| Number 97 | December 8, 2000 |
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This Week:
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Greetings, Let me take this opportunity to thank the many readers who have made financial pledges to Nygaard Notes. Pledges so far have come to over $3,000! What this means is, first of all, I have just a little more time to do this job, meaning that my ever-tenuous grip on my sanity is just a little tighter. It also means that I have been slowly catching up on some of the clerical and administrative tasks involved in doing the Notes. And, it means that I have time to finally attempt to start having meetings of the Context Club, as you will read about elsewhere in this issue. In addition to the Context Club, this week's Notes has a little history lesson! Plus, a little more on race, a little more on media, and a little more of whatever it is that Nygaard Notes has. This week's and last week's comments on race are intended to be the groundwork for next week's (I hope) essay on shame and guilt and the functioning of the white power structure. More new readers this week. Hi! I look forward to your comments. See ya next week, Nygaard |
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From the "Advertising" column in the November 21st NY Times (one of my favorite columns) comes the following quote from an advertising executive commenting on the challenge of getting people to choose one electronic messaging service over another:
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‘Way back in Nygaard Notes Number 24 (April 9, 1999) I mentioned the idea of beginning to have regular meetings of something I called the Context Club. The members of this club would be united in their belief that it is impossible to understand anything without understanding the context in which it exists. Since that time, many of you have asked if this is ever going to happen. Will Nygaard Notes readers ever have a chance to get together for discussion and debate about the political context in which we are living? I think that the time has come. The next few issues of the Notes will include a little bit about this idea, with a plea for input from readers. This input will shape the nature of the group, which I hope will start in January. Here's the first plea for input: How many of you would be interested in such a group? If you think you might be interested in attending such a group on occasion, please send me a note, by email or regular mail, and say that you would be interested. If enough people express an interest, then I will ask next week for some ideas about how such a group might work, including questions like: How often should we meet? Where? (it'll be somewhere close to where I live, which is near downtown Minneapolis) How structured, or unstructured, should this group be? (pretty unstructured, I'm thinking) Should meetings have a theme, or should we just discuss whatever people come up with? Should they be focused on what is in Nygaard Notes? Or some other text? And so forth and so on. Your note doesn't have to say much. Just say "Yeah, I would probably come every week." Or "I would come once in a while." Or something. Details will follow. If it turns out that not enough people have the time and interest to participate in this, then I will move on to the next brilliant idea. Let's see what happens. |
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Just before the recent and ongoing election, the New York Times ("All the News That's Fit to Print") published a fascinating story on page 14 entitled "The First Lady: For Georgia Name-Calling, Nothing Is Lower Than ‘Hillary.'" The pull-quote for the story was "An epithet that ranks with ‘carpetbagger' and ‘scalawag.'" The article tells of how some Southern white politicians were running negative political ads comparing their opponents to "Hillary," since she is so unpopular "down here." To understand why she is so unpopular, we need to understand the terms "carpetbagger" and "scalawag." For those who are not up on the history of American Reconstruction, it was the decade or so after the Civil War, during which there was an "effort to construct a democratic, interracial political order from the ashes of slavery," in the words of historian Eric Foner. In those days the Republican Party was the abolitionist party, the "radical" party that favored black enfranchisement and some sort of racial justice. Modern-day Republicans love to say that their party is the "Party of Lincoln," based on this ancient reality. Highly ironic. "Carpetbagger" was the name applied by anti-Reconstruction (i.e. pro-slavery) Southerners to a Northerner who supposedly could pack "all of his earthly belongings" into his carpetbag and come to the South in order to stick his nose in where it didn't belong. In fact, carpetbaggers migrated to the post-war South for a variety of reasons, but it is true that many of them eventually rose to political prominence during Reconstruction, due in part to votes of the newly-enfranchised former slaves. In the eyes of the white plantation owners and Southern aristocrats, a "carpetbagger" thus came to symbolize opposition to what they called "home rule," which was (and is) a euphemism for white supremacy. What does this have to do with Hillary? Since Hillary Clinton was running for the Senate in a state to which she apparently moved for that purpose, the label of "carpetbagger" is easily applied – and actually sort of accurate, in a dictionary sort of way – and this makes her an easy target among many white racists in the South. But that is not the most powerful epithet. Even more reprehensible than the hated carpetbagger is the "scalawag." "Scalawag" is another term that goes back to the Reconstruction era, and originally referred to a white Southern Republican, and more generally a white Southerner who supported Reconstruction, and thus black civil rights. Sometimes called "white Negroes," scalawags were considered the "local lepers of the community" by members of the former Confederate power structure. I grew up in the rural North about 80 years later, and I learned to understand the term "scalawag" as an epithet, hearing it often applied to a public figure who was "shady" or somehow involved in underhanded schemes. I'll bet that many of you reading this learned to understand this word the same way. Though seemingly far removed from the social struggles of the post-Civil War South, this racially-defined connotation somehow made its way into the brain of little Jeffie in Waseca, Minnesota -- a town with no African American residents at all! I now see that this was one of the innumerable ways that I was trained to identify myself as a "white" person. That is, as one of the beneficiaries of the myriad advantages of white supremacy. All of this was communicated to me without any overt teaching about slavery, or the Civil War, or Reconstruction, or even any reference to race. Amazing, isn't it? As with many words in the language, the values and connotations associated with a word are rooted in a context of race and class, of winners and losers, of the powerful and the powerless. Had Reconstruction not been destroyed and replaced with the 100-year reign of Jim Crow and black disenfranchisement, perhaps the word "scalawag" would have come to have a positive connotation in the mainstream vocabulary. I'm guessing that the word has always had a positive connotation in some black households, at least the ones with long memories. It may even have heroic connotations, representing as it does the choice of a "white" Southerner to be a "race traitor," that is to embrace the idea of racial justice at a time when to do so was very isolating and even dangerous. I'm not a big fan of Hillary Clinton, but it's worthwhile to ponder the reasons for the absolute hatred that many conservative Americans seem to hold for her. Those reasons no doubt include her image as a strong woman, which is intolerable to many people, and also to her much-less-deserved image as an "extreme liberal" (whatever that is; I've heard her scornfully labeled as such). But it's important to also remember that she and her husband are from Arkansas, and have a – deserved or not – reputation among many as being somewhat sympathetic to the plight of African Americans in the post-Reagan era. This makes her and her husband look suspiciously like "scalawags" which, to some Americans, is as contemptible as you can get. |
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Last week I mentioned racial bias in the insurance industry and the recently-settled bias suit against Coca Cola. Here are five more recent news items that have to do with race. Next week I'll tie some of this stuff together, but for now let's just have a look at what's been in the news lately. Item #1: State-Level Racism New Jersey has been in the news a lot lately for racial profiling. The Times reported, also on November 28th, that "At least 8 out of every 10 automobile searches carried out by state troopers on the New Jersey Turnpike over most of the last decade were conducted on vehicles driven by blacks and Hispanics, state documents have revealed." These same "blacks and Hispanics" make up 13.5 percent of the drivers on said Turnpike. This excellent article points out that similar percentages "were common throughout the state," adding that "discrimination [is] so deeply ingrained in state police culture that veteran troopers acted as ‘coaches' and taught profiling tactics to rookies." Our local paper, the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!), ran the same story on the same day, headlined: "New Jersey Says It Didn't Hide Racial Profiling By Troopers." This was an odd choice of headline, since the Times article pointed out that many of the just-released documents that New Jersey "didn't hide" had been requested by plaintiff's lawyers five years ago, a request that was denied. Attorney William Buckman was quoted as saying that "There seems to be only one reason to withhold all of this: to conceal how high up in the attorney general's office people were aware of the length and the breadth of the problem." The Times article quotes a state official as saying that "the troopers went to great lengths to cover each other's misdeeds." It sure sounds like New Jersey tried to "hide racial profiling by troopers." Item #2: Federal-Level Racism The one unfortunate thing about the November 28th piece in the Times on New Jersey police practices is that it runs the risk of singling out one state for a practice that is rampant all over the country. This problem was partially addressed in the next day's NY Times, the November 29th issue, in a follow-up story on the front page, headlined "U.S. Wrote Outline For Race Profiling, New Jersey Argues." According to the report, "New Jersey officials argue that the reason racial profiling is a national problem is that is was initiated, and in many ways encouraged, by the federal government's war on drugs," a charge echoed by the American Civil Liberties Union. The Drug Enforcement Administration denies the charges, but they are easy to believe for anyone who has been paying attention to the "war on drugs," which has always been a war on people, especially people of color. I'll be writing about that in Nygaard Notes one of these weeks. Item #3: Local-Level Racism The one unfortunate thing about the November 29th piece in the Times is that some readers may think that people have to be taught by the federal government to be bigoted. Hardly. For evidence, let's go back to the November 28th issue of the Times, which included a story on page 27 about an African American police officer, Yvette Walton, who was fired in April of last year. Her crime? As the only African American woman assigned to do street patrols in the Street Crime Unit in the NYPD, she had testified before the city council that the Unit had "engaged in racially discriminatory practices that disproportionately targeted minorities in illegal search and seizure operations." Noting that Ms. Walton had been the recipient of 18 commendations for her work, the judge stated that "She would not have been dismissed had she not spoken out publicly on behalf of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement on an issue of immediate and substantial concern to the department." Item #4: "A Terrible Price" The Star Trib had already underlined the credibility of Ms. Walton's charges in a story from November 4th, reprinted from the Los Angeles Times: "Police Abuse Is A Lingering Problem, Commission Says." The report points out that police reforms in the last 20 years "often come ‘at a terrible price' for minority communities, ‘which often bear the brunt of the abuse.'" Item #5: Our National Commitment A few weeks earlier, on October 13th, the local paper ran a 58-word paragraph in the "National Digest" headlined "Civil Rights Agencies' Funding Wanes." It seems that the number of full-time employees in six major federal civil-rights agencies dropped by 10 percent between 1994 and 1999, as did the amount of congressional funding for those agencies. |