Kai on Carter...

The following is an article published on TheRoot.com by Kai Wright on September 17, 2009. It examines the words of Jimmy Carter, one of the few prominent white men in America willing to speak about race.

Jimmy Carter, True Son of the South, Hits Nail on Head

By: Kai Wright

Posted: September 17, 2009 at 10:21 AM

The White House’s fear of challenging the tea-bag madness is typical of its cautious politics. The rest of us accept it at our peril.

Jimmy Carter is a son of the South. Not the New South of relocated corporate headquarters and (foreclosed) McMansions, but Jim Crow’s South. So we’ll all have to excuse his refusal to act like he doesn’t hear Glenn Beck’s vicious dog whistle. He knows too well the coded language of political racism because he witnessed its writing.

America abhors history. No wonder, given how many national crimes are lurking back there. But we’ve arrived at a time when a politician’s refusal to consider the past is a perverse testament to prudent leadership. And as a result, a statement as obvious as Carter’s—that the tea-baggers hate President Barack Obama because he's black —can be passed off as controversy in 2009.

It’s self-evident that a movement that calls the president a lying, socialist, Nazi eugenicist with a fake birth certificate is about something more than deficit spending. People don’t brandish automatic weapons and pray for the president’s death because they want to keep their employer-sponsored health plans. But to name the stalking beast is more than we can bear.

Not, thankfully, for Carter. He knows the tea-baggers aren’t new, that their fear of “big government” is but the latest version of states’ rights, which was itself a pseudonym for white supremacy. And he wants us to recall this history: In the months following the 1954 Brown ruling, a Mississippi college football star and plantation manager named Robert Patterson launched a crusade to protect school children from “being taught the Communist theme of all races and mongrelization.” Patterson was angry, and proud of it. “You say this is not the time for hotheads and flag-waving,” he wrote in a public letter quoted in Gene Roberts’ and Hank Klibanoff’s must-read history of civil rights journalism. “We need those hotheads, just as we always have when our liberty has been threatened.”

Patterson channeled his anger into a lasting innovation for the white supremacy movement—give it a respectable face, strip it of explicitly racist rhetoric and use it as an invisible hand to guide mob violence. He created the Citizens' Council, which would spawn a regional network by year’s end. Each council’s membership boasted the area’s finest white leaders in business, government and, yes, media. They directed their public anger less at integration itself than at federal incursions on local rule, but the resulting violence was no less extreme.

At the time, Carter was a Plains, Ga., peanut farmer and board of education member. He recalls in his campaign memoir, Turning Point (Random House, 1993), how the Plains Council pressured him to join. When he refused, the council sent 20 of his best customers to demand compliance. Carter again refused, this time adding, “and besides, there are a few politicians in Atlanta who are taking the dues from all over the state and putting the money in their pockets, just because folks are worried about the race issue.”

Tea-bagging elites like Fox News, Sarah Palin and Joe Wilson are the political descendants of Patterson’s councils. They’re still using coded language to orchestrate rowdy, racist mobs and they’re still pocketing the money the frenzy generates.

In the tea-bagging universe, “big government”—or, really, the social programs both Beck and Rush Limbaugh conspicuously dub “reparations”—is a stand-in villain for integration. Not the literal act of blacks and whites going to school together. Rather, bashing big government swats at the same anxiety Patterson had: a concern over who gets to make the rules. That question has haunted Dixie ever since black slaves outnumbered the South’s white residents. And it still haunts the GOP’s Southern, white base today.

Nor is it new for the movement’s media mavens to cry foul when someone dares break the code. It started, as Roberts and Klibanoff detail, as the national media covered Little Rock’s brutalities, and it intensified throughout the era. Southern newspaper editors, themselves affiliated with Citizens’ Councils, led a concerted effort to bully national outlets into what pioneering Atlanta Constitution editor Ralph McGill called “the cult of objectivity.”

