stationed) and then removed his coat to expose the T-shirt, with the explicit purpose of having it photographed.
. . . aaanndd, Clue #3: No name? A press photographer is going to take a picture like this and make no effort to ID the guy? Nuh-uh.

Actually, it's even less credible.

See Wordsmith's post at Flopping Aces, "Racist Romney/Ryan supporter in Lancaster, Ohio?" Click through for the analysis, but bottom line: Wordsmith's calling bullshit. And what's more, one commenter says that he went through the Getty photographer's slideshow from the Romney/Ryan rally and there are no crowd images, or any other images, with this man wearing that particular t-shirt. But most interestingly, one commenter links to a "photo forensics" site that claims to have a date-stamp for the digital file as "Profile Date Time 2012:01:25 03:41:57" (here).

If the "forensics" data is accurate, the photo's from January of this year, and thus is not only Photoshopped but is also not a picture from a recent Romney/Ryan rally in Ohio.

But again, the main reason this as a completely manufactured controversy is the past record of conservatives utterly rejecting any racist paraphernalia at campaign events and tea parties. Where there's been racism it's been completely repudiated. When the famous photo of so-called Texas tea party "leader" Dale Robertson emerged, the absolute renunciation was swift. Newsbusters has the flashback, "TPM Trumpets Racist Rebuffed by Tea Party Groups as 'Prominent' 'Leader'." And of course folks will remember that the leftist media was jonesing for racist tea-partiers so badly that it had to invent them, for example, Contessa Brewer, "Guy With AR-15 at Obama Rally Was Black Dude: MSBNC Kinda Leaves That Part Out."

The so-called racist Mitt Romney "dog-whistle" t-shirt is almost certainly a scam. It's bogus. We've seen this movie before and the ratings are in: total flop. The "race card" doesn't work anymore, if it ever really did. The left's goal is to falsely delegitimize criticism and silence dissent. This photo below, seen early in the tea party era at Gateway Pundit, captures what's really going been going on with race on the right:

I'll update if more information becomes available, but I'll tell you again, it's a scam. Just one look at that "Romney/Ryan" picture and you can see that's an obvious Photoshop.

Book Review: Zubovich on Connelly's *From Enemy to Brother*

Review of John Connelly's From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933-1965 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012)
ISBN 9780674057821

Reviewed by Gene Zubovich

    It may seem strange that a nearly four-hundred page book would be dedicated to fifteen sentences of the proclamation Nostra Aetate, a Vatican II document of 1965 dealing with the relationship between Catholics and other religions. But the subject matter is by no means small: these paragraphs changed the official Catholic teaching on the Jews that had prevailed for 1,700 years. Indeed, John Connelly does not shy away from the word “revolution” in the title of his book, From Enemy To Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933-1965.

    Connelly, an historian of East-Central Europe whose first book dealt with the transformation of higher education under Stalinism in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany, began this research a decade ago, setting out to find Catholic resistance to Hitler's persecution of the Jews during the 1930s. Much to his surprise he found Catholic critiques of antisemitism largely absent. When appeals on behalf of the Jews did appear they lacked a concrete moral language and were full of anti-Judaic assumptions.[1] Catholics, particularly German-speaking Catholics, were part of an intellectual tradition that could not accept Jews as anything other than a cursed people who were destined to suffer for their historical rejection of Jesus.

    Connelly does not claim that Catholics didn't help Jews during the 1930s and 1940s, but he does argue that those who helped Jews most—like women's groups—were farthest removed from theological disputes (42). It was the theological absence, the lack of clear statements by bishops or the Vatican, that Connelly sees as the church's biggest failure.

   What, then, happened between the 1930s and the Vatican II proclamation of 1965 that declared the Jews to be the “older brothers” of Christians who ought not be converted to Christianity? Connelly argues that the roots of the proclamation came from a small group of Catholics in 1930s Vienna who were concerned with the treatment of the Jews in Nazi Germany. [2] Vienna proved to be a fertile ground for men like Karl Thieme and Johannes Oesterreicher, who formulated a specifically Catholic argument against antisemitism. Thieme, Oesterreicher, and nearly all of the other anti-racist activists in their circle were converts to Catholicism from Judaism and Protestantism. They eschewed nationalisms and freely moved about from place to place without a feeling of rootedness. Without such border-crossers, as Connelly calls them, Catholicism could not have found a new language to speak about the Jews. Without them, he argues, “the Catholic Church would never have 'thought its way' out of the challenges of racist anti-Judaism” (287).

    Connelly's early chapters discuss the prevalence of antisemitism within the Catholic Church during the first half of the twentieth century. He points to German-speaking lands as particularly prone to racist assumptions. The border-crossers of Vienna had to contend with a German-language theological tradition in which words—like “Volk” and “Erbsünde” (“inherited sin” instead of “original sin”)—trapped theologians in a biological and racial understanding of theological problems. The chief task of the border-crossers was to root a critique of antisemitism in Catholic theology and to provoke Catholic officials to speak clearly on behalf of the Jews.

