Fox news website: Man attacked while putting up signs for a Republican candidate for Congress.
A Pew research poll found Republican voters consider the primary targets of discrimination to be Whites and Christians.
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| Click: Fox News coverage |
The colorful lead illustration for the Fox News story on the brutal beating of an elderly Sikh man was this photo of the logo for Jeff Denham, a GOP candidate for Congress. Later in the story some of the details were filled in. The assailants were two white men wearing black hooded sweatshirts, who threw sand in his face, beat him, told him to go back to his own country, and spray painted his car with a Celtic cross--under the lead paragraph and headline that it happened while he was attempting to put up signs for the GOP congressman.
ABC covered the story as a hate crime against an elderly man who was Sikh, by two young men who attacked, spit on, beat, and vandalized his car with spray painted words "Go back to ur country" ABC's story related this attack to another attack on an elderly Sikh man 30 miles away. Click: ABC coverage of the same event
ABC described hate crime violence against Sikhs. The Fox news story implied the real story was violence against a man doing Republican political work. Poor picked-on campaign volunteers.
Fox News understands its audience. Republican voters believe the real and pervasive discrimination happening in the USA is against Whites and Christians. Republicans feel Whites face more discrimination than do Muslims, Immigrants, Blacks, and Gays and Lesbians. On average Republican voters think only transgendered people face equal discrimination to Whites and Christians. Blacks are thought to be the least discriminated against group. Blacks get all the breaks.
When the hardest of hard core GOP constituency groups are combined, both white and Christian, in the form of self-identified evangelicals, the perception of persecution is most acute: The Pew Research report reads: White evangelicals are more likely to say Christians face a lot of discrimination than they are to say Muslims face a lot of discrimination (57% vs. 44%, respectively). Click: Pew
Democrats look at it differently.
Some of the difference may be caused by the news silos.
Some of this may be a return of the nativism of the 1920s, and for the same reasons--disquiet over mass immigration by people who seemed foreign and troubling to the status quo culture--immigration of Roman Catholics from Italy, Orthodox Christians from the Balkans, and Jews from Europe. This is not new in America and it is not unique in the world. (I lived in Boston in the 1970s. Irish Americans, Italian Americans, Polish Americans, Jews, Blacks, all had their neighborhoods, each elected their own ethnicity, and people fit into tribes. Older people pretended to tolerate one another; young people fought one another.)
Some of this may be Democratic messaging on identity combined with government attention to protected classes. Democrats have collected a coalition of interest groups. Hillary Clinton, in particular, represented the politics of grievance and re-assertion of oppressed groups. She spoke of glass ceilings for women. She spoke of tapestries not melting pots. Pre-election 2016 Democrats counted white women and all Hispanics as chess-pieces, blocs of votes on the Democratic side--a mistake.
Many American whites felt every color of "the rainbow" was acknowledged and entitled to celebrate itself--except White Christians. Celebrating White is forbidden and shamed. Trump gets cheers when he says--in July--that people are free to say "Merry Christmas." MeToo shames males, defining men as perpetrators and beneficiaries of "rape culture."
Spokespeople and activists for social justice felt entitled--required even--to call out racism, xenophobia, and misogamy when they perceive it, and they perceive it in places where other people don't see it, or refuse to acknowledge it. Democrats were not afraid of making race and gender an issue. It was a duty, and they thought they had the numbers on their side. But their message was heard by everyone, and the resistance was greater than the thrust. Their coalition fractured. Whites voted their race, but women voted their race not gender, Hispanics voted their immigration status, and blacks didn't turn out.
Fox is both a cause and an effect. They have a message that resonates: "regular' heterosexual, white, Christian Republicans are the subject of disrespect and violent attack, and we are the primary victims of racism and prejudice.
That Sikh man was attacked putting up lawn signs for a GOP candidate. Just look at the news.
What's going on?
Fox News understands its audience. Republican voters believe the real and pervasive discrimination happening in the USA is against Whites and Christians. Republicans feel Whites face more discrimination than do Muslims, Immigrants, Blacks, and Gays and Lesbians. On average Republican voters think only transgendered people face equal discrimination to Whites and Christians. Blacks are thought to be the least discriminated against group. Blacks get all the breaks.When the hardest of hard core GOP constituency groups are combined, both white and Christian, in the form of self-identified evangelicals, the perception of persecution is most acute: The Pew Research report reads: White evangelicals are more likely to say Christians face a lot of discrimination than they are to say Muslims face a lot of discrimination (57% vs. 44%, respectively). Click: Pew
Democrats look at it differently.
 |
| Click for details |
Some of the difference may be caused by the news silos.
