Yes, this is a joke, but seriously, it’s getting just about that stupid, and not simply because George Zimmerman’s “black friend” swears he’s not racist (and that that whole “coon” thing he said about Trayvon Martin before he shot him was really “goon,” and that it was meant as a term of endearment, natch). Much more, it seems that everyone who ever says or does something blatantly racist to a black person is quick to wrap themselves in the cloak of their multicolored affinity networks, as if this provided the perfect inoculation against the charge that they were anything less than purely enlightened.

I’d like to think it’s because we’ve made progress — that this feigned ecumenism was the result of a real and abiding shame at the recognition of one’s biases, and the concomitant desire to front so as to maintain one’s own sense of decency. But sadly, I think it has nothing to do with any such societal evolution. Rather, it’s just a bunch of phony twaddle spread by those who are too stupid to know what racism is, or, alternately, so cunning as to hope that the rest of us are.

I mean really now, when even Daryl Dedmon (who ran over James Anderson in Mississippi a few months ago, after saying he wanted to “fuck with some niggers”), has friends who insist with straight faces that he’s not racist, and point to a couple of black associates as proof, you know that the black buddy defense is about as solid as goose shit and smells nearly as bad.

When a cop can call a black scholar a “banana-eating jungle monkey” and yet, still insist that he isn’t racist and has “no idea” where that language came from (hint: it’s racism, asshole), you know that some white folks are so congenitally ignorant as to disqualify themselves from either policing or association with remotely decent people.

When a Republican Party activist in San Bernadino sends around phony food stamp certificates, which she calls “Obama Bucks,” to her friends, and then swears this wasn’t racist — because even though they were adorned with prominent pictures of fried chicken, “everyone likes fried chicken” — you know before the sentence is even fully formed in her throat that she’s a lying crapsack.

When you come to political rallies carrying signs of the president dressed as an African witch doctor with a bone through his nose, or send around e-mails depicting the White House lawn covered in watermelons, or throw “ghetto parties” at your fraternity house, replete with blackface makeup, your claims of interracial camaraderie are not merely irrelevant to the suggestion that you just might be a racist, more to the point, they are blatant effing lies. The people who claim they have black friends and still do this kind of thing are liars, plain and simple. Every one of them. No exceptions.

How do I know? Easy. Every time I’m confronted with one of these people I ask them a series of questions, all of which are splendidly simple, yet, questions that they have never — not even one of them — been able to answer in a satisfactory manner.

First, and regarding their black friends, I ask the most obvious of all questions: Can you name them?

And not just first names please — I mean, who can’t think up “Jamal” or “Keisha” off the top of their head in a pinch — but rather, first and last name. After all, I know the first and last names of all my real friends, white, black, or otherwise.

If they manage to somehow get past this question — and only about a third do — I then ask them where their black friend (or friends if they’re really large-scale liars) grew up? After all, if asked this about a real friend, most of us would be able to answer with little trouble.

Then, for the handful who make it this far — and I mean they can be counted on a few fingers — I ask the final and ultimately fatal question.

Could you please dial their numbers on your cell phone for me, and let me speak to them?

Blank stares ensue, followed by something about how they don’t have their black friend’s numbers in their phones (unlike their white friends, whose numbers are right there, ready to be dialed or texted at a moment’s notice). So I ask for e-mail. Nope, they don’t know their e-mails either.

Mmm hmm… Of course not. And ya know why? Because they are lying.

They don’t have black friends. Not real ones at least. Knowing some black dude with whom you occasionally shoot hoops at the campus rec center does not mean you have a black friend. Engaging in small talk with a black person about your mutual affinity for hip-hop, does not mean you have a black friend. Telling the black person who just bussed your table at the restaurant “thank you,” sure as hell does not mean you have a black friend. Neither does it count if your kid happens to have a black teacher with whom you get along well at parent-teacher conferences, nor when you chat about your respective Final Four brackets with a black person around the office water cooler — nor even when, on occasion, you might go out with a bunch of your colleagues, including the darker among them, to a sports bar for wings and beer.

Friends are people with whom you share the multitude of pain and joy that life has to offer.

They are the people with whom you share real secrets, insecurities, fears, triumphs and defeats.

They are the people who know they could turn to you in a pinch, and to whom you could turn were the proverbial shoe on the other foot.

They are the people who — were they really in your life — would jack you up were you to say or do any of the incredibly stupid-ass things that you seem to do or say over and over again. And they are the kind of people that having jacked you up over your asshattery would make sure you knew exactly why you should never say or do that kind of thing again, or why, if you find it impossible to curb your stupid, should yet make damned certain never to use them and their friendship with you as a cover for your actions.

Of course — and here’s the bigger point — even if one does have black friends, this doesn’t mean that one is free from racial bias or could never act in such a way as to further racism. I mean, if personal closeness to people of color were all it took to insulate oneself from a charge of racism then, by definition, male heterosexuality would be the perfect defense against charges of sexism: to wit, all straight men could answer allegations of misogyny, no matter how blatant, with a simple, “but I’m married to a woman!” every time they ogled a woman’s breasts in public, called a woman a bitch, claimed that women who get raped “probably asked for it,” or ruminated about how no woman should be president because of, ya know, that whole menstrual cycle thing.

In short, personal affinity for someone who is of color, or a woman, or LGBT, or whatever, says nothing about how one views the larger group from which those individuals come. After all, there were many whites who supported enslavement and segregation as social systems, and yet, managed to conjure personal kindness for individual black people on a case-by-case basis. Their friendly relationships notwithstanding, they were complicit with evil, and thus, were themselves instruments of that evil. Whites who claim to have black friends (and perhaps even do), and yet view the larger black community with disdain, or view their black friends as exceptions to a general and more negative rule (like the ones who tell their black friends that they “don’t even think of them as black” as if that were a compliment rather than the prejudicial calumny it is), are indeed racists, however unwilling they may be to wear the label. Sadly, based on the social science research, this applies to most of us, for indeed, the white community in particular does (by our own admission) continue to adhere in large measure to any number of hostile and racist stereotypes about African Americans. That we may be willing to carve out a few exceptions — our own personal Cliff and Claire Huxtables — does nothing to alter this sad fact.

Even more distressing, the systemic inequalities that continue to plague our nation are capable of rendering even genuine interracial friendships moot by virtue of the fundamentally different treatment provided to those on the respective sides of that racial coin. So, for instance, I grew up with mostly black friends, for the first several years of my school experience. Having attended pre-school at an early childhood ed program at a Historically Black College (Tennessee State), most of my early peer group was black. It was black kids with whom I identified early on. It was black kids on whose ball teams I played. It was black kids with whom I hung out in the cafeteria, with only a few exceptions.

And yet, a few important facts are worth considering: facts that make those early friendships far less important to understanding my own racialized experience than they might otherwise seem.

First, my genuine affection for those friends did little or nothing to prevent them from experiencing institutional racism and race-based mistreatment in those schools. Routinely they would be punished more harshly than the white kids (myself included) for minor behavioral infractions, even though they committed those infractions no more frequently than we did. That we were friends did not imbue me with an understanding of what was happening, let alone the nerve at the time to speak out and interrupt the process to which they were being subjected. Likewise, most all the black children in those early grades — so many of whom were truly friends of mine — were tracked into basic and remedial level classes, while most all the white kids were tracked into advanced and honors classes, even though we showed no more promise (and sometimes quite a bit less) than they. And again, my closeness to those kids, personally, did not prevent me from taking advantage of my race-based privileges — or indeed, even allow me to notice that they were race-based privileges at the time — let alone to protest the unfairness of it all. So although the friendships were real, their impact on racism as a functioning social reality in the lives of my black friends, and myself, meant absolutely zip.

