While several media liberals have praised Juan Williams of Fox News for pushing around Newt Gingrich with the idea that his campaign rhetoric is at best insensitive to black Americans, Chauncey DeVega at the Daily Kos is sticking to the theory that Williams is a tool of racist Republicans: "Juan Williams is an object of abuse, a means to prove a point. Juan Williams is a paid pinata for white conservatives."
Or Williams is a toilet: "Juan Williams is/was a repository for the fecal matter of white conservative bigotry, and a need to maintain superiority over negroes who dare not to step off of the sidewalk when white folks pass." Or Williams is actually "coprophagic," he eats feces:
That in another life Juan Williams would be a critic of "negro agitators" during the Civil Rights movement is coincidental to his designated role on Fox News: he is exemplary of Joel Kovel's theories about white supremacy, and how it manifests as a White society which is collectively (and individually) stuck in the fecal phase of human psychological development -- it is all over his face. Juan Williams smiles while cashing his checks at the prospect of his political coprophagia at the ass end of conservative politics. He revels in playing the role of the human centipede.
Chauncey followed up his pinata line with this:
I do not know if he was legitimately hurt and surprised by their reaction to him, or if his pain was not feigned, and rather sincere and real. In understanding the logic of Republican racism and naked appeals beyond the dog whistle, Williams was the stand-in, the object of abuse through which to actualize rage and hostility. Barack Obama was not available. Any black body would do. The cheering, snide glee of Newt Gingrich dressing down uppity "Juan," and the audience's cheering of a "boy" being put in his place, would be missed by only the most in denial observer.
Let's just round up the crazy with this final brain-blast:
In 2012, Republican candidates are using overt signals, what are for all intents and purposes blaring air raid sirens and signal flares that race, whiteness, and American identity are deeply intertwined. The appeals to white racism by the Tea Party GOP during the primaries are not background rhythms or subdued choruses. They are the driving guitars of Blue Oyster Cult's "Godzilla," the chorus of Jay-Z's "99 Problems," the opening moments of the Notorious B.I.G's "Kick in the Door," or the flipped samples of Justice's "Stress". You feel it. You know it. To deny the obvious is to close one's ears to a driving drum line and cadence that travels up through your shoes...and to your bones.
How else can a fair observer excuse away Republican arguments that blacks are lazy parasites, whose children should live in work houses and pick up mops and brooms to learn a work ethic, that "illegal" immigrants should be killed by electric fences, or Muslim Americans should be subject to racial profiling, marked like the "Juden" of Nazi Germany?
