Thursday, April 11, 2013

Were Right-wing Media Spokesman Tim Graham's Comments About Karen Finney's "Blackness" Influenced by White Supremacist Websites?

Last week, Tim Graham suggested that Karen Finney was not really "black." Thus, she did not contribute to the "diversity" of MSNBC, the network Finney was recently signed to as a TV personality.

Where did Tim Graham's concerns and attitudes come from?

Was Tim Graham just recycling an age old habit in America, where white folks get to decide if African-Americans were sufficiently black, and thus, fit for the auction block, to be sold as human property, uniquely vulnerable to wanton violence?

Was Tim Graham conscious of the ugly, racist, roots of his claim that a light complected black person was not a "real" African-American? Maybe Tim Graham was just playing the "innocent" race provocateur game as he tried to get attention for his employer the Right-wing Media Research Center?

Epistemic closure is a phenomenon best demonstrated by how the Right-wing media machine that failed the Republican Party during the 2012 election. This dynamic involves how conservatives and the Tea Party GOP media have been amazingly effective in their ability to create a self-contained reality that defies empirical reality on policies ranging from from tax policy, to evolution, climate change, and economics.

Epistemic closure has made the Right-wing media echo chamber a type of religion; its websites, talk radio shows, and TV programs, are its sites of worship. Consequently, heretics are driven out of, defamed, shamed, and proverbially burned at the stake for daring to defy the "truth."

The anti-intellectualism of contemporary conservatism finds comfort in the simplistic, binary, and closed worldview that is legitimated by the conservative news-entertainment complex.

Carl Sagan, the scientist, philosopher, and author, famously suggested that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof. In the Right-wing media machine of 2013, said rule has been modified such that paranoid delusions and fantasies are accepted as truths without proof. What the factually grounded and mentally healthy call "common sense", has been rejected a priori as some type of machination and trickery from the Left.

Racism is not an opinion: it is one of the most verifiable, recurring, and demonstrable facts in United States history from before the Founding to the Age of Obama. Serious people know this to be true; it is the day traders, dishonest types, "color blind" racists, and dilettantes who waste their energy debating the equivalent of gravity in the physical sciences.

Birtherism, the Southern Strategy, efforts at voter demobilization, and nativism of the contemporary Republican Party, are examples of how racism and conservatism in the post civil rights era are increasingly one and the same thing. Epistemic closure and the Right-wing echo chamber reinforce and legitimate white racial resentment and hostility towards people of color. Epistemic closure also does similar work in how the Right-wing media legitimates both anti-women and anti-gay attitudes.

New research demonstrates how the White Right (as well as White Nationalists) and "mainstream" conservatism are overlapping online. Here, through social media and other means, White Nationalists are finding ways to cross pollinate their hate with mainline Republicans and conservatives.

Tim Graham markets himself, and his organization, as watchdogs who monitor "liberal media bias."

In practice, when he questioned the racial identity and authenticity of Karen Finney he was drawing on the ugly history which created what historians and others call "the one drop rule"--a legal and moral framework that allowed white folks to bound and limit black humanity for the purposes of making the latter vulnerable to white racial terrorism and exploitation.

For a white person in America to be so profoundly arrogant as to dare to publicly define the boundaries of black humanity is an ugly union of white privilege and white supremacy. Such a move should be rejected as an affront to human dignity across the color line. Good and decent white folks most certainly know much better.

Tim Graham's questioning of Karen Finney's blackness mirrors and echoes what was recently posted on White Supremacist websites such as VDARE. Tim Graham's claims did not come out of the ether, born from nothingness.

Because conservatism and racism are one in the same in the Age of Obama, it is no surprise that the White Right and the Tea Party GOP would be so similar in their racial attitudes.

The Republican Party is spending 10 million dollars to improve its outreach to black and brown communities. This is wasted money. The Republican Party has demonstrated, repeatedly, that white racial resentment, bigotry, and xenophobia are its core values. Bigotry and racism are not "gaffes" for the Tea Party GOP. These values are core to the Republican Party in the Age of Obama. Repeated mistakes, long-recurring about the same thing, are not honest errors; they are signals about the party's core values.

