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