    At the moral and intellectual center of the battle against racist acquiescence to Nazi policy was an Austro-Jewish convert named John (“Johannes” prior to 1940) Oesterreicher, who became the primary architect of the Vatican II statement on the Jews. Here the book approximates a bildungsroman, as we follow Oesterreicher's (and by extension the Catholic Church's) intellectual and spiritual growth. We witness his quixotic attempt to get Pious XII to speak out clearly on behalf of the Jews during the late 1930s (he asked the Pope to free Catholic soldiers from their oath to Hitler) and his desperate attempt to formulate a Catholic anti-racist theology based on the sparse statements of past popes and councils. He broadcast sermons into Nazi territory that referred to Hitler as the anti-Christ and called on Germans to oppose the Nazi “enemies of the Lord” (161). All the while he continued to believe that the Jews were a people destined to suffer until they turned to Christ. In fact Oesterreicher continued his missionary activities to the Jews until he narrowly escaped arrest and near-certain death by boarding a ship to New York City in 1940.

    His parents were not so lucky. His father died in a concentration camp, “thank God, of pneumonia,” he wrote to a friend. “My poor mother, however, was taken to Poland; I need not tell you what that implies” (232-3). This profound personal loss moved Oesterreicher to search for new ways to talk to and about Jews, but the basic missionary impulse remained. Six months after he arrived in the US, Oesterreicher was preaching in New York City and began missionary work amongst New York Jews. Many of the harsh words like “curse” “deicide” and “enemies of God” that had been used by Catholics, including Oesterreicher, in the prior decades disappeared from Catholic discourse during the 1940s and 1950s along with much of the racist antisemitism, but the missionary impulse and anti-Judaism remained intact.

During these years little was said by Catholic theologians on Christian-Jewish relations. The few statements that were made came mainly out of  interfaith conferences organized by the American occupation forces and were based on the model of the National Conference of Christians and Jews. For the first time, at least in the twentieth century, Catholic and Jewish leaders in Europe began talking to one another. And it would be through dialogue with Jews that men like Oesterreicher would change their views. His friend and sparring partner Karl Thieme, for example, would ultimately call for an end to a mission to the Jews after a Jewish author pointed out the antisemitic language he had used his book published in the 1930s (198). But these conversations had limited impact on the Church at the time—those who engaged in conversations with Jews did so despite Vatican warnings against interfaith conferences.

    Behind the indifference of the Catholic Church toward relations with the Jews was a subtle shift that is described by Connelly but needs further elaboration. Catholics became less likely to read worldly events as providential, demanding acquiescence to God's work. They did not want to say that the Holocaust was God's punishment for the Jews. Instead, “a new way of reading the signs of the times” meant “rejecting as presumptuous the idea that any human can know whether and how God might punish humanity” (173). How this change came about is solely attributed to the Holocaust but there were certainly other developments that helped propel this momentous change, which seems underemphasized in this book. The earlier reading of events was a major theological presupposition  of those (including Oesterreicher) who believed that Hitler's persecution of the Jews was part of a curse resulting from deicide. After the Holocaust, Catholics came to see worldly events as something that required ethical action.

But things were slow to change. Oesterreicher founded an institute at Seton Hall University that he described as “missionary” in 1953. Yet, somehow, his attitude began to shift in ways he would never fully acknowledge. By the late 1950s he began describing his work at Seton Hall as “ecumenical” and began turning away entreaties from missionaries interested in working with Jews.[2] He came to emphasize—based on a passage from Romans 9 through 11—that missionary efforts ought to be directed at Catholics themselves and that the eschatological expectations of Jewish conversion en masse would remain mysterious and uncertain. Based on these passages of St. Paul's writings, as well as the thinking of his Austrian cohort, Oesterreicher found new ways to talk about Jews as “older brothers,” words that would find their way into the Vatican II statement on the Jews.

    The book concludes with the developments of Vatican II. Connelly makes clear that the new statement was by no means inevitable. In fact, he argues, the theological implications of De Judaeis (the statement on the Jews) went further than many of the bishops who voted for it were comfortable with. Early drafts of the proclamation had absolved Jews of ancient charges of deicide and spoke of the Jews as clearly loved by God. This new way of talking about the Jews was opposed by some Catholic leaders but also by several Arab states in the Middle East. Catholic bishops working in Muslim lands worried about repercussions of the statement. Indeed, the Syrian and Jordanian governments protested against the absolution of Jewish guilt for Christ's crucifixion (250). The conservative Roman Curia, the theological center of Catholicism, shortened the draft to exclude any mention of deicide and expressed hope that Jews would one day join the church. But reports of the early draft had  already been leaked to the press and the ensuing controversy, including a statement by Holocaust-survivor Rabbi Abraham Heschel that he would prefer Auschwitz over conversion, meant that backtracking would be impossible without severe humiliation. In the end the statement lacked any mention of the Holocaust or the Church's own responsibility for antisemitism. But the refutation of the deicide charge was reinstated and the statement spoke in positive language that God continued to love the Jews. Many contemporary observers complained that the statement was mild and should have been made long ago. But Connelly is persuasive in showing what a major departure this was from just decades earlier.

