JOHN MCWHORTER JUNE 3, 2010
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I have held off on writing about Rand Paul’s take on the Civil Rights Act. Partly because I am finishing a book. But also because his idea that it shouldn’t have been made illegal for businesses, as private institutions, to discriminate strikes me as, oddly, both too interesting to sound off on without long-term reflection and too uninteresting to get excited about in the moment.
Uninteresting because who among us really thinks that there will be a move any time soon to legalize segregation for American businesses? We are dealing in an abstract idea here (Paul has been criticized for not knowing the difference between a law seminar and a campaign). As such, we’re talking good copy but not serious news, what with certain slightly weightier things going on in, say, the Gulf of Mexico, Gaza, and such.
But if this thing is going to go as far as a conversation over whether Fox News’ John Stossel gets fired for agreeing with Paul, then we are slipping into the grievously unconsidered and melodramatic notion that it is the equivalent of pedophilia to say things that black people don’t like. The noise is coming from the folks at Color of Change, a website devoted to “amplifying the political voice of Black America.”
This is a voice? This sort of thing never leads to anything constructive and makes black people look incapable of close, abstract reasoning in the bargain. Yes, reasoning – which is not always “racism” when it irritates those of a race, even me. So – what does it mean to question the Civil Rights Act of 1964?
The argument is not new that there shouldn’t have been a Civil Rights Act of 1964 and that black people would have been better off nurturing their own institutions, chipping away at segregation bit by bit, and gaining equality by the same effort that other minorities put forth, rather than by fiat. I’ve heard it ventured, sometimes in public by someone unafraid to be called a racist, but usually in quiet settings.
And in truth, that fiat did have its downsides. Many wonder why there is a tendency among many blacks to adopt victimhood as an identity and almost wallow in the noble status of it. They need look no further back than 1964. Black people were freed (largely) from segregation and disfranchisement so abruptly that they hadn’t had time to get past the race-wide inferiority complex they naturally had internalized after 350 years of naked oppression. Shelby Steele gets this across most beautifully; he may have slipped on Obama, but The Content of Our Character didn’t get the National Book Award for nothing.
That inferiority complex could not disappear just because some laws were changed. And it conditioned a meme that lives on in black thought and continually perplexes old heads. The old idea was that black people should work twice as hard to prove themselves. That wasn’t fair – but today’s tacit idea is too often that black people should not have to work as hard as everyone else, as a kind of payback.
Enter our current conversation over black firefighters’ performance on written exams, with it considered beside the point to suggest that they study obsessively hard for them as some other candidates do. Not to mention the comfort with the idea that black students should not be required to make grades or test scores as high as other students because their parents don’t subscribe to magazines and may work two jobs – while Asian immigrant kids under the exact same circumstances kick scholastic butt and we are told that the comparison is unfair because their parents have “immigrant pluck.” The implication is that such pluck would be too much to expect of black people, an idea that would have sounded bizarre to gaslight-era blacks just a generation past slavery. The new notion started after 1964 (the book to consult is Stuart Buck’s new one, the best race book of the year).
And then we shake our heads when whites say in polls that they don’t consider blacks as intelligent as whites. It’s a glum state of affairs.
Yet if you ask me, this mental warping of two generations of black people, where for too many, the blame game has to fill in for true inner confidence, was collateral damage. The Civil Rights Act, in all of its peculiarity and danger – there is too little awareness of what an unprecedented advance in human history it was – was worth it. There is the argument that federal infrastructure’s support of “private” businesses justified forcing federal legislation upon them. Then the most compelling justification is that the “private” discrimination in this case was so pervasive as to deny a race of millions the basic rights of citizenship in this land. Something needed to be done.
People like Paul think that the rejection of racism as socially incorrect would have happened anyway, just later. But that’s shaky social history, presentist, as they say. A Rand Paul sees a certain inevitability in whites shedding their racism because it’s all he has ever known as a mature person, like humans supposing that evolution has been a grand series of rehearsals for us. But my, the old order had persisted for an awfully long time before it finally crumbled. The social rejection of racism was driven in large part by the head start, authority, finality, and even the drama of the legal banning of segregation.
Maybe some think that the flower children alone could have done it, or that maybe Stokely Carmichael just needed to yell even louder. I doubt it. Could the Internet have done the trick? Just maybe – but would we really have wanted black America to have to wait that long? I for one am happy, as a black person born in 1965, to have missed Jim Crow or anything like it as the result of the Civil Rights Act the year before – even if the black America I have known has paid the price of a rather tragic amount of cognitive dissonance in its wake.
