The following quote is from “Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There” by Lewis Carroll (1872).
`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.’
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
This nonsense poem composed by Lewis Carroll and included in his famous book about Alice in Wonderland is titled Jabberwocky. I have only included the first two verses here as an introduction to the main topic of this piece dealing with American racism in the year 2010. The following discussion has the formidable task of rationalizing and analyzing the current political landscape overflowing and polluted with all forms of nonsense verbiage. I shall resume my exposition of the differences between comprehending the verses of the Jabberwocky and understanding the right wing talk radio rhetoric, but first some background is necessary and it continues below.
Historically there exists untold scores of documents which record the fact that African slaves disembarked on these shores in the company of their slave owners, the first European settlers to reach these shores. Hence slavery was indigenous and flourishing in America long before its birth as a new nation. As school children we were taught that slavery was an embarrassing part of America’s past, but we were never told that the first
African slaves arrived at Jamestown in 1620, (390 years ago or) almost four
Centuries ago. Therefore, Africans whether slave or free have been a living part of all of America’s history. This fact explains the fanatic zeal that the Texas Board of Education continues to exhibit in their effort to write the presence of Africans throughout every phase of American history out of the primary and secondary school history books.
To these racialist fanatics the undeniable presence of Africans throughout American history is like a highly vexing rash all over one’s body, that no matter how hard you scratch it the itch just won’t go away. If these historical revisionists were to live for 150 years they still would not have enough time to remove all of the codes and laws dedicated to African slave management and control that are stored in thousands of courthouses and libraries all over this country. However, this fanaticism drives these individuals ever onward clinging to their quest convincing themselves that they must soldier on for the sake of their children and their RACE. Please make this important mental note that the first and most prominent fact is the source for AMERICAN RACISM is AMERICAN SLAVERY.
It should be noted that slavery has existed throughout the history of mankind, long preceding Biblical times. But the constant in all of those events over the course of many millennia always has been the emotional need to dehumanize the fellow human being whose life has been stolen by the conditions within of the institution of slavery. The slave owner will always find some difference between himself and his slave to cite as justification for his enslavement of another fellow human being. In ancient times tribal differences were often cited as justification for enslavement. If enslavement involved people from the same tribe, then the justification often cited was a genetic one, i.e. people from the slave’s ancestral family were always lazy and dim witted people. However, in the American colonies, the skin color and facial features differences between the Europeans and their African slaves was so striking and evident that it made the institutional codification of racism based solely on skin color highly predicable.
I should like to reveal one additional fact. It is not the nature of any group of human beings to accept being deprived of the most basic and simple freedom and that is to make decisions for him or her self. Even doing the daily tasks set by the master, the slave will still ultimately to take the course that he or she has decided upon to perform those tasks. This urge constantly demonstrated itself within the slave population and many times it proved to successful not only for the slave but also for the slave’s master who reaped any monetary reward from the slave’s inventiveness. However, sometimes a particular slave might prove too clever for his master and was able to secretly parlay his inventiveness into a situation wherein he alone was able to reap substantial financial reward totally unknown to the master. As a result the history of slavery is littered with hastily enacted laws which added restrictions to an ever growing list of things that a slave could not possess, or claim ownership thereof. The three plus centuries enactment of these laws helped to legally codify racism into the court archives of virtually every town and city in America. The presence of these slave control/anti Negro laws on the books in statehouses and local court houses have effectively influenced and thereby institutionalized LOW QUALITY POLICE SERVICE for Negro residents across the nation. To those white folks who would take issue with my statement and claim that no such laws exist as legal legislation or local codes in their state, I would give them this simple task, i.e., just go and look through the archives. You may have to go back some 150 years or more to find these gems, but trust me they have not been repealed.