Second, and as I’ve written about elsewhere, my genuine connections to black people — in all likelihood far more extensive than 90 percent or more of all white Americans — did not provide an ablative hardening around my consciousness, which somehow prevented the entry of any and all racially-biased thoughts from time to time. I’ve caught myself having racist thoughts over the years, and though I have caught myself and interrupted the thoughts before they manifested as racist action, that doesn’t get me off the hook. It means that like anyone else, I am subject to the influences of my culture. It means that advertising works on us all, and in the case of racially prejudicial imagery, we’ve all been subjected to plenty of that advertising, so to speak. We can deal with that honestly and humbly — and resolve to do better tomorrow than we managed to do today — or, alternately, we can prevaricate and pretend that we haven’t a racist bone in our ostensibly colorblind bodies.

Finally, no matter how many friends of color we white folks may have, unless we are there to intervene every time they get unfairly stopped by a police officer, every time they get followed around at the mall on suspicion of shoplifting, every time they apply for a mortgage loan and face the risk of being charged higher interest, and every time they apply for a job, knowing that the employer may be looking at them as a walking, talking stereotype, then our friendships will mean pitifully little in the larger scheme of things. Only when those personal relationships translate into collective and committed action will they do black and brown folks much good.

And interestingly, white folks who are actually committed to that kind of action, and the change it would portend in the larger society, are the white folks who never feel the need to parade their interracial friendships in front of others, while the ones who wear their black and brown friends on their sleeves like trophies are the ones who rarely ever do a damned thing to alter the institutional patterns that subject said friends to myriad injustices.

Oh, and just so ya know: this is pretty much exactly what your black friends would tell you… that is, if you actually had any.

Little did we realize, however, that for at least some in the white community that prior era of glory was not merely the too-often-nostalgized 1950s — with its misremembered innocence still fresh in their minds — but rather, the 1850‘s. Not 1957, the year in which the CBS television network gave us Leave it to Beaver, but instead, 1857, the year in which the Supreme Court gave us its decision in Dred Scott.

But now we know.

It was there, after all, that the nation’s brightest, most accomplished and yet most ethically decrepit jurists reminded the nation that blacks “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” They could never be citizens, “entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guaranteed by (the Constitution),” because the framers of that document (to whom the Court referred as “great men,” “high in their sense of honor”) had never intended them such. And much like today’s conservative theorists, who are equally enamored of the so-called “jurisprudence of original intent,” the highest court, beholden as it was to the insipid moral views of 18th century white supremacists, insisted things must stay that way.

As the decision noted:

“[T]he legislation and histories of the times, and the language used in the Declaration of Independence, show, that neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves, nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used in that memorable instrument (the Constitution).

They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect…This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race. It was regarded as an axiom in morals as well as in politics, which no one thought of disputing, or supposed to be open to dispute; and men in every grade and position in society daily and habitually acted upon it in their private pursuits, as well as in matters of public concern, without doubting for a moment the correctness of this opinion.”

Importantly, and this is what is particularly relevant for our current discussion, the Court opined that blacks were clearly never intended to be considered citizens, for had they been so, such designation would have extended to such individuals the unacceptable right “to go where they pleased at every hour of the day or night without molestation, unless they committed some violation of law…”

And this is what brings us to the terrifying present, a period some 155 years later, but during which time it appears there are still far too many in the white community (and even some among persons of color) who would return us to the logic of Dred Scott. This they make clear from their hateful and bigoted musings about Trayvon Martin, a 17-year old black male who made the mistake, in their mind, of forgetting that he had no rights which white men (or even Latino white-male-wannabes like George Zimmerman) need respect. No right to go where he pleased, “without molestation,” no right to be treated like a citizen, indeed like a human being. No rights to due process, to peaceably assemble on a public street, to free speech (which he foolishly tried to exercise by asking his pursuer, Zimmerman, why he was following him), to be free from cruel and unusual punishment (such as extra-judicial execution for being black in a hoodie and thus arousing the suspicions of a paranoid negrophobe). No rights at all.

And not even the well-established right to self-defense — the very right Zimmerman would now claim for himself, but which apparently did not extend to the young man whose life he ended. And so we hear (whether true or not — it remains to be seen) that Zimmerman had a broken nose and head injuries, that Martin attacked him: never mind that Zimmerman took out after Martin, that Zimmerman accosted Martin and asked him what he was doing in the neighborhood, that, according to witnesses, it was Zimmerman who pinned Martin down. We are supposed to feel sorry for the shooter because even in the light most favorable to him, his victim might have actually fought back! Imagine that, fighting back against a total stranger who attacks you. That Martin would still be alive and Zimmerman would never have suffered the indignity of a broken septum, nor the anger of millions aimed in his direction had he just kept his stupid ass in his SUV like the police told him to do apparently matters not. Because, as some wish to remind us, Trayvon Martin had been suspended for school on suspicion of marijuana possession (an allegation so weak that he received no citation for the incident); and because Trayvon didn’t have a receipt for those Skittles he had in his possession when he was murdered (as if any 17 year old asks for a receipt when they purchase candy like they were going to need it for an expense report); and because Trayvon posed like a gangster on Facebook. Oh no, sorry, wrong Trayvon, but racists are like the Honey Badger–they don’t give a shit.

The active and putrescent campaign of defamation now in full swing against this dead child is a reminder of just how little black life matters to some. No matter the facts, their deaths are always justified.

These are the ideological soul mates of those who insisted Emmett Till really did say “Bye Baby” to that white woman, as if such an offense could even theoretically justify shooting him, tying a cotton gin fan to his neck with barbed wire, and tossing him in the Tallahatchie River.

No rights which the white man is bound to respect.

They are the iniquitous heirs of the white reprobates who insisted against all logic and evidence that Dick Rowland really did attack Sarah Page in that Tulsa elevator, and thus, it was necessary to burn the black Greenwood district of the city to the ground in retaliation.

No rights which the white man is bound to respect.

They are the fetid philosophical offspring of those whites who stood beneath the swinging bodies of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, whom they had lynched, content in their own certitude that they had — again, evidence be damned — raped a white woman.

No rights which the white man is bound to respect.

They are the vile and reeking progeny of those who insisted that even disrespecting white people was sufficient justification to affix black bodies to short ropes dangling from tall trees, to burn them with blowtorches, chop off body parts and sell them — or pictures of the carnage — as souvenirs.

No rights which the white man is bound to respect.

They are the odious inheritors of a time-honored and dreadful tradition, in which virtually no misdeed the target of which is black can simply be condemned for what it is, and then have such condemnation followed by a period at the end of the sentence. No, it is forever and always the case that such condemnations, when and if they issue at all, will inevitably be followed by a comma, and the word “but,” and the attempt, however clumsy and craven, to all but erase the condemnation in a word salad of imbecilic rhetoric and exculpatory exhortation.

They are the carelessly cogitating companions of those who seek to brush aside the killings of Amadou Diallo, Patrick Dorismond, or any of the hundreds of other folks of color, who comprise the disproportionate share of unarmed persons killed by law enforcement in city after city across America over the years. They are always to blame for their own deaths.

If they had just put their hands up, like they were asked.

If they had just not run.

If they had just answered the questions put to them politely and quickly.

If they had just not grabbed for their keys or wallet.

If they had just understood that the men dressed in plainclothes, pointing guns at them were police.

If they had just not worn those clothes, or that hairstyle.

If they just hadn’t seemed nervous.

If they just hadn’t fit the description of some criminal the police were looking for, and by “fit the description” we mean had they not been black or brown, between 5 foot 8 and 6 foot 6, walking upright.

