XDA

Here is Dahlia Lithwick, who was born in Canada in 1968, calling us Republicans racists for no reason. Yeah, this is just what we need, a lily-white Lefty from the Great White North who never lived a second under the Democrat manufactured and maintained Jim Crow abomination in the Deep South telling us about racism in America. I've forgotten more about the tail end of the Jim Crow period (1961 through 1965) than Ms. Lithwick will ever know. And what I know compared to Senator Jeff Sessions' knowledge here is pretty much a minnow compared to a whale. But let's look anyway at the stupider things she says (and they are numerous).

Sessions assured Graham that being called a racist was “painful,” and almost all of his witnesses in the two panels that testified Wednesday told stories of Sessions as a mentor, boss, colleague, and friend, someone who supported black colleagues and never whispered a racist sentiment. It’s an incredibly sweet and distillate version of political qualifications—the notion that if someone can work, consume Dairy Queen Blizzards, manage others, and never explode in a torrent of racial abuse, he is a civil rights warrior. These stories are entirely beside the point.

As Jamelle Bouie argues, what’s in a man’s heart is immaterial if, as attorney general, he is blind to the systemic and often unconscious bias that infects the lives of women and minorities he is meant to protect with the apparatus of our civil rights laws. And yet Sessions voted against hate crime legislation because, as he put it in 2009, “I’m not sure women or people with different sexual orientations face that kind of discrimination. I just don’t see it.”

OK, fellow Stanford graduate, racism is maintaining invidious discrimination based on a malignant animus against a whole race. A systemic and often unconscious bias against women, if any exists, would not be racism but misogyny. Try to stick to the subject. There is no good word for the hatred of homosexuals, etc. but it's clearly not racism. Sessions has explained his opposition to the stupid hate crime legislation and it is, as usual with him, rational and persuasive to the open minded.

But let's get back to the systemic and often unconscious bias against minorities (again, not exactly racism unless the minority is a race). Is Lithwick saying all Americans have this bias (I only have a Masters in English but I think that's what 'systemic' connotes)? So if I know that things have gotten so much better than they were in the early 60's because I've lived it, seen it as well as read about it, so that I don't agree there is any systemic bias against minorities, am I a racist like Senator Sessions allegedly is? What if I'm right, and race relations had improved from the end of the century of Jim Crow evil so that actual racism is now clearly taboo in our American society? Am I still a racist for disagreeing with Ms. Lithwick and Mr. Bouie? Even if I'm right and they are wrong?

He doesn’t see the impact his 86 out of 87 votes against abortion and other women’s health protections would have on women...

Not racism. (Is abortion "women's health protection"? What if the embryo is a female, as it too often is? Is that female embryo's health protected by an abortion? Seems like Ms. Lithwick went full Democrat meme there without really thinking it through). Moving on.

He doesn’t see...how his vote against taking the language of religious tests out of immigration law would hurt Muslims.

Not racism. Again.

Sessions doesn’t see racial disparity at all, which is, as his character witnesses each concluded, what makes the Democrats’ claims of racism especially corrosive. Of course, not seeing that racism exists is its own sort of blindness. To be determinedly race-blind on principle isn’t racism. But it sure isn’t neutral, especially at the helm of the Justice Department.

So the Democrats call Senator Sessions racist and the people who know him best say he is not in any way a racist and you defend the Democrats' slander by saying he's blind to racism, which you then say isn't racism. Did you miss all the classes teaching logic the philosophy department provided at Stanford? Certainly seems so. It gets worse.

I'll skip the idiocy about retiring the discrimination against Southern States in the Voting Right Act of 1965. Black voter participation in the Deep South has never been higher than in the last three presidential elections. If the racist whites (is it still all whites, Dahlia, even you?) are trying to suppress the black voter down there, they are doing a miserable job of it. I think it's easier to believe that there is no such effort. I'm aware blacks came out in force all over the country to vote for President Obama.

Republicans on the committee believe in the kind of racism that leaves you bloodied and pepper sprayed on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, but not in the sort that asks you to produce a voter ID in 2016, or closes every DMV where you might procure one.

We Republicans believe exactly that for the following reasons: The Democrats' crimes against the black and white advocates for equal civil rights near Selma in 1965 are a historical fact and the alleged "racism" inherent in asking all voters for identification does not actually exist. I think Ms. Lithwick might benefit from seeing this short, documentary.

[Republicans] reject the old-timey racism and still dispute the existence of the subtle, sometimes unconscious, and often systemic bias built into every brick of the prison industrial complex, and every word of our sentencing laws and felon-disenfranchisement statutes.

What? Do the sentencing laws, and statutes about losing civil rights due to felony convictions only apply to one race in America and not to any others? I just checked and these statutes apply equally to all Americans because applying to only one race would violate the 14th Amendment, passed overwhelmingly by Republicans and opposed overwhelmingly by Democrats. The fact that blacks commit more crimes per capita in America than any other racial group is not the result of there being prisons, sentencing laws, or laws regarding lost rights for a felony conviction. I don't know what is causing it, but it's not the laws. All in all, the imaginary systemic racism Ms. Lithwick and her ilk claim exists is so very subtle that it can only be detected by the most sensitive among us, which are the Lefties, of course.

Jeff Sessions will be the next attorney general, and conversations about race and racism will become ever more difficult, especially in public spaces.

You're not having much difficulty talking about it in print at Slate right now (you're just having trouble making any sense). What about Senator Sessions' becoming the Attorney General will make conversations about race and racism more difficult? This is as moronic, baseless statement. But here's the big finish, such as it is.

[Corey Booker*, attention whore] proved that one’s friends and colleagues and co-senators can testify that you have a good heart and a hearty love of Dairy Queen, and still fail to understand that this has almost nothing to do with the architecture of racial injustice our laws must attempt to dismantle.

What "architecture of racial injustice"? The prisons, sentencing laws etc. you wrote stupidly about above?

I think, and I believe this is sound analysis, that racism nowadays affects individuals and not organizations. It is a personal decision to hate or discriminate against or feel, unjustly, superior to a whole race. Of course there are people who think that way, but very, very few of them are Republicans. The Democrats continue to try to expiate the sins of their collective past by pretending the Republicans are now (and probably always were) the bad guys about race in America, and by inventing new forms of racism which don't actually exist.

In order to be able to live with their evil past, the Democrats now say: See, it wasn't just the bad old days when the Democrats exclusively owned slaves and exclusively were members of the Klan and exclusively created laws that created discrimination against blacks; there is just as much racism now as back then and the Republicans are the torch carriers of this racism now that they have magically switched racial animi and animae with the Democrats.

Ms. Lithwick is a fervent practitioner of this sort of delusion.

The takeaway from this terrible opinion piece is that the Left thinks the Right is racist, not because the Right has an invidious racial animus against blacks (they overwhelmingly don't) but because the Right doesn't think like the Left does.


*I met Cory Booker at Stanford about 16 years ago and talked to him for a couple of minutes after he gave a speech. He was a good guy and fun to talk to. But the times change and we change with them.

Labels: Dahlia Lithwick: Lefty Projection on Race