    Specialists in American intellectual history will note that liberalism plays no role in the story told in From Enemy To Brother. The United States is one of the settings for Connelly's story and he notes the more tolerant atmosphere of US Catholicism in comparison with that of Europe. But the roots of the Vatican II proclamation on the Jews are found in an Austro-fascist context, where many of the protagonists adopted a form of personalism that had much in common with fascist corporatism. Connelly stresses that the conditions of Austria were ripe in creating border-crossers and that there were advantages to thinking through specifically Catholic arguments in that context. But all this begs the question: why did American Catholics and Protestants, who began talking to Jews well before their Europeans counterparts, not develop a more accommodating theology?

    The United States, after all, had a strong tradition of religious tolerance that expressed itself in the “tri-faith” or “Judeo-Christian” concepts.[3] And individual figures developed promising ideas about the Jews earlier than in the European context. Reinhold Niebuhr, a major theologian during the middle of the twentieth century, is a particularly good example of someone arising out of the liberal tradition and developing positive attitudes towards Jews. As late as 1923 Niebuhr had argued for a mission to the Jews but just three years later he changed his mind in an article that praised Jews for their ethics and theological tradition. In the same article he sounded like a modern-day pluralist when he disavowed the need for Jews to convert and encouraged Jews to perpetuate their own communities. This would later lead Niebuhr to become one of the first and most prominent religious figures to sound warnings about Nazi treatment of the Jews and to urge government aid. He would also become a life-long supporter of Zionism.

    Niebuhr’s thought on the Jews was largely ignored by his peers, much like Oesterreicher’s, and it was not until Vatican II that Protestant denominations would reconsider their positions on Jewish conversion. Indeed the story of Protestant inaction on behalf of the victims of the Holocaust parallels the Catholic one. In the US the leading Protestant journal The Christian Century expressed skepticism toward atrocity stories. The Federal Council of Churches, the united voice of ecumenical Protestantism, sponsored a Day of Compassion in 1942 but it ended in embarrassment because of low participation and general indifference.[4] Moreover, Niebuhr himself did not fully develop his thoughts on the Jews until the 1960s and 1970s, largely in response to Vatican II.[5]

    As it turns out, many of the critiques of racism and antisemitism produced by Protestants and Catholics during the mid-century were more often rooted in political liberalism than in theology. Leading protestants often spoke confidently, prior to the 1960s, as spokesmen for the American liberal tradition and they saw little need to tackle issues of pluralism from a theological standpoint.[6] American Catholics had a more tentative relationship with American liberalism prior to Vatican II. But figures like John Courtney Murray were working in the 1940s and 1950s to reconcile the two. And when American Catholics spoke out on behalf of Jews, as they did in the wake of Kristallnacht, they usually spoke the language of political liberalism.[7]

    Perhaps recourse to political liberalism created an atmosphere in which difficult theological issues could be avoided. Why bother reconciling the book of John with Romans when you could appeal to the Bill of Rights or the principle of equality of all peoples? Connelly, however, makes it clear that there is a special relationship between Catholics and Jews that could not be done away with through appeals to universal equality (248). One simply could not simultaneously affirm equality of all peoples while believing that Jews lived under a curse.

    From Enemy to Brother should become required reading for historians interested in modern religion, cosmopolitanism, and pluralism. The book provokes difficult questions about the American liberal tradition and its relationship to religion. How did American theologians reconcile the affirmation of universal equality with the kinds of theological problems described by Connelly? Were the kinds of arguments against antisemitism produced by American theologians who affirmed the notions of “Tri-Faith” or “Judeo-Christian” America less tenable and convincing than those produced by Oesterreicher and other border-crossers? Did Protestants coexist as easily with the American liberal tradition as they believed they did?

    From Enemy to Brother is a powerful and moving account of the origins and passage of the 1965 statement on the Jews that changed centuries of official Catholic teaching. It is a book that pushes historians to explore new avenues in intellectual and religious history. For specialists in American intellectual history in particular Connelly's book raises important questions and opens up new subject matter for discussion.

_____________________
[1]    On the distinction between antisemitism and anti-Judaism, a distinction Connelly uses but does not fully accept, see George M. Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003)
[2]  Connelly acknowledges the scholarship on French Catholic thought on the Jews and discusses the work of Leon Bloy and Jacques Maritain. He contends, however, that the German-language Catholic group went further than the French, since the latter group never moved beyond its anti-Judaic assumptions. He further argues that the German-language thought is more relevant to the discussion of Vatican II

[32]    At the time “inter-faith” was the most common way to describe relations between Christians and Jews, which implied a much clearer separation than “ecumenical”. On the notion of “interfaith” see Kevin Schultz, Tri-Faith America: How Postwar Catholics and Jews Held America to Its Protestant Promise (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

[3]     Martin E. Marty, Modern American Religion, Volume 3: Under God, Indivisible, 1941-1960  (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Schultz, Tri-Faith America. William R. Hutchison, Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).