Some of this may be a return of the nativism of the 1920s, and for the same reasons--disquiet over mass immigration by people who seemed foreign and troubling to the status quo culture--immigration of Roman Catholics from Italy, Orthodox Christians from the Balkans, and Jews from Europe. This is not new in America and it is not unique in the world. (I lived in Boston in the 1970s. Irish Americans, Italian Americans, Polish Americans, Jews, Blacks, all had their neighborhoods, each elected their own ethnicity, and people fit into tribes. Older people pretended to tolerate one another; young people fought one another.)
Some of this may be Democratic messaging on identity combined with government attention to protected classes. Democrats have collected a coalition of interest groups. Hillary Clinton, in particular, represented the politics of grievance and re-assertion of oppressed groups. She spoke of glass ceilings for women. She spoke of tapestries not melting pots. Pre-election 2016 Democrats counted white women and all Hispanics as chess-pieces, blocs of votes on the Democratic side--a mistake.
Many American whites felt every color of "the rainbow" was acknowledged and entitled to celebrate itself--except White Christians. Celebrating White is forbidden and shamed. Trump gets cheers when he says--in July--that people are free to say "Merry Christmas." MeToo shames males, defining men as perpetrators and beneficiaries of "rape culture."
Spokespeople and activists for social justice felt entitled--required even--to call out racism, xenophobia, and misogamy when they perceive it, and they perceive it in places where other people don't see it, or refuse to acknowledge it. Democrats were not afraid of making race and gender an issue. It was a duty, and they thought they had the numbers on their side. But their message was heard by everyone, and the resistance was greater than the thrust. Their coalition fractured. Whites voted their race, but women voted their race not gender, Hispanics voted their immigration status, and blacks didn't turn out.
Fox is both a cause and an effect. They have a message that resonates: "regular' heterosexual, white, Christian Republicans are the subject of disrespect and violent attack, and we are the primary victims of racism and prejudice.
That Sikh man was attacked putting up lawn signs for a GOP candidate. Just look at the news.
3 comments:
I read an excellent article recently on these issues. Written by a lecturer from your favorite university, Harvard.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/08/sarah-jeong-shouldnt-be-fired-for-her-tweets-that-doesnt-mean-liberals-have-to-defend-them.html
Excerpt:
As I have already noted, the kind of rhetoric in which Jeong engaged is likely to delay, rather than to accelerate, the political ascendancy of people of color. But as NBC political analyst Anand Giridharadas pointed out when he was a guest on my podcast, The Good Fight, there is even reason to avoid this kind of talk if you are convinced that the victory of the “inevitable demographic majority” is imminent:
"We are going to become a country that is majority-minority. This is going to be a country no longer run by white men. In certain fields, you see that faster than in others, but the train is moving. So part of the difficult thing here is to ask those in “Woke America” who are still on the wrong end of many power equations right now, but who are moving into a country that is more favorable to them, to start preparing for how they’re going to act as victors.
It’s a tough thing to ask people to be gracious and magnanimous in victory before they have won. The process of their victory, which is going to take place over decades in millions of little moments—in workplaces and at water fountains, in schools and on streets—is going to provoke so much fear and anxiety and racism and chauvinism and sexism that if the partisans of the new America are not magnanimous in victory, the victory may turn out to be a pyrrhic one. And it’s important to make sure we don’t lose the country right at the moment that it’s passing into new hands."
If the left imitates the inflammatory rhetoric of the right, the best possible future is one in which today’s minority groups take over the reins of power but our social divisions grow even more poisonous. Since we will still have to live alongside each other, this would mean that minority groups, even once they are in power, would face the hostility of an extremely resentful bloc of what Jeong might call “old white men.”
The defensive inversion of bigotry, in other words, is a disastrous recipe for building the kind of society to which the left itself should, given its own values and the interests of its own members, aspire: one in which there is more rather than less friendship and affection across racial lines, and one in which society is more rather than less peaceful. And that is why any liberal or leftist who shares an aspirational vision of what a racially just America might one day look like has very good reason to reject the kind of rhetoric of which Jeong’s tweets are but a particularly controversial example.
Peter, thanks for posting Tam Moore's comments. It brought back old times. I well remember the havoc created by the Rev. Huss' takeover of the Oregon GOP back then.
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