Apparently I'm more pissed off than I thought

[drwex]

Today's NPR talk show on Texas (or rather, some kook fringe elements in Texas that even Gov Perry won't sing with) trying to secede got my blood boiling. I had to turn off the radio and think about why and here's what I came to:

This secession stuff is angry white racist stuff. It's angry white (mostly) men trying to get rid of all those nasty colored folks. Of which, naturally, the President is the biggest one. But look: Texas has had its entire state school system under court supervision for years because they (the Legislature) refuse to provide adequate funding for poorer school districts. For "poor" you can read "brown" or "Latino" as it pleases you.

Texas has also had the most redistricting plans rejected by courts of any state I can find. The reason the courts keep rejecting these plans is because they're (say it with me) racist. They are plans designed to marginalize and minimize the voting power of non-white people.

If you got rid of Federal oversight, the people running Texas would be free to de-fund poor and Latino-majority school systems. They'd be free to disenfranchise non-white folk. They'd be free to let white people go armed to the border and shoot those nasty brown people who try to cross it. This is what they mean when they say "free" - free from the interlopers in Washington who make them treat non-whites somewhat better.

Lest you think I'm making this up out of whole cloth remember that I lived in Texas for four years. Even though I lived in Austin, which is considerably more liberal than the rest of the state, it was still one of the most overtly racially segregated places I've ever been. There literally was a 'wrong side of the tracks' and I had real estate agents refuse to show us (a white couple) houses on THAT side of the tracks. Back then we could manage to get people like Ann Richards and Jim Hightower elected, which you sure couldn't do today.

I find it depressing and upsetting that the press (let alone NPR) is spending time on this nutball stuff and that nobody seems willing to call it for what it is: racism.

Comments

[hammercock.livejournal.com]

I heard some of that this morning as well. It's always seemed overtly racist to me, and I've never even spent more than a day in the state of Texas.

On the other hand, if they did secede, then perhaps we could remove all the bullshit that the Texas Board of Ed keeps cramming into the nation's textbooks. :-P

[trowa-barton.livejournal.com]

Think about that: If Texas secedes, then it would be treated as a foreign country, which means tariffs on imported textbooks and potential embargos. Imagine Texas trying to receive goods and services from the very Latinos in Mexico that they are discriminating against...

[drwex]

That thought has occurred to me. There's an upside to everything, I guess.

[dcltdw]

NPR has, at least for the past few years, bought into the whole "balanced" reporting meme that the MSM subscribes to as well, which is why you don't hear anyone on NPR calling a spade a spade.

Me, I'm kinda in favor of 1 secession and then 2 waging unrestricted economic warfare against those states. Except then my empathy kicks in, and I realize that a lot of innocent people would be hurt just because of a few unhappy racists, which makes me go "uh, nevermind, I'm being a petty jerk".

[whipchick.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you bring up this aspect--I've been thinking, "loony-tunes" and it hadn't occurred to me how much racism there is behind it. What I find odd is that this is not a government thing, this is a bunch of local people signing a petition. That is interesting, but has as much legal weight as any other internet petition. So I'm surprised that the media is taking them seriously at all. I'm not in the USA right now, what am I missing that's giving these people any sort of legitimacy? Why are they not being treated as idiots?

[drwex]

That's an excellent question for which I have no answer other than "everyone is tired of repeating the same five 'stories' in the news these days."

[gentlescholar.livejournal.com]

Well, there are a lot of racists saying to each other, "What NOW?" and so there is a lot of interest in seeing what new racist thing gains steam.
It took someone else mentioning it way back for me to realize that all those people are calling the President a "Muslim" because it is as close as they can safely get to "nigger."

As for the secession, I'd be all in favor of it except
a) it punishes all the decent people in those states
b) in 10 years or so we would have to invade them to stop slavery, and we've already done that. Those states are basically demonstrating that they still can't run themselves without adult supervision--even though this is the fringe in the news, they are symbolic of a whole lot of people who are closer to them than I would like.

[drwex]

Some time ago, Ta-Nesi Coates had a brilliant piece (that, sadly, i can no longer locate among his voluminous output) in The Atlantic on Obama and race. In it he said (I paraphrase) that America was enlightened enough to have elected an African-American but not enlightened enough to deal with having a black man as President. I think that's very true and insightful, as it locates the disjunction between those who talk about "post-racial" society and those for whom a man's skin color is always going to be a determining factor.

It's true that we're not post-racial but it's also true that there's a segment of America for which the entire CONCEPT of post-racial is null.

[halleyscomet.livejournal.com]

The legitimacy comes from a few places.

1. FOX is essentially the press wing of the GOP, and they actively built the Tea Party movement. The secession petitions play into their anti-Obama narrative.

2. The Tea Party and the racism that drives a good deal of it still controls the GOP. This is therefore seen as an indication of the state of the Tea Party Zeitgeist.

3. While the 9/11 attacks were devastating, most terrorist attacks on US soil are perpetrated by right wing white people, the very people advocating for secession. This could be an early warning sign of a resurgence of white supremacist domestic terrorist attacks.

[drwex]

1. I assume you saw this? http://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Latest-News-Wires/2012/1127/Fox-News-ends-interview-after-Thomas-Ricks-criticizes-network-video

Freaking hysterical.

2. I still don't think the Tea Party is in control. I think it's wide open right now as the Machine lost but the Tea Party still doesn't have a viable alternative. Once the recriminations are over and we start to see the jockeying for position to start the 2014 races we'll know more. I expect the T.P. to do well again but not so well as last time. They've picked off the low-hanging fruit and won't find many easy targets left within their own party. If they can't win primaries they can't advance their agenda. So, we'll see. I expect a great deal will depend on how things fall out over the so-called "fiscal cliff" and some other hot-button issues, such as whether or not Obama nominates Susan Rice for Sec'y of State and how those confirmation hearings go if he does. Personally I think there are better candidates but Obama may feel he can't back down to perceived pressure.

3. I'm not sure that the majority within the past decade have been r-w-w-p. You have the Fort Hood shootings by a non-white, and what else?

[intuition-ist.livejournal.com]

Interesting... I didn't notice the segregation overmuch when I was in Austin, but then again I was living in the student ghetto. There didn't seem to be a huge African-American presence at UT Austin, now that I think about it, but there were certainly lots of Hispanics. NC and most of the "Deep South" states are far more overtly racist (even now) than Texas. It's just that the nutbars in Texas think they can secede because of their history in becoming a state in the first place. There was certainly a vocal fringe movement of "hey, we're not *really* a state" when I was there.

[moechus.livejournal.com]

Maybe we should just admit that we were wrong to annex Texas and hand it back to Mexico.