Over the past few days, Dave Weigel has been following up on a report from Max Blumenthal that Andrew Breitbart-funded conservative activist James O’Keefe attended a 2006 “race and conservatism” debate that featured white supremacist Jared Taylor.
Weigel writes that one of the event organizers Marcus Epstein (who has his own controversial history with race) describes the event “accurately” as “as a debate, not a forum for Taylor.” I suspect this is probably accurate–that O’Keefe is not a doctrinaire racist like Taylor, but rather the kind of conservative whose views are motivated by an underlying racial anxiety that prompts people to put on events like “affirmative action” bake sales.
What’s interesting is that the line between them isn’t always clear–at least not to the extremists. While I was at Vassar, a group of conservatives started a zine called The Imperialist. Naturally, it devoted a lot of effort to trying to annoy liberals more than really trying to get a point across, and was bizarrely fixated on affirmative action. Just to give you an idea of how white Vassar was at the time, in my class, there were three male students that could be described as “African-American” (i.e., the descendants of slaves brought to America as chattel). All three of us had a white parent. Two of us were racially ambiguous.
College can be a rough gig–and it seemed clear to me that these particular kids were coping with their anxiety about academic performance through their hostility to minority students at the college. There were so few of us there that the frustration over affirmative action was outrageously disproportionate–and came across as hostility to students of color being there at all. Conversely, the conservatives felt that the rhetoric of some students of color, decrying superficial aspects of white privilege as “white supremacy,” was absurd.
As a joke several of the Imperialist writers had put together a satirical “white supremacist” group on facebook. Me and several other students from the Men of Color Alliance (MOCA) confronted one of the editors over the issue. We ended up having a productive conversation, and afterwards we agreed to keep the lines of communication open.
The following year, most of us had graduated, things got tense following another controversial piece The Imperialist when an actual white supremacist started defending The Imperialist and posting private information about black students online–such as which dorms they lived in. In the ensuing controversy, the conservative student group that published The Imperialist was deauthorized and denied funding. I spoke briefly to the student who ran the group, who was beside himself that anyone would associate their views with those of white supremacists. He couldn’t understand it. I explained to him that if both the liberals on campus and the white supremacists who defended The Imperialist saw them as being on the same side, they really needed to find a new language to express their views. There was a reason why the extremists saw them as potential allies.
The O’Keefe thing strikes me as a similar situation. I don’t think O’Keefe is a Jared Taylor style racist, rather, like many other conservatives, his personal anxieties get churned into racial resentment, assisted by a conservative culture of grievance that habitually blames people of color for their frustrations. Just as the conservative fixation with affirmative action at Vassar was deeply disproportionate given the actual number of black students there, so the conservative fixation on ACORN is disproportionate to their actual impact on society–and is animated by a similar kind of racial anxiety. If kids at Vassar blamed black students for anxiety about their academics or intelligence, ACORN has become a catch all for economic and social concerns: The growing political voice of minorities, the economic crisis, the changing demographics of America.
I once thought that it was possible that Barack Obama’s approach to race might have mitigated those anxieties, but for some people it’s obviously excacerbated them. Obama’s personal excellence–his intellectual pedigrees, his ability to master the finer points of policy–have provoked an existential crisis among people who look to Rush Limbaugh to assure them that the president’s brilliance has been manufactured by some form of “affirmative action.” There’s a sense of superiority they’ve always had, and always taken for granted, and its slipping away. That scares them.
The problem is we don’t have a very good language for talking about–and consequently dealing with–this kind of racial anxiety, which is not based in a conscious belief in white supremacy. Still, there’s a reason why the racial extremists tend to see conservatives as kindred spirits–even if conservatives don’t see themselves that way.
— A. Serwer
