Conor Friedersdorf responds to my post a couple of days ago on Charles Blow's column on people of color at a Tea Party event in Texas:
Actually, today’s populist conservatives basically demand “baroque gestures of solidarity” from white people too. If Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin were black, Mr. Serwer would be pointing to the former’s “let’s double Gitmo” comment and the latter’s whole oeuvre as evidence that movement conservatism rewards only those minorities who offer baroque gestures of solidarity.
Friedersdorf is right: Conservatives -- and liberals for that matter -- demand "baroque gestures of solidarity" from their candidates regardless of race. The difference with the group of Tea Partiers Blow was discussing is the nature of such gestures, which is what made Blow so angry in the first place. From Blow's original column:
The speakers included a black doctor who bashed Democrats for crying racism, a Hispanic immigrant who said that she had never received a single government entitlement and a Vietnamese immigrant who said that the Tea Party leader was God.I won't speak to the third example, but the first two speakers' statements are explicitly related to racial superstitions they assume their audience holds about them. The doctor is signaling to his mostly white audience that he is not the type of black person who "blames racism for everything," and the Hispanic immigrant is letting his audience know that she's not some foreign moocher who came to the U.S. for a handout. The fact that reaffirming the racial resentments of conservatives is the price of the ticket for a person of color with conservative views is pretty infuriating. Race is being "used as a cudgel" against these Tea Partiers by their own ideological fellows in ways Friedersdorf has not begun to consider. That's what I meant when I said he was being "oblivious."
Friedersdorf continues:
There are, in fact, cultural and historical reasons for everything. I am perfectly willing to acknowledge all the culture and history related to race, politics, conservatism, and political opportunism. They don’t change the fact that in this case, race is unfairly used “as a cudgel to discredit them in a way that would never be applied to a political movement on the left.”Let me be clear, Blow's column was very unfair to the people on the stage whom he referred to as minstrels. I don't think it was as unfair to the Tea Partiers, who, like Friedersdorf, seem to think that the issue is that conservatives aren't given enough credit for their efforts at using people of color as window dressing. Neither Friedersdorf nor the Tea Partiers seem to recognize the real issue, which is that conservatives seem indifferent to the issues facing people of color, and that even people of color who do share their policy views are forced to identify themselves as being "the good ones" in order to be accepted. From Friedersdorf's original post:
It’s this kind of piece that causes people on the right to think that on matters of race, they’re damned if they do, and they’re damned if they don’t — if they don’t make efforts to include non-whites they’re unenlightened propagators of privilege, and if they do make those efforts they’re the cynical managers of a minstrel show, but either way, race is used as a cudgel to discredit them in a way that would never be applied to a political movement on the left.
What is Friedersdorf's priority? A conservative movement not seen as widely hostile to people of color because it isn't, or a conservative movement that doesn't have to deal with being seen as widely hostile to people of color? The above statement suggests the latter, which goes a long way toward explaining conservatives' ongoing difficulties on matters of race.
That the Tea Party is so overwhelmingly white isn't seen as a symptom of a larger problem (which is that most people of color view Republicans as hostile to them or their interests, because, well, they often are). Instead, the problem Friedersdorf hones in on is that people notice the undercurrent of racial hostility at some of these events and write about them in ways that make conservatives look bad on matters of race. He's mistaking the symptom for the disease.
I think liberals bear some responsibility for this in that they often seem satisfied with similar superficial gestures of "diversity," but liberals also get into internal conflicts about these things all the time, precisely because they see this kind of inclusiveness as being genuinely important in a way that the right doesn't. Conservative criticisms of such empty gestures would also bear far more weight if they weren't so generally dismissive of racism except when directed at white people or when the target happens to be a self-identified conservative person of color.
Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a good post on this, but in the end the problem is with conservatives' focus -- both now and in the past -- on exonerating themselves from charges of racism rather than actually addressing the concerns of people of color or their apprehension about the Republican Party. That requires a willingness to do more than seek "merit badges from your friends or foes."
-- A. Serwer