Rand Paul and John Stossel would disagree with me here. The question is whether this can be classified as the stuff of intellectual debate, or whether people of their view are to be tarred as morally reprehensible “racists” mourning the America depicted in To Kill a Mockingbird, now being celebrated for its sesquicentennial. On that, Leonard Pitts in the Miami Herald has a piece that made me think, calling Paul on his claim that despite his strict interpretation of private property rights, he abhors racism and would have marched with Martin Luther King. Pitts thinks that Paul and like-minded people would not have, and thus are modern versions of the whites standing on the sidelines of Civil Rights marches shouting and throwing rocks.
Really, I have decided, that’s a good thinking point – I can imagine assigning it to a class for discussion – but not fair. If Paul says that he would have been in favor of banning segregation of public facilities, then given that this was the more prominent issue in Civil Rights protests, upon what basis other than a reflexive, almost recreational kind of suspicion can we say that he would have rejected the protests as nonsense for agitating against segregated lunch counters as well?
And if he would have done this, would that have made him simply a “racist” against black advancement, as opposed to someone less interested in empathy than in legal niceities? Given the signature status of the Civil Rights revolution in American and human history, such a view will hardly elicit warm feelings in most of us. However, does it make a person morally unfit in a universal sense? Is it useful to dragoon the term “racist” into applying to people for whom race problems are urgent in facets, but less of a priority overall than they are for people of the race in question?
It puts me in mind, of all things, of a failed Leonard Bernstein musical. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, in 1976, depicted a pageant of American Presidents in the guise of a portrait of America ever in rehearsal of realizing its basic principles. It had four main players – two as assorted Presidents and First Ladies, and two others as a black couple playing, over time, slaves and servants. The idea, just twelve years after 1964, was that admitting black people as full human beings was The Story of America, such that an evening’s musical theatre about our nation would focus on that.
It ran five nights: it didn’t work then, and it doesn’t now. Like today’s rhetoric taking that stance, it’s beautiful music – so beautiful it almost hurts. But the idea that black issues are incontrovertibly The Main Meal of what American history consists of is reductive and preachy. There are other things, especially because most Americans are not black Americans.
In any case, we have to remember, after all, that people of this Libertarian take suppose that businesses that discriminate would eventually fail because of the unpopularity of the stance – and no one can deny that here in 2010, as opposed to the America of Mad Men, overt racism has distinctly little social cachet. Paul and Stossel are not saying that they espouse a return to 1960; they simply wish that its eclipse had been approached in a different fashion. Stossel has said: “I won't ever go to a place that’s racist and I will tell everybody else not to and I’ll speak against them.” Even Color of Change admits that “They argue that the free market will take care of effects related to race -- since they and countless others wouldn’t support businesses that chose to discriminate, those businesses would eventually fail.”
So – yes, Stossel is saying that if he had it his way, I would suddenly find myself barred from some hotels, bars, and restaurants. But also that he wouldn’t patronize those places himself and would shout their sin to the heavens with his pulpit, convinced that as a result those businesses would close and my kids and grandchildren wouldn’t go through what I did. And in our America where to be tarred as a racist is to be classified as a Hitler, we cannot say that such an argument is insane. Debatable? Sure – but neither insane nor a smokescreen for Archie Bunker bigotry. A Stossel thinks he would win the debate. That is, he seeks a different path to the mountaintop – which would adhere to the lines of his political philosophy in the bargain.
Many, I know, will see me as missing something here or in some kind of denial – but I don’t see John as a racist on this one, despite that I would enjoy questioning him as to how he would feel if when I ran into him at an event I recounted having been asked to leave the neat new Italian place in Tribeca because they don’t serve “your kind.” (I have known Stossel “around” from when he was at ABC, and I suggest his latest book as proof that he’s too smart to be the morally benighted troglodyte he’s being tarred as.)
But in the end, isn’t all of this a little too hypothetical? The chances that businesses will be told that they can legally discriminate in America are dismissable, surely even to the most dedicated Cassandras among us. It is a sign of how far black people have come that an organization devoted to “amplifying the political voice of Black America” could think of musing over this kind of science fiction as serious work.
