This 9/11 in Manhattan: A Time to Confront the Racists
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
Not since the massive Klu Klux Klan marches of the 1920s have white nationalists strutted their stuff so proudly. The “media-validated” Tea Partyers are on a roll, and are even getting physical with Black folks in lower Manhattan, where they plan a national rally on 9/11. The anti-racist opposition will also be out in strength, in solidarity with Muslims and, hopefully, to strongly encourage white supremacists to find someplace else to gather.
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
“1:pm, lower Manhattan is the right time and place to respond.”
Most days, there are lots of better things for progressives to do than follow the Tea Party around. The largely media-made “movement” already gets outsized attention, drawing cameras, as author Paul Street says, any time one hundred white guys gather at a car dealership in suburban Chicago. The NAACP and Al Sharpton seek to circle Black wagons around Barack Obama’s corporate White House by pointing to the Tea Party, rather than Wall Street’s death spiral economy, Black mass incarceration and Obama’s wars, as the gravest danger to Black America. The Tea Party can be a huge diversion, an excuse to avoid confronting real power.
But Saturday, September 11, lower Manhattan is the right time and place to respond, not just to mounting provocations from the white nationalists of the Tea Party, but to those “mainstream” politicians, including Barack Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who have made disastrous concessions to the forces of racism.
Every utterance that urges organizers of the Cordoba House, a proposed community center with room for prayer, to respect the “sensitivities” (or, sometimes, “sensibilities”) of Muslim-haters, represents a great leap backward in U.S. history, to a time when the typical white American believed Blacks should not attempt to integrate neighborhoods and schools that did not want them. Such intrusions on white turf and hearth, although conceded as possibly within Black people’s legal rights, were deemed grossly “insensitive” to the feelings of whites. The onus was on the Black intruder, whose legal rights were morally trumped by white people’s right to be unmolested by the repugnant and scary presence of Negroes.
“’Mainstream’ politicians, including Barack Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, have made disastrous concessions to the forces of racism.”
There is not an iota of difference between such Thirties-, Forties- and Fifties-era attitudes, and Sen. Reid’s judgment that Cordoba House “should be built some place else.” Reid, of Nevada, fits right in with the 67 percent of New Yorkers surveyed in a recent New York Times poll who said the “mosque” planners should find “a less controversial location” – that is, someplace that, theoretically, wouldn’t upset the Muslim-haters.
Cleverer politicians question the “wisdom” of being Muslim in certain places. "I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there," said President Obama, back-peddling from earlier declarations of Muslim’s absolute right to worship two blocks from the former World Trade Center. The onus remains on the Muslim, whose judgment and “wisdom” are in doubt, rather than the racist, who comes in for no such critique (Obama doesn’t believe in racists or ghosts of Mississippi).
Anti-Muslim hysteria – which is really anti-people of color hysteria – seems to have acted as a time machine, transporting the nation back two, three or more generations. But of course, there are no time machines, and we are forced us to recognize that much of the vaunted racial “progress” (in white attitudinal changes) of the past half-century never actually occurred, or simply sloughed off like old skin.
“We are forced us to recognize that much of the vaunted racial ‘progress’ (in white attitudinal changes) of the past half-century never actually occurred.”
September 11, 2001, marked the end of an era that had seemed to have been marked by great progress in fighting racial profiling – or, at least, in making the practice disrespectable. Even Republican politicians denounced racial profiling as unacceptable and “un-American.” Morally and legally, Blacks and Latinos had won significant victories against the profilers – rare good news in the criminal justice arena. Then the Twin Towers came down, and profiling was instantaneously back with a vengeance, as if decades of work had never happened. Clearly, whatever changes occurred in most white people’s minds during the pre-9/11 era must have been ephemeral. Now, the other racist shoe is dropping, as the media-validated Tea Party white nationalists plant their racist flag in downtown Manhattan, with a national rally scheduled to prevent the “Islamicization of America.”
The term that is actually on their minds is “Niggerization,” since the home-grown model of white American racism remains relentlessly operative and is the only kind these crackers can actually navigate. That’s why a thirtyish Black man was surrounded a few weeks ago by white thugs at the Tea Party’s lower Manhattan outpost, presumably because his hat and shirt appeared…Muslimish. It turned out the non-Muslim, African American passerby was a construction worker at Ground Zero.
To be frank about it, the Tea Party, and racists in general, need to be put back in their place – at least in Manhattan, where that can theoretically be accomplished.
The Emergency Mobilization Against Racism and Anti-Islamic Bigotry rally begins at 1:pm Saturday, September 11, at City Hall, and then marches to the Muslim community center site a few blocks away. Over a hundred organizations and individuals have endorsed the event, including lots of Black ones. Bring energy and anger.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
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