Tim Graham's channeling of the narratives and memes of White Supremacist websites is not an accident. Such choices are the living face of the contemporary Republican Party.

The Republican Party is facing obsolescence. Its retrograde racial attitudes are driving its morbidity. Will conservatives adapt and change, moving into the 21st century, or will the Tea Party GOP clutch desperately to the ghosts of Jim and Jane Crow America?

The choice is theirs to make.

51 comments:

Shady Grady said...

They will stick with the racism.

CNu said...

Of course they will. The "common good" pablum being preached hereabouts is dishonest, cornucopian, and entirely unsustainable. For the last three generations, too many resources have been squandered in service to the lowest common denominator elements of society which have categorically failed - as Bill Cosby said - "to hold up their end of the bargain".

The tribal qualities of the base have proven utility as contributors to the fitness of the group which employs these tactics and controls. In the impending generations of scarcity, those who have gunned up and consolidated will prevail over those pretending that their increasingly shrill bourgeois pleas have any effect on long-term killer-ape psychology.

i.mean.really said...

That exercise in tomfoolery had me cracking up. I was waiting for Haley Joel Osment to pop out and say, "I see white people."

All jokes aside, walking around with paper bags is going to be the undoing of the GOP. America is getting too close to that "tad more than tan" for their antics to continue.

Shady Grady said...

All of which has nothing to do with the shrill cries of some white conservative/racist people that they get to decide who's black.

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chauncey devega said...

What does that have to do with tim graham? and resource scarcity is a justification for racism as a political tactic? racism is a waste of resources in the aggregate and for society at large.

CNu said...

Racism is a proven political tactic from which its beneficiaries will not withdraw. Why should they, because you'll call them everything but a child of god?



Resource scarcity, austerity, and the other reality variables gradually amplifying their effects on society, will trigger ever intensifying attraction for and compliance with the proven tribal tactics.

CNu said...

Your "common good" progressive big tent doesn't have a prayer of holding together as cohesively and effectively as the herrenvolk siren going off in whitetopias from sea to shining sea.



Matter fact, because your so-called "common good" is always and without exception calibrated to the lowest common denominator in society, the most oppositional and radically autonomous elements tenuously cobbled together, it doesn't have a gun or a prayer of holding out against the socioeconomically inevitable.


But please, by all means keep doubling down on the strategy that's worked so well for black folks for the past 40 years...,

chauncey devega said...

I absolutely agree with that point for the most part. One of the other things I have been thinking about, and I am sure many others are, professional futurists and the like, is what does the coming singularity mean for any of these arbitrary distinctions at all.

CNu said...

Sure it does, and surely you're not that dense, especially if you're the one who dragged in the HBD trophy like a cat dragging in a prize morsel for its owner.


When the subject comes up on VDare, and you have Steve Sailor himself proclaiming that Karen Finney is a Mayflower princess, there is no more explicit pronouncement/profession available concerning what is attractive and desirable mating stock.



Since sista girl gots nobody to escort her to the ball cept little fruity Jonathan Capehart, she's still quite clearly fair game, capiche?


What makes your racial draft pronouncements any more valid than these horny tribal white boys? Better recognize, killer-ape time ain't no joke.

CNu said...

There's nothing arbitrary about it. The wattles on these critters are straight up, simple, and plain. The only folks struggling to understand, are folks enured to too damn much bourgeois conversation - as if conversation had a prayer of changing anything. http://subrealism.blogspot.com/2008/10/evolutionary-roots-of-base.html


Steve Sailor, Tim Graham, whoever, they're sending a clear message that some of your women are more than welcome. As for the rest of you, well, there's a reason guns and ammo are being stockpiled and law enforcement officers are being executed.

chauncey devega said...

Their ability to use political violence should be all over the news. Silence.

CNu said...

But this has been the case for as far back as I can remember. This before your time, but do you remember ever hearing about Jimmy Carter's coal gasfication project?

You want to talk about a grand public works vision so far ahead of its time (not really - but so smart, prescient, and needful - SASOL in south africa did this on a grand scale)



If you've heard of it, do you have any idea about the events that brought about that project's demise?

