Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Silence

Via The Quaker Agitator, I read Leonard Pitts' op-ed piece on Ann Coulter, Ignoring Coulter is a mistake. Obviously jealous that Michelle Malkin was getting too much attention from her recent attack on kids needing health insurance, Coulter decided to use the religious bigotry card to trump Malkin. Riffing on the Pope's view that the Catholic Church is the one true faith and all the other religions are disordered, Coulter suggested that Jews need to convert to Christianity to be saved or "perfected."

As Pitts said of Coulter's latest:

Ann Coulter plays the news media like Louis Armstrong once played his cornet. She is a virtuoso of stage-managed controversy. So there's something to be said for refusing to play along, for ignoring her in the hope that she will just go away.

But some things only fester and grow in the dark. Some things use silence as assent.

Last week, Coulter told Donny Deutsch on CNBC's The Big Idea that in her perfect America, everyone would be a Christian. Deutsch, who is Jewish, expressed alarm. Whereupon Coulter told him Jews simply needed to be "perfected" - i.e., made to accept Jesus as savior. Which is, of course, one of the pillars (along with the slander of Christ's murder) supporting 2,000 years of pogroms, abuse and Holocaust.

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But time, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once observed, is neutral. Time alone changes nothing. It is people who make change in time. Or not.

While some of us are cheerfully assuring one another that They Don't Really Mean It, the Southern Poverty Law Center reports that the number of hate groups in this country has risen by a whopping 40 percent in the last seven years. If you had spent those years, as I have, jousting in print with the agents of intolerance, you would not be surprised. I've noted a definite spike, not simply in the hatefulness of some people, but in the willingness to speak that hatefulness openly and without shame. What used to be anonymous now comes with a name and address.

Like Coulter, many of those people find intellectual cover under the cloak of conservatism. It is a development thoughtful conservatives (the very need to use that qualifier makes the case) ought to view with alarm. . . .

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So this is not about bashing conservatives. It is, rather, about challenging them, and all of us. Within living memory, we have seen Jews in boxcars and blacks in trees and silence from those who should have been shouting. They pretended it wasn't happening until it already had.

So, what about Ann Coulter? What about the push-back against diversity, pluralism and tolerance that she represents? I keep hearing that we should just ignore it.

That's been tried before. It didn't work.

As Pitts observed, I have noticed the number of hate groups is up significantly, see Raging Racists, and the expression of bigotry is well on its way to becoming acceptable discourse. I have made those same observations, in Bill's a Bigot:

I do believe words have been given power. In fact, in the “Brave New Anti-PC World,” words have become more powerful. Racist words, sexist words, homophobic words, words denigrating non-Christian religions. That is, abhorrent comments such as those uttered by Bennett are part of an on-going attempt by the "Anti-PC Crowd" to make it acceptable to express racist sentiments. I have noticed an increased frequency in the number and intensity of inappropriate statements lately. So much so that it suggests to me that the expressions are deliberate.

See also, Crass public discourse: Time to push back?.

As if to prove the point, James Watson, DNA pioneer and Nobel winner, opined on his belief that whites are intellectually superior to blacks, as was reported in The Times (U.K.) Black people 'less intelligent' scientist claims:

One of the world’s most respected scientists is embroiled in an extraordinary row after claiming that black people are less intelligent than white people.

James Watson, a Nobel Prize winner for his part in discovering the structure of DNA, has provoked outrage with his comments, made ahead of his arrival in Britain today.

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The 79-year-old geneticist said he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really.". He said he hoped that everyone was equal, but countered that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”.

He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because “there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don’t promote them when they haven’t succeeded at the lower level”. He writes that “there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so”.

He has served for 50 years as a director of the Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory on Long Island, considered a world leader in research into cancer and genetics.

As is noted in a follow up piece on the controversy:

Dr Watson has courted controversy before. Three years ago, he was reported as saying that a woman should have the right to abort her unborn child if tests could determine that it would be homosexual. He has also suggested a link between skin colour and sex drive, proposing a theory that black people have higher libidos, and claimed that beauty could be genetically manufactured.

See Scientist James Watson flies home after employers suspend him. Watson has come under intense criticism for his remarks and has canceled his book tour, returning to the states to deal with his suspension from his Lab, Scientist Watson returns to U.S. over race row.