At this point we have just pointed to several important Attributes of American slavery as contributory to American racism. This was and still is the historical state of America prior to and current with the Glenn Becks’ of the right wing talk world. Glenn Beck has a great deal in common with the Texas Board of Education as both seek to be historical revisionists of the roles that African Americans played in the development of this nation throughout the 390 years of American history. Now let’s move on to a quick comparison between Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky and Glenn Beck’s racialist rhetoric.
Lewis Carroll wrote the Jabberwocky poem as a bit of whimsy. The short and sweet analysis of Carroll’s composition is that the purpose of this nonsense gibberish was purely to provide entertainment for the innocents.
On the other hand, Glenn Beck’s seemingly disconnected diatribes leave most rational people wondering what could possibly be the meaning of these seemingly nonsensical statements. First of all Beck’s topics meander all over the topical map without uttering a single conversational thread to connect one to the other. For example, in one sentence he rants about government waste. In the next sentence he states that inner city black people are getting reams of food stamp handouts which they use to buy liquor and lottery tickets. Then in his third sentence he states that Obama is flooding black neighborhoods with food stamps as a payoff to black people whose votes put him in the White House. Beck then finishes up with the fourth sentence which is a highly emotional tearful declaration that Obama intends to starve all white people to death so he can take over the nation. (I wish to emphasize here that the four sentences above depict a typical Beck racialist rant and is provided in this exposition as a clear example of his broadcast style.) The cleverness of Beck as shown in the example above is in the way he is able to mix criticism of the federal government in together with a generous sprinkling of race baiting lies, and he does all of this seamlessly in real time without a single pause in his verbal delivery.
The white person with genuine anti government issues will essentially hear the words “government waste” and “getting reams of food stamps” loud and clear. The vehicle in this instance demonstrating “government waste” is in the form of Beck’s report citing widespread unauthorized use of “food stamps”. This particular white person listening to the Beck four sentences above may, in respect to how he or she may feel about racial issues, either tune out or embrace the racialism in Beck’s message. I would surmise that the majority of the white Tea Partiers sincerely consider themselves to be hard workers on the political battlefield dedicated to the point of obsession with the need to reduce of America’s massive debt. However, the majority of these same people are also highly sensitive about discussing their own racialist feelings and will defend themselves in a highly emotionally manner against the charge of being a racist simply because they are members of the Tea Party. To these Tea Party members I simply say that “Tolerance” of a certain behaviors becomes manifest in an organization when its members fail to condemn other members who are engaging in these intolerant behaviors, yet in their silence they know such behaviors to be wrong.
In recent times Glenn Beck, Limbaugh and other right wing talk show hosts have introduced a new tactic, and that is to define people or organizations that have been involved in the fight for equal rights and civil rights for African Americans for the past six or seven decades as being RACISTS themselves. As startling as this publicly broadcast declaration is, the RACISM that they are accusing these renowned Civil Rights organizations of is RACISM AGAINST WHITE PEOPLE. However, you will note that all of these right wing talk show hosts are very careful not to openly declare that members of the black leadership or black organizations are practicing racism against white people. The primary business of these right wing talk show hosts is “defining” those that they perceive as their enemies. Simply put, the scurrilous statement accusing the black folks (who are the subject of discussion) of practicing racism against white people IS IMPLIED in the very statement that defines a particular black person or black organization as RACIST. This despicable act also has the intentional consequence of effectively seizing the most sacred and time honored dreams and ambitions of America’s most downtrodden people and turning each beloved aspiration on its head. When these right wing talk show hosts call black leaders “racists”, they are unconditionally defining them as “BLACK RACISTS”.
