I’ve been reading BB for years, but you have a point - I’ve never really noticed Rob’s editorial style (I’d find it much easier to tell you what sort of post Cory or Xeni or Maggie might write and what sort of subject they usually write about). I’ll watch out for that.
Not sure it matters whether this is a news site or not (I get news from it all the time) - I just felt that the summary Rob gave wasn’t helpful. It didn’t help me understand the subject matter which disappointed me - hence my earlier comment.
I think the third point isn’t aimed at me (hope not anyway) - I can’t answer the question but I would guess your premise is flawed.
It’s the opening gambit of the “racism isn’t a thing because race isn’t a thing, so you race peddlers who keep harping on race and bringing it up are the real racists” argument.
Wow that’s a classic racist trope to repeat “things that actual racists say (wink, wink),” including lots of classic antisemitic crap Cohen may have read.
It’s never “inbred degenerate bigots who hate America believe…”
The real giveaway is when racism is described as something “most people (average people, normal people, real Americans) believe this awful thing” and in this case Cohen say “People with conventional views…” with the message to the reader that they need to conform to the racist ideas that supposedly dominates the group.
I’m not racist. I am somewhat classist, which given how non-whites have been forced into the underclass sometimes causes me to make similar mistakes. I try very hard to fight it; knowing that I have the bad habit is the first step.
You mean like when Beschizza opens his first response in the comments by saying:
Yes, he elaborates on this statement, but I’m not sure discourse is well served by telling people that they may be robots: this doesn’t seem to leave much room for reasonable disagreement.
We say “mixed” or “multi” when asked, since we’ve found strangers and even many acquaintances don’t shut up (“what are you?”) until they get an answer that enables them to find the right box to put us in. Sometimes you just have to make it easy for other people…the kind who need things to be made easy for them.
I am confused by some of the discourse here.
Let’s go through the questionable sections
I don’t know of any conventional school of thought that looks at inter-racial marriages as nausea-inducing or avant-garde in today’s America, if conventional is widely held amongst a large group of people. Mr. Cohen clearly makes both of these statements.
If this is satire, making fun of hicks who are really racist but pretend not to be, I am confused about the use of the terms ‘conventional’ and ‘avant-garde’, neither of which communicate his sarcasm / mocking tone well. What ‘hick’ would talk like this? It reads directly as his voice, rather than mocking or a satiric view of another person’s point.
If he is telling us that the Iowan Republicans hold these views, his limit to those subgroups is very unclear. He starts the paragraph with the GOP and tea-party, and then goes into the ‘conventional’ view. Conventional conservatives? Conventional tea-party folks? Conventional Iowan Republicans? The first seems most likely, that he is starting by highlighting how the tea-party isn’t even racist, and conventional wisdom is held by a broader set of people.
I am left to agree with Rob. It is hard to believe a writer would employ such poor use of tone and structure to confuse us in this way, and leave us puzzled about whom he is talking about. Rather, it seems quite intentional.
Why would the WaPo leave it in? The almighty click.
Exactly, “If you (who are the true haters) stopped bringing race up, it would cease to become an issue.”
We’ve seen it before, we’ll see people victim-blaming and at the same time protecting of tribalist horrors, then hiding under the “well, I was just asking questions and being thought provoking, how dare you make these accusations.”
I sometimes think I have spent years unlearning what I learned earlier in my life. For instance, it was not George A. Custer who was attacked at the Little Bighorn. It was Custer — in a bad career move — who attacked the Indians. Much more important, slavery was not a benign institution in which mostly benevolent whites owned innocent and grateful blacks. Slavery was a lifetime’s condemnation to an often violent hell in which people were deprived of life, liberty and, too often, their own children.
[…]
Instead, beginning with school, I got a gauzy version. I learned that slavery was wrong, yes, that it was evil, no doubt, but really, that many blacks were sort of content. Slave owners were mostly nice people — fellow Americans, after all — and the sadistic Simon Legree was the concoction of that demented propagandist, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was a lie and she never — and this I remember clearly being told — had ventured south to see slavery for herself. I felt some relief at that because it meant that Tom had not been flogged to death.
[…]
It has been decades since the gauze was removed to show the horror of American slavery.
It does not seem like “it took until very recently for him to realize why slavery was bad”. It seems more like he was commenting on the teaching of slavery and how it sometimes gets presented as “not so bad”.
This is pretty much the standard dodge by contemporary overt racists. They’ll go through bizarre contortions to dodge the label “racist”, while making profoundly racist arguments. I’m not sure whether this is insanity, or simply a cynical rhetorical move. But it’s clearly racist.
I’m at something of a loss how Cohen wasn’t immediately fired for his column on Zimmermann’s murder of Trayvon Martin, in which he condones murdering people on the basis of how they dress, and expresses anger at politicians who wore hoodies to express solidarity with youth of color.