[ 4]    On the Day of Compassion, see Marty, Modern American Religion, Volume 3, pp. 61-62. On Protestant indifference toward Jewish suffering see  Robert W. Ross, So It Was True: The American Protestant Press and the Nazi Persecution of the Jews; also David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust. The major exceptions were the historical Peace Churches (Quakers, Brethren, etc.) and the Unitarian Church.

[5]    On Niebuhr as a product of the liberal theological tradition see Richard Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (New York: Pantheon, 1985) and Gary Dorrien, Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition (New York: Wiley-Blackwell Publishers, 2008); see also Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism and Modernity, 1900-1950 (New York: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003).

 [6]    On the interrelationship between political and theological liberalism see Leigh E. Schmidt and Sally M. Promey, ed., American Religious Liberalism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012).

[7]    John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003); American Religious Responses to Kristallnacht, ed. Maria Mazzenga (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

_________
Gene Zubovich is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. He is completing his dissertation on Protestant social thought during the 1940s.

Post-Civil Rights Intellectual Ferment

In the book I am writing on the history of culture wars, I place the late-twentieth-century controversies about race in the context of the larger war for the soul of America. This includes the ongoing debate about affirmative action, which came to the surface in 1978 with Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Supreme Court decision that left affirmative action weakened but intact. It also includes the shouting matches over race, poverty, and public policy, intellectual skirmishes carried over from the Moynihan Report conflagration of the 1960s.

That race helped shape the culture wars is hardly surprising, given the degree to which the nation’s racial landscape had been transformed. Racial politics were persistently perplexing, despite the successes of the civil rights movement, largely because, as President Lyndon Johnson proclaimed in a Howard University speech on June 4, 1965, “equality as a right and a theory” was not the same thing as “equality as a fact and as a result.” In other words, the equal rights codified by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not entail actual equality between the races. This fact was made horrifyingly apparent by the numerous riots that plagued American cities in the 1960s, beginning with the riot that exploded in the predominantly black Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles in August of 1965, resulting in 34 deaths, thousands of injuries, and untold millions in property damage. That this riot occurred only a few days after the Voting Rights Act outlawed discriminatory voting practices highlighted the vast discrepancy between equality as a right and equality as a fact.

American intellectuals mostly agreed that post-civil rights America was not post-racial; that racial disparities persisted. But they often vehemently disagreed about how to diagnose and solve the array of problems stemming from this fact. By the 1980s, such disagreements became more pointed. Liberal stalwarts such as sociologist Frances Fox Piven continued to argue for a more robust welfare state, but could no longer expect to dominate the national conversation, due to newly created space for conservative policy intellectuals such as American Enterprise Institute Fellow Charles Murray. Author of the 1984 bestseller Losing Ground, which became something of a policy manual for the Reagan administration, and which Daniel Rodgers positions as one of the more odious representations of the microeconomic contagion that defined the “Age of Fracture,” Murray argued that expensive Great Society programs designed to alleviate poverty actually resulted in increased poverty, the unintended consequence of the ironic incentives built into welfare policy. According to Murray, after calculating the costs and benefits of marrying and seeking employment, a poor couple, whom he imagined as rational economic actors “Harold” and “Phyllis,” would have concluded that it made more sense to remain unmarried and on welfare. Rodgers crisply summarizes the implications of Murray’s contention: “The cure constructed the disease and fed on its own perverse failures.” The seductiveness of Murray’s microeconomic solution was obvious, especially in an era defined by austerity: doing less was both inexpensive and achieved a better result. At a time when urban poverty seemed more and more intractable, and more and more linked to racial inequality—evident in the racialized discourse of the so-called “underclass”—Murray’s “benign neglect” approach proved salient, particularly since the electorate was impatient with political measures that appeared to benefit blacks. It is no surprise, then, that Losing Ground helped lay the foundation for Clinton’s “end welfare as we know it” legislation.

The intellectual history of the so-called underclass reveals the centrality of race to the highly contentious struggle to define a normative America. Racial liberals like Piven sought a more empathetic nation, one more willing to make sacrifices for the victims of persistent forms of institutional racism, in part, by expanding the welfare state. But a growing number of Americans, Charles Murray’s audience, believed that welfare, or government handouts, were an affront to those traits that supposedly made America great, namely hard work and individual responsibility. This conservative view, always present in American social thought, became increasingly popular after federal law was redesigned to prevent discrimination. This highlights one of the unintended consequences of civil rights legislation: racial disparities could no longer easily be blamed on racism.

