The Nation: 'Reverse Racism' Is a Weapon of Mass Distraction

[marmar]

Andrew Breitbart, the blogger who helped destroy ACORN with heavily edited, racially tinged videos (the unedited versions of which have still not been released), just scored another victory over reverse racism, proving once and for all that it’s just like old-fashioned, regular racism: when it occurs, it's always a black person who suffers.

If you need to search for culprits in the railroading of USDA worker Shirley Sherrod, Breitbart is the obvious heel, but hardly the only one. (Tip to kids who live in Ag Sec Tom Vilsack's neighborhood: this Halloween, dress up like Glenn Beck, and the Vilsack household won't just give you all the candy you want, they'll shoot the family dog and cook it up for you.)

The real creeps are anyone in the media who excuses or erases the role played by Breitbart, Fox News, and the Tea Party blogosphere in smearing Sherrod as a racist.

I say that because, once the full video had proven that Sherrod was not shooting off bigoted remarks but actually explaining how she overcame her own bias against whites (and after the white farmer’s wife had confirmed that Sherrod saved the family farm from auction and was a “friend for life”), the right-wing media turned on a dime and gave us nine cents change. Following Breibart’s lead, the winger media began parroting the line that the controversy wasn’t about Breitbart or Sherrod herself but about the NAACP calling the Tea Party racist, and about NAACP members laughing when Sherrod said she had been tempted to do the wrong thing. To do that, they had to write Breitbart out of the story. The villains, they insist, are the NAACP and the Obama administration: those two organizations—both headed by African-Americans, BTW—fell for some silly ol’ video and beat up on Sherrod, who the right is now trying to claim as their sister in victimhood. As conservative David Frum writes:

There will be not even a flutter of interest among conservatives in discussing Breitbart’s role. By the morning of July 21, the Fox & Friends morning show could devote a segment to the Sherrod case without so much as a mention of Breitbart’s role. The central fact of the Sherrod story has been edited out of the conservative narrative, just as it was edited out of the tape itself. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/blog/37847/reverse-racism-weapon-mass-distraction

[HillbillyBob]

1. Ever notice its the biggest racists that

try to push this reverse discrimination stuff?

[rurallib]

2. I think reverse racism used to go under the term 'uppity'

[Karenina]

3. BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

:rofl::rofl::rofl:

Thanks rurallib! I needed a good guffaw right about now! :pals:

[drm604]

4. Perfect

and absolutely true. :rofl:

[starroute]

5. Notice also that "reverse racism" redefines the meaning of "racism"

Racism once meant a theory that certain human populations were evolutionarily superior to others and thus deserved to prevail on a survival-of-the-fittest basis.

Between the Nazis and modern genetics, that sort of racism pretty much got swept into the dustbin of history, leaving a sort of watered-down definition of racism as a suspicion or resentment of ethnic groups other than your own.

The trouble with this definition is that given the history of racial relations in this country, blacks are far more likely to feel that sort of resentment towards whites -- and justifiably so -- than whites are to feel it towards blacks.

But redefining racism as "racial resentment" means that a lot of white people, especially if they live out in Sarah Palin's America and simply don't come into contact with non-whites very often, can claim that they're not racists and blacks are.

Coming up with a more useful definition is tricky, but I'd humbly suggest that we re-re-define racism as something like "a belief that one racial or ethnic group has an established right to political and economic dominance in a particular nation or region, combined with a strong desire to suppress anything or anyone that appears to threaten that dominance."