So someone says they don’t like part of the Civil Rights Act – upon which ... what? If you want to Fight the Power, fight something real, that has concrete effect on real people’s lives – and that is most certainly not burning people in effigy who criticize a done deal. “Political voice”? How about speaking up about the War on Drugs? Or what schools who seek Race To The Top funds will be doing to help poor kids learn? Or how green jobs could make a dent in unemployment rates for uneducated blacks? Or how jobs requiring no college will be growing in the near future right when the Obama Administration is dedicating extra funds to community colleges?
A typical response to a point like this is to ask why we can’t do it all – i.e. here, attend to things like that plus get off on monitoring Fox News for people who say things that “threaten Civil Rights” (but don’t). And the answer is that there are things that serve no purpose in what is supposed to be the goal in question.
Imagine someone who insists, while they make an omelette, upon also popping all of the bubbles on a sheet of bubble paper. “Why can’t I do both things?” he asks. And boy, does it feel good to pop those bubbles – it almost channels the life force and it makes a delicious noise. Especially compared to making the omelette, which is a rather quiet thing of little drama. But once the bubbles are all popped, all he has is a flabby sheet of plastic that he throws away and forgets. And really, wouldn’t he be in a position to make a better omelette if he just took a deep breath and put the bubble paper aside?
30 comments
Interesting as always. But an extremely trivial cavil. This year is the *semicentennial* of *To Kill a Mockingbird*. The sesquicentennial will be 2110.
- mnkoplow
June 4, 2010 at 2:58pm
So it came out in 1960, or what? Sometimes just a little clarifying information can please.
- ironyroad
June 5, 2010 at 2:45am
The question of whether Paul -actually- would have marched with King seems to me important and relevant for two reasons: first, it's an easy and painless way of projecting racial tolerance that demands no actual thought on policy. Second, and more importantly, Goldwater and the right viciously opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for reasons similar to Paul's, and using rhetoric similar to that Republicans use to justify their opposition to everything today. Now that it's a settled moral question in our society, it's easy for Paul to side with King, but are we supposed to believe that, given his political philosophy and impulses, he -actually- would have been on the right side of history at the time? The answer to that question is relevant to how we interpret his criticism of the CRA of 1964 today. This is the downside to the myopia of current right-wing self-analysis, which forgets how opposed it was to desegregation. Rand, Stossel, et al, through their (probably unrealistic) insistence that the private sector and the free market (you know, the same free market that couldn't even accurately value complex financial transactions, a task it's presumably much better equipped for) could have ended segregation on its own, are dodging the question of what to do when policies based on libertarian/free-market ideas are unable to deal with important social ills. Segregation is only one example. Health care would seem to be another. It would seem that the right values antigovernment purity above solving society's problems. I would also note that Stossel's insistence that free-markets would take care of social ills is wrong-headed in two respects: first, it doesn't take into account the market power of people whos who preferred to be served only in segregated facilities, whose market power had played a role in creating the current system. Second, as McWhorter notes, Stossel does not take into account the role of federal intervention in creating the environment of moral consensus against racism, upon which such a market victory would have depended.
- Curran1
June 7, 2010 at 4:02am
John McWhorter, there's such a thing as thinking about a subject too much, way too much. Easy to essay at length in 2010 about what was going on in the early 1960s; far more difficult to have been there at the time. One humongous, inconvenient fact: segregation was enforced by a Gordian tangle of state laws and cultural mores, one which restricted the activities of everyone, not just blacks. The sword that cut the Gordian knot was the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Second, for a useful, honest history of conservative opposition to the civil rights movement, see The Claremount Instute, "Civil Rights and the Conservative Movement," http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1543/article_detail.asp Conservative opposition to the Civil Rights Act was not, by the way, based on the act's regulation of private businesses, Title II. Conservatives opposed federal regulation of the state governments. The 2010, Rand Paul version of history, "oh, I'm all for civil rights, I'm only against telling the owner of a neighborhood diner who he should have to serve," is complete rubbish. Conservatives supported the states' authority to segregate, to impose racial (and religious, ethnic, etc) restrictions on marriage, voting, employment, public accomodations, the entire kit and kaboodle. As for Rand Paul's remark that he would have marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., yes, everyone was in the French Resistance. Dan
- dbuck1
June 7, 2010 at 7:37am
John McWhorter, there's such a thing as thinking about a subject too much, way too much. Easy to essay at length in 2010 about what was going on in the early 1960s; far more difficult to have been there at the time. One humongous, inconvenient fact: segregation was enforced by a Gordian tangle of state laws and cultural mores, one which restricted the activities of everyone, not just blacks. The sword that cut the Gordian knot was the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Second, for a useful, honest history of conservative opposition to the civil rights movement, see The Claremount Instute, "Civil Rights and the Conservative Movement." [The link interfers with the TNR spam filter, so to find the article, Google the titke.] Conservative opposition to the Civil Rights Act was not, by the way, based on the act's regulation of private businesses, Title II. Conservatives opposed federal regulation of the state governments. The 2010, Rand Paul version of history, "oh, I'm all for civil rights, I'm only against telling the owner of a neighborhood diner who he should have to serve," is complete rubbish. Conservatives supported the states' authority to segregate, to impose racial (and religious, ethnic, etc) restrictions on marriage, voting, employment, public accomodations, the entire kit and kaboodle. As for Rand Paul's remark that he would have marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., yes, everyone was in the French Resistance.
