Years ago I threw my lot in with those who argued we shouldn’t get into the Hitler argument. Now here we are, at it again. It’s a problem Joe took up in his quote of the day on Tuesday. In that same vein, Leonard Pitts devotes his column today to a history lesson about Nazis:
it was Nazis who shoved sand down a boy’s throat until he died, who tossed candies to Jewish children as they sank to their deaths in a sand pit, who threw babies from a hospital window and competed to see how many of those “little Jews” could be caught on a bayonet, who injected a cement-like fluid into women’s uteruses to see what would happen, who stomped a pregnant woman to death, who once snatched a woman’s baby from her arms and, in the words of an eyewitness, “tore him as one would tear a rag.”
That’s who the Nazis were, ladies and gentlemen … those obscenities plus six million more. They were the triumph of ideology over reason and even over humanity, the demonization of racial, religious and political difference, the objectification of the vulnerable other. And the authors of a mass murder that staggers imagination, still.
You would think, then, that where they are invoked to draw a parallel or make a point, it would be done with a respect for the incalculable evil the Nazis represent. You would think people would tread carefully, not because of the potential insult to a given politician (they are big boys and girls) but because to do otherwise profanes the profound and renders trivial that which ought to be held sacred by anyone who regards himself as a truly human being.
But in modern America, unfortunately, rhetoric often starts over the top and goes up from there. So fine, George W. Bush is “a smirking chimp.” Fine, Barack Obama is “a Chicago thug.” We have a Constitution, after all, and it says we can say whatever we want. It doesn’t say it has to be intelligent.
And yes, you are even protected if you liken Obama or Bush to Hitler. Yet every time I hear that, it makes me cringe for what it says about our collective propensity for historical amnesia and our retarded capacity for reverence. Once upon a lifetime ago, six million people with DNA, names and faces just like you and I, were butchered with gleeful sadism and mechanistic dispatch. “Six million people.”
You and I may no longer respect one another, but is it asking too much that we still respect them?
So, some of you may be asking, as goes Nazis so goes Racists? Because the other day I put up a post that I knew deep down was inflammatory. In it I essentially called those who opposed healthcare insurance reform racists.
Unfortunately, to this minute I have not had time to read all the ruckus it caused. And, in fact, I believe the particular history of this country, a history that included slavery and racism, North and South, does still impact our beliefs. And through those beliefs, I believe it does still impact our policy choices. Finally, I believe that slavery has given us a level of income inequality that remains stubbornly in place.
But does anything going down today come anywhere near even the least of the sins written, enacted and enforced by law in the Jim Crow South? Do I think the worst of the gun-toting town-hall protesters bears even the remotest of resemblances to those lynch mobs, North and South, that once inflicted horrific violence across this country?
Most definitely, I do not. And the comparison to those who suffered under that violent regime does them no respect. Instead, I know that playing the race card, as I arguably did the other day, makes race relations measurably worse.
This I wrote in May of 2008 and re-posted just last month:
[In discussing his book, The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse, Richard Thompson Ford] argues that we should think of racism not as a crime, like murder, where we have to find bad people and fix them, but rather as a social problem that we can come together to work on and fix, “kind of like air pollution.”
He disputes the notion that Americans don’t like to talk about race. He says we talk about race obsessively, just not very productively. “Every few weeks there’s a race scandal, but we don’t talk about the real problems and we don’t talk about real solutions.” Instead we talk about phony scandals generated by people paid to be offensive (stand-up comics, cable news pundits and radio jocks). And the problem is this distorts our understanding of race and distracts us from the real issues we could be addressing.
Ford sees a good news/bad news story about race relations in a world of “racism without racists.”
I haven’t quoted this from Melissa Harris-Lacewell here before. She has many good things to say, things I believe we all should listen to, but my favorite of her observations is that you can’t use a hammer on a screw:
“What I’m suggesting is we are experiencing a new form of racial inequality. We could think of Jim Crow as a nail. And the protest against Jim Crow were a hammer. And a hammer is an extremely effective tool when you’re dealing with a nail. Contemporary racial inequality is structural. It’s undercover. It is connected with also with sort of black achievement which is also going on at the same time. Contemporary racial inequality is a screw, and if you take a hammer and start pounding on a screw, you just end up with a mess which means we have to live with the fact that a new generation is going to have to innovate a screwdriver to deal with the new problem. And that screwdriver might not look anything like the hammer. And we can’t keep yelling at them to use a hammer for a new problem.”
So what would a re-imagined Civil Rights movement look like? I don’t know. I look to the Millennials to come up with that answer. I hope they can learn from our mistakes.
I do know that more equal societies almost always do better. And that equality of opportunity is not, in my view, equality for all. Because inequality of circumstance makes genuinely equal opportunity impossible.
I’ll have more to say on that in future posts. In the meantime, I’ll try to better practice what I preach.