Nothing is unacceptable to these people. Nothing. Their fear of blacks allows them to smooth over every bigoted crease in their racialized narrative, to make the indefensible defensible, in the name of their own perceived safety. Their pathological inability to look at black people as anything other than an undifferentiated mass of criminals, rather than encouraging us to condemn them for their utterly stupefying lack of discernment, and mentally diseased dysfunction, is to serve as a defense to every racist act. Black people are to bear the burden of everyone else’s mendacious and morally supine stupidity. Black people are to continue being profiled, suspected, and occasionally killed, so long as those conditioned by white supremacy are afraid of them. And that, we are to believe, is the fault of black people, not the rest of us.

Because black people have no rights that the white man is bound to respect.

A black president will have to prove, again and again, to the utter dissatisfaction of cretinous bottom-feeders, that he is really an American.

A black college student will have to prove, again and again, to the utter amazement of benighted white undergrads that he or she really does belong in the University community to which his or her entrance was secured.

A black teenager will have to prove that he isn’t a criminal, to the satisfaction of anyone who might think otherwise, lest they be tackled and shot.

And some of us will continue trying to prove — as if there could, any longer, be a question about it — that white privilege is real. That any feeling, remotely thinking person could dispute it, when no white mother is having to have the talk with their sons that black mothers across America are routinely having with theirs (both before and after the killing of Trayvon Martin) tells you all you need to know about denial and its impermeability. It tells you all you need to know about the America of 2012, relative to that of 1857. For however much things have changed since then, one thing remains the same.

Black people still have no rights which the white man is bound to respect.

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On the evening of February 26, George Zimmerman, a self-appointed “neighborhood watch captain” in an Orlando suburb, shot and killed 17-year old Trayvon Martin.

Because Martin was black.

And no, don’t even think of rolling your eyes at the suggestion. That is what happened, just as surely as so many might well be loathe to admit it.

Oh sure, he denies such a motivation, as does his family, but the details of the incident, now emerging from that evening leave very little question about it.

This was not, as we too often hear in the wake of such incidents, “a tragedy.”

This was not, as some would have it, “a terrible accident.”

It was murder, plain and simple. And it would be called such by everyone in a nation that had any commitment to honest language, which, sadly, would pretty much rule out the one in which Martin’s life began and ended, and in which Zimmerman continues to operate as a free man, unarrested by the police.

Trayvon Martin is dead because George Zimmerman believed his neighborhood needed and deserved to be protected from young black men, who could not possibly belong there, in his estimation. Never mind that Martin was in the community with his father, visiting friends. Never mind that Martin was armed only with Skittles and iced tea, while Zimmerman carried a loaded weapon.

Zimmerman, who has a history of aggressive behavior (including assaulting an officer a few years ago), appears to have something of a Dirty Harry syndrome about him. He is someone described by his own neighbors as overzealous, motivated by an obsessive desire to guard the perimeter of his community and pose as a crime-fighting hero to those around him. It doesn’t take much imagination to size up Zimmerman psychologically. He’s like so many other utterly unaccomplished males who fantasize about being a badass law officer, meting out justice to the ne’er-do-wells. He’s the kind of person who, if he weren’t playing at policeman, would be one of those guys fabricating stories of his war heroism, buying fake military uniforms and medals on eBay and telling strangers in bars how he single-handedly held off insurgents in Kandahar or some such shit. He’s one of those guys. If you’ve met one, you’ve met them all: a wannabe somebody with a gun permit and a healthy dose of amped up, testosterone-fueled anxiety about outsiders; and so too, in his case, it appears (not only from this incident but also from dozens of previous 9-1-1 calls he’d made), a consistent fear about black men, whom he seemed to consider, almost by definition, as not belonging in his neighborhood.

If Trayvon Martin had been, say, Todd Martin, a 17-year old white male, in the same neighborhood on the same evening, it wouldn’t have mattered that he was wearing a hoodie, looking at homes as he passed them by, or fiddling with his waistband. These, it should be noted, were the apparent indicators of criminality that Zimmerman felt compelled to share with the police during his 9-1-1 call, before opting to chase Martin himself, in brazen defiance of their explicit instruction to stay put. Had he been white, Martin’s humanity would have been clearly discernible to Zimmerman. But he was black, and male, and that alone inspired Zimmerman to conclude that there was “something wrong with this guy,” and that he appeared to be “on drugs,” a judgment Zimmerman felt qualified to render based on his extensive background in behavioral psychology, bested only by his prodigious law enforcement training, and by extensive and prodigious, in this case, I mean none whatsoever.

Indeed, if you do not know that Martin’s race (and more to the point, Zimmerman’s racism) is central to the former’s death at the hands of the latter, it may well be that you are incapable of ever comprehending even the most obvious manifestations of this nation’s longstanding racial drama. Worse still, it may suggest that you are so bereft of empathy as to render you morally and emotionally dangerous to decent people.

And by empathy here, I don’t mean merely the ability to feel for the family of this murdered child. I’m guessing most all can manage that much. Rather, I refer to the kind of empathy too rarely attainable, by whites in particular, in the case of black folks who insist, based on their entire life experience and the insight gained from that experience, that their rights to life and liberty are too often subject to the capricious whims of those with less melanin than they, and for reasons owing explicitly to the color of their skin.

Empathy — real empathy, not the situational and utterly phony kind that most any of us can muster when social convention calls for it — requires that one be able to place oneself in the shoes of another, and to consider the world as they must consider it. It requires that we be able to suspend our own culturally-ingrained disbelief long enough to explore the possibility that perhaps the world doesn’t work as we would have it, but rather as others have long insisted it did.

Empathy, which is always among the first casualties of racist thinking, mandates our acceptance of the possibility that maybe it isn’t those long targeted by oppression who are exaggerating the problem or making the proverbial mountain out of a molehill, but rather we who have underestimated the gravity of racial domination and subordination in this country, and reduced what are, in fact, Everest-sized peaks to ankle-high summits, and for our own purposes, rather than in the service of truth.

And please, let us have no more ignoble and dissembling rationalizations for Trayvon Martin’s death and Zimmerman’s killing of him. If you are one, like those firmly ensconced in the pathetic Sanford, Florida police department, trying against all logic and human feeling to square this pernicious circle, just stop it. That there had been a half-dozen or so break-ins in Zimmerman’s community, ostensibly orchestrated by black males matters not a whit. Likewise, that there was a string of robberies in my New Orleans neighborhood during my senior year of college, which were the handiwork of white men, would not have justified my being stopped by police every time I returned home from a late afternoon class, to say nothing of being accosted by some community asshole with a Charles Bronson complex. But of course, such an analogy is silly isn’t it? We all know that whites are never subjected to this kind of generalized suspicion, even when we do, indeed, fit the description of one or another bad guy on the loose. We are not all looked at sideways when yet another white male serial killer is at large, or yet another abortion clinic bomber. We don’t face police roadblocks in lily-white communities so as to catch drunk drivers, even though the data is quite clear that whites represent a disproportionate number and percentage of those driving under the influence.

As for Zimmerman’s claims of self-defense, that anyone could believe such a demonstrably transparent lie as this is stunning. Or rather it isn’t. It makes perfect sense in a nation where blackness and danger have long been considered synonymous, such that any black male over the age of perhaps 10 can “reasonably” be assumed a predator whose designs on decent people and their property are so concretized as to warrant virtually any measure invoked to monitor, control and incapacitate them. However much has changed in the U.S. since the 1960s, or for that matter the 1860s, make note of it that at least this much has not: black folks are still, in the eyes of far too many whites, a problem to be addressed, a riddle to be solved. And deprived of the old mechanisms of social control to which we were once so wedded — formal segregation, regular lynchings, forced sterilization, even enslavement — we have opted for the development of new forms: racial profiling, gated communities into which we shall police entry, zoning laws that limit who can live among us, and mass incarceration for non-violent drug offenses, among others.