- dbuck1
June 7, 2010 at 7:39am
I suppose I have reached the age that many people consider the period of my childhood and adolesence almost ancient history. So it is with 1964, when the author of this post (McWhorter) wasn't even born. To me, 1964 isn't ancient history at all; it's like yesterday. When schools, restaurants, hotels, shops, movie theaters, neighborhoods, physicians' offices, hospitals, everything, was segregated. For those who were fortunate to come of age after 1964, segregation was more than a minor inconvenience or insult, for it denied black Americans basic freedoms. Such as the ability to travel. For how does one travel if you cannot eat in restaurants, stay in hotels, or even use public restrooms. It required both a complex itinerary (with stops at private homes since public facilities were off limits) and bravery (since it often required trips down dirt roads - the only "facilitites" available - not knowing who or what may lurk in the shadows). I don't believe that Rand Paul is a racist, and I attribute his naivete to his relative youth. But his ignorance of life in America a mere 45 years ago should disqualify him from any position of public responsibility.
- rayward
June 7, 2010 at 7:43am
The thing is, we actually kind of ran this experiment. With smoking in public places, which would seem to be much more trivial and easier for individuals to cause change through market behavior. There has been no federal legislation akin to the CRA on smoking in public places. Instead, it's been left to state authority and the private market. Some states, like Minnesota and California, adopted early laws creating intrafacility segregation to carve out some space for nonsmokers who wished not to be attacked with poison gas quite so directly. Other states followed in time. But despite the fact that nonsmokers have always been the majority in the marketplace, most states have done little more to respond to their interest in not being attacked with poison gas while eating, drinking, or staying at an inn. It took until the early 1990s for there to be serious free-market changes, such as hotels designating smoking and nonsmoking rooms or for restauranteurs to experiment with going smoke-free to attract nonsmoking customers. Ultimately, nonsmokers who wished not to have their children attacked with poison gas had to wait for states to more strictly regulate private behavior through fiat, not the market. That process, which is still ongoing, has given us another great set of experimental data. First, businesses, even bars, that go smoke-free have generally seen sales and revenue increase. Which means that the market should have led more of them to go smoke-free on their own, but because businesspeople are humans and not computers, restauranteurs and publicans defied rational market forces for two generations. Second, when neighboring states alternately prohibited or permitted smoking, sales and revenue generally increased for businesses on both sides of the divide. On the nonsmoking side of the border, people who previously stayed away from smoke-filled establishments came out in droves. And on the free-smoking side of the border, those who wish to assault strangers with poison gas as a recreational activity flocked together to do so. So we see that the market simply doesn't work to affect social change as Paul et al wish. (You'd think this would be obvious to market worshippers: the market exists to produce and sell things, not to embiggen men's souls.) And when government action is finally taken to solve a problem that the market cannot, piecemeal action by states tends to concentrate and reinforce holdouts against the new social norms. Thus we see that the Paul approach to civil rights would, on its own, produce no end to segregation. And merely state-by-state action against segregation would increase the extent of segregation where permitted. It is as if Paul et al saw a nail sticking up, and said that it was urgent that the nail be pounded down, but they were opposed to using a hammer for any purpose. Let everyone who wishes to see the nail flush with the wood blow on it, they say, and eventually that nail will go down. Or if a tool must be used, only the prying claw of the hammer may be applied to the nail, never the face. There comes a time when the earnestness with which a person desires a result can no longer be credited against his practical efforts that produce the opposite result. The libertarian and conservative argument for ending segregation through laissez-faire markets is one such time. John Stossel should not be fired for expressing this - or really, any - opinion. But neither should anyone who expresses this opinion be taken seriously, nor given credit for his claims to oppose segregation.
