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Conservative Racism: A Story in Excerpts

Jill

1. Muslims are “different,” because they are anti-modern and they marry their cousins.

2. Barack Rodney King Obama. Yes, that is the headline. I don’t have to say anything else, but I will just point out that you know you’ve got nothin when you’re criticizing your opponent for attempts at consensus-building.

3. Yo, George, Wassup? Another actual headline. Summary: White dudes are teh rulez.

4. Obama is black and that’s why people like him. But is he too black?

34 thoughts on Conservative Racism: A Story in Excerpts

  1. From the George article: Not to pick on college students — who can’t be faulted for not learning what they haven’t been taught — but recent studies show that our educated youth don’t know much about history.

    Umm.. Who’s fault is that? Which side of the political spectrum is trying to rewrite history as so that the country is a “Christian” nation?

  2. Convservatives blame educators for everything because they are trying to ruin our best industry — our colleges and universities. Oh, and they are trying to ruin public schooling K-12 as well.

  3. I don’t know that it means anything, but when I tried to click on the Townhall link, earthlink posted a banner at the top saying “this webpage is probably a scam.”

  5. In many European countries and under Jewish law, it is permitted to marry cousins within certain degrees of consanguinity; in Germany, IIRC, even first cousins may marry.

    Thanks, National Review.

  6. In the first part of this piece, I showed that, on a world scale, the radical form of in-marriage represented by the union of parallel cousins is highly unusual. Parallel-cousin marriage is confined almost exclusively to the region once ruled by the original eighth-century Islamic empire, and this involuted form of marriage stands in sharp contrast to the relative value placed on out-marriage, inter-group alliance, and interchange favored by almost every other culture in the world.

    I would like to direct that author to the following map:

    http://www.ncsl.org/programs/cyf/cousins.htm

    Now, mind you, the prevalence of first cousin marriage in the US might be really small–this map only shows states where its legal. But still… the fact that the laws on the books allow this means that it was at some point not uncommon and probably acceptable. So, no, its probably not just the territory of the “original eighth-century Islamic empire.”

  7. Sorry for the double post (my first one may still be in moderation when this one appears), but I just noticed that most of the states where first cousin marriage is still legal are on the east coast, in the south, or in the California-AZ-NM-TX areas… those areas were all settled very early and probably still have these laws left over from earlier periods (this is pure speculation on my part though).

    So, it probably was more common in the past in the US.

  9. On the cousin marriage thing, it was far more typical in Victorian England than outmarriage. Charles Darwin and Queen Victoria both married cousins, although at the moment I can’t remember in what degree Victoria and Albert were related. (Darwin and his wife were both grandchildren of Josiah Wedgwood of fancy china fame.) Jane Austen has a number of such marriages in her books, as does Dickens. Among European royalty, by the 19th century it was pretty much impossible to find anyone who WASN’T already related anyway.

    Seriously, there are many problems with the practice of importing relatives from the old country as wives, principally that the wives are completely isolated from European society and therefore easy victims. Of course, seeing the problems from the perspective of the wives wouldn’t have allowed such a satisfying racist rant and would have required some basic belief that women are humans deserving respect, which would have completely missed Kurtz’s point.

  10. Muslims aren’t the only cousin-marriers. I seem to remember reading a Louisa May Alcott novel as a kid, in which the heroine is romanced by and eventually married to her cousin. I was all kinds of freaked out, but none of the characters seemed the least bit put off. I assume it was a common enough practice at one point.

    And I love that the root of Muslims’ failure to assimilate is that they just won’t marry white people: because they prefer to get busy with their cousins. (The assumption being that most white people are just dying to marry non-white people and “assimilate” them?) Way to Other, dude.

  11. Poor Obama- too black for some whites, yet not black enough for some blacks. What’s a guy to do? It’s not like we can evaluate him based on his personality or voting history or experience or performance in debates or anything.

  12. Wow, Parker has a nice use of ellipses there in her Frank Newman quote, which was not at all about lack of focus on white men. Here’s the entire quote, which was in an article about testing for higher education (you’ll have to pay to see it, as it’s 5 years old):

    ”The real reason we don’t test is, we would rather not know,” said Frank Newman, a former president of the Education Commission of the States who, as head of the Futures Project at Brown University, promotes accountability in higher education.

    ”We have a rhetoric about what we do,” he said. ”That rhetoric is: when you come to our institution you get a great liberal education, you’re going to learn to think, you’re going to learn about the life of the mind, you’re going to learn the great traditions of Western thought. If we start measuring, we will start finding out that you didn’t learn how to think, you didn’t learn about the great traditions of Western thought. Then we have a nasty little problem on our hands. If we find out that those students can’t write well, who do we turn to?”

