Naturally, in a still-racist society, the final outcome of this process is that the racists will be given a pass--over and over and over again--while the critics will be forever tarred as racists over a single misconstrued event. And that's precisely how a new racist order is constructed on the ruins of an old one.

and

The principle behind outing was that everyone had a right to privacy, so long as they remained private. But to become a participant in the public sphere and engage in attacking people just like yourself as if they were essentially evil--that meant you were no longer private. The outing was an act against the public person, and was intended to unmask their hypocrisy, so as to destroy their political effectiveness as a deceiver.

Your comments are excellent, Paul. This is a racist society, a hypocritical society and a society that enables hate as a primary tool to promote a political agenda.

That is what Glenn's posts are about (at least to me). He's outing the hypocrisy of both individuals and organizations in the MSM and he's carefully describing, case by case, the methods they use to get away with it.

I feel like I'm totally caving in to peer pressure here, but all of the comments on whether or not blackface is OK or not is crazy. Of course it's not OK. Popular culture tells us it's not OK.

Two examples:

1. In Ghost World - remember the scene in the movie when Enid took Seymour's "Coon Chicken" picture to school, made it past the art instructor into an art exhibit, made the news and then all hell broke loose? Seymour lost his job over it. Well, Coon Chicken Inn was a real business. Ghost World, a Fantagraphics comic that became a book that became a movie, stands right alongside Napoleon Dynamite as part of the contemporary cultural canon. I trust their insight.

Moral of the story: white people shouldn't do blackface. (It's true that at the beginning of the last century white performers like Eddie Cantor often dressed in blackface when they sang jazz, but so did black performers. As a matter of fact, black performers usually had to dress up in blackface when they performed in front of white people.)

2. Little Black Sambo was also the mascot for the restaurant chain Sambo's, also out of business partially as a result of racial shit hitting the fan over popular culture racial stereotyping.

Blackface is iconic. It's racist. It's been a part of American culture for a hundred years. It's Jim Crow start to finish. It doesn't matter that The Three Stooges did it. So did Shirley Temple, Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney and Lucille Ball. That was then. This is now.

FDL made a mistake. They admitted it. It doesn't make it right that they were not a bully going after someone smaller, but someone smaller going after a bully. But that does mark a distinction between FDL and Imus. And it also explains why Rush gets away with what he does. He's a big fish who goes after other big fish.

P.S. FDL is still a great blog.

Woody_Chipper,

You're are absolutely correct.

That is exactly what Gerstein tried to do. And Glenn called him on it. And we've got about a zillion comments in this thread debating the moral ambiguity of blackface, when there should be zero ambiguity. Just as there should be no ambiguity whatsoever about the benefit of having Hilary Clinton blog on FDL, or the benefit that FDL provides to the progressive blogosphere.

Dude, I'm there!

There may be a lot more people of color reading these threads than you imagine. My mother was Scots-Irish, my father Mexican. I married an Irish girl and we made some beautiful babies. Several of them are freckled and several of them are brown. I don't speak a word of Spanish. My oldest child learned Spanish in high school in order to reclaim a part of his heritage. I am proud of him for doing that. I still haven't learned Spanish.

As a society we are in crisis. It has been a very bad six years. Some might say it's been bad for much longer than that. In the past few years we have been led by some of the worst people among us to the brink of catastrophe.

But that doesn't mean it can't get better.

I know that my older children (ages 22 through 31) have almost no prejudice in them. They don't blink an eye at interracial or same sex relationships. They don't even think in those terms. They know that people love each other in as many different ways as there are people. I think that many young people share similar views on life: your friends are your friends whoever they are, your iPod is worth its weight in gold and living at home sucks so you may as well go to college.

There is an article on alternet that discusses a recent survey of young people in California. If they represent the future of both America and the world, as the article suggests, things are going to start looking better very soon.

http://www.alternet.org/story/51048/

It looks like all the GG regulars are bellied up to the bar on this one. I'm really enjoying the impassioned exchanges and occasional diatribes from what seem to be a diverse group of social conservatives, libertarians, liberal democrats, socialists and occasional fascists.

I started my day reading a review of Clive James Cultural Amnesia by William Deresiewicz

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070514/deresiewicz

and then I came here. Talk about Deja Vu.

If the ship of state is truly changing course (and I believe that it is) and this represents the new direction, I couldn't be more hopeful. Maybe the 21st century will get off to a decent start after all.

It is our choice of good or evil that determines our character, not our opinion about good or evil. — Aristotle