- rhubarbs
June 7, 2010 at 7:57am
In "The Death of Politics," Playboy, March 1969, former Barry Goldwater speechwriter Karl Hess put is finger on the logical inconsistency underpinning conservative support for states' s rights in matters pertainig to race: ================================= Conservatives, in one of their favorite lapses of logic — States' rights — nourished modern American racism by supporting laws, particularly in Southern states, that gave the state the power to force businessmen to build segregated facilities. (Many businessmen, to be sure, wanted to be "forced," thus giving their racism the seal of state approval.) The States' rights lapse is simply that conservatives who would deny to the Federal government certain controls over people, eagerly cede exactly the same controls to smaller administrative units. They say that the smaller units are more effective. This means that conservatives support the coercion of individuals at the most effective level. It certainly doesn't mean that they oppose coercion. In failing to resist state segregation and miscegenation laws, in failing to resist laws maintaining racially inequitable spending of tax money, simply because these laws were passed by states, conservatives have failed to fight the very bureaucracy that they supposedly hate — at the very level where they might have stopped it first. ============================================================= State miscegenation laws, by the way, which prohibited marriages between whites and blacks, native americans, and asians were once on the books of all but a half dozen states, and were not declared unconstitutional until the 1967 Supreme Court ruling Loving v. Virginina. The Loving case arose when an interrracial couple, Richard and Mildred Loving, legally married in DC, relocated to Virginia, where they were arrested. Dan
- dbuck1
June 7, 2010 at 8:39am
The fatal flaw in the libertarian view of how the market would have solved segregation is that they treat the Jim Crow laws as a foreign force. They will say something like "segregation is fortified by the state" or something. Which is true, but it is sort of a chicken and egg argument. Let's say that in 1900 or so all Jim Crow laws were declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. Does anyone really think that the market wouldn't drive any that did try to integrate out of business? Wouldn't you lose customers to the place that proudly stated, "We don't cater to them..."? The Jim Crow laws were in place because they enjoyed overwhelming support in the South. Sure it is possible that the market would have simply solved things with enough time. However, it is odd that this argument is always made after the government is forced to intervene (child labor laws, safety regs., civil rights). This seems to me to more of a fetish for "markets" than sound historical inquiry.
- MikeB.
June 7, 2010 at 11:24am
Restaurants? Restaurants??? I am sorry but getting served or not served in any restaurant is pretty far down the most essential aspect of civil rights and that is in hiring practices. Even today racism is alive and well in many, many small businesses. I worked in a printing company that had quite a few blacks, but not one that worked in the office ever. No salesmen, no customer service reps. no bookkeepers, nothing. This was in northern NJ. I was in purchasing and I don't ever recall meeting or knowing any black reps for any of the local businesses I bought from. Now, granted I have been out of the states for a while, but I doubt things have improved much over the past 15 years. As to Stossel, I have little doubt he is full of it. He imagines himself to be a hero by not going to a overtly racist restaurant while being in favor of a system that will impoverish blacks, so that in the end, they won't even be able to afford to go there, but hey, as long as he is against OVERT discrimination, and he helps convince the owners to theoretically allow blacks, the few that have money, to eat there, well then society will be just wonderful. Stossel lives in the rarified world of money and celebrity, as such he has little contact with the world most of us live in, especially people in the inner city. I have zero doubt that there are untold millions of minorities stuck in lesser paying jobs because they simply never were given the opportunity to fulfill their potential. Stossel is a complete and utter shithead if he doesn't know this.
- blackton
June 7, 2010 at 6:26pm
I think it is beyond time (and I am glad a few are starting) to call out the Pauls and libertarianism for the crap it is. Ron Paul got a semi-free ride because he was against the Iraq War in 2008. But if you listen to him, he spouts the most banal psuedo-history such as his blurb on the back of "The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History" which argued that slavery wasn't so bad. He has said ridiculous arguments that have no merit about the Civil War, such as Lincoln could have simply bought the slaves (He tried this with border states in 1862 and they rejected it, do you think South Carolina would accept it?). His total lie about MLK is absurd. How could a man who marched and advocated for more aid to the poor from the government be a hero to a man who thinks any of that is tyrrany. Libretariansim is against child labor laws, min. wage, any old age pension, environmental regs., etc. Let's stop pretending that this clown and his clown son deserve respect and praise. Let's face it, these two Pauls who put market rights over the rights of non-whites are obvioulsy the members of the caste that had the privalages. Would they be so caviliar had it been the other way around?