    Newman was discussing testing the effectiveness of liberal arts education in terms of learning to think. Not memorizing facts.

    Besides, Parker is way off base. The things she believes students should know aren’t taught in college-level history classes. They’re taught in secondary school, and anyone who has a secondary education has been taught them. But then she’d have to take an honest look at why there are problems with our public school system, when she’d much rather shoot arrows at colleges.

    She also might have to consider that education in our country is seen solely as a means to an end – a better job. Not as a worthy endeavor in and of itself.

  14. The cousin-marrying thing is interesting not only because it’s totally historically revisionist, but also because he bases his entire argument on orientalist scholarship, a practice which has been long-criticized.

  16. ??? Get that guy a history book on Europe, pronto! Sheesh–has this idiot even LOOKED at the geneology of the royal houses of Europe?!

    First cousin marriages can be found in the Mid-east not just among Moslems–Christians as well.

  18. Yep, it’s perfectly legal to marry your first cousin in New York.

    One of those little factoids I remember from the bar exam.

  20. Charles Darwin and Queen Victoria both married cousins, although at the moment I can’t remember in what degree Victoria and Albert were related.

    They apparently shared a grandmother, the Duchess of Saxe-Coburg, probably through Victoria’s mother.

    Of course, this marriage was one of the reasons why hemophilia ran rampant through the royal families of Europe in the mid-to-late 1800s — Victoria and Albert’s children, who were carriers, married other cousins who were also carriers. So in some ways, you can blame the Russian Revolution on Queen Victoria insisting on marrying her cousin. ;-p

    Yes, I am a European history geek, and laughed out loud when “30 Rock” made all kinds of cracks about the inbreeding of the Hapsburgs. I have come to love “30 Rock,” and to hate “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.”

  21. I’d like to point out to those African Americans who buy into the racist stereotype that Republicans are bigots who don’t represent anybody but the white guy:

    There will NEVER be a black Democrat who will be the first black US Senator, first black US Representative, first black American to preside over a session over the US Senate, first black National Security Advisor, first black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, first (or second) black Secretary of State, or the first black Supreme Court justice. That’s right, those milestones have all been accomplished by black Republicans.

    In fact, the first black US Senator and US Representative were elected to Congress in 1870s, long before the Democrats stuffed their white hoods in the dumpster and finally quit voting against civil rights legislation.

    With all these Obamagasms going on, I just thought I would clarify that the stereotype of the Republican party as a white party is hogwash. While the Democrats talk a pretty tough game when it comes to racism, the Republicans have been quietly electing African Americans to political office for over 130 years.

  22. It was more that Victoria’s children married into those royal families than that they married cousins, really, since most of those hemophilia sufferers were men – only one carrier required to produce a male hemophiliac.

  23. It was more that Victoria’s children married into those royal families than that they married cousins, really, since most of those hemophilia sufferers were men – only one carrier required to produce a male hemophiliac.

    Well, yeah, but I may not have been clear: you had a bunch of cousins, all carriers for hemophilia, who were marrying each other. It’s kinda like the way that dwarfism is showing up more and more in Amish communities — when the gene pool is too small, more genetic problems crop up.

    That’s why you get stuff like the Habsburg Jaw when families intermarry too much over the course of generations.

  26. the Republicans have been quietly electing African Americans to political office for over 130 years

    That’s funny–I was pretty sure that Senators and Representatives are elected by everyone, not just Republicans, and that the other positions you mention (like, oh, Supreme Court Justice) are not elected offices.

    But it’s true–the Republican party was very good for blacks, back before they welcomed the Dixiecrats in. Then everything changed.

  30. About the whole cousin marriage controversy:
    In “Gone With the Wind”, set, for those who don’t know, in the white aristocratic American South during the 1860s, Ashley Wilkes and Melanie Hamilton were cousins and married, and it was customary for the Wilkes and Hamilton families to marry cousins.
    Also, I knew someone who did anthropological research in Pakistan, and although it is ideal for cousins to marry whose fathers were brothers, they do not marry a cousin whose mother was their father’s sister (sorry for being so convoluted!) because sisters and their families live with their male relatives, so that marriage would be considered incestuous. Thus their marriages may be considered incest by our standards, but they do observe their own incest taboos.

  32. Muslims are “different,” because they are anti-modern and they marry their cousins.

    …. lol… that description sounds a lot like “hillbillies” or “hicks”… so if stereotypes were true to life, then they wouldn’t really be that different from Kentuckians, eh? (Being from KY I never really found the stereotype to be accurate, though there is one self-proclaimed “redneck” that I know of). *shakes head* Stereotypes are so dumb.

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