NYC Letter: OK-By-Me Racism -- Melissa Harris-Perry

Day 1,243 of CHOPE
D-minus 213 Days

Americans in part identify who we are, and who deserves what, through our notions of whiteness and of the racial enemies that are the non-whites.

Melissa Harris-Perry,
professor, author, MSNBC talking-head, and racist
TAKE BACK THE AMERICAN DREAM CONFERENCE
WASHINGTON June 18, 2012 (Mediaite)

That's not all Ms. Harris-Perry had to say.

MSNBC HOST: 9/11 GAVE AMERICA 'PTSD',
'MUSLIM TERRORISTS' WERE
AN 'IMAGINED RACIAL ENEMY'
FOR WHITE AMERICA

WASHINGTON June 19, 2012 (Blaze) - During a speaking engagement Monday, MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry made some startling accusation concerning 9/11 and Americas War on Terror. Perry, who anchors The Melissa Harris-Perry show on the weekends, remarked that 9/11 vaulted America into a "nationalist fervor" that was similar to "having post-traumatic stress disorder".

... Some quotes from Melissa Harris-Perry:

• Americans of course responded in very typically American ways to that entree [terrorism?], something that many people in the rest of the world had already experienced. We began with a kind of nationalist fervor that was justified as reasonable patriotism.
  
• I’d like to point out that we clearly must have been having post-traumatic stress disorder because for about a year after September 11th, there were African-American men walking around the city of New York with N.Y.P.D hats on – that can only be explained as a P.T.S.D. response. But, I know we'll just let that -- let you sit with that for a minute. [Ed.: This was meant to be a joke. Get it?]
  
• [Our lede quote in context.] The other thing that happens in that moment [scil., the purported racial response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks], I don’t want to miss this, is that a new version of what America typically needs emerge, and that is a racial enemy. Americans in part identify who we are, and who deserves what, through our notions of whiteness and of the racial enemies that are the non-whites.
  
• And in this moment, the new racial enemy became not so much Reagan‘s 'welfare queen', who was imaginary, but instead this imagined other that is somehow Muslim, or Arab, or Sikh, or something else.
  
• We became willing to stomach a kind of horrific racial violence in the name of national security. It is something that we have been willing to stomach as a people over and over again in our history.
  
• The Patriot Act was not an act of a Republican president acting alone. The Patriot Act was a bipartisan decision by both parties. It was not bought and paid for by corporations; it was bought and paid for by our fear.

This of course is not how we remember 9/11.

Brave Ms. Harris-Perry chides us for existential fear where brave liberals, such as herself, recognized in 9/11 America's comeuppance. We are left pondering what the prescribed liberal response, in hindsight, to 9/11 should have been. What was the correct, the measured response to an enemy, not imagined, who killed 2,977 non-combatants by intent? Who vowed afterwards to keep killing American non-combatants? Brave Ms. Harris-Perry doesn't say. [Pause.] But we glean from the hash of her argument that America missed an historic opportunity for national sensitivity training.

Ms. Harris-Perry's wild suppositions are not original to her. They derive from the liberal worldview. A worldview reinforced at every stage of professional ascent. It opens doors. It pays well. Ms. Harris-Perry is not an unintelligent woman, but she embraces stupidity because it makes her more successful. Stupidity as bigotry is a paycheck. And in this economy who is so stupid as to turn away a paycheck for unremunerative integrity? Enough paychecks and you don't even notice the bigotry anymore.

CHOPE.

Not-for-nothing stupid.