… hello! and welcome to BoingBoing! “Snipe Killer”.
Saying things “parenthetically” is “inappropriate” and “esoteric” when discussing issues of such importance and sensitivity. It’s a polarising subject, and readers will cast him on one side or the other.
For those who read the article, they come away with a sense, and impressions about the writer.
I came away with some doubt as to what he was actually trying to say. I’ve never heard of him before, but couldn’t back up honestly an assertion that he isn’t somehow a racist, either explicit or implicit.
And, ftr @sdmikev, my reading comprehension is not “shitty”. It’s fucking excellent. Paranormal.
Every aggregation site like BoingBoing has to have one submitter whose posts should just be ignored outright. Let’s face it, BoingBoing’s is beschizza.
“Race” exists as an abstract concept, therefore racists exist. “Get over it” is a moronic suggestion, because we are not the persons with issues. Try posting that on Stormfront. Try eradicating the tribalism/xenophobia before you get to telling others things we already know.
You know, I never use that term either, but one of my children occasionally refers to herself that way. Since she’s got ancestry in at least three so-called “races” (I secretly enjoyed @Salgak driving trollies that, sorry Nathan) it’s even more inherently ridiculous. I figure I should let my kids call themselves whatever they want, though, and just make sure they understand that I expect them to be more than the sum of their appearance and ancestry.
But realistically, in America, people with visible African ancestry are “black”. Not biracial, not mixed, but Black. Tiger Woods can call himself cablanasian all he wants, people in the street call him a Black golfer pretty close to 100% of the time. That’s how it is here; we still adhere to the one-drop rule as a culture, like it or not.
I think you pegged the problem better than Rob did, right there. It’s explicitly OK to have conventional views, by convention, conventionally, eh? It’s “normal” to be “conventional”.
Not only does this article not look much like satire, but from wikipedia on Richard Cohen:
Following the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the shooting of Trayvon Martin in July 2013, Cohen wrote "a controversial column in which he defends George Zimmerman's suspicion of Travyon Martin and calls on politicians to acknowledge that a disproportionate amount of crimes are committed by black males"...Towards the end of the column, Cohen calls Trayvon Martin "a young man understandably suspected because he was black".
Cohen wrote a column in 1986 which argued owners of jewelry stores were right to refuse to allow entry to young black men because of a fear of crime. This column led to the Washington Post having to apologize.
I notice people like to call horrible comments satire as a cheap excuse for them, but they aren't unless it's a view the author doesn't hold. Here that is unconvincing, to say the least. When he says the GOP aren't racist because conventional morality gags at biracial children, there's no reason to doubt that's what he thinks.
Of course race exists. There is the dachshund, the bulldog, the terrier, the chow, the dalmation… But I can’t figure out what that has to do with a marriage between two humans.
Cohen is a tedious writer whose views are always conventional and predictable. There are many good reasons to sack Cohen, he is a waste of space. But the actual article makes it clear that the term ‘conventional views’ is describing the GOP base rather than Cohen’s own views.
Like many tedious thinkers, Cohen imagines himself to be profound and original. I have never read a Cohen column and thought ‘I wish I had said that’ and I have never seen him write something I didn’t know. But I have frequently seen him write up the vapid stupidities of Sally Quinn’s salon and its ilk.
The point Cohen makes in his column is that Christie does not stand a chance in the Iowa caucuses where the GOP base is apologetically racist. Which is a point that I am sure nobody else thought of before except for everybody. And even then he is wrong. Romney won the Iowa caucuses in 2012 despite being a Mormon over Rick Santorum.
Christie does stand a chance of being nominated for the same reason Romney was nominated: he is the only GOP candidate with a chance of winning the presidential race.
I understand that some here think that Mr. Cohen is satirizing conservatives by suggesting that they think that their racism is a “conventional” view. These people have obviously not read enough of Mr. Cohen’s insanity, because that ascribes a level of subtlety and intelligence that has not been evident at any time in the past.
No, Cohen really is that stupid, and he really believes that the view he described is “conventional” and not necessarily confined to conservatives.
There are some who actually believe that this fool represents “liberal” views. In fact, he represents a conservative’s caricature of a liberal, sort of a reverse Stephen Colbert role without being at all funny. He doesn’t realize it’s an act even though he is doing it. I am personally so liberal that I would have been prosecuted in the 'fifties, and I have never agreed with Mr. Cohen on anything.
Adding my disclaimer, I am a US Army veteran (E-5, Honorable Discharge). Your patriotism may vary.
“Wow, that really strange phrase in this column has some weird racist overtones.”
“How dare you call some columnist I don’t know racist! Axe to grind! I am disappoint!”
Always funny to me that the immediate reaction to an implication of racism is a bunch of knee-jerk accusations of knee-jerking. For all the people complaining about how inaccurate the headline and OP are: try reading them again. The headline doesn’t imply anything about Cohen’s views and the OP makes it clear that Beschizza is making an inference on the basis of Cohen’s previous writing. It also makes clear what Beschizza is actually criticizing Cohen for (“the way it’s evasively projected onto “conventional” people is vile”).
Edit: The situation is only made more ridiculous when everyone making knee-jerk accusations of knee-jerking is prone to saying stuff like “No. You’re wrong. End of story. You look ridiculous.”
Fair enough, I did miss that on first reading.Though the original concern about the article seemed to focus on the gagging sentence without reference to the connection between that and the not racist claim. Maybe some of us just need things spelled out more clearly. But it was a comprehension fail on my part, sorry.
People hate each other for all sorts of stupid reasons. But most of what is CALLED racism is ACTUALLY cultural predjudice.
Heck, look at poitical faction hatred. Place a White Anglo-Saxon Prebyterian member of, say, FreeRepublic in the same room as a similarly WASPresbyterian member of DailyKos. The fight will be as vicious, if perhaps not as physical, as any other “racist/sexist/religionist/etc” fight you may name. . .
The various tribes of Humanity only sometimes have a basis in gross similarity of physical form. More of the tribes are based on some other discriminator. …
