Geraldine Ferraro: Still racist after all these years

Ben Smiths Blog - Politico.com
“If Jesse Jackson were not black, he wouldnt be in the race,” she said.

Really. The cite is an April 15, 1988 Washington Post story byline: Howard Kurtz, available only on Nexis. Here’s the full context:
Placid of demeanor but pointed in his rhetoric, Jackson struck out repeatedly today against those who suggest his race has been an asset in the campaign. President Reagan suggested Tuesday that people dont ask Jackson tough questions because of his race. And former representative Geraldine A. Ferraro D-N.Y. said Wednesday that because of his “radical” views, “if Jesse Jackson were not black, he wouldnt be in the race.”

Twenty years later, still with the same old stuff. Same hairdo, too.

Comments

  1. David C. wrote:

    Is it racist if it’s true? Jackson’s entire identity and power base was his position as a black activist & leader. He wasn’t a governor, a senator, or even a mega-rich successful businessman, the normal qualifications for running for president. What else was his presidential bid based on other than being a black leader?

    On the other hand, her remarks about Obama were stupid. Obama hasn’t been running a campaign based on his race, and he has wide support across racial lines. Ferraro is just a bitter Hillary supporter. I’m not sure she’s actually a racist, rather than just someone who said something idiotic because she’s pissed off over the way things have gone.

    Posted 12 Mar 2008 at 8:56 am

  2. Albert Johnson Jr wrote:

    Ms. Ferraro,

    I am terribly disappointed. Your recent suggestion that Mr. Obamas’ success happened only because he is black is especially painful. To think that being black in America is a lucky thing strikes me as being inconsiderate.

    I am a black person born the same year as Mr. Obamas’ wife 1964, and I can tell you at no time in my life was being black a lucky thing, or are you unaware of the sad and continuing legacy of American race relations. You disregard Mr. Obamas’ legitimate and laudable accomplishments by attributing them to one thing, and it’s the one thing Mr. Obama tries least to be – a man of race. Mr. Obama is a child of God, a husband, a father, a university graduate and a lawyer. Mr. Obama has been a stellar state representative of Illinois and he is currently a United States Senator, and great American. Somewhere probably in the high teens of the list of things Mr. Obama is would be black man.

    The statements you have made and defend amount to making his race his primary attribute. You are playing the race card in a manner that is insulting, and quite frankly would be more expected from the kind of reactionary people America has hopefully outgrown.

    In 1984 I was a student at the University of Southern California an institution with a traditionally conservative bent. I remember campaigning for and ardently defending a certain congressperson from New York as being more than just a woman, but a person regardless of gender worthy to potentially lead this country. I’m sorry to know now that I was wrong, and all the time any Gerard really would have sufficed.

    Posted 12 Mar 2008 at 3:06 pm

  3. Grim wrote:

    Slightly off topic, but don’t see a better place for it. I think this is right up your alley (from the comments):

    Conservatives believe in evolution. Liberals-progressives believe in intelligent design.Conservatives believe that there is a vast repository of knowledge in tradition and culture accumulated through millenia of trial and error, and that most of that knowledge is unconscious and transmitted from generation to generation through customs and behavior so ingrained and automatic as to be second nature.They believe that no man or council of men can even begin to approach that vast body of wisdom through conscious thought or design and are thus very cautious in implementing radical social experiments, as the laws of unintended consequences will surely dictate disastrous results.Liberals-progressives on the other hand look at culture, tradition, etc., as backward, unevolved, and an unnecessary hindrance to be jettisoned in favor of utopian social arrangements to be designed by an elite of the most enlightened individuals. The premise being that man is perfectible if only the proper government is designed to nurture and control people so they are able to achieve their fully evolved potential.

    The analogy is shocking at first, but there’s something in it to consider.

    Posted 13 Mar 2008 at 2:02 am

  4. Alon Levy wrote:

    I stopped reading at “Liberal-progressives believe in intelligent design.”

    Posted 13 Mar 2008 at 5:34 am

  5. Grim wrote:

    So did I, the first time, because it was so obviously wrong. Yet I couldn’t believe I’d read even that much, so I went back to consider the argument, and there is something to be said for it.%R%RThe difference is that the debate over actual evolution is a debate about what has already happened, whereas the debate offered in the analogy is about how best to proceed.

