Gearing up for a presidential run in the coming months, Mike Huckabee is busy making various racist statements in the press. First there was a diatribe about how Obama was raised in Kenya (he wasn’t), repeatedly invoking the Mau Mau revolution as a tool to associate Obama with anti-white uprising. Huckabee has since stated he misspoke (over and over, apparently) and really meant Indonesia (and we’re not exactly sure what the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya has to do with Indonesia).
Following the Mau Mau incident Huckabee went after Natalie Portman, for being single and pregnant. Portman is a millionaire actress, so this isn’t so much an attack on her as poorly camouflaged racism. I say ‘poorly’ because a large chunk of his comments aren’t being reported in the traditional media. If he had simply criticized her for her lack of ‘family values’, I would contend this isn’t actually an attack on her, as an attack on ‘single mothers’. And when Americans, especially those who might consider voting for Huckabee, think of “single mothers” I would further contend that they don’t think of millionaire actresses — they think of poor, mostly black, women. I don’t need to spend much time convincing you of this though, as Huckabee was kind enough to just come right out and say it,
Most single moms are very poor, uneducated, can’t get a job, and if it weren’t for government assistance, their kids would be starving to death and never have health care … You know, right now, 75 percent of black kids in this country are born out of wedlock. 61 percent of Hispanic kids — across the board, 41 percent of all live births in America are out of wedlock births. And the cost of that is simply staggering.
No, Mike, your blatant racism is simply staggering. Welfare makes up about 1% of the federal budget; is that an amount that can be fairly characterized as “simply staggering” in the context of what we spend on other things? (Especially given the multiplicity of returns on investing in a more fair society.) Another inconvenient truth, the majority of welfare recipients are children, not single mothers, and of the women on welfare, a majority are white, and their kids are white. So there goes that charge. And these single mothers can’t get a job? More than half of welfare recipients are off the roll in the same year, and more than 80% within 4 years. The inconvenient facts go on: the average welfare family is no larger than the average non-welfare family, the average AFDC assistance payment is around $300 per month, and so on. But Huckabee knows all of this: most of the numbers I am quoting here are from the House Ways and Means — this is not secret data.
You know what other data isn’t secret? Huckabee quotes some scary numbers about the percentage of black children born out of wedlock in the US. I’m not sure of his end source (original source should be census data), but I have one (The Population of the United States), and on page 256 of my source it quotes the same number he uses, and then in the next paragraph it says,
For the non-white and black populations there has been a significant decline in the out-of-wedlock birth rate, especially for ages under twenty-five. For the white population the rates have risen rapidly for all ages. [emphasis mine]
In summary, Huckabee blames unemployable single black and latino mothers for the “staggering” costs to this country, except we find out the costs aren’t staggering, the mothers aren’t unemployable, the majority of these mothers are white, and in fact that only scientific data he puts forth is done in a disingenuous manner that makes it seem as if mothers of color are in the midst of an epidemic of unwed childbirths, when his own sources show that the ‘epidemic’ is on the decline for mothers of color, and on the rise for white mothers. What’s worse is that Huckabee is smart enough and well-informed enough to know all of this already. He’s not just making this stuff up, he’s intentionally distorting the truth in order to play to pre-existing racist conceptions held by potential voters. This sort of racism has real consequences for the exact children he speaks of, and not just for blacks or latinos, but for all poor American children. For a pretty good book on the subject, see Welfare Racism, which I will review soon.
On the topic of other racist bloviations, Peter King (chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee) is busy holding hearings on the radicalization of Muslims in America. The problem here is that neither the facts, nor even common sense, bear out his racist positions. King has been a staunch supporter of the IRA (in case you missed the ’80s, they are an Irish group fighting for independence in Northern Ireland, and known for killing British civillians). He continues to defend his position on the IRA, saying that, “The fact is, the IRA never attacked the United States. And my loyalty is to the United States,” so he would have you believe his support for them is irrelevant. Yet at the same time he calls for others to denounce Hamas (a Palestinian group fighting for independence in the West Bank, known for killing Israeli civillians). Hamas has never attacked the United States. Hamas has defended itself against Israel, as much as the IRA defended itself against Britain. My point is not to debate the merits of either organization but to state that the US government lists both as terrorists, and to my knowledge the targets of both are our political and military allies (we give over $2BN per year to Israel in military aid — they receive one-fifth of our foreign aid budget). The difference, of course, is that Hamas are Muslim and are non-white, the IRA are Christian and white. Arab Muslims: terrorists. White Christians: freedom fighters. Got it yet?
It gets even stickier if you look into the details of the IRA and their funding and weaponry, as Libya was shipping them arms while we were bombing Tripoli and Benghazi. But surely King knows this. So my point is not to say that King is a racist, but that he is making racist statements, something that might be even worse than just being an overt racist. People know to ignore those who run around saying blatantly hateful and incredulously racist things. But those who come off as passionate but reasoned can do a lot more damage with half truths and illogical justifications, if not outright falsifications.
As in the case of Huckabee, King ignores and distorts the truth, in order to play to racist notions held within the population at large. And, like Huckabee, his claims aren’t based on any real data. His witnesses aren’t experts but instead people with false anecdotes. Peter King claims that, “They won’t turn in their own. They won’t tell what’s going on in the mosques. They won’t come forward and cooperate with the police,” when that is simply not true — 40% of foiled terrorist plots since 2001 in the US were discovered based on a Muslim reporting them, and since 2009 the number is now 75%. Resa Azlan (who wrote his PhD disseration on institutionalized Islamophobia) has a great article in the Washington Post that pretty much covers everything else that needs to be said.
In conclusion, this is the sort of thing Chomsky is referring to when he talks about “manufacturing consent.” Harmful social structures and institutions remain in place through oppression and disenfranchisement, and the persons behind those structures, the persons who profit from them, they remain in place, able to profit, through the tacit consent of the general population. They gain this consent by distracting, confusing, and dividing the population against itself. Ask yourself who wins when people of different ethnicities and religions, people who as an aggregate make up the whole of our democracy, are divided against each other. It’s not coincidence that the agenda at hand is to persecute Muslims and black women, for neither of them look anything like the architects of structural violence.