Conservative propaganda strategy: The way to fight against racial justice - claim to fight for it.

from OurFuture.org:


Black is white
Submitted by Rick Perlstein on August 6, 2007 - 8:55am.

When I wrote about the Supreme Court's monstrously mendacious decision to ban local school districts from seeking racial fairness, I was especially offended by Chief Justice Roberts' formulation, “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."

Historian Nancy McClean has now published an amazing essay in which she reveals the workshops that churned out this Orwellian notion. "Roberts’s decision," she writes, "is replete with quotable phrases from the lexicon conservative strategists honed in their think tanks in the 1970s and then carried into the nation’s courtrooms through their various legal societies."

Here's the story:


How did National Review greet the Brown decision? Frank Meyer, its founding co-editor and the leading conservative movement builder in the formative years, called the high court’s decision a “rape of the Constitution.”

To fight the implementation of Brown, Buckley and Meyer forged an alliance with the intellectual architect of “massive resistance,” James Jackson Kilpatrick. Kilpatrick’s agitation against school desegregation as editor of the Richmond News Leader earned him praise as “one of the South’s most talented leaders” from the Mississippi-based white Citizens’ Councils then working to crush the civil rights movement.

Buckley traded mailing lists with this avid white supremacist organization in 1958, assuring its leader that “Our position on states’ rights is the same as your own.” Indeed, it was. What made “the White community” in the South “entitled” to use any means necessary to keep blacks from voting, Buckley had editorialized the year before, was that “it is the advanced race” so its “claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage.” ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/black_white?tx=3

Stanley Fish talks about the problems with principles like this. They sound great. But, the historical context needs to be considered.

Most of us can agree that all racial discrimination is wrong. But, if a history of racial discrimiantion has given one race a huge economic and political advantage, then, with that advantage still in place, applying the principle, all racial discrimination is wrong, leaves in place the effects of the historical discrimination.

When conservatives declare their adherence to this principle, they are really declaring their satisfaction with the status quo brought about by racial discrimination.