The fruits are seen in the timidity of today’s mainstream news. Demonstrable liars like Joe Wilson and Sarah Palin are given point-counterpoint coverage. A rally dominated by ugliness such as that on display in Washington on Sept. 12 is reported as legitimate political dispute. And Jimmy Carter’s willingness to speak the clear truth is debated as controversy. Decades ago, CBS correspondent Howard K. Smith predicted this outcome as he watched his network reel from complaints about his Freedom Ride coverage. Applying balance to a discussion in which there is none, he warned, was “equivalent to saying that truth is to be found somewhere between right and wrong, equidistant between good and evil.”

The White House’s fear of challenging the tea-bag madness is typical of its cautious politics. But the rest of us accept it at our peril. The absurd, plainly racist ideas that found air at Palin’s campaign rallies have dug in as meaningful parts of our daily public conversation. Carter is the most significant public figure to say that’s not OK. Rather than allow the right to shout him down, many more purported leaders must stand up with him.

do the numbers lie and which country back?

I have tried very hard to avoid news as of late...partly because the stories carried by the news themselves are a sad commentary on our culture and nation - such as the inordinate amount of press dedicated to kanye west storming the stage of the VMAs, or the fact that these days in america, everything has to be a crime that somebody must pay for (i.e. a coach barely escaping with an acquittal after one of his players collapsed and died during practice) unless its committed by old white men in suits residing at least part of the year in washington - and partly because news from within my world can often serve as a crushing reminder that it is always a long, arduous and extremely difficult right to see that the constitution remains more than a mere inconvenience for some win-at-all-costs prosecutor.

but a few things just cannot be avoided. and one of them is the health care "debate" - not really much of a debate so much as an ideologically trenched shout off. it came up again last night at a small gathering and there was much talk of numbers and statistics. and while I am an advocate of an eventual single-payer system and strongly believe that we must provide access to health care, which is not the legal mandate and role of health insurance companies - a distinction all too often lost - I also am very much wondering how accurate all the numbers thrown around actually are. yes, we spend a hell of a lot more than other countries...but are our results really as bad as those on the left want to portray? and if you can access our health care, are the results really as extraordinary as those on the right want to portray? for instance, if we could factor in the negative impact that our violent culture and resulting higher murder rates, is our life expectancy really that much lower than so many other industrialized countries? and what about our relative lack of a general safety net, leaving more of us stranded in poverty which inevitably brings with it delitorious effects on our health? does our poor urban planning force us to be less active than others? but then, in the end does any of that matter? or am I just guilty of once again avoiding the only question that matters - how can we possibly say that anyone is not entitled to some of the most basic necessities in life; nurishment, clean water, shelter and their health? what does it say about us that for all the high ideals we claim to stand for, we still have a tendency to treat these as commodities to be used for propping up our stock portfolios?

and another unavoidable story is the ongoing discussion of racism and its effects and manifestations in our nation. jimmy carter expressed what a hell of a lot of persons of color feel in this country...that some otherwise completely illogical opposition to the president is a manifestation of the vestages of centuries of racism, perhaps a bit more dormant in recent times than just a few decades ago. and while I am again reminded that for whatever reason, the vast majority of white people simply refuse to address the legitimatacy of such opinions given the deplorable history of race relations in this country, I am also struck by one of the phrases that is repeated over and over and pointed to as proof that racism is the underlying current - "Give me my country back."

and regardless of whether the holder, consciously or subconsciously, desires to express that america is a white man's nation, one must wonder exactly what country it is that the holder wishes to have back. let's be honest (and stereotypical), many of these people never got a fair shake in this country...largely because of their parents occupations or simply being born in the wrong area code. so what is it they want back? is it just the fantasy we all were indoctrinated with as children of this mythical exemplary nation that stood above all others and in which it was actually possible to rise above it all if you just put your head down and worked hard? because in reality...there are very few instances in this nation's history where that was actually true (and ironically, it often occurred during some of the darkest times). is it one where we all share a sense of community and actually take care of each other? and if so, does that not necessarily include a racial element given the extreme tribalism that our "melting pot" has often slipped into? in the end, I am left believing for most it is the mythical america that they believed as a child sitting on the curb waiving their flag and catching shriner candies...an america that as they aged and matured, they never saw. it isn't that they want their country "back" so much as they want the innocence and beauty of their youth returned...they want to believe again. face it, it is a hell of a tough world regardless of whether or not we are the richest nation that ever was. too many of us have not gotten the country we were promised as school children...and yes, we are angry. perhaps the only true difference between us is how we handle that anger...and how it manifests itself.