- MikeB.
June 7, 2010 at 6:58pm
I guess the basic point of this very thematically discursive post by McWhorter is the stunningly banal point that Paul and Stossel shouldn't be marked as racists for trying to formulate a libertarian alternative to the Civil Rights Act as de jure ending Jim Crow by legislative fiat. Who can disagree with that? The "that" of course refers to McWhorter's basic point, not to such wacky libertarian supposin'. What's more interesting to me is the emptiness and fantasy quality of such libertarianism as a telling microcosm of the Tea Party.
- basman
June 7, 2010 at 11:21pm
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." F. Scott Fitzgerald By this test Prof. McWhorter is a first-rate intelligence. According him the Civil Rights Act 1964 was a good thing in that it destroyed an immoral system, but at the same time it had some disastrous effects on American blacks. There is a name for this inextricable mixture of good and ill. It's called "tragedy". To recognize this needs a sense of irony that is unavailable to most liberals. To liberals the world is a melodrama devoid of moral complexity. On the one hand are noble minorities and their equally noble liberal friends. Against them are those stupid white bigots, especially the white working class. It's all very simple. It's very simple, but as the song says, it ain't necessarily so.
- bulbman1066
June 8, 2010 at 12:18am
I know you had honest libertarian opposition to the civil rights act; but you had more bigots enshrouding themselves in the libertarian opposition. It just had to end....the situation was just intolerable. Same thing with Brown. ....you could make an "honest" critique of that decision. But why? Enough was enough. It had to end. We get the libertarian arguments. But I don't care.
- OscarPeck
June 8, 2010 at 12:19am
Here is an excellent discussion of these issues between Josh Cohen and Brink Lindsey. The latter makes the libertarian case *for* the The Civil Rights Act and cites short pieces by Sanchez, Richard Epstein, Randy Barnett and David Bernstein to the same effect. Call it the argument from state supported socially embedded racism--itself the explicit denial of the libertarian ideal. Lindsey's discussion in particular is good in accounting for the argument from freedom of assembly but concluding that that argument was outweighed by the deeper need to end such socially embedded--de facto and de jure--racism. http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/28665
- basman
June 8, 2010 at 1:33am
MikeB writes: "Sure it is possible that the market would have simply solved things with enough time. However, it is odd that this argument is always made after the government is forced to intervene (child labor laws, safety regs., civil rights)." The government has intervened on the issue of women's rights. They granted them the right to vote after black males were allowed to vote. There was equal pay legislation shortly before the civil rights legislation. There was title III in the CRA. BUT, even without these, it feels like business and the workforce valued the contribution of women too much to ignore them. Thus, I'd argue the various laws passed helped women modestly at the time, but were not crucial to achieving what they have achieved. So, I'd submit this as an example of something that would have solved itself over time. Sexual orientation is another area that seems to be sorting itself out. States are patching holes, companies have created policies, etc. But even our current president seems hesitant to take this on as a federal issue. (Ironically, Bill Clinton seems to have taken Paul's and Goldwater's position on sexual orientation. Goldwater voted for civil rights in the late 50s, but couldn't bring himself to vote for the 1964 act because of Title II, which prevented private businesses from discriminating. The rights of the individual must outweigh everything else he believed. I still feel this way today regarding religion. I do not think an atheist must rent a room over the garage to a family of religious freaks. And I do not think a family of religious freaks shoudl be forced to rent their extra room to a devil worshipper. And I'll bet plenty of TNR readers would NOT rent a room in their house to a coverall-wearing redneck that enjoyed hunting and watching Fox, regardless of his manners and his ability to keep to himself. But I'm just speculating.)
- seattleeng
June 8, 2010 at 2:45am
"And I'll bet plenty of TNR readers would NOT rent a room in their house to a coverall-wearing redneck that enjoyed hunting and watching Fox, regardless of his manners and his ability to keep to himself. But I'm just speculating." Did it ever occur to you that many TNR readers are related to "coverall-wearing rednecks that enjoy hunting and watching Fox?" Do you think everyone who reads TNR lives in Manhattan Penthouses? And your stereotypes are ridiculous. My relatives hunt and watch Fox but they don't wear coveralls or have Rednecks. Do you even know what coveralls are for? They are not a fashion statement. Conservatives don't wear coveralls to weddings, they don't serve roadkill possum pie for dinner. As to having red necks, that is from being white and working outside in the southern sun all day, it isn't a spray on fashion accessory. Honestly, do you have pretty much everybody?