I challenge you to make full use of the elite, living memory research resources at your disposal to see if you can find out what happened at the close of the 1970's.

Dubious Brother said...

@CNu: I remember reading a bit about Carter's synth-fuel policies as an undergraduate, 20 years ago, and that congressional approval for federal loan guarantees to build infrastructure for the venture came down to a single vote in the House--which it needed to pass, but didn't get. I also recall that later Carter himself vetoed a bill that would give the then Energy Research Dev. Agency the authority to provide the guarantees.


Please, fill me in on the backstory to the backstory, or send a link, if you've got one.

CNu said...

db, I've never been able to find a link or any published account of what happened. What I learned about it came word of mouth from treasury special agents during my 10 year stint with the dept.



According to these guys, the process was derailed by an escalating series of highly organized violent tax protests, (gun battles) culminating in a battle on the plains which made waco seem like a cake walk.


If you bear in mind all the forces and factors in play at that time, the stench still wafting out over the countryside from Watergate, abuses of the IRS to attack Nixon's political "enemies", the declining economy, etc., etc., etc., disenchanted and highly violentized blowback from vietnam vets, big money interests in derailing coal gasification, yada, yada, yada, it becomes very easy not only to see and understand how such a thing would have gone down, but also how it might have been effectively covered up, and finally the political compromises which had to be made among the power sharing elites which resulted in Carter going away to be replaced by the nutty as phuk Ronald Raygun, an unlikely and non-establishment nod to a new entrant set of elites and to a newly energized "base".

Shady Grady said...

White racists have also objected vociferously to President Obama declaring himself as black. Do you think that means they want to sleep with him?

I'm not seeing your logic here.



AFAIK Finney identifies as black or biracial/black. Claiming she's not is pretty arrogant. People should be called by the names they prefer.

CNu said...

Why do you read Steve Sailor Shady? Why do respectable negroes pretend that that claptrap is never to be linked - almost like a rabbi writing G_d - or some other such silly shyte. You have to go "backchannel" to share the links from whence Graham is allegedly sourcing his silliness?!?!

I'm not seeing your logic here.

lol, no surprises there. Notwithstanding our "negroes with guns" common ground, I'm just not excited by policing racial orthodoxy and lines of racial identity. To the extent that these lines can be violated and transgressed repeatedly, daily, it is to precisely that extent that they can be abolished.

Off the top, I think the whole "issue" is too silly and trifling to merit even a moment's consideration. One of the main reasons I instigate in the comment section - is because I cannot for the life of me comprehend certain black folks unshakeable preoccupation with negative emotion and race porn. You are in the power of an external "cognitive error" just as surely as Graham and any other of these fools.

http://youtu.be/Uqtq9fbDueQ

Respectable negroes can't get serious about serious stuff, but eagerly and salaciously get all bent out of shape by Jet magazine level pablum.

The fact that folks even bother to chew this cud only signifies how pathetically far the black brand has sunk. It's not as if these proclivities aren't completely and conspicuously transparent.

Here's what it bottoms out to Shady.

Like little kids picking teams, choosing sides, and on the basis of what?

The Hon.Bro.Preznit is about as far removed from black partisan as it's humanly possible to be, yet he's capitalized on the old team "loyalty" (misplaced sentimentality) to get away with doing nothing/doing dirt - and not being criticized or held accountable for it by black folks.

Karen Finney is a gorgeous woman.

If I was young and single and loved to mingle in DC, I would make a point of seeing to it that she identified as closely as possible with me. I don't care what team she purports to play for, as long as she's on my team.

Somebody, anybody claiming her for their team is silly. Flatly and simply fanboy silly. Such silliness is about as far removed as it's possible to be from anti-racist.

Now I know that you will reflexively retreat into the tortoise shell of your own self-righteous conviction that "it's "arrogant" for Graham to identify her differently than she identifies herself" - so phukking what?

That alien has a hold of you as surely and as completely as it's got Graham, Sailor, CDV, et al...., better get your shyte together before your dilithium crystals are gone bruv.

Synonymous said...

Bares repeating

"Like little kids picking teams, choosing sides, and on the basis of what?