Under what rational interpretation of self-defense could Zimmerman’s actions qualify? Zimmerman chased Martin down. Zimmerman tackled Martin after Martin demanded to know why Zimmerman was following him. Martin screamed for help. And Zimmerman shot him. Even if Martin fought back, how could such a thing — a quite reasonable response, it should be noted, to being attacked by a total stranger — justify pulling a gun, pulling the trigger and shooting the person who was acting in self-defense against you? To those who accept Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense, let us ask a simple question: would you be so willing to buy that argument if a black person were to chase down a white person in a mostly black neighborhood, and then upon catching him, end his life when the white person resisted being pummeled? You know full well the answer. We all do.

If I chase you and jump you, and you resist my assault, and in response to your resistance I kill you, I am the bad guy. Period. End of story. No exceptions, no prevarications, no ifs ands or buts. It’s me. Trayvon Martin is the innocent one here. He is the one who was acting in self-defense, when he resisted the assault of a total stranger, whose purposes for chasing him and accosting him made him rightfully afraid. After all, “neighborhood watch captains,” whether duly elected as such or just in their own heads (as seems to have been the case with Zimmerman), don’t wear official law enforcement uniforms, which might help identify them to the persons they may find themselves pursuing. And ya’ know why? Because despite their fervent and pre-adolescent desires to play cops and robbers like they used to do when they were eight years old, they are not cops. They are not even security guards. They are self-appointed enforcers with no authority whatsoever, save that which they have chosen to fabricate so as to make themselves feel more important.

Oh, and when you abuse that ill-gotten authority and take the life of a young black man in the process, you don’t get to be taken seriously when you swear that your actions couldn’t have been racist because, after all, you’re Latino (this being the latest fanciful insistence of Zimmerman’s family). Dear merciful Lord, what is that supposed to prove? Racism is not about the identity of the person acting it out so much as those upon whom it is acted, and for what purpose. There were black slave owners in the South, after all, and what of it? American slavery was a racist institution because it subordinated people based on racial identity, and was predicated on the notion of black inhumanity and white supremacy. That there were some black people who bought into both sets of lies does not acquit the institution of the charge of racism, nor those among the African American community who participated in it. So too, that there are persons of color who are just as anti-black in their thinking as many whites, pathetic and heartbreaking though it may be, means nothing and truthfully, should surprise no one.

It should be especially unsurprising that Zimmerman would have internalized racially-biased assumptions about black males, given the society in which he (and we) reside. And although this hardly lets him off the hook — one must be responsible for one’s own actions in any event, no matter the social contributors to those actions — it is worth noting a few things about the milieu in which this wannabe police officer was operating. In other words, Zimmerman’s culpability, while total and complete, is not solitary.

After all, we are a society in which research has shown quite conclusively that local newscasts overrepresent blacks as criminals, relative to their actual share of total crime, and overrepresent whites as victims, relative to our share of victimization.

A society in which other studies have shown that these racially-skewed newscasts have a direct relationship to widespread negative perceptions of black people. Indeed, a substantial percentage of anti-black racial hostility can be directly traced to media imagery, even after all other factors are considered.

A society in which the disproportionate incarceration of black males — especially for non-violent drug offenses, which they are no more likely (and often even less likely) than whites to commit — feeds the perception that they are so treated because they are dangerous and must be kept at bay.

A society in which criminality is so associated with blackness that whites literally and almost instantly connect the two things in survey after survey, and study after study, even though we are roughly 5 times as likely to be criminally victimized by another white person as by a black person.

A society in which anti-black racism has been so long ingrained that not only most whites, but also most Latinos and Asian Americans, demonstrate substantial subconscious bias against African Americans in study after study of implicit racial hostility (and even about a third of blacks themselves demonstrate anti-black racism).

George Zimmerman was very simply taught to fear black men by his society, and he learned his lessons well. And while he must be punished for his transgressions — and hopefully will be, now that the Justice Department is investigating and a Grand Jury is being convened — let there be no mistake, he cannot and should not take the fall alone for that which stems so directly from a larger social and cultural narrative to which he (and all of us) have been subjected.

Black males are, for far too many in America, a racial Rorschach test, onto which we instantaneously graft our own perceptions and assumptions, virtually none of them good. Look, a black man on your street! Quick, what do you see? A criminal. Look, a black man on the corner! Quick, what do you see? A drug dealer. Look, a black man in a suit, in a corporate office! Quick, what do you see? An affirmative action case who probably got the job over a more qualified white man. And if you don’t believe that this is what we do — what you do — then ask yourself why 95 percent of whites, when asked to envision a drug user, admit to picturing a black person, even though blacks are only 13 percent of users, compared to about 70 percent who are white? Ask yourself why whites who are hooked up to brain scan monitors and then shown subliminal images of black men — too quickly for the conscious mind to even process what it saw — show a dramatic surge of activity in that part of the brain that reacts to fear and anxiety? Ask yourself why whites continue to believe that we are the most discriminated against group in America — and that folks of color are “taking our jobs” — even as we remain roughly half as likely to be out of work and a third as likely to be poor as those persons of color. Even when only comparing persons with college degrees, black unemployment is about double the white rate, Latino unemployment about 50 percent higher, and Asian American unemployment about a third higher than their white counterparts.

George Zimmerman must be held accountable for his actions, and hopefully he will be. Innocent until proven guilty of course, there is a process for determining matters of formal legal responsibility, and may that process now move forward to a just conclusion. But beyond the matter of legal guilt or innocence, beyond that which can be addressed in a court of law — one way or the other — there is a bigger issue here, and it is one that cannot be resolved by a jury, be it Grand or otherwise, nor by judges or prosecutors. It is the none-too-minor matter of the monster we as a nation have created, not only apparently in the heart of George Zimmerman, but in the minds of millions: individuals far too quick to rationalize any injustice so long as the victim has a black face; persons for whom no act of racially-biased misconduct qualifies as racist; persons who have allowed their own fears, anxieties and occasionally even hatreds to numb them, to inure them to the pain and suffering of the so-called other.

Yesterday, I received an e-mail from someone suggesting that perhaps we should begin to sport buttons like those that became so ubiquitous in the case of Troy Davis last year. You know the buttons, right? The ones that said: “I am Troy Davis.” The ones that aimed at solidarity with an unjustly executed man, but which, on the lapels and t-shirts of white people seemed, to me at least, more banal and offensive than anything else, since we were not, in fact (and would not likely ever be) in the position of Troy Davis. And while in this case too, I understand the sentiment and appreciate the real compassion underlying the suggestion — or the no-doubt-soon-to-be-witnessed insertion of Trayvon Martin’s name in many a Facebook profile handle — I feel that perhaps we who are white should remind ourselves, before we jump on either bandwagon, that unfortunately, we are much less like Trayvon Martin and much more like George Zimmerman.

And that is the problem.

For sources pertinent to the various data and study claims made in this piece, please see Tim Wise’s 2010 book, Colorblind: The Rise of Post-Racial Politics and the Retreat from Racial Equity. To join the call for a serious Justice Department investigation into the killing of Trayvon Martin, please sign this petition at ColorOfChange.org

Never mind his decades-long association with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

Neither of these connections will matter once you get a load of what I’ve uncovered: a linkage between the president and someone at least as radical if not more so than either of those. A man whom President Obama has openly praised, and not just twenty-two years ago at some fairly innocuous law school protest, but regularly, in his books, in his speeches, repeatedly, over the course of his political career. Someone whom he has still never repudiated, as he did with Wright, no matter the many statements this individual is on record as making, and which line up rather nicely with many of Wright’s views.

What does this radical for whom Obama has shown so much gushing and uncritical praise, say about economic issues? Only that capitalism is a system “permitting necessities to be taken from the many to give luxuries to the few,” and that, “Something is wrong with capitalism…Maybe America must move towards democratic socialism.”