African Americans, whose ancestors constantly felt the slave driver’s whip across their backs throughout American history up until the Emancipation Proclamation, are amazed that these outlandish declarations would even be broadcast over America’s airways. Most of today’s African Americans can properly be defined as unwilling preservationists of the hardships and struggles that befell American Negroes after the Civil War. Following the failure of reconstruction, southern Negro Americans were forced back into agricultural slavery via the white controlled institutions of tenant farming or share cropping. On the other hand many Negro males in the south were unjustly incarcerated by local white police, arbitrarily seized on the street and arrested on phony trumped up charges and forced into slavery to work the iron ore and coal mines through long multi-year sentences imposed by local white “kangaroo courts”. The majority of these men simply disappeared and were never heard from again as they perished in the legal custody of the southern mining companies. So it is incredible for black ears to hear some white man speaking from the luxury of his broadcast studio accuse the mistreated descendents of these long deprived and abused slaves of being RACIST? All these astonished black folks can say is “huh?” in complete bewilderment.
Why are these right wing talk show hosts doing this? Well here is my perspective and response to that question. The Republican Party is currently split into three disparate groups each striving for complete control of the Republican Party. These three groups are identified as follows; the Libertarian Republicans, the southern sons and daughters of Dixiecrats who turned Republican under Reagan, and finally Dick Armey’s Army A.K.A the Tea Party. Currently no Republican platform or ideology exists capable of uniting these three groups. The fissures in the base of the Republican Party have grown more evident as Armey’s Army knocked off several long term well respected Republican members of Congress in recent primaries, replacing them with their own Tea Party blessed candidates. The Republican powers are desperate to bring the Party together even on a temporary basis to get through the November Congressional elections. The fact that the Republican Party hierarchy is willing to tolerate the glaring missteps of its chairman Michael Steele is a clear indicator that they are passionately against introducing further division into the rank and file of the Republican Party. Such a division (between the three groups mentioned above) is certain to erupt during the process to replace Steele once he had been fired.
So they have directed Beck and other right wing talk show hosts to amp up the volume on the one hot button issue that resonates with all three groups and that is the issue of RACE. Hence they have been busy building new black bogey men to scare people within these three groups into uniting against the centuries old enemy for white folks, i.e., the BLACK MAN. Since the Republican internet interns were so successful in putting ACORN out of business, they had to create a new bogey man. 1, 2, 3, Presto! Here comes the NEW BLACK PANTHERS fresh out of the Republican think tank and built to order! By the way, the political tactic of using “fear of the Negro” is as old as American politics itself. Political demagoguery in America’s antebellum period often was filled with racial innuendos in public statements exchanged between white opponents. Since racially tinted political bombast long preceded the 15th amendment to the Constitutional giving the Negro the right to vote; it is therefore obvious that white men invented the concept of the RACE CARD and developed an effective method of using its psychological influence to shape the opinions of white voters.
Glenn Beck, however, is naturally creative on his own. So he decided to desecrate the 28th of August, the anniversary of Dr. King’s famous “I have a Dream” speech (given during the 1963 March on Washington) by holding his own “March for Freedom and jobs” event the same day and on the same site. Beck has announced that he intends to read Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech during his event. However, the dog whistle here to his followers by Beck in making this public announcement is that the “March for Freedom” will actually consist of thousands of white people marching for their freedom against (Beck’s unsubstantiated reports of) black racism. Hence Beck’s reading of Dr. King’s speech, if coherent, is most likely to be turned on its head and thus become an additional instrument for racialists to use to inspire white people to seek relief from Beck’s (manufactured) oppressive black racists.
African American groups will only enhance Beck’s twisted cause if they show up in Washington without the accompaniment of significant white support on the 28th to protest Beck’s event. Beck is hoping that a large group of angry black protesters will show up and attempt to disrupt his event. If there is a large all black protest turnout he will simply use their presence as evidence that the blacks in America are seeking to oppress all white Americans. Beck will also use every frame of video of black people protesting his event as a recruitment tool which will enable him to enlist more white members to his twisted cause. Hopefully, African American groups can enlist large numbers of white demonstrators to join them in protesting Glenn Beck’s event. A huge multiracial protest turn out will turn Glenn Beck’s big day into a mediocre news event and thus go a long way towards encouraging this racialist misfit to retire.