In this post-civil rights context, alternative explanations for the continued presence of an underclass proliferated. William Julius Wilson’s 1987 book The Truly Disadvantaged was one of the more discussed. Wilson, a liberal sociologist then at the University of Chicago, couched his book as an explicit effort to retake the debate from conservatives like Charles Murray.
As such, he partly attributed the existence of an underclass to economic factors such as deindustrialization, which resulted in joblessness for many city inhabitants. But Wilson also dedicated several chapters to a candid analysis of “the social pathologies of the inner city,” hardly a departure from Murray. Ghetto dwellers, for Wilson, were hemmed in by a vicious cycle that perpetuated the usual litany of pathologies, including illegitimacy and crime. Wilson’s book is better remembered for its gratuitous focus on the pathological behavior of the underclass than for its economic diagnosis of urban underemployment. As such, The Truly Disadvantaged failed to advance the national discussion of the underclass beyond Losing Ground.

Murray, on the other hand, did advance the discussion, beyond even his own neoconservative framework. Joined by Harvard psychometrician Richard Herrnstein, he offered a new version of a much older social Darwinist framework in the1994 bestseller, The Bell Curve. Murray and Herrnstein contended that the underclass existed due to a gap in cognitive ability. Dull people, those with a low IQ—which they stridently defended as an unbiased measurement—were likelier to be poor and dysfunctional. Moreover, Murray and Herrnstein argued that IQ was mostly genetic and that blacks as an ethnic group were inherently duller than whites. Soon after publication, more than mere book, The Bell Curve became a phenomenon. Dissected in most major national publications, pundits of every ideological stripe weighed in on the national debate. Most liberals denounced the book. The New York Times columnist Bob Herbert labeled The Bell Curve “a scabrous piece of racial pornography masquerading as serious scholarship.” Most conservatives, even those who sought to distance themselves from The Bell Curve’s more odious conclusions, rushed to Murray and Herrnstein’s defense and attributed the controversy to the “political correctness” of their liberal critics.

Post-civil rights intellectual ferment also reshaped social thought on the left. A variety of left-leaning academics innovated theoretical approaches—new schools of thought—to explain the persistence of racial disparities in post-civil rights America. One prominent example is Critical Race Theory (CRT), which originated in the 1980s. (I’ve been enmeshed in CRT primary sources for weeks now, in preparation for an AHA paper on the topic—if you’re in Chicago next month, stop by our panel, titled, “Black Ivy: African-American Intellectuals During the Twentieth Century"). In terms of intellectual trajectories, CRT emerged as one of the stiffest challenges to conventional late-twentieth-century legal thought. Its theorists, lead among them its founding thinker, Derrick Bell (who died recently--see his obituary), drew upon older anthropological notions about the social construction of race to explain how the American legal system was complicit in the persistence—or more ominously, the permanence—of American racism. In the paper I will be giving at the AHA, I argue that Bell’s experiences at Harvard University influenced his pessimistic rendering of American law and society.

Harvard Law School hired Bell in 1969 to placate black student protests that were part of a nationwide movement to make universities more amenable to minority students. In 1971, Bell became the first African American to gain tenure at Harvard Law. Bell’s courses on law and race were legion among students, as was his famous casebook, Race, Racism, and American Law (1973). When he left Harvard in 1980 to become the dean of law at the University of Oregon, students organized protests to compel administration to replace him with a minority professor. When Harvard administrators refused, students held their own course, where they continued to read Bell’s casebook. CRT emerged out of this extracurricular course, populated by such foundational CRT thinkers as Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw. Bell returned to Harvard in 1986 for another four stormy years. In 1990, when Bell threatened to remain on unpaid leave until the law school hired a woman of color, Harvard fired Bell. Out of these experiences at Harvard, Bell and others innovated the scholarship that formed CRT. They took stock of how racism manifested in a supposedly colorblind institutional setting that operated much like the legal system. Just as Bell critiqued the hidden biases of the so-called Harvard meritocracy, he also leveled a sustained scholarly analysis of, in Cornel West’s words, “the historical centrality and complicity of law in upholding white supremacy.”

CRT emerged in a moment of despair. The civil rights movement narrative—grounded in the belief that the United States was progressing beyond racial discrimination, in its belief in the ability of the legal system to redress discrimination—foundered on the rocky shoals of the Reagan era. Reagan codified the growing disenchantment with civil rights efforts by redirecting the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, under Deputy Attorney General William Bradford Reynolds, away from ameliorative efforts such as affirmative action. CRT sought to theorize how and why racial disparities persisted, and in some ways worsened, despite the many legal victories of the civil rights era. CRT openly questioned the traditional civil rights premise that racial progress was possible in the United States, a pessimistic outlook that formed much of Derrick Bell’s late work, such as his brilliantly provocative book, Faces at the Bottom of the Well, subtitled, pointedly, “The Permanence of Racism.” In that 1992 book, Bell eloquently gave life to the more academic body of CRT scholarship that had shaken up the prestigious law journals during the 1980s. An excerpt:

On the one hand, contemporary color barriers are certainly less visible as a result of our successful efforts to strip the law’s endorsement from the hated Jim Crow signs. Today one can travel for thousands of miles across the country and never see a public facility designated as ‘Colored’ or ‘White.’ Indeed, the very absence of visible signs of discrimination creates an atmosphere of racial neutrality and encourages whites to believe that racism is a thing of the past. On the other hand, the general use of so-called neutral standards to continue exclusionary practices reduces the effectiveness of traditional civil rights laws, while rendering discriminatory actions more oppressive than ever… Today, because bias is masked in unofficial practices and ‘neutral’ standards, we must wrestle with the question whether race or some individual failing has cost us the job, denied us the promotion, or promoted our being rejected as tenants for an apartment. Either conclusion breeds frustration and alienation—and a rage we dare not show to others or admit to ourselves.