The Hon.Bro.Preznit is about as far removed from black partisan as it's humanly possible to be, yet he's capitalized on the old team "loyalty" (misplaced sentimentality) to get away with doing nothing/doing dirt - and not being criticized or held accountable for it by black folks."

Can this guy get any righter?

"Respectable negroes can't get serious about serious stuff, but eagerly and salaciously get all bent out of shape by Jet magazine level pablum."

nomadfiles said...

"The Republican Party is facing obsolescence. Its retrograde racial attitudes are driving its morbidity." Yes but the Dem Party is facing its own identity crisis. As it betrays the core of it's New Deal convictions, the basic attraction to its own core constituents, it too runs the risk of obsolescence as they become disenchanted with the party.

"Will conservatives adapt and change, moving into the 21st century, or will the Tea Party GOP clutch desperately to the ghosts of Jim and Jane Crow America?"

The conservatives may adapt and change, not by reforming their racial attitudes but by moving to a party that is more effective in cutting the social programs that they see as being inordinately beneficial to the people they hate (blacks). The conservatives will switch allegiance to the Democratic party. Facts on the ground:

"[I]t's easy to get the impression that the president hasn't met Republicans half-way with his cuts to Medicare and Social Security, the two biggest entitlement programs. In fact, he's exceeded them. The president's budget would spend less on both Medicare and Social Security than Ryan's GOP plan over the next ten years.

On Social Security: Ryan didn't cut Social Security by a penny. The president has proposed cutting the program's spending by $130 billion, by adopting a slower-growing measure of inflation.

On Medicare: Ryan's budget kept Obamacare's Medicare cuts and added another $127 billion. His budget projects $6.74 trillion in Medicare spending between 2014 and 2023. Obama cuts even deeper with $380 billion in cuts below his baseline, and his budget projects $6.67 trillion in Medicare spending over the same period. Upshot: Obama's ten-year Medicare budget is $70 billion below the GOP, and his announced cuts are about $250 billion deeper than the GOP."from Hullabaloo

We may in fact be building towards a great pole reversal, like the one in the mid 20th century, where the GOP once again becomes the party of progressive blacks while the Democratic Party becomes the party of white racists.The defection of blacks from the party will probably happen in droves when the betrayal the Obama presidency becomes more widely understood after he has left office.

And remember. The Republicans are reaching out to us:

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/04/11/rands-racial-outreach/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+andrewsullivan%2FrApM+%28The+Dish%29

Shady Grady said...

You keep missing the point. It is hardly "policing racial orthodoxy" to be taken aback when whites try to insist, against all previous behavior, that so-and-so is really "not black" or "not Hispanic" or whatever. It is evidence that in their mind "whiteness" no longer has quite the cachet that it used to. Previously they used to fight to keep people out. Now they're trying to extend it.


The value of the club is not what it used to be. I find that interesting.

CNu said...

Then we agree. The value of the club is decidedly NOT what it used to be, and that is a very good thing indeed. It is a thing which ought be mutually and reciprocally transgressed regularly and often.



As also a number of other identity-political boundaries in need of regular and recurrent transgression. Number one on my list is the pseudo-historical ethnoreligionationalism of Jews, the shrill and excessive harping of ugly, undesirable whidte wymyn which has been institutionalized as contemporary feminism, and last but not least, the profane exhibitionist acting out of in-your-face gay sexual identity politics.


If I'm Ervin "Magic" Johnson about now, I'm not pretending that that humiliating shydte perpetrated by my son-in-drag is acceptable and that I'd support it. Aw hails to the gnaw......,

first last said...

Obama Derangement Syndrome. Recognize the signs.

first last said...

Holy cow you are stupid.

first last said...

Holy cow you are an idiot.

first last said...

Did I mention that you are really stupid?

first last said...

S.T.U.P.I.D.

first last said...

You are....[fill in the blank]

first last said...

You have literally no idea what you are talking about at all.

first last said...

Idiot.

first last said...

Ah I get it now...you aren't so much stupid as you are a closet case.

Douglas Anderson said...

I really didn't want to vote for Obama.I kept telling people he was going to sell us out

colinjames71 said...

