Day by Day: Pushing the envelope

A lot of people have tried to use “black face” to make a point. Lamont supporters put Lieberman in black face to show he was the house slave of the Bush Administration. It backfired.

Screams of “Black Face” about a camo faced hunter in a Bob Corker ad got no headway.

Every year some drunken, usually Southern, frat boy gets suspended for wearing “black face”. Such as these turds from Clemson.

Using black face against Michael Steele had a mixed effect:

Black Democratic leaders in Maryland say that racially tinged attacks against Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele in his bid for the U.S. Senate are fair because he is a conservative Republican.

Such attacks against the first black man to win a statewide election in Maryland include pelting him with Oreo cookies during a campaign appearance, calling him an “Uncle Tom” and depicting him as a black-faced minstrel on a liberal Web log.

Not enough black voters were outraged enough to cross parties and vote Steele into office.

So I wonder how Chris Muir is going to treated for portraying Hillary Clinton in “black face”. Let’s be honest about one thing first: had a Republican spoken to an African-American audience using the type of speech patterns and accents that Ms. Clinton used she would have been castigated by every media outlet and ruined.

There was virtually none over Ms. Clinton. The Left rose to defend her speech as “quoting an old hymn”...or some similar trope. La Shawn Barber, though, got it right.

I grew up in a black church and visited numerous black churches all my life, and I’ve never heard a choir sing that song the way Hillary drawled it. However, whether she was quoting a song or not, it doesn’t change the fact that she sounded like a pandering idiot. I listened to more audio at Hot Air, where she’s not quoting the song but still affecting a bad southern accent…..

The question is whether this is the famous Clinton Chameleon ability or the more subtle racism of seeing people, as Muir’s Damon says, as a group and not as individuals. I don’t think that Ms. Clinton is a racist like the Kluxers of old (did someone say Robert Byrd?) but she is the new racist, the kind that sees blocs of voters as targets to be pandered to, instead of individuals. Hence her speaking to an audience like it was full of Aunt Jemimas and Steppin Fetchits.

Technorati Tags: black+face Technorati Tags: Hillary Technorati Tags: Muir

UPDATE:

I usually agree with Gaius. I think to a degree he is wrong this time. This needed to be done to show the double standard. However, I think his consistent stance against the use of blackface is admirable.

UPDATE II:

Let me be clear.

(I probably am not allowed to speak of this subject because both of the “races” that I descend from held another “race” in slavery)

The difference Jane Hamsher’s use of black face on Senator Lieberman and Chris Muir’s use of it on Senator Clinton is this: Hamsher used black face to call Senator Lieberman Bush’s “House Nigga” and Muir showed that Senator Clinton’s pandering meant she thought that her audience was her’s.

In one case it was used to demean a person, in the other it was saying that a person demeaned a group. When I was a small I was staying with my grandfather who had just moved back to North Carolina after leaving the state in the 30’s, in no small part due to the KKK. Once we dined out with some of his new neighbors.

A young black man was our waiter. Whenever he came to the table the neighborman would speak to the waiter just like Senator Clinton did. That night on the way home my Grandfather told me that how people spoke was a reflection of where they were raised and how they were educated but how one spoke to another was a reflection of how they felt about that person.