- blackton
June 8, 2010 at 10:20am
bulbman, conservatives also seem to have a problem with moral complexity. To conservatives, the world is an endless Manichean struggle between pious, thrifty, patriotic, salt-of-the-earth "Real Americans" and atheistic libertines, blacks, feminists, homosexuals, foreigners, trade unionists, environmentalists and other wooly-headed leftists who are out to take everything away from them and destroy all they hold dear. Both worldviews I find to be narrow-minded, unrealistic and counter-productive.
- zardoz67
June 8, 2010 at 11:10am
Blackton, please, if you want to see who is more redneck, I don't need to be pulling in my family members to compete. I brought up rednecks, because it's one group that the left will openly mock on television. Just listen to Garafallow and Olberman go off on them for a few minutes, and tell me that woman doesn't hate someone just for their beliefs or who they are. True, rednecks aren't a protected class. But if groups that are outside of a protected class are fair game for hatred, then we've got a larger problem.
- seattleeng
June 8, 2010 at 11:39am
Some liberals and lefties do indeed have problems with irony. But almost all conservatives do, and religious conservatives probably the most. Evangelical Protestantism in particular has a dislike of irony because it suggests hidden traps and meanings in language and locution that can't be trumped by textual literalism.
- ironyroad
June 8, 2010 at 12:20pm
seattle, no, NJ has never been made fun of on TV ever. And on a show like 30 Rock it is NYer's who bare the brunt of being made fun of, and the only redneck on that show Kenneth is portrayed as a sweet almost angelic figure. the fact is pretty much everyone gets mocked on TV but the simple fact is the people who get mocked most of all are urban Liberals since the writers are invariably urban liberals and they like to mock that which they understand. Granted, I don't watch much TV but the ones I do watch poke fun of urban liberals. Prove me wrong. Now as to Olbermann and whoever Garafallow is (unless you are referring to the actress Jean Garofalo) well Garofalo is an actress so who cares? And Olbermann is no worse than Hannity, O'Reilly, and Beck (the Satanic trio). What I am talking about is regular TV sitcoms and I can bet you that by far urban liberals are mocked far more.
- blackton
June 8, 2010 at 1:32pm
Seattle, rednecks aren't a protected class.....they aren't any class in the sense of an ethnic or religious sense. They are laughed at because of their behavior. Now I agree it goes too far often, and it is overbroad, but it really isn't close to the same sort of "class", but just an unprotected one. Being a redneck is not an immutable trait.
- OscarPeck
June 8, 2010 at 1:57pm
I think Maddow went after Rand Paul on Civil Rights because it was the most sensational issue to go after Libertarians on. However, it is just scratching the surface... Well Rand Paul if it is a gross infringement on property rights to force businesses to deal with people with black skin, what else is? Is it socialism to have child labor laws? Can't a mine owner send a nine year old down into the coal mine to work? Why not pay him in company script redeemable at the company store? Remember minimum wage laws are socialism. Hey since zoning laws and environmental regulations are also socialism, can I store nuclear waste in my backyard for money? Can I put up a 90 foot spite wall to block out the sun on my neighbor's yard? Can the owner of a nuclear power plant sell plutonium to the highest bidder without pesky government nosy agents stopping me? After all stopping them would be an example of the Levathin state. Privatize the roads right? Have someone rich buy the roads around a residential development and charge the people to go home everyday. Come on Rand Paul, don't be coy? What else goes under libertarianism?
- MikeB.
June 8, 2010 at 2:54pm
Best article on Rand Paul: "And that's why the best rap on libertarians isn't that they're racist, or selfish. (Though some of them are those things, and their beliefs encourage both bad behaviors, even if accidentally.) It's that they're thoroughly out of touch with reality. It's a worldview that prospers only so long as nobody tries it, and is too unreflective and self-absorbed to realize this. In other words, it's bratty. And that's bad enough." http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/05/21/libertarianism_who_needs_it
- MikeB.
