"Cliven Bundy and the perils of identity politics"

[applegrove]

Cliven Bundy and the perils of identity politics

By Paul Waldman at the Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2014/04/24/cliven-bundy-and-the-perils-of-identity-politics/?tid=rssfeed

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Race is a part of that, but not all of it. When conservatives looked at Bundy, they saw not just a white guy, but also a cowboy, and that particular brand of character who waves an American flag while fighting the American government (in his case by stealing public property). And they saw lots of guns, which also told them he was their kind of people. Everything about him told them he was their kind of guy. And I’m sure if liberals had thought about it, they would have said, “I’ll bet this guy has some colorful ideas about race.” Conservatives would have protested that that’s a vicious and unfair stereotype. But in this case it turned out to be true, and how.

One couldn’t help but be reminded of the mini-controversy over “Duck Dynasty” star Phil Robertson back in December, who got in trouble for some comments that were quite similar to Bundy’s. In Robertson’s case, he didn’t reach all the way back to slavery. He just said blacks were happier during the Jim Crow days of his youth: “I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once…they’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!… Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.” Sarah Palin admitted that she didn’t even know what Robertson had said even as she was loudly defending him against unfair liberal attacks. Why? Well, because he too was her kind of people — Southern, Christian, gun-loving, liberal-hater. What else do you need to know?

As Cliven Bundy shows, you need to know more than that. Obviously, we shouldn’t expect people to run extensive background checks on every newly minted media figure. But if you’re going to construct your politics around defining who “us” and “them” is, don’t be surprised when your new allies have some rather sharp beliefs about “them.”

This episode is yet another reminder that despite what you might hear in some precincts of right wing media, racism against white people is not, in fact, the only remaining racism in America. And this brings us to Justice John Roberts and the recent SCOTUS decision striking down a challenge to Michigan’s law banning state universities from considering race in admissions. As I’ve argued, that decision was defensible on the merits. But the broader problem is that Roberts’ decisions in recent years have made clear that he thinks discrimination against African-Americans is merely a thing of the past, so the law should no longer seek to address it, whether by protecting voting rights or taking steps to desegregate public schools or through affirmative action programs.




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