I argue that CRT and its many offspring, such as whiteness studies, grew to be the dominant intellectual mode of thinking about race in post-civil rights America. In this way, it was the central oppositional formation to the neoconservative, post-welfare state, colorblind discourse, though the latter obviously had far more influence over policy. Agree or disagree, intellectuals who thought about race had to reckon with Critical Race Theory and with neoconservatism, one overly focused on race and racism to the exclusion of most any other form of social analysis, the other overly quiet on race and racism as to make one wonder if race wasn’t also the main point. But in making this argument about the bifurcated discourse of race in post-civil rights America, I do not wish to lose sight of alternative modes of analysis, roads not taken, so to speak.

One alternative mode of thinking through race that influenced intellectual history and some circles of literary study is cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitan thinkers, especially Henry Louis Gates, Jr., sought to more forcefully challenge the ontology of race than did CRT thinkers. It’s not that CRT thinkers believed race ontologically “real,” rather, they fought hard to keep racial analysis, as a dichotomous black-white discourse, at the forefront, in the realist assumption that racism was the single most important foundation of American social stability and thus resistance to it demanded a focus on it. Cosmopolitan thinkers de-emphasized dichotomies and accentuated the amorphousness of racial constructs. Race for them was performative, as was gender for Judith Butler.

I wrote a chapter for the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitan Studies where I implicitly argue that cosmopolitanism has not had much influence over racial thought in the Unites States. But it has influenced U.S. intellectual history, thanks in no small part to David Hollinger. His many interventions represent a cosmopolitan exploration of the ways in which our solidarities and identities—racial, religious, and national—govern our lives. In his now standard work, Postethnic America, Hollinger focuses on how solidarities and identities should ideally operate according to the principles of “affiliation by revocable consent.” In other words, he seeks to transcend the stultifying debates about multiculturalism, the players in which assume identities to be rooted in blood and immutable culture, to embrace more individualistic and voluntary conceptions of identity. However, in Hollinger’s follow-up to Postethnic, titled Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity, he emphasizes the less voluntary structures of solidarity, what he terms a “political economy of solidarity.” Solidarity, for him, “is a commodity distributed by authority,” especially when tied to the nation state. “Central to the history of nationalism, after all, has been the use of state power to establish certain ‘identities,’ understood as performative, and thus creating social cohesion on certain terms rather than others.” I would guess that the more tempered arguments made in Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity resulted from the criticism Hollinger might have received after Postethnic America from those influence by the CRT mode of analyzing race, where black-white relations might not be immutable by blood, but certainly are not very mutable by American cultural standards.

What other modes of analysis grew out of post-civil rights intellectual ferment? I am genuinely interested in reader comments here. One mode that is perhaps my favorite, though it is less influential than all of the others I describe above, is the class-based analysis of race articulated by Adolph Reed, Jr. Reed’s analysis is, like CRT, pessimistic, but in much different fashion. Although Reed is hardly a post-racial thinker along the lines of the neoconservatives—he continues to analyze the ways in which racial inequality persists—he believes that class analysis is the best mode of thinking through such inequality in a post-civil rights context. In his fabulous 1999 book, Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era, Reed unsparingly critiques the ways in which civil rights professionals legitimized black political leaders, especially the new black mayors of cities like Atlanta, allowing these black politicians to further neoliberal policies that did great harm to the majority of their black constituents. Situated as such, Reed has been more critical of Obama than perhaps anybody else on the left, even before Obama won the presidency, calling him a “vacuous opportunist” in a May 2008 Progressive article. More recently, Reed talks about the “limits of anti-racism,” which seems to take his mode of thinking even further afield from CRT and mainstream liberal-left discourse on race.