    If I believe the conservative side has the best of that argument — and I do — I also recognize that you can both believe in evolution, and prefer intelligent design for the future (so long as the intelligence is your own). I’m not sure that I do prefer it, for exactly the reasons the analogy considers: very often, even the best human intelligence is unable to see far enough to make for a good designer. Unintended consequences, incomplete information, and selection bias make for serious potential problems in any such design attempt; and we see the results plainly enough, to return to the original purpose of this blog for a moment, in the work of the Commissars.

    Posted 13 Mar 2008 at 8:09 am

  6. Alon Levy wrote:

    In principle, you can, but turning it into an issue of liberalism versus conservatism misses the point. Up until about World War One, everyone in the West was into intelligent design. Marxism offered a blueprint for society; conservatism offered worldwide empires that would Europeanize (or indefinitely subject) nonwhites; liberalism was all about capital-P Progress.

    Between the 1920s and the 1970s, most Westerners dropped these ideas, but the divisions were intra- rather than inter-ideological. The old left died out in favor of a new left that celebrated human cultures; conservatism rediscovered religious traditions; liberals rejected old ideas of centrally imposed progress like urban renewal, massive damming, forced urbanization, excessive use of chemicals, and gender roles.

    Posted 13 Mar 2008 at 2:56 pm

  7. Alon Levy wrote:

    (Of course, everyone likes central planning sometimes. There are shades of gray, and precise circumstances. For example, public health remains focused on central efforts to eradicate certain diseases. But overall, the ideas of inevitable progress and central management are a lot less accepted in the West today than they were in 1904.)

    Posted 13 Mar 2008 at 3:06 pm

  8. canuckistani wrote:

    I would switch roles in the metaphor. Progressives believe in forcing society to evolve by trying new things, accepting that which works and discarding that which doesn’t, while conservatives have a society intelligently designed by 18th thinkers which they want to see preserved.

    I am of course talking about the modern, democratic left, of course. If we go back to the era before communism had been entirely discredited, it would be easy to find leftists whose dream society was intelligently designed by 19th century thinkers.

    Posted 13 Mar 2008 at 5:48 pm

  9. Pigilito wrote:

    To me the difference between progressives and conservatives is that progressives believe in the brotherhood of man - and are willing to force others into living the progressive utopia. Granted, conservatives seek to impose a certain morality as well (I would peg it as mid 20th century), but they tend to be more willing to leave others alone (I don’t include religious conservatives in that definition).

    A further problem is that when people balk at doing as progressives demand, progressives are ever ready to resort to violence; the death throes of the New Left in Europe led to terror against the state, and witness what the progressives in the USSR did when they had power.

    Posted 13 Mar 2008 at 7:43 pm

  10. Alon Levy wrote:

    Violence isn’t progressive or conservative; it’s radical. In the US, the greatest terror didn’t come from race radicals trying to destroy white people, but from racist reactionaries trying to maintain the systems of slavery and segregation. In the 1990s, there was a very large body of right-wingers, reaching up to Rush Limbaugh, who said the US government was fascist and advocated violent resistance to the state.

    Posted 13 Mar 2008 at 8:21 pm

  11. Alon Levy wrote:

    It’s very hard to actually pinpoint what it means to be progressive or conservative. These things tend to be based on temporary alliances a lot. For example, take education: it’s impossible to explain the Democratic line on education (more funding, more unionization, less oversight of teachers, more equality) without reference to their reliance on teachers’ unions and the history of school segregation.

    I mean, I’ll tell you that to me liberalism means equal rights. But that’ll tell you exactly nothing about my position on affirmative action, since it’s based on a heap of real-world evidence about discrimination and the consequences of various anti-discrimination policies. It’ll tell you nothing about my preferred methods for gathering evidence, or about my positions on economic policy issues, or about what I think about foreign policy.

    Posted 13 Mar 2008 at 8:34 pm

  12. Pigilito wrote:

    Alon: I disagree, violence has always been a part of progressivism. From Lenin, through Che and the New Left, violence has been pushed forward as an essential element of politics. Many leftists in Europe and the US still admire violent revolutionaries - in large part because of the violence, it makes it somehow more authentic and purer.

    It is possible to distinguish (broadly) the violence on the Left from that on the Right. The Left sees violence as practically a sine qua non of progress, whereas the Right resorts to violence out of a reactionary mindset, rather than as a way of advancing their agenda.

