Rep. King: Can’t “restore civilization” with “somebody else’s babies”

By Dan Brooks in Rhetoric 1 Comment

Rep. Steve King (R-IA) describes a beautiful sandwich only white people can eat.

For the last year or so, Representative Steve King of Iowa has flirted with white nationalism. It’s the kind of flirting where you drink four cocktails and just start talking, although King was presumably sober in October when he tweeted that “cultural suicide by demographic transformation must end.” That was ominous. “Cultural suicide” and “demographic transformation” are vague terms, but the accompanying photo with European ethno-nationalists Frauke Petry and Geert Wilders offered a hint of what he meant. This weekend, the congressman praised Wilders again and got a little more explicit:

To paraphrase an old joke: What do you mean “we,” white man? The tweet raises some obvious questions. Who are we, again? And which babies aren’t ours? While we’re at it, we should probably figure out what the congressman means by “restore civilization,” considering that he is tweeting this message using a cell phone that distributes his words via a worldwide communication network to people who can read. Mad Max it ain’t. The questions about what King means by “we” and “our civilization” and “somebody else” lie at the heart of this tweet and, increasingly, his whole perspective.

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How white is Richard Spencer, really?

By Dan Brooks in Fascism 1 Comment

White nationalist Richard Spencer has the erect bearing of a Leghorn.

Richard Spencer strongly identifies as white, like his mother, despite rumors that his father is a tube of chicken semen she accidentally sat on at the fair. Spencer is the president and director of the National Policy Institute, a “racial realist” think tank he founded, and the executive director of Washington Summit Publishers, a publisher he also founded. He is about my age. His professional accomplishments make me wonder why I don’t run a policy institute and a publishing house, but maybe I’m just not as white as he is. It would be scientifically unsound to conclude that, though. We also must control for education. Spencer went from the prestigious St. Mark’s preparatory high school in Texas to the University of Virginia, then immediately to a master’s program at the University of Chicago, followed by two sessions at the Vienna International Summer University and then a PhD program at Duke. Given this trajectory—from prep school to grad school to president of his own think tank—it’s easy to understand why whiteness is so important to Spencer. Getting born to the right parents has been the key to his professional and political life.

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Breitbart plays the race card in Carson vs. Pelosi

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 0 Comment
The homepage of Breitbart.com around noon eastern

The homepage of Breitbart.com around noon eastern

I was astonished to see the Breitbart headline in the screenshot above, but it changed when I clicked on it. The story-page headline reads Nancy Pelosi Calls Ben Carson “Disturbingly Unqualified,” which is probably a more precise way to describe her than “white Democrat leader.” Beware autoplay video with sound, should you click on that link yourself. The story is short enough to quote entirely here:

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi is calling the decision to tap Ben Carson as head of Housing and Urban Development a “disconcerting and disturbingly unqualified choice.” Pelosi says the country deserves someone with “relevant experience” to protect the rights of homeowners and renters.

In her statement released Monday, she says “there is no evidence that Dr. Carson brings the necessary credentials to hold a position with such immense responsibilities and impact on families and communities across America.”

Trump says, “Ben shares my optimism about the future of our country and is part of ensuring that this is a presidency representing all Americans.”

There’s a lot missing from this report, including what Carson’s qualifications might actually be. If you want those kinds of nuances, you’re better off with the Times. It’s kind of weird that Breitbart would just reprint a statement from the House Minority Leader with none of its own commentary or counterpoint, save that quote from Donald Trump. But all the commentary they need is in that homepage headline: White Democrat Leader Calls…

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Dolezal resigns, tells Today Show “I identify as black,” embarrasses sons

By Dan Brooks in Intersectionality 0 Comment
Rachel Dolezal as a teenager, at Bellhaven University, and during her suit against Howard

Rachel Dolezal as a teenager, at Bellhaven University, and during her suit against Howard

I think my favorite new internet micro-genre is pictures of Rachel Dolezal looking white. There are a lot of them, and I’m sorry we could not include knee-length dreadlocks by a tree in the composite above. Someday this story will end, but yesterday it continued on its natural course: Dolezal resigned from her position at the NAACP. That predictable turn came with the less predictable news that in 2002, she sued Howard University for discriminating against her because she was white. That must have been the old Rachel Dolezal, because the contemporary one told the Today Show she identifies as black. Video after the jump.

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Why won’t we let Rachel Dolezal be “trans-racial?”

By Dan Brooks in Intersectionality, Uncategorized 5 Comments
Spokane NAACP president Rachel Dolezal now and in the late 1990s, respectively

Spokane NAACP president Rachel Dolezal now and in the late 1990s

By now you have either quit Twitter or heard about Rachel Dolezal, the president of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP who identifies as black but whose parents insist she is white. It’s not my job to say what races people are, but Ma and Pa Dolezal sure seem to be right. A professor of Africana Studies at Eastern Washington University, Dolezal says in her faculty bio that she received an MFA from Howard and has been the victim of “at least eight documented hate crimes.” That’s a weird item to put in your CV. But everything about the Rachel Dolezal story is weird, from her parents’ estrangement from more than one of their children to her refusal to simply say she is black. Again, it looks like she isn’t. But who gets to decide?

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