Monday, December 14, 2015

It has been a few years now since I composed the note below to the Rachel Maddow Show.  As the byline shows, I was still at Seattle University then.  I am reprising it in this setting now because we are in the season again when toxic people and their toxic ideas are gaining respectability, especially in the media, because their hosts will do anything for ratings when they are not making false distinctions between the toxicity that people like, at the present time, Donald Trump--welcome to your next president, America!--Ted Cruz, and, of course, Mr. Marco 'Glib' Rubio, represent and genuine difference of opinion on matters of mutual concern in a decent society.  Enough said.

Dear Rachel Maddow,
I have just finished watching your exchange with Pat Buchanan.  I must say that I was mightily disappointed with your handling of him and his racial supremacist views.  I was expecting that you’d do a better job and you did not. 
Here is why I think you did not.  You, quite out of character, allowed yourself to join the ranks of those who continue to dignify the bullshit that Pat Buchanan wraps in fine raiment that makes him a feature of the talk shows on TV.  When you asked him why there have been 108 white men out of the 110 men who have ever served in the US Supreme Court, he gave you the KKK party line and you did not pick up on it.  I cannot assume that you are afraid of him. 
He said, among other things, that in all the signal events of American history it was “100 % American white men” who were present and/or active.  You let that pass.  How much American history does Pat Buchanan know?  Or pundits are allowed a pass when they peddle illiteracy in the name of rhetoric?  Has Buchanan ever heard of Crispus Attucks?  And, obviously in Buchanan’s KKK-inflected history of the United States, there were no blacks who fought on the part of the right side in the Civil War, hence his startling claim that Gettysburg was all white in battle.  You let him slide on that, too. 
And when he uttered the slander that Judge Sotomayor is an affirmative action hire, you seemed to be apologizing by suggesting that there is some good for our nation to have a wider pool of candidates to pick from.  Yes, you are right.  But that was not the right answer to a rampaging racial supremacist.  Did the judge receive an affirmative action degree from Princeton or Yale?  Did her law review editorship carry an asterisk showing that it was an affirmative action appointment? 
And when he trotted out the canard that they all do who want to defend white privilege regarding the superior performance of the fire fighters or his own SAT scores, you let him slide, again.  In the first place, except in the make-believe world of racial supremacists, no institution hires or advances employees on the basis solely of test scores.  When we allow ourselves to be sidetracked into arguing test scores, we let them take the high ground.  Secondly, I always like to ask my students whether they will agree if someone suggested to them that in all the years that the US Supreme Court has been in existence since 1787, only two black people have had the smarts to sit on it, they usually display more wisdom than the old racist fool that you dignified in your segment.  Even a random sampling of the population over time would have yielded a greater than 2 frequency for black candidates.
By not calling people like Pat Buchanan what they really are—racial supremacists whose only ‘improvement’ on the David Dukes of this world is better diction—you contribute, even if inadvertently, to their continuing respectability in our public sphere.
I do enjoy your programme and tonight’s missteps will not change that.  I just hope that you will take another look at the bona fides of the Buchanans of this world and ensure they receive no pass the next time around.

Femi Taiwo
Philosophy Department

Seattle University

In fairness to the host, she did do a rejoinder the following day taking care of some of the concerns in the above, though by no means all or most of them.  And, certainly, I am not one to suggest that complaints like mine have anything to do with her follow-up.  But in a season where bullshit is again having respectability conferred on it in our public discourse, mostly media-driven, some caution might be in order for the rest of us not to fall easy prey to snake-oil salespersons.  A word is enough for the wise.

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