What does this militant, for whom the president shows so much love, say about white folks and race in America? Only that “Racism is a way of life for the vast majority of white Americans, spoken and unspoken, acknowledged and denied, subtle and sometimes not so subtle — the disease of racism permeates and poisons a whole body politic,” and that whites largely refuse to acknowledge “the debt that they owe a people who were kept in slavery,” for hundreds of years.

What is the position of this dangerous subversive to whom Barack Obama is clearly tethered, when it comes to the role of the United States in the world? Only that, “We’ve committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I’m going to continue to say it. And we won’t stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation.”

There is more, much more in fact: pointed condemnations of white racism and arrogance, trenchant critiques of American nationalism and patriotism, and withering bromides against the wealthy, all from a man whom Barack Obama praises often, and apparently regards as something of a national role model.

Indeed, he said as much a few months ago, when he dedicated a monument to this man on the Mall in Washington — the recently unveiled statue for Martin Luther King Jr.

One can only wonder how Andrew Breitbart would have spun this, or how Sean Hannity might still. But then again, we do know how the right would handle such material. We know that they won’t touch it at all. Despite King’s radicalism — a radicalism about which most Americans remain unaware thanks to our four-decades long sanitizing of his work and message — the right will and must remain silent on this score, lest they bump up against the obvious: namely, that King is iconic (as well he should be), and as close to a secular Saint as one can get.

But while the right will no doubt avoid smearing King, they have no trouble condemning others whose views, about U.S. foreign policy, racism and economic justice largely mirror his own. It is as if they believe anyone who dares note the ongoing reality of racism (as Bell did until his death), or the role the United States has played in propping up dictatorships and collaborating with human rights abuses abroad (as Wright did in the various sermons that brought down nationalistic jeremiads upon his head back in 2008), is ipso facto a racist and a traitor. To mention racism makes one racist. To speak of injustice in your own nation makes you un-American.

It is a position ultimately requiring the right to believe that most all black people in the country are racist against white people and fundamentally treasonous, since most African Americans do indeed believe racism to be a real and persistent problem and since most continue to insist that there are various injustices afoot in the nation’s economic and justice systems. If believing these things makes one racist, then most all people of color would have to be written off as such. Likewise, the entire civil rights movement would have to be considered racist, for daring to criticize the United States and its white population for its foot-dragging lethargy with regard to ending segregation.

Let’s remember, just as whites today largely deny that racism is an obstacle for people of color — and thus, consider it anti-white bigotry to tell them otherwise — so too, when the movement of which Dr. King was such a central part was forcing America to look at itself and the evil it perpetrated daily, most whites didn’t see what all the fuss was about. Polls in the early ’60s, before the passage of various civil rights laws, found that most whites (between 63 and 85 percent depending on the wording of the question) thought blacks were treated equally in their communities with regard to housing, jobs and education. So if condemning racism makes one racist, just because white folks disagree with the assessment of social reality being put forward by black people, we would have to conclude that the movement led by King was racist too, just as we are presumably to conclude about the positions of people like Derrick Bell, Jeremiah Wright and most all African Americans today.

If the right wants to argue the points made by persons like Bell, Wright, most all folks of color or those of us in the white community who echo their concerns, so be it. They are free to do so. Decent people can disagree about the extent and force of racial discrimination in the modern era. But to suggest that it is by definition racist against white people to believe in the persistence of racism against persons of color is intellectually obscene. It is an argument intended to shut down debate, to cow people of color into remaining silent about their own lived experiences, to make whites into victims of black and brown reality — in other words, it is an attempt to invert the structure of oppression, by suggesting that whites are more victimized by the feelings of people of color than people of color are victimized by the actions of white people and the institutions within which we exercise so much disproportionate control. It is an attempt to make it, in effect, an inexcusable moral crime to merely engage in thinking while black.

That conservatives condemn Bell, Wright, and others for speaking forcefully about racism in America, while ignoring the equally strident positions of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement itself, proves beyond question that the right lacks anything remotely approaching a consistent ethical core. If their positions were principled, rather than the stuff of crass and opportunistic politics, they would stand up and condemn Martin Luther King, Jr., and those who praise him. That’s what conservatives used to do, after all, when King was still alive: every one of them, without a single solitary exception. All the conservative press, their foot-soliders at the grass-roots level, their national standard bearer in the form of Barry Goldwater, all of them opposed the movement. If they were still operating from a position of principle (albeit a ghastly one to behold), they would have opposed the statue for King on the Mall. They would condemn Representative John Lewis for having been a part of the movement and for his own personal associations with King. They would bash Obama for daring to praise King.

At least back in the day the right was consistent. They reviled the civil rights struggle. They stood with the segregationists, openly. Today, the right plays games with race: using coded language to smear a black president, playing upon racial anxieties about immigration, welfare spending, ethnic studies programs, affirmative action, and textbooks that dare to tell the truth about racism in American history. They prevaricate as if racial dishonesty were tantamount to a religious sacrament.

And still, they can produce no one as towering in their greatness or as capable of moving Americans as a Dr. King.

That must hurt. To know that while we on the left have heroes like that, they must make do with John Wayne, Jerry Falwell, James O’Keefe and the recently departed Andrew Breitbart.

As the saying goes, haters gonna hate. But at least they could do us all a favor and apply their hate consistently.

What is Post-Racial? Reflections on Denial and Reality

Short (for me), but to the point and easily digested, with hyperlinks to sources provided…

As I cruised along, I was only partially mindful of the social, cultural, and as of late, racial meaning of this roadway. I vaguely remember, as if tucked away in some far region of my conscious mind, the reports from about a decade ago, in which it was noted that this particular corridor was especially notorious for racial profiling. I remember, again, vaguely, that in the mid-to-late ’90s this stretch of road was the scene of an all-too-common injustice, in which a disproportionate number of black motorists were stopped and had their cars searched, despite being no more likely to possess illegal contraband than drivers of other races.

To be specific: about 70 percent of those pulled over by state troopers on this portion of I-95 were black, despite African Americans comprising only about 20 percent of all drivers and those speeding or breaking other laws on this road. Such disproportionality was hardly confined to I-95 in Maryland of course — similar problems have been documented in Florida, New Jersey, Louisiana, Missouri and elsewhere — but it was this part of the nation’s interstate highway system that, for a while at least, had commanded the attention of the courts, thanks to a successful lawsuit brought by the ACLU on behalf of black motorists.

Since the time of that suit, I haven’t seen much in the way of new studies, or claims of profiling along I-95. Yet, given the anecdotal reports that one can hear from large percentages of persons of color who drive this or any other thoroughfare in America, it seems reasonable to suspect that the practice continues, albeit perhaps a bit less blatantly than before. National data still suggests, for instance, that black and Latino motorists are stopped and searched in far greater percentages than whites, even though they are less likely to actually have illegal drugs or other items on them than whites are.

But sometimes, even in the absence of hard quantitative evidence that something pernicious is going on, you can have one of those experiences that clues you in to the presence of something amiss. And driving down I-95, still on the Maryland side of the Delaware line, I was to have such an experience: the flipside, if you will, of racial profiling.

So it is at this point that I should probably make note of the fact that not only was I in a GMC Yukon, but it was a brand new Yukon, with shiny black paint and tinted windows — windows that were just dark enough to make it a bit difficult for one to discern, from the outside, the physical features of the driver behind the wheel or any passengers therein.

About 20 minutes before crossing into Delaware, I passed two state patrol cars, parked in the median between the North- and Southbound lanes, their respective drivers pointing their speed guns at oncoming traffic in either direction. As I had approached them I noted that I was hurtling along at slightly above the speed limit, but not by much — perhaps four or five miles faster than that which was legally protected — and certainly not by an amount that would normally trigger a ticket or even a stop by police. Nonetheless, as I approached I slowed a bit, so that by the time I reached the cars and passed them, I was driving at exactly the legal limit, along with the rest of traffic, equally mindful, I would imagine, of the presence of law enforcement.