Some snippets:

The contemporary discourse of “antiracism” is focused much more on taxonomy than politics. It emphasizes the name by which we should call some strains of inequality—whether they should be broadly recognized as evidence of “racism”— over specifying the mechanisms that produce them or even the steps that can be taken to combat them. And, no, neither “overcoming racism” nor “rejecting whiteness” qualifies as such a step any more than does waiting for the “revolution” or urging God’s heavenly intervention. If organizing a rally against racism seems at present to be a more substantive political act than attending a prayer vigil for world peace, that’s only because contemporary antiracist activists understand themselves to be employing the same tactics and pursuing the same ends as their predecessors in the period of high insurgency in the struggle against racial segregation.
…
Ironically, as the basis for a politics, antiracism seems to reflect, several generations downstream, the victory of the postwar psychologists in depoliticizing the critique of racial injustice by shifting its focus from the social structures that generate and reproduce racial inequality to an ultimately individual, and ahistorical, domain of “prejudice” or “intolerance.”
…
All too often, “racism” is the subject of sentences that imply intentional activity or is characterized as an autonomous “force.” In this kind of formulation, “racism,” a conceptual abstraction, is imagined as a material entity. Abstractions can be useful, but they shouldn’t be given independent life.
….
I can appreciate such formulations as transient political rhetoric; hyperbolic claims made in order to draw attention and galvanize opinion against some particular injustice. But as the basis for social interpretation, and particularly interpretation directed toward strategic political action, they are useless. Their principal function is to feel good and tastily righteous in the mouths of those who propound them. People do things that reproduce patterns of racialized inequality, sometimes with self-consciously bigoted motives, sometimes not. Properly speaking, however, “racism” itself doesn’t do anything more than the Easter Bunny does.

My position is—and I can’t count the number of times I’ve said this bluntly, yet to no avail, in response to those in blissful thrall of the comforting Manicheanism—that of course racism persists, in all the disparate, often unrelated kinds of social relations and “attitudes” that are characteristically lumped together under that rubric, but from the standpoint of trying to figure out how to combat even what most of us would agree is racial inequality and injustice, that acknowledgement and $2.25 will get me a ride on the subway. It doesn’t lend itself to any particular action except more taxonomic argument about what counts as racism.

A Quote for Tuesday

I'm bringing back David Sehat's old feature--"A Quote for Tuesday"--at least for today.

"Yes, racism exists, as a conceptual condensation of practices and ideas that reproduce, or seek to reproduce, hierarchy along lines defined by race. Apostles of antiracism frequently can’t hear this sort of statement, because in their exceedingly simplistic version of the nexus of race and injustice there can be only the Manichean dichotomy of those who admit racism’s existence and those who deny it. There can be only Todd Gitlin (the sociologist and former SDS leader who has become, both fairly and as caricature, the symbol of a “class-first” line) and their own heroic, truth-telling selves, and whoever is not the latter must be the former. Thus the logic of straining to assign guilt by association substitutes for argument.

My position is—and I can’t count the number of times I’ve said this bluntly, yet to no avail, in response to those in blissful thrall of the comforting Manicheanism—that of course racism persists, in all the disparate, often unrelated kinds of social relations and “attitudes” that are characteristically lumped together under that rubric, but from the standpoint of trying to figure out how to combat even what most of us would agree is racial inequality and injustice, that acknowledgement and $2.25 will get me a ride on the subway. It doesn’t lend itself to any particular action except more taxonomic argument about what counts as racism."

Adolph Reed, Jr., "The Limits of Antiracism," Left Business Observer

More on race, Obama, and the Republican electoral strategy

The issue of whether or not Republican attacks on Obama have been motivated by racism has been a frequent theme on this blog, as has the wider issue of the connection of conservatism to racial backlash. So I was pretty interested in Matt Bai's take on what promises to be a campaign issue in 2012. He writes:

"Is there a racial element to some of the attacks on President Obama? It’s pretty hard to argue there isn’t, when a conservative writer like Dinesh D’Souza argues that Mr. Obama sees the world like an African nationalist (a theory Mr. Gingrich praised again in his interview Sunday), or when Donald J. Trump asserts that Mr. Obama isn’t smart enough to have gotten into Harvard or to have written his own books. But here’s the thing: race and cultural otherness were powerful undercurrents in Republican politics long before the nation’s first black president came along. . . . So to say that Mr. Obama is being cast as somehow alien to the white American experience simply because he is black really does miss the point. He would still be cast in this way if he were an urban, northern Democrat who happened to be white.

Bai goes on the point out that the triumph of anti-racism after the civil rights movement has both moderated and coded Republican politics to the point that Republicans have to be very careful in using race at all. In a certain sense, he seems to be supporting the contention of Lee Atwater, who said of conservative electoral strategies concerning race:

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

As Bai explains, the coding of race, and the stigmatization of racism, has made it difficult for Republicans to appeal to race in any too obvious way in criticizing Obama. And that Obama is black has, paradoxically, made the use of white racist arguments in conservative politics even more tricky than it would have been if Obama were white.

More on race, Obama, and the Republican electoral strategy

The issue of whether or not Republican attacks on Obama have been motivated by racism has been a frequent theme on this blog, as has the wider issue of the connection of conservatism to racial backlash. So I was pretty interested in Matt Bai's take on what promises to be a campaign issue in 2012. He writes:

"Is there a racial element to some of the attacks on President Obama? It’s pretty hard to argue there isn’t, when a conservative writer like Dinesh D’Souza argues that Mr. Obama sees the world like an African nationalist (a theory Mr. Gingrich praised again in his interview Sunday), or when Donald J. Trump asserts that Mr. Obama isn’t smart enough to have gotten into Harvard or to have written his own books. But here’s the thing: race and cultural otherness were powerful undercurrents in Republican politics long before the nation’s first black president came along. . . . So to say that Mr. Obama is being cast as somehow alien to the white American experience simply because he is black really does miss the point. He would still be cast in this way if he were an urban, northern Democrat who happened to be white.