    Posted 13 Mar 2008 at 8:53 pm

  13. Alon Levy wrote:

    The idea that Lenin was somehow a better leftist than Martin Luther King is shared by exactly two kinds of people, both delusional: old guard communists, and conservatives who’d like to believe everyone to their left is an old guard communist.

    MLK himself relentlessly attacked everyone who said violence or separatism was a legitimate civil rights tactic. His inspiration, Gandhi, never engaged in violence. The other great left-wing movements of his time, second wave feminism and the anti-war movement, were nonviolent, and often suffered violence from people opposed to them.

    Meanwhile, his rivals lynched innocent black men, and sicced police dogs on him when he tried marching. Reagan appealed precisely to them by kicking off his campaign with a speech about states’ rights, in a town where three civil rights workers had been murdered. More recently, the USA’s greatest domestic terrorism incident, the OKC bombing, was committed by a member of the militia movement, rather than a socialist or an anarchist.

    Posted 13 Mar 2008 at 11:11 pm

  14. canuckistani wrote:

    Alon: I agree that violence is more a degree of radicalism than ideology - for every Bolshevik, there’s a Blackshirt. For every Jacobin, a Jeunesse Doree.
    And when we discuss Lenin, it is important to remember that the violence of the Bolsheviks was only made possible by the violence of the Tsarists; by suppressing at swordpoint the social moderates attempts at reform, they played into the Bolsheviks hands by making violence the only other possible recourse for people who were literally starving.
    That’s why the conservative I admire most is Churchill - a man who understood that a welfare safety net made society more stable by undercutting the strong point of the communists. It’s no coincidence that hardcore communism almost completely died out in the West after some provision was made for the poorest level of society.
    Think of welfare as lamppost insurance. :-)

    Posted 14 Mar 2008 at 12:00 am

  15. canuckistani wrote:

    The Left sees violence as practically a sine qua non of progress, whereas the Right resorts to violence out of a reactionary mindset, rather than as a way of advancing their agenda.

    Sorry Pigilito. I can think of dozens of social democratic movements which have eschewed violence, and a number of right-wing movements who have embraced violence as a useful technique for gaining and preserving power - and I can stick to South America and Asia if we’re worried about Godwin’s Law. Your generalization goes too far. As for me, I’ve voted for what Americans would call leftist parties for most of my adult life, none of which have approved of or condoned violence. There’s more to the left than Marx.

    Posted 14 Mar 2008 at 12:07 am

  16. Alon Levy wrote:

    My favorite conservative is by far Hamilton. Common wisdom at the time was that free trade was always good; the Jeffersonians wanted more agriculture and feared cities. Bucking the trend, he instituted a pro-industry economic order where tariffs would help city industry flourish.

    Churchill I’m more suspicious of. He admired Hitler almost right up until their countries started fighting each other; he had no problem with genocide used against Native Americans or Aboriginal Australians.

    Posted 14 Mar 2008 at 3:05 am

  17. Grim wrote:

    See? I told you it was an interesting concept that belonged here. :)

    Posted 14 Mar 2008 at 3:23 am

  18. Pigilito wrote:

    Certainly MLK was a progressive, and I don’t include all progressives in my Left-Right split. Perhaps it’s time I defined my terms. When I speak about progressives being more willing to force others into doing the right thing, I mean that many support others attempting to do so (I want to make clear that I don’t see anyone in the Democratic party imposing the brotherhood of man by force). Witness the continued support among much of the academic elite for the USSR even after the publication of volume one of the Gulag Archipeligo. Many progressives still look upon Lenin as an inspiration, ditto Che, Fidel, and others.

    To Alon:

    I can think of dozens of social democratic movements which have eschewed violence, and a number of right-wing movements who have embraced violence as a useful technique for gaining and preserving power.

    I see it the same way: the Right uses violence to seize and maintain power, it does not generally see violence as part of its ideology, whereas many on the Left do. Again, I agree that movements on the Left are mostly democratic and peaceful; however, it can’t be denied that the movements that have embraced violence in the US, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan were all made up of folks who would describe themselves as progressive. And where they have seized power, progressive Leftists have brought Biblical levels of calamity to their lands (see USSR, China, Cambodia, etc.).

    Sorry to keep going on this.

    Posted 14 Mar 2008 at 2:51 pm

  19. Alon Levy wrote:

    Fascism considers violence and war important things in themselves. Both Mussolini and Hitler said peace was a decadent thing, and the state needed to engage in war in order to be great. A lot of the things the more radical neocons say suggest similar ideas: the US should regain status not by being economically powerful or globally respected, but by attacking small countries just because it can.