Instinctively I look in the rear view mirror whenever I pass a police car, a habit that I suspect is not mine alone. Even when I know I have done nothing wrong, I do it, more or less on reflex. Cops make me nervous and always have, even though as a white man my reasons for such skittishness in their presence are far less rational than they would be for almost anyone else.

This time, as I looked in the mirror I saw — as is usually the case — the officer remain put, apparently having not clocked me going at a pace that would have necessitated a pullover. Relieved I averted my gaze from the mirror and returned my focus to the road ahead. Then, as if out of nowhere, I glanced back up and noticed a car advancing on me from a distance at a high rate of speed. At first I couldn’t tell that the approaching vehicle was a police cruiser, let alone the very cruiser I had eclipsed just a few moments earlier. Thinking it was someone wanting to pass, I moved over to the middle lane, leaving the lefthand lane open for whomever was in such a hurry.

But then, rather than pass, the car — the official provenance and inhabitants of which I now recognized — slowed to match my speed and pulled up parallel to the Yukon. Puzzled by this behavior, especially since the officers had not put on their lights, and thus, had done nothing to suggest that I had violated any rule of the road, I turned and looked at them. Perhaps they wanted to tell me that I had something hanging out of the rear of the SUV, or that I had a tire going flat, or something else, ya know, helpful like that.

But no. As I looked into the passenger side window of the cruiser, the reason for which it had pulled alongside me became obvious. The officer riding shotgun peered into my window, his hand just above his eyes so as to block the glare of the bright January sun. It took all of three seconds for him to get a good look at me, aided in that process by my own decision to turn towards him to see what all the fuss was about. A look of recognition — and, frankly, disappointment — washed over his face, right before he turned to his partner behind the wheel, shook his head in an easily readable “no” motion, and pointed to the quickly approaching turn-around spot in the median, as if to suggest that they should turn back around. Nothing to see here. Not having found what (or more to the point, whom) they were searching for, they did just that, and headed back south, presumably to join the stake-out spot where they had been perched previously.

Now, there is no way to know for sure what this interaction (or non-interaction as the case may be) meant. To suggest that there was anything racial about it — for instance, that the officers were hoping I was a man of color so they could pull me over on suspicion of something — will likely provoke howls of righteous indignation from those who deny the problem of profiling, or who accuse people of color and whites like myself of “making everything about race.” But that said, I would ask that you keep an open mind and just think for a second about the incident objectively.

Might they have been looking for a specific criminal suspect (white or of color), driving in a black late-model Yukon, and merely needed to get a visual to ascertain whether I was he? Sure. That’s possible. But given that there were two cars parked side by side in the median, facing opposite directions, both with speed guns focused on passerby mitigates against it. They were, from all reasonable inferences, looking for vehicles that were speeding. I was not speeding. Had I been, and they had decided to come after me as they did, they would have pulled me over and given me at least a warning if not a ticket. That they left a speed checkpoint to chase me and then, having gotten a look at my face, gave up and went back to square one, suggests they were looking for something else. And given the history of that roadway, policing in America, and race in the same, it is not at all untoward to suspect that my white skin was not that something.

But here’s what I know for sure, and what I hope all of us are willing to consider. Whether or not those officers were hoping to be able to pull over a man of color, and whether or not they would have done so, had I been such a man, isn’t really the important thing. What matters is that at no point would I, a white man, ever have to fear as I travelled that or any other interstate or road anywhere in my country, that my color alone might trigger sufficient suspicion in the eyes of law enforcement so as to warrant a stop, even when I had done nothing illegal. That is not a luxury possessed by anyone who is black or Latino in this country — their country — and that matters.

Had I been a man of color, heading to Delaware that day for a speech corresponding to what has now become a week-long commemoration of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday — a possibility to be sure, given that most speakers for such events are people of color — how might the incident have differed? I don’t mean differed in the sense that I would have necessarily been pulled over. Again, maybe they weren’t looking for a black person. Maybe they were looking for a white female who had just robbed a bank and escaped in a black Yukon. But how might it have differed psychologically and even physiologically, as I, the black man, glanced into my rear-view and spied the police cruiser advancing on me at a high rate of speed? As I saw it pull even with me and then stay there? As I looked to my left and saw the white man with the badge, the gun, and the full authority of the state behind him, staring into my eyes, calculating in that moment whether I was the one, wondering if perhaps I might have a wheel-well filled with drugs, or a gun under the seat despite nothing but my skin to even remotely imply that either of these things might be true?

No matter how much money I might have, what size home, what kind of job, what beautiful and perfectly functional family, or my level of education, were I a black man in that situation (or a Latino in this era of generalized suspicion towards brown folks as de facto undocumented) everything would have been different, from my heart rate to the anxiety-related activity in my amygdala to the tightening of my muscles to the lump in my throat. And while these may appear to most whites as momentary discomforts with no larger import, imagine those kinds of experiences happening not once or twice, but regularly over a year, two years, a life. Imagine the uncertainty, the trepidation, the second-guessing of every glance, comment, or stare, made necessary by a lifetime lived in self-defense mode, the need for keen observation and interpretation of the most mundane interracial encounters made as critical to your safety and survival as nutrition, as vital as love.

See, that’s what race means, even now, and that is what (among so many other things) gives the lie to all claims of post-raciality made by those who refuse to feel what people of color are all too willing to tell them, if only they could hear. That some must contend with almost daily reminders that they are perpetual outsiders, perpetual suspects, perpetually in need of proving their belonging — indeed their very humanity — while others need not concern themselves with such things, leaves the latter with an edge, however subtle, and the former with a weighty and pernicious hindrance, the consequences of which cannot be overstated. To know that one can not only drive without subjecting oneself to presumptions that one is less-than, but also apply for jobs or loans while knowing the same, or raise one’s hand in class, hoping to demonstrate one’s brilliance to the teacher, similarly secure in the knowledge that that teacher will not ever see the hand as belonging to a walking, talking stereotype of incapacity matters. In a society as fully in thrall to bloodthirsty competition as ours, such an edge can make all the difference. It frees up cognitive space for problem solving rather than worry, and for confidence rather than self-doubt.

That advantage — one might even say, privilege — of being seen first as an individual rather than as the member of a defective and problematic group, can even be the difference between life and death. And here I am not merely referring to the way in which so many people of color have been killed by police who saw their cell phones, keys, or merely black skin as evidence of danger and shot first, only to ask questions never. Here I am referring to the way that black and brown folks who are fortunate enough not to go the way of Sean Bell, or Amadou Diallo or so many others, nonetheless have their lives shortened by the racialized stresses that flow from life lived as a problem.

Years of research about which most have no awareness — because it doesn’t make the news — tells us that the daily coping with racialization, which people of color learn to do from an early age, but which whites rarely if ever experience, leaves scars. It contributes to the excess release of stress hormones in the black and brown body, causing something called allostatic load — a reference to the short-circuiting of the body’s natural defenses against anxiety-producing events and traumas. That allostatic load then corresponds to higher blood pressure, higher rates of heart disease, and early death. The research has found that even affluent black folks have higher markers for allostatic load than poor whites, despite the real stresses that the latter contend with each day.

In a nation that was even remotely interested in becoming “post-racial,” let alone one that was well on its way to being there, one would imagine that issues like this — like the lives of millions of Americans, compromised by racial injustice — might register on the radar screens of all persons seeking to be president. That it might register in the discussions about health and health care, or criminal justice. That it might at least rate as highly on the measures of political importance as, say, cutting the capital gains tax or colonizing the moon.

But it doesn’t. It never has. And unless and until we stand up and demand otherwise, it never will.

Attention to all self-proclaimed liberals and progressives.

