Chris Rock and Kiese Laymon on racial progress

In an interview with New York Magazine (via Slate), Chris Rock offers some thoughts on racial progress after Ferguson, changing the typical framing of this issue and focusing indirectly on the issue of power. He says:

When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it’s all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before. … So, to say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years. If you saw Tina Turner and Ike having a lovely breakfast over there, would you say their relationship’s improved? Some people would. But a smart person would go, “Oh, he stopped punching her in the face.” It’s not up to her. Ike and Tina Turner’s relationship has nothing to do with Tina Turner. Nothing. It just doesn’t. The question is, you know, my kids are smart, educated, beautiful, polite children. There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people.

Also making the rounds on Facebook is an article about the experiences of Kiese Laymon, a black faculty member at Vassar College. Like Rock, Laymon highlights the differential power afforded to whites vs. blacks, even when the whites are campus security guards and the blacks are professors, concluding:

We are so much better than the sick part of our nation that murders an unarmed black boy like a rabid dog, before prosecuting him for being a nigger. We are so much better than powerful academic institutions, special prosecutors, and the innocent practitioners of white racial supremacy in this nation who really believe that a handful of niggers with some special IDs, and a scar(r)ed black President on the wrong side of history, are proof of their—and really, our own—terrifying deliverance from American evil.

This, combined with other recent events, demonstrates that we still have a long way to go to change the structural elements that will allow whites to be “nicer.”

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Whites for Romney

One interesting aspect of the political spectacle surrounding this year’s presidential election is the percentage of whites, particularly white males, who prefer Mitt Romney to Barack Obama. Tom Scocca of Slate takes a look at the polling gap between whites and non-whites. He writes:

White men are supporting Mitt Romney to the exclusion of logic or common sense, in defiance of normal Americans. Without this narrow, tribal appeal, Romney’s candidacy would simply not be viable. Most kinds of Americans see no reason to vote for him.

This fact is obfuscated because white people control the political media. So we get the Washington Post reporting that the election is “more polarized along racial lines than any other contest since 1988”:

Obama has a deficit of 23 percentage points, trailing Republican Mitt Romney 60 percent to 37 percent among whites, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News national tracking poll. That presents a significant hurdle for the president—and suggests that he will need to achieve even larger margins of victory among women and minorities, two important parts of the Democratic base, to win reelection.

That’s not polarized. Polarization would mean that various races were mutually pulling apart, toward their favored candidates. “Minorities” is not a race (nor, you may have noticed, is “women”). Minorities and women are the people standing still, while white men run away from them.

Scott Lemieux, over at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, points out that the media presents Obama’s support differently because of who does, and who does not, support him. While Politico claimed Obama does not have a broad mandate based on his supporters, Lemieux argues that “if Romney ekes out an electoral college and popular vote victory, we’re not going to be hearing about how Romney’s mandate is too narrow because it’s so dominated by white men.”

Of course, all of this would be moot if whites would just listen to Chris Rock’s assertion that Obama is white:

He makes some good points. Chris Rock is black, though, so I’m guessing that whites are unlikely to listen to him.

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