Ward Harkavy of the Village Voice also discusses Watson and the Eugenics Archive at Watson's Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Watson's Double-Helix Double-Bind Double-Reverse:

[T]he Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory was the melting pot of all sorts of wack theories and experiments concerning race, and many of them had nothing to do with black people but rather focused on the supposed inferiority of southern and eastern Europeans. In fact, it was the Nordic-superiority bullshit that so inspired Hitler and his crew.

Just because crackpots use your ideas doesn't make you yourself a crackpot, of course. There were plenty of influential, widely praised people who endorsed eugenics and embraced ideas of racial inferiority and its inevitable corollary: racial superiority. No doubt that current anti-Mexican cretins will use Watson's latest comments to fan the flames of the anti-immigration cause.

All of which leads me to the issue of how to respond to racist eruptions. My tendency has been to ignore the ignorant bigots. I discussed the issue of responding (or not) to freaks like Coulter and Michelle Malkin in a recent post, It's That Time of Year:

Malkin, like Ann Coulter and the rest, are vicious people that will only go away when they are treated like they should be -- with scorn and then ignored altogether.

I also have to admit it. I am an elitist. I can't abide stupid people. And by stupid, I'm not referring to intelligence quotient. I am talking about vile, insipid people like Malkin who thrive on bullying and belittling others. As far as I am concerned, people like that should just be ignored. Attention gives them power. As I said in my last post on her:

Malkin not only should be ignored, she should be shunned.

After reading Pitts' column, I started thinking about this issue again. Clearly the constant barrage of bigotry by the media pundits on the right has resulted in a corresponding increase in the use of such language and related conduct by the racists. See e.g., Few Answers About Nooses, but Much Talk of Jim Crow. From the Jena 6 to the recent copycat incidents involving nooses, as well as the swastikas found in fields in New Jersey, there is a surge of hate filled activity in many parts of the country.

It is true, as QuakerDave says: "Silence equals complicity." In the context of these examples of hateful conduct, I agree with his view. Silence is never the answer. Yet, to respond the same way to the illiberal pundits, when that's precisely the reaction that they are hoping to elicit, is still a difficult concept for me to follow.

Mustang Bob at Bark Bark Woof Woof has a great suggestion about the best way to react to the haters, Don't Ignore Them; Laugh at Them:

Anybody who's read this blog for any length of time will know that I agree with Mr. Pitts's advice wholeheartedly; to ignore the bullies like Ann Coulter is dangerous, but I also don't believe in giving them the credibility that they think they're entitled to because they can get a gig on Hardball. I've always said that the best way to deal with them is the Mel Brooks approach: make fun of them. The quickest way to deflate pompous and self-important people is to laugh at them and let the limelight point out how ridiculous they are. . . .

As I've also noted, it takes a certain skill to make a mockery out of people like Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, and Michelle Malkin. It's easy to take cheap shots at them and speculate about Ms. Coulter's gender identification or her scanty clothing choices, Mr. Limbaugh's weight and addiction to pain pills, and Ms. Malkin's ethnic heritage. But that's counterproductive; all it does it make it about irrelevancies, even when their hypocrisy about gays, drug use, or interning immigrants begs for the comparison. In order to truly make a mockery of these clowns, you have to go after their outrageous opinions and statements and turn them back on them. You can't shame them; they have no sense of shame, or if they did, they long ago gave it up as a part of the deal. . . .

The response to these people shouldn't be scolding or flaming rage; all that does is prove that someone is actually taking them seriously. The Mel Brooks approach of bare-knuckle mockery and burlesque laughter is the best weapon. If you want proof of that today, look at how the right wing is completely thrown off the track by Hillary Clinton's laugh. They're baffled that she's laughing at Chris Wallace of Fox News and his furrowed-brow questions about "hyperpartisanship" on the part of the Clintons, which is a question you'd expect from Stephen Colbert. Suddenly the pundits are analyzing the hell out of Senator Clinton's laugh, and the subtext is a worrisome concern that she's not taking them seriously. "But we're pundits! She has to take us seriously!"

This isn't to dismiss Leonard Pitts's point, either. We shouldn't ignore the Ann Coulters and Tucker Carlsons, but we don't have to give them credibilty they crave. We should just laugh them off the stage.

I think that's something I could do -- with passion. If we're not going to shun them, let's make fun of them.

Tags: Commentary, News and Media, Racism