I would like to properly introduce you to a man about whom you’ve heard much — especially from his enemies and those who prefer a continuation of the status quo — but at whom you might wish to take a second look, and whom you might consider supporting for president.

Unlike Barack Obama, he supports an immediate end to our current and ongoing wars abroad.

Unlike Barack Obama, he supports an end to predator drone attacks by the United States military, which kill innocent civilians and foment growing hatred of America. He believes that the so-called “war on terror” as we’ve engaged it has undermined American freedoms at home and contributed to greater tensions and anti-American sentiment abroad.

Unlike Barack Obama, he supports an entirely revamped Middle East policy, in which the U.S. will no longer subsidize the oppression of the Palestinian people by the state of Israel.

Unlike Barack Obama, he supports either abolishing or fundamentally reforming the Federal Reserve system, and he opposed bailing out the banks with public funds.

Unlike Barack Obama, this individual opposes government spying and believes in absolute freedom of speech and the press, and as he puts it, “reduced government intrusion into our lives.”

Clearly, with such a progressive vision, no one of the left would want to pass up the opportunity to support a candidate such as this for president! Surely it would be a vast improvement over Barack Obama, that Wall Street- friendly, imperialistic, war-monger, who promised to close Guantanamo but didn’t, among other unforgivable crimes.

So by all means, let’s get behind someone who will close down the national security state, stand up for civil liberties, and stop handing out money to bankers.

Ladies and Gentlemen of the left, I give you your perfect candidate for 2012:

David Duke.

Oh I’m sorry, did you think I was talking about someone else?

Yes, that David Duke: former head of the nation’s largest Ku Klux Klan group and lifelong neo-Nazi, who once said Jews should go into the ashbin of history, and that it would be possible to do what Hitler did, even in America, if white supremacists could just “put the right package together.”

But ya know that whole racist thing doesn’t matter, right? Because he’s against wiretapping.

I mean, yeah, he has analogized Jews to cancer, has called for the partition of the United States into distinct racial sub-nations, and believes in a eugenics program to create an Aryan master race. But who cares? Because he’s against the Patriot Act.

And hey, I mean, let’s be real, none of that really awful stuff he believes in — ya know, like the racial sub-nations, or the eugenics, or the sterilization of welfare recipients, or the whole Hitler-in-America thing, could really happen. I mean, Congress would never agree to all that stuff. So the fact that Duke believes so many truly horrible, inexcusable, thoroughly fucked up, one might even say evil things, shouldn’t deter us from praising him, or even supporting him for president. We have to stop Obama: that spineless coward who didn’t stand up for single-payer. And no, Duke wouldn’t support single payer either. But so what? At least he’d tell the TSA to back off with their whole nudie-picture-body-scans-at-the-airport thing. And that’s what really matters.

And he’d end that Iraq war. Yes, I know, it’s already ending, but he’d end it faster. Like tomorrow. Because ya know, that’s possible: A president can just snap his fingers and poof! The troops all suddenly appear at Andrews Air Force base! It’s fucking magic!

And he’d shut down the Fed! Woo-hoo! That would be awesome: so then interest rates and the money supply could be controlled entirely by private banks, without even a theoretical modicum of public accountability! What progressive wouldn’t love that? And sure, the Fed was created by an act of Congress, but that doesn’t matter: a president with the determination of David Duke can just snap his fingers and poof! All the central bankers will be begging on the streets for change! Like I said, it’s fucking magic!

So yes, he may want to abolish all welfare programs for the poor; and he may want to crack down on immigrants who are trying to make their lives better, by repealing birthright citizenship as guaranteed in the Fourteenth Amendment and militarizing the border; and he might want to repeal Roe v. Wade, by way of a constitutional amendment that would grant full personhood status to zygotes, thereby limiting the reproductive freedom of women; and he may want to slash taxes on the rich, and give tax breaks to parents who want to homeschool their kids and perhaps teach them that dinosaurs and humans co-existed, but who cares? He’s a straight-shooter who stands on principle and will shake up the system and break the political stranglehold exercised currently by the approved establishment candidates. Take that! Zip-Zow!

Alright, enough. Can we just cut the crap?

Even a broken clock is right twice a day, and even the most retrograde political candidates are capable of stringing together a few ideas that make sense. Even David “The Holocaust was made up by some Jewish script writer in Hollywood,” Duke.

And yes, I realize that Ron Paul — this election season’s physical embodiment of the broken clock — is not, literally, as bad as David Duke. Yes, he supports all those incredibly ass-backwards policies rattled off above (about welfare, immigration, abortion, taxes and education), but he is not, like Duke, a Nazi. He is supported by Nazis, like Stormfront — the nation’s largest white nationalist outfit, which is led by Don Black, who’s one of Duke’s best friends, and is married to Duke’s ex-wife, and is Duke’s daughters’ step-dad — but I’m sure that’s just a coincidence. Surely it’s not because Paul wants to repeal the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act, and allow companies to discriminate in the name of “free association.” And it couldn’t have anything to do with those newsletters that went out under his name, with all kinds of blatantly bigoted commentary about black people being IQ-deficient predators, at a time when he was promoting those very newsletters (and so, presumably, reading them), and not objecting in the least.

Yet to the so-called progressives who sing the praises of Ron Paul, all because of his views on domestic spying, bailouts for banksters, and military intervention abroad, the fact that 90 percent of his political platform is right-wing boilerplate about slashing taxes on the rich, slashing programs for the poor and working class, breaking unions, drilling for oil anywhere and everywhere, and privatizing everything from retirement programs to health care doesn’t matter: the fact that he’ll ostensibly legalize drugs is enough. And this is so, even though he has merely said he would leave drug laws up to the states (which means 49 separate drug wars, everywhere except maybe Vermont, so ya know, congrats hippies!), and he would oppose spending public money on drug rehab or education, both of which you’d need more of if drugs were legalized, but why let little details like that bother you?

Yessir, legal weed and an end to the TSA: enough to make some supposed leftists ignore everything else Ron Paul has ever said, and ignore the fundamental incompatibility of Ayn Randian thinking with anything remotely resembling a progressive or even humane worldview. And this is so, even though he wouldn’t actually have the authority to end the TSA as president, a slight glitch that is conveniently ignored by those who are desperate to once again be able to take large bottles of shaving gel onto airplanes in the name of “liberty.”

I want those of you who are seriously singing Paul’s praises, while calling yourself progressive or left to ask what it signifies — not about Ron Paul, but about you — that you can look the rest of us in the eye, your political colleagues and allies, and say, in effect, “Well, he might be a little racist, but…

How do you think that sounds to black people, without whom no remotely progressive candidate stands a chance of winning shit in this country at a national level? How does it sound to them — a group that has been more loyal to progressive and left politics than any group in this country — when you praise a man who opposes probably the single most important piece of legislation ever passed in this country, and whose position on the right of businesses to discriminate, places him on the side of the segregated lunchcounter owners? And how do you think they take it that you praise this man, or possibly even support him for president, all so as to teach the black guy currently in the office a lesson for failing to live up to your expectations?

How do you think it sounds to them, right now, this week, as we prepare to mark the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, that you claim to be progressive, and yet you are praising or even encouraging support for a man who voted against that holiday, who opposes almost every aspect of King’s public policy agenda, and the crowning achievements of the movement he helped lead?

My guess is that you don’t think about this at all. Because you don’t have to. One guess as to why not.

It’s the same reason you don’t have to think about how it sounds to most women — and damned near all progressive women — when you praise Paul openly despite his views on reproductive freedom, and even sexual harassment, which Paul has said should not even be an issue for the courts. He thinks women who are harassed on the job should just quit. In other words, “Yeah, he might be a little bit sexist, but…”

It’s the same reason you don’t have to really sweat the fact that he would love to cut important social programs for poor people. And you don’t have to worry about how it sounds to them that you would claim to be progressive, while encouraging support for a guy who would pull what minimal safety net still exists from under them, and leave it to private charities to fill the gap. And we all know why you don’t have to worry about it. Because you aren’t them. You aren’t the ones who would be affected. You’ll never be them. I doubt you even know anyone like that. People who are that poor don’t follow you on Twitter.