    Posted 15 Mar 2008 at 4:37 am

  20. Alon Levy wrote:

    As for the academic elite, most of the New Left is against communism. Its two biggest names, Chomsky and Zinn, are anarchists rather than communists. Chomsky was still the last person in the world to acknowledge the crimes of the Khmer Rouge, but he still comes from an intellectual tradition that considers what its proponents call state socialism as bad as what they call state capitalism. It’s delusional, but it’s more self-marginalizing than dangerous.

    Che is something else. I think it was Hitchens who said that he became such an icon because he failed. Successful communists would go on, institute an authoritarian state, purge their political enemies, and make the Western left feel bad for supporting them. Unsuccessful ones can engender the idea that they would have somehow been different if they’d succeeded.

    Posted 15 Mar 2008 at 4:46 am

  21. Pigilito wrote:

    Alon:

    Fascism considers violence and war important things in themselves. Both Mussolini and Hitler said peace was a decadent thing, and the state needed to engage in war in order to be great.

    True, but that misses my point. Communism as it was put in place used violence against its own people as part of its ideology; it was part and parcel of the being a communist. The difference is that Fascists, and any other group in search of power, used violence against their own people in order to gain and secure power. Communism used violence to change its people into better people (e.g., Collectivisation), which was my argument when I jumped in to this discussion.

    As to the academic elitie being against communism, I’ll agree

    Posted 15 Mar 2008 at 7:44 am

  22. canuckistani wrote:

    Once again, I have to agree with Alon - violence is an inherent part of fascism, but I will draw the exception that fascist violence is directed against “external” enemies - communists, Jews, and in particular, other nations which wish to deprive fascist nations of their deserved place in the sun.

    But I will dispute Alon over Churchill’s embrace of Hitler. Accepting William Manchester’s “The Last Lion” as a source (the most recent book I’ve read about Chruchill), it is clear that Churchill loathed Hitler and his racist-nationalist rhetoric from the moment Hitler first appeared on the world scene. I’ll dig up quotes if you require, but I am curious about your sources.
    I will freely admit he could be a racist and was an unabashed imperialist. But I’ll cut some slack for anyone who saves Western civilization.

    Posted 15 Mar 2008 at 10:53 am

  23. Pigilito wrote:

    Canuckistani (and Alon): I agree that fascists were and are prone to viloence. But again, my point remains that the Left were far more likely to use violence against all its citizens in order to bring about their brotherhood of man. Fascists like Hitler sought to bring about sociaetal change as well, but he was insane and guilty of every sin, crime, and outrage imaginable. More garden variety fascists, such as Franco, used violence to maintain power and destroy enemies. They did not use violence in furthering their nations’ march to a utopia, which to my mind still distinguishes the Left from most other political “isms”.

    As far as Churchill, I’ve also never heard anything about him admiring Hitler at least certainly not for his views.

    I think we’ve gone round and round on this enough that we know each others’ arguments, so I’ll bow out and let anyone else have the last word. Until the next disagreement, then.

    Posted 15 Mar 2008 at 9:38 pm

  24. canuckistani wrote:

    As long as we don’t end up with “Liberalism = Fascism”, I’ll consider it an informative and interesting draw.

    Posted 17 Mar 2008 at 10:09 am

  25. Grim wrote:

    I agree that fascists were and are prone to viloence. But again, my point remains that the Left were far more likely to use violence against all its citizens in order to bring about their brotherhood of man

    This is the distinction, though: Fascism holds that there is no brotherhood of man; and the use of violence to purge the weak is an inherent part of the ideology.

    Liberalism holds that there is a brotherhood of man, which ought to be honored and defended in some way.

    Communism holds that there is a brotherhood of man, which ought to be enforced — if necessary, by killing anyone who disputes the particular interpretation of the leadership.

    Posted 18 Mar 2008 at 1:56 am

  26. Alon Levy wrote:

    More garden variety fascists, such as Franco, used violence to maintain power and destroy enemies.

    Franco is actually a bad example of a fascist. He ruled through the established conservative elites; Mussolini and Hitler both came to power using populist movements that convinced the elites to give them power as an alternative to communism.

    Posted 18 Mar 2008 at 2:36 pm

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