Thug is the New N-Word

I am sure that most of you reading my blog have noticed that how in the past couple years, say since the election of Black man as president, the racial rhetoric in this country has steadily moved downward, as a new sense of white backlash has emerged. I remember while I was at CU-Boulder, when Obama was campaigning and then was eventually elected, several students in different classes with me wanted to do research projects on how race relations were improving in the country because of the prominence of a possible Black president. The argument was that racism was on its way out: how else could a black man be taken seriously or elected to the highest office in the land. Further, once in office, Obama would show the remaining racists that he could do the job and prove all the racists wrong.

Seriously. People thought this. Privileged white kids never cease to amaze me. Of course, I provided the proverbial counter argument, and effectively shut down anyone's attempt to do such a stupid, shortsighted project. I do what I can.

Fast forward two years later, and I would argue that racism is alive and well in 2010. It would be hyperbolic to say that it is as bad as it ever has been; that simply wouldn't stand up to historical analysis. But, it is bad and only getting worse. We are paying the price for the ways that the government handled civil rights. In short, Congress and the presidency in the mid-1960s, with a complicit Supreme Court after, established a set of laws that tried to set up the impossible "colorblind" ideal: everyone is equal and if we simply remove employment barriers and treat everyone equally then racism will go away. That's ok on one level, but it no way deals with the past injustices that shape the present. Colorblindness is only the first step needed towards racial reconciliation, not the end result. But that's what we got: we are supposed to believe the country is colorblind and that our all too inconvenient past never happened. The people (ultra-cons and other not-so-enlightened folk) that believe in this doctrine do not allow any kind of conversation about race, since, in their minds, race no longer exists; it disappeared with Jim Crow. That is how people can call a Black man such as Jeremiah Wright a racist when he simply says that programs and leadership are needed for the black community to solve problems endemic to those areas. Since he is not being colorblind, he is a racist. Tea Partiers can hold up signs calling Obama Hitler.

Fundamentalism is scary. It allows no room for irony.

The result of all of this is that the discourse surrounding race is at a standstill in America, and this benefits the conservatives and racists. That is, by making it racism every time someone mentions race, people with ideas like mine do not get to be critical of any one spouting off racist shit. We are rabble-rousers, or pot-stirrers. For the cons, racism is a thing of the past and if we progressives would just let it the past stay in the past, then it would go away. In other words, it is Black people's fault that there is still racism. Unbelievable.

History is beginning to repeat itself. I had this great idea the other night that approximately as much time has passed between the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (the thing that cons are REALLY upset about) and the present day as did between Reconstruction and the re-disenfranchisement of Blacks. That is, crazy whiteness seems to work in periods of 50 years. The every-other-other generation theory I guess. I can't explain it and don't really understand it, I just find it interesting.

Anyway, hiding behind this veil of color-blindness, racists return to time honored traditions. And, since we live in a "race-free" society, racists have to find code words for what they really mean. Reagan had his welfare queens. Civil Rights activists were Communists, or troublemakers. When you go to a football game, you always hear some old white guy yell “Run, boy?” towards a Black running back. It’s all coded language, so these folks can be racists but not say n----r. But, we know what they really mean. It's amazing what white folks will do to not call someone a n----r.

The new code word that keeps popping up for me is "thug."

When I want to get a good grip on the ways people feel about race in the state of Mississippi, I read the comments following stories on the website for the state’s newspaper, The Clarion Ledger. It is part social science experiment and part masochism, because where it teaches me a lot, it is also very painful and I have no one to blame for reading it but myself. (It's like taking a sociology exam at the dentist's office while he waits to rip you soul through your teeth, if that makes any sense). Following pretty much any story about a Black guy committing a crime, you see comments like “String that thug up!” or “Jackson will continue to go to shit if all the thugs are allowed to keep running free” and "Build a fence around Jackson and kill all the thugs!" and voleyball. Of course, there is often the caveat that they are just talking about criminals when they say thug, although no one ever calls the white criminals thugs. They say things like “What a waste” or “Don’t send him to jail his family has suffered enough.” Like Paul Mooney said, these white people can see themselves in these other people, and therefore they can be rehabilitated. The Black thug, however, cannot, and he will always be a thug by nature (sounds familiar; slavery is calling, it wants its reasoning back).

As I have been reading these comments, I always knew exactly what people meant, even though, because of the colorblind ethos, they never had to say it and could hide behind the shroud of only talking about black criminals. But, even that is starting to change.

Today, there was a story about a report that said that government officials had forged some documents concerning the oil spill so they could make a better argument for shutting down gulf oil drilling temporarily (as if millions of gallons of oil in the water and millions of dead animals wasn’t enough reason). I knew the comments were coming. The cons are gonna jump all over this one, even though Bush got a pass for numerous instances of forging information for the benefit of his own policies (Iraq anyone?) But the comments were worse than I thought.

One guy wrote about the “thugocracy” that is ruling this country. That’s interesting. No way to even attempt to defend the use of thug there. It’s pretty obvious what is meant by that. Then there was the kicker. One guy wrote (and it gets its own line here):

“This is what happens when a thugocrat takes over the former white house.”

Seriously.

Race discourse is starting to take a new shape in this country. Whereas people, for a while, at least had the decency to try to cover up their racism, it isn’t happening anymore. Calling Obama a thugocrat is indefensible, even with the infantile logic of your average ultra-con. This has happened because the usual suspects of racism have been allowed to control the discourse of race, to the point where they can call the president a thug and a fascist, yet if I ask “what do you mean by thug, exactly” I am somehow the asshole for not letting race live in the past.

Think about that coupled with the Tea Partiers saying “Take the country back!” Or, to quote Paul Mooney again, "White people like going back in time, which is always a problem for me. I can only go back so far. Any farther and my black ass is in chains."

The white hegemonic power structure is still in place and it dictates the rules. What can be said, what can’t be said, and who can and can’t say it. Until that power structure is defeated, a thousand Civil Rights Acts and a million Black presidents won’t change anything. Racism is about power, and the power dialectic has barely budged in the history of America. It takes a lot of amassed power and white privilege to pretend like this country can be colorblind. THAT is what I was trying to get those kids at CU-Boulder to understand.