June 8, 2010 at 4:22pm
It's interesting that when we discuss the Civil Rights Act of 1964 we never mention the other people that came to be protected against discrimination. It didn't just ban discrimination in public accommodations on the basis of color or race; it also banned it on the basis of creed and national origin. It directly benefited Jews (or Catholics) as well as blacks. I don't know how much overt discrimination there was against Jews by 1964 in hotels or resorts ("restricted"), but there certainly had been ten years earlier than that.
- argaman
June 8, 2010 at 8:36pm
OscarPeck: "Seattle, rednecks aren't a protected class....." That's why I noted that fact in the same post... But is your assertion that if someone isn't part of a protected class then it's OK to treat them as you wish? Perhaps its attitudes such as yours that make so many strive to become a protected class. I'm sure your fat friends at work love your fat jokes. And I know you don't mean anything by it, because some of your best friends are fat... Why don't you treat everyone with respect, instead of just the few the government requires you to treat with respect. OscarPeck: "They are laughed at because of their behavior." Good. God. Almighty. You enjoy a good laugh at an exaggerated and mean stereotype do you, especially if that stereotype is designed to make you feel superior?
- seattleeng
June 9, 2010 at 2:43am
"Why don't you treat everyone with respect, instead of just the few the government requires you to treat with respect." seattle, if everyone had been treated with respect, we wouldn't have needed the Civil Rights Act! Also, it wasn't "government" requiring folks to treat other folks with respect, it was the people of the United States, whose legislature it is that passes such laws. The government is only a tool.
- ironyroad
June 9, 2010 at 9:52am
Seattle said "But is your assertion that if someone isn't part of a protected class then it's OK to treat them as you wish? " No, of course not. It's rude and uncouth behavior to do so. But "Redneck" does not rise to the level that, imo, would ever require government protection (well never say never, but I don't see it). As it is, people laughing at them, is a far cry from people not hiring them, not serving them, paying them less, not renting to them; nor, obviously, a history of government imposed discrimination. Untoward behavior - yes; but protected class, no.
- OscarPeck
June 9, 2010 at 1:20pm
OscarPeck: "But "Redneck" does not rise to the level that, imo, would ever require government protection (well never say never, but I don't see it)." Same could be said about society's view on blacks in 1930. Women in 1940. Mentally handicapped in 1955. Society will say the same about homosexuals in 2015. Fat people in 2025. Why not rednecks in 2030? OscarPeck: "As it is, people laughing at them, is a far cry from people not hiring them, not serving them, paying them less, not renting to them; nor, obviously, a history of government imposed discrimination." Do you really think a 300 pound 6'5 guy with a huge beard, coveralls, gunrack, 'BILL OREILLY RULES' sticker on a MASSIVE beatup pickup, festooned with Jesus and GWBush bumper stickers, NASCAR signage could rent a room from a homeowner living in the Castro district? Should the homeowner have to rent to that person? Is it OK to NOT rent to someone because you don't like their beliefs? Could that person get a job at a local eatery in the Castro district if he wore a "God is my Copilot" shirt? Should that prevent him from getting a job? The true country folk in this country are poor beyond your wildest dreams. Think Appalachia. They've worked for decades at jobs nobody else would do. They have almost zero education. And yet we are on the cusp of providing protections for gay couples that (on average) make a combined income far in excess of the national median, attend college at a rate far higher than the national median, and on and on. I'm all for those protections, but there are folks that need it more. Much more. It's a bit surprising that you write those with so little of anything off so quickly as not needing help when we are bending over backwards to help the male attorney and his same-sex SO that is also an attorney, both living in the ritzy part of town working for a top 5 law firm and pulling in a collective $800K/year. Is your goal to help people, or favor those with your same ideology?
- seattleeng
June 10, 2010 at 12:05am
"Do you really think a 300 pound 6'5 guy with a huge beard, coveralls, gunrack, 'BILL OREILLY RULES' sticker on a MASSIVE beatup pickup, festooned with Jesus and GWBush bumper stickers, NASCAR signage could rent a room from a homeowner living in the Castro district?" Who knows? But one crucial thing that distinguishes the foregoing from being black, female, gay, Catholic or whatever, whether in the Castro or elsewhere, is that the above are all fashion choices. Should a Jewish apartment owner be obligated to rent to a guy wearing a swastika T-shirt, black leather boots, and walking a Dobermann? The common-sense approach of "when in Rome" seems to be lost on Americans in general.
- ironyroad
June 10, 2010 at 6:50am