There is a reason why Ron Paul rallies, and the street-corner Paul-supporting pseudo-flash mobs are overwhelmingly, disproportionately comprised of white, middle class men. And it matters. Surely it is not because white, middle class men are more likely than others to oppose war, torture, drone killings of Muslim children, or bailouts of rich bankers. It is not because white, middle class men are more progressive when it comes to civil liberties than women, poor people or folks of color. Indeed, the opposite is true.

I’ve talked with them on numerous occasions, these Paul devotees, with their “Who is John Galt?” signs, with their 20-minute spiels about why it’s so important to invest in gold, and whispered assurances that “they” will never tell you the truth about the Illuminati, or the Rothschilds, or the Bilderbergers, or Tower 7, or vitamin supplements. They never talk about the institutional racism at the heart of the drug war. They never talk about how we need to rethink the war on terror (except insofar as it inconveniences them to be body scanned at the airport, when everyone knows, we should just be checking brown-skinned men in turbans). These guys are largely attracted to Paul because he’ll get government off their backs, by lowering their taxes, cutting spending that helps poor people whom they regard as lazy, ending the “suffocating” regulations that they believe stifle innovation, and vouchsafing their God-given right to own any and all manner of assault rifle they desire, the latter of which they simply “know” President Obama is going to forcibly confiscate, along with their handguns, rifles, and maybe even Super-Soakers any day now.

In short, regardless of what Paul may believe on certain issues, and which may fall squarely in the orbit of that which is progressive or left, his hard-core acolytes (and the ones who would be empowered most by his success) are anything but that. They want the government to stop taking their tax dollars and “giving them” to Mexicans and blacks, or anyone of any race or ethnicity who in their mind isn’t smart enough or hard working enough to have their own private health care. They don’t want the government to help homeowners who got roped into predatory loans by banks and independent mortgage brokers: instead they blame the homeowners for not being savvy enough borrowers, or they blame government regulation for ostensibly “forcing” lenders to finance housing for minorities and poor people who didn’t deserve it.

And no, you can’t separate the man from his movement, so don’t even try.

When you support or give credence to a candidate, you indirectly empower that candidate’s worldview and others who hold fast to it. So when you support or even substantively praise Ron Paul, you are empowering libertarianism, and its offshoots like Ayn Rand’s “greed is good” objectivism, and all those who believe in it. You are empowering the fans of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, in which books they learn that altruism is immoral, and that only the self matters. You are empowering the reactionary, white supremacist, Social Darwinists of this culture, who believe — as does Ron Paul — that that Greensboro Woolworth’s was right, and that the police who dragged sit-in protesters off soda fountain stools for trespassing on a white man’s property were justified in doing so, and that the freedom of department store owners to refuse to let black people try on clothes in their dressing rooms was more sacrosanct than the right of black people to be treated like human beings.

See, believe it or not, judgment matters. If a man believes there is a straight line of unbroken tyranny betwixt the torture and indefinite detention of suspected terrorists on the one hand, and anti-discrimination laws that seek to extend to all persons equal opportunity, on the other, that man is a lunatic. Worse than a lunatic, that man is a person of such extraordinarily obtuse philosophical and moral discernment as to call into real question whether he should even be allowed to go through life absent the protective and custodial assistance of a straightjacket, let alone hold office. That one might believe in unicorns would still allow one to profess a level of sagacity and synaptic activity in one’s brain several measures beyond that of the man who thinks liberty is equally imperiled by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as by the CIA.

That any liberal, progressive or leftist could waste so much as a kind word about someone as this is mind-boggling. There are not many litmus tests for being a progressive in good standing in this country, but one would think, if there were, that surely to God, civil rights would be one of them. It is one thing to disagree about the proper level of taxation, either on the wealthy or corporations: honest people can disagree about that, and for reasons that would still permit one to claim the mantle of liberalism or progressivism; so too with defense spending, drug policy, trade, education reform, energy policy, and any number of other things. But the notion that one can be a progressive, even merely liberal, while praising someone who believes that companies should be allowed to post “No Blacks Need Apply” signs if they wish, and that only the market should determine whether that kind of bigotry will stand, is so stupefying that it should render even the most cynical of us utterly bereft of words. It is, or should be, a deal-breaker among decent people.

And please, Glenn Greenwald, spare me the tired shtick about how Paul “raises important issues” that no one on the left is raising, and so even though you’re not endorsing him, it is still helpful to a progressive narrative that his voice be heard. Bullshit. The stronger Paul gets the stronger Paul gets, period. And the stronger Paul gets, the stronger libertarianism gets, and thus, the Libertarian Party as a potential third party: not the Greens, mind you, but the Libertarians. And the stronger Paul gets, the stronger become those voices who worship the free market as though it were an invisible fairy godparent, capable of dispensing all good things to all comers — people like Paul Ryan, for instance, or Scott Walker. In a nation where the dominant narrative has long been anti-tax, anti-regulation, poor-people-bashing and God-bless-capitalism, it would be precisely those aspects of Paul’s ideological grab bag that would become more prominent. And if you don’t know that, you are a fool of such Herculean proportions as to suggest that Salon might wish to consider administering some kind of political-movement-related-cognitive skills test for its columnists, and the setting of a minimum cutoff score, below which you would, for this one stroke of asininity alone, most assuredly fall.

I mean, seriously, if “raising important issues” is all it takes to get some kind words from liberal authors, bloggers and activists, and maybe even votes from some progressives, just so as to “shake things up,” then why not support David Duke? With the exception of his views on the drug war, David shares every single view of Paul’s that can be considered progressive or left in orientation. Every single one. So where do you draw the line? Must one have actually donned a Klan hood and lit a cross before his handful of liberal stands prove to be insufficient? Must one actually, as Duke has been known to do, light candles on a birthday cake for Hitler on April 20, before it no longer proves adequate to want to limit the overzealous reach of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms? Exactly when does one become too much of an evil fuck even for you? Inquiring minds seriously want to know.

Meanwhile, at what point do you stop being so concerned about whether a presidential candidate is pushing the issues Paul raises (so many of which do need raising and attention), and realize what every actual leftist in history has realized, but which apparently some liberals and progressives don’t: namely, that the real battles are in the streets, and in the neighborhoods, and in movement activism? It isn’t a president, whether his name is Ron Paul or Barack Obama who gets good things done. It is us, demanding change and threatening to literally shut the system down (whether we mean Wall Street, the Port of Oakland, the Wisconsin state capitol, Columbia University, a Woolworth’s lunch counter, or the Montgomery, Alabama bus system) who force presidents and lawmakers to bend to the public will.

In short, if you’re still disappointed in Barack Obama, it’s only because you never understood whose job it was to produce change in the first place. But don’t take out your own failings in this regard on the rest of us, by giving ideological cover and assorted journalistic love taps to a guy who believes the poor should rely on the charitable impulses of doctors to provide for their medical needs, including, one presumes, chemotherapy; or that America was meant to be a “robustly Christian” nation, but is being currently undermined by “secularists;” or who puts the term gay rights in quotation marks when he writes it, and believes states should be free to criminalize homosexual intercourse, and who is such a homophobe that he won’t even use the bathroom in a gay man’s house; or who has all but said that he would like to take America back to the early 1800s, in terms of the scope of government: a truly glorious time to be sure, if you were white, male and owned property.

Ya know, like some of the liberal “thinkers” who have, as of late, decided to praise Ron Paul.