Discovery!

I have been searching for awhile now for a way to address the often prejudiced and sometimes racist attitudes towards the president without provoking the usual shrill and hysterical reaction from the Right. I have now found such a way.

First of all, was that really the cover of the National Review? Yes it was.  Talk about a dog whistle! Chait is dead on right with his analysis in this piece. Here are some my favorite bits...

It is bizarre to ascribe haughtiness and a lack of a capacity for embarrassment to a president whose most recent notable public appearance was a profusely and even flamboyantly contrite press conference spent repeatedly confessing to “fumbles” and “mistakes.” Why would Hillyer believe such a factually bizarre thing? One answer is that, by the evidence of this column, Hillyer believes all sorts of factually bizarre things. But most African-Americans, and many liberal whites, would read Hillyer’s rant as the cultural heir to Northup’s overseer: a southern white reactionary enraged that a calm, dignified, educated black man has failed to prostrate himself.

But are Hillyer and other conservatives really that bad?

Before plunging further into a poisonously defensive racial debate, I should note that I feel certain Hillyer opposes slavery and legal segregation, and highly confident he abhors racial discrimination, and believes in his heart full economic and social equality for African-Americans would be a blessing. (More than two decades ago, Hillyer worked against the candidacy of David Duke.) His feeling of offense at Obama’s putative haughtiness (“chin jutting out”) might be a long-ago-imbibed white southern upbringing bubbling to the surface, but more likely a flailing partisan rage that could just as easily have been directed at a white Democrat.

You can accept the most benign account of his thought process – and I do – while still being struck by the simple fact that Hillyer finds nothing uncomfortable at all about wrapping himself in a racist trope. He is either unaware of the freighted connotation of calling a black man uppity, or he doesn’t care. In the absence of a racial slur or an explicitly bigoted attack, no racial alarm bells sound in his brain.

So, they are just ignorant and don't want to reflect and change. Shocking...

Of course, this part of a larger problem.

The broad social structure of white supremacy is not a part of the working conservative definition of racism. Conservatives see racism as a series of discrete acts of overt oppression. After slavery had disappeared, but before legal segregation had, conservatives considered it preposterous to claim that blacks suffered any systematic disadvantage in American life. 

Hence the recent racism is over tweet.  They simply can't out of the black-white mindset. If racism isn't over, then the blacks and liberal whites must be continually crying wolf and trying to get free hand outs or something.

Pay close attention to how the president is criticized by the Right. The framework for the criticism is exactly how Chait describes it.