eyes on the crack in the door...

texas as murderer, prosecutors that don't care about justice...

a little over 3 years ago I wrote a bit about the story of cameron todd willingham, a man executed, nay, murdered by the state of texas in 2004 because it used lying hacks to convict him of capital murder in the alleged arson which killed his three children. a group known as the innocence project, a wonderful collection of attorneys and students dedicated to exonerating those wrongly on death row (of which, anyone in the business knows, there are plenty), basically completely debunked the case against willingham. the chicago tribune investigated the matter a bit further and concluded that texas very likely killed an innocent man. now, the new yorker has reported on a commission put together by the state of texas to look into such shenanigans which has discovered that, beyond a reasonable doubt, texas killed an innocent man.

for those of you that don't know, willingham was in his early 20s when a fire broke out in his home. he tried in vain to get to his three toddlers but was unable to do so. once outside the home, witnesses initially reported that he was hysterical in his attempts to regain access to the home to get to his children...to the point that he was restrained by authorities. however, the so-called "forensic experts" decided that the fire was clearly an arson that had to have been deliberately set because no natural fire would burn the way it did. suddenly, witness statements started to change and willingham was portrayed as acting oddly for someone who's children were being burned. willingham maintained his innocence (up until the needle delivered the deadly poison) and refused a plea deal that would have spared his life. the jury (stacked with death penalty supporters as I have written before) was out all of one hour.

and now, actual experts that know the science of fire and its characteristics have examined the evidence and conclusively ruled out arson, going so far as to basically call the original "experts" complete hacks that did not understand a thing about fire and the way it behaves. all this while we learn from israel that dna evidence is easier to manufacture than fingerprints. and yet we still cling to putting people to death in a very apparently flawed system, a system of which we can now say, beyond any reasonable doubt, is responsible for the death of innocent persons.

which really is not all that surprising when you have the very opposite of the types of persons that should be prosecuting cases actually doing it. rather than people concerned with the rule of law and doing justice and representing the people (including any allegedly accused of crime), we have some of the least ethical, win-at-all-costs persons with obscene amounts of discretionary power wielding the giant hammer of the state against you and I. take a case of mine for instance...

a man is shot once and dies from the gunshot wound. the police and DA's office know the dead guy had a record a mile long, including such wonderful things as nearly choking his wife to death, breaking into a girlfriend's parents home to beat her severely and crack her jaw in two places, and connections to drug cartels of which he bragged. they hear from co-workers of the shooter and the shooter himself that the dead guy repeatedly threatened the shooter and others around him with death or great bodily harm by pulling knives on a 65 yr old man, showing off his gang tatoos and bragging about his ability to have people disappear and explicitly stating "I will kill you." they know he was extremely intoxicated when he died and that moments earlier he had threatened to kill the shooter again, to the extent that multiple people had to restrain him from attacking the shooter, even after the shooter displayed his weapon and asked to be left alone. every person they interview validates the shooter's story...except one. of course that one person has a serious substance abuse problem, and tells a tale with obvious falsehoods that they know to be false (like placing the shooter in a big white truck...when all involved know the dead guy was in the big white truck). but this one person is facing 40 plus years for beating the shit out of his boyfriend and nearly biting his thumb off while on probation. and this one person gets a deal from the prosecution to six months time served...and his testimony is wildly different than that of any reasonable person otherwise associated with the case. and it directly conflicts with the information investigators received from the plethora of unbiased people also around at the time (in addition to the co-workers of the shooter). the prosecutor calls only the one snitch that got that great deal...ignoring all the people he knows about that show this guy is a lying sack of shit just wanting to get out of jail. and this is your justice system.


I would've changed my fucking lock...