Bai goes on the point out that the triumph of anti-racism after the civil rights movement has both moderated and coded Republican politics to the point that Republicans have to be very careful in using race at all. In a certain sense, he seems to be supporting the contention of Lee Atwater, who said of conservative electoral strategies concerning race:

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

As Bai explains, the coding of race, and the stigmatization of racism, has made it difficult for Republicans to appeal to race in any too obvious way in criticizing Obama. And that Obama is black has, paradoxically, made the use of white racist arguments in conservative politics even more tricky than it would have been if Obama were white.

Political Anti-Intellectualism And The Liberal Arts: Historical Considerations

Since anti-intellectualism has often been most effective in politics (e.g. with victims such as Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s, Eugene McCarthy in the 60s, and even Bill Clinton in the 90s), I'm not surprised to see a present-day application via the "professor" label.

With regard to the article, I'm not sure I agree---initially at least---with Charles Ogletree's assertion that today's manifestation in relation to President Barack Obama is a "thinly veiled" kind of racism (article's phrase, Jack Stripling is the author). The problem I have with that line of thinking is that it's nowhere in the recent history of anti-intellectualism---as a broad social phenomenon at least. All of the late twentieth-century political figures that were objects of anti-intellectualism were white. Indeed, if there's any historical racism associated with political anti-intellectualism it's in the fact that Martin Luther King, Jr. was never derided precisely for his mental prowess. To carry Ogletree's argument a bit further, it seems to me that if any "uppity" association occurs to racists in relation to Obama, it will be because of his newfound aggressiveness (i.e. bully pulpit), not his mental ability. The "professor" appellation is likely just straightforward anti-intellectualism on the part of some opposition that may be racists.

Returning to Stripling's article, I do appreciate the thinking in this passage related to David S. Brown: It’s no surprise that the anti-intellectualism that Hofstadter wrote about has resonance among some Americans today, says Brown, a historian at Elizabethtown College. Higher education programs are increasingly moving toward the pre-professional variety, and students and parents are inclined to press colleges about how their programs will lead to jobs -- not to intellectual growth, Brown says. In that context, the stereotypical liberal arts professor is ever more marginalized.

When I first read the InsideHigherEd article I thought that, with more people than ever in college and even more than ever in graduate school, this line of political strategy can't be effective, long term, beyond a limited cohort of our citizenry. But I hadn't directly linked today's anti-intellectualism, as Brown did, to the ongoing vocationalism (read: devaluing of the liberal arts) that's occurred in higher education---beginning after World War II but increasingly evident in the last 10-15 years. - TL

Political Anti-Intellectualism And The Liberal Arts: Historical Considerations

Since anti-intellectualism has often been most effective in politics (e.g. with victims such as Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s, Eugene McCarthy in the 60s, and even Bill Clinton in the 90s), I'm not surprised to see a present-day application via the "professor" label.

With regard to the article, I'm not sure I agree---initially at least---with Charles Ogletree's assertion that today's manifestation in relation to President Barack Obama is a "thinly veiled" kind of racism (article's phrase, Jack Stripling is the author). The problem I have with that line of thinking is that it's nowhere in the recent history of anti-intellectualism---as a broad social phenomenon at least. All of the late twentieth-century political figures that were objects of anti-intellectualism were white. Indeed, if there's any historical racism associated with political anti-intellectualism it's in the fact that Martin Luther King, Jr. was never derided precisely for his mental prowess. To carry Ogletree's argument a bit further, it seems to me that if any "uppity" association occurs to racists in relation to Obama, it will be because of his newfound aggressiveness (i.e. bully pulpit), not his mental ability. The "professor" appellation is likely just straightforward anti-intellectualism on the part of some opposition that may be racists.

Returning to Stripling's article, I do appreciate the thinking in this passage related to David S. Brown: It’s no surprise that the anti-intellectualism that Hofstadter wrote about has resonance among some Americans today, says Brown, a historian at Elizabethtown College. Higher education programs are increasingly moving toward the pre-professional variety, and students and parents are inclined to press colleges about how their programs will lead to jobs -- not to intellectual growth, Brown says. In that context, the stereotypical liberal arts professor is ever more marginalized.

When I first read the InsideHigherEd article I thought that, with more people than ever in college and even more than ever in graduate school, this line of political strategy can't be effective, long term, beyond a limited cohort of our citizenry. But I hadn't directly linked today's anti-intellectualism, as Brown did, to the ongoing vocationalism (read: devaluing of the liberal arts) that's occurred in higher education---beginning after World War II but increasingly evident in the last 10-15 years. - TL