I was cautiously optimistic about Obama from day one- though i really thought that capturing all three branches in 08 would bring about "sanity" and good, solid policy from Congress. And in '12 i was mortally terrified of a Romney presidency. I almost wish now the Rs took it all so they would so completely f*ck up everything that their overreach would cause a nationwide backlash resulting in a total wake-up of the public writ large and a resulting change necessary to rid us of the status quo that is the capture of the majority of both major parties by big-money interests. And i never thought big O would be this bad- drones, secrecy, austerity, wall St. DOJ, fracking, domestic spying, war on whistleblowers, capitulation to the right, the almost certain approval of KXL, what am i forgetting? that too.

colinjames71 said...

there's a joke in there somewhere- "the one drop rule" and $10M for "outreach", because that's one drop in the well of money at the disposal of conservative (can we just stop calling them that now?) causes.

Shared Humanity said...

Tremendous analysis......as a white man, I can assure you that "good and decent white folks most certainly know much better." Of course, I don't need to tell you this.


Keep speaking the truth. You have a large audience.

CNu said...

lol and wrinkling my nose in disgust at the yeasty stench emanating from your nether reaches trollette....,

nomadfiles said...

You recognize the signs. Time is almost up on the Obama deception and the reawakening of blacks from their anesthetized slumber. Digby agrees with me that, after Big O has demolished Soc Security and departed by 2016, having performed the elites planned hit, the Democratic Party will be left in shambles.

from Hullabaloo by noreply@blogger.com (digby) "this is a fool's game that will blow back on Democrats at the ballot box when Republicans cynically use it against them and the people blame for failing to protect their vital interests.

...Mr. Obama would apply any changes only to people becoming eligible for Medicare after 2016.Uhm, so do you suppose that the administration thinks that people in 2016 won't be upset about this? It's only three and a half years away. But then again, that will be the last year of the Obama administration at which point he will go off into the sunset and burnish his legacy while the people take out their frustrations on the poor Democrats who are running for office that year.

... The best the Obama administration can hope for is that they get it in under the wire while the harshest blowback happens to the Democratic fools who have to face voters in the future.

gendotte said...

Per the last paragraph. Yep.

chauncey devega said...

yup, the democrats elected a black democrat to destroy the party. what you drinking nomad? you need to write this stuff down or make a movie.

nomadfiles said...

Truth is stranger than the fiction the elite have foisted upon us.

chauncey devega said...

How kind. I hope so. I am gonna need their support going forward :)

chauncey devega said...

Zing! I need some of them drops.

nomadfiles said...

"I almost wish now the Rs took it all so they would so completely f*ck up everything that their overreach would cause a nationwide backlash resulting in a total wake-up of the public"

That is certainly what I was thinking. Remember, remember the 6th of November.

"Another Obama term in my opinion would be disasterous."
That's the point at which we're at. When both officially sanctioned choices are disastrous the most sane and logical action is to choose neither. Vote third party or stay home. At least the criminal government will not have your endorsement. Here is what these mofos is up to:
"...it's not really about getting one or the other figurehead presidential contenders elected. It is to prepare everybody for "the grand bargain" or as Bill Black calls it, "the grand betrayal" of the dismantling of Social Security and Medicare. Either candidates will suffice for the needs of the top 10% of the top 1%."
http://www.correntewire.com/it...

I'm the kind to say 'I told you so."

nomadfiles said...

I see no reason
The Obama treason
Ever should be forgot.

colinjames71 said...

and I'm the kind say,

you were right. ):>)

I called both my senators the day that c-cpi was confirmed in official O budget, told em i was ready to change my registration and never vote democrat again if they didn't fight this and start fighting for middle class, etc. Looks like I'm going green.

nomadfiles said...

lol, but coti. [crying on the inside]

colinjames71 said...

who doesn't! Hey I just wanted to say thank you, love you're writing, I think you're great, keep up the good work bro.

chauncey devega said...

how kind. will keep trying!

nomadfiles said...

Howard Dean stands with me in my disgust.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2013/04/i-stand-with-howard-dean-in-his-disgust.html

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