The kabuki correction

-- by Dave

Every time I watch Bill O'Reilly's lame "correction" of his insanely misbegotten reportage about pistol-packing gangs of lesbians, it feels like I'm like watching an art form taking birth.

It's a form of the non-correction correction, a direct descendant of the non-apology apology. But it has a certain high-art quality, a gambit so outrageous you can't help but kind of stand back and admire it in frustration.

I mean, there was O'Reilly mouthing platitudes about how there was never any intent to demonize gays and lesbians (really? then what was the intent?) and conceding that "maybe we went a little too far" in suggesting that what they had found constituted some kind of ominous national trend. At the same time, he was adamant that "this was a legitimate story."

Well, no, it wasn't. Even the greenest J-school student would have examined the basis for the story -- an assault on a man in New York in which dubious assertions were made on all sides, a garbage piece of reporting at a Memphis station for which the station itself later issued a correction and an apology, and a report about 8th-grade bullying in Philadelphia that had nothing to do with gangs -- and concluded there was no "there" there. Had the student proceeded, an "F" would have been the outcome.

But not in the insane Bizarro Universe that is Fox News and, for that matter, the larger Beltway pundit class. In a normal world in which the standards of integrity and accuracy reigned supreme in journalism, O'Reilly long ago would have been recognized as a buffoon and laughed out of the business.

At the very least, a significant correction acknowledging every facet of the false reportage would be both broadcast and posted on the Fox News website and given prominent display. This is especially important, ethically speaking, in cases in which a minority group is exposed to demonization and ridicule as a result of the bad reportage.

Instead, what we get are scenes like this: the godlike media pundit, rather than concede that nearly every facet of a report he broadcast as credible was in fact a grotesque fantasy built out of whole cloth, conceding minor points but claiming general accuracy in spite of these "flaws." O'Reilly also claimed that Fox posted a correction on its website, but if it did so, it is difficult or impossible to locate. (I've searched the site thoroughly as well as Googled for the "correction" and have come up dry; if any readers can find it, I'd appreciate it.)

Moreover, in watching all this, I get a little shudder of deja vu mixed with a dread sense of prescience: We've seen this before. And you know what? We're gonna see it again.

We most recently saw this with CNN Lou Dobbs in his bizarre non-correction for his misbegotten reportage on disease and immigrants, including his confrontation with the Southern Poverty Law Center's Richard Cohen and Mark Potok.

The similarities are striking -- indeed, in observing these two prominent instances, along with a number of similar incidents over the years, it's clear that they have a distinct form, as though cut from an identical mold. Because of that, it's possible to actually distinguish these kinds of non-corrections from the standard fare, which typically constitute simply ignoring one's critics.

They appear, in fact to be an elaborate kabuki ritual, with certain steps, costumes, and bows required along the way:

-- The feint. This is the "correction" itself, such as it is. Typically this requires the pundit to suggest that some minor transgressions, none of which even potentially affected the overall thrust of the reportage, occurred.

-- The assurance. This involves the pundit assuring both his interlocutor and his audience that he is well-intended and decent, and therefore any minor errors that occur along the way are perforce inconsequential. (Typically delivered with a smarmy, thoroughly insincere sincerity.]

-- The defense. Here, the pundit produces some kind of half-fact, mischaracterization, or non-sequitur that serves to stake the claim that the overall thrust of the reportage is perfectly accurate, no matter to what extent it was built upon the foundation of errors or falsehoods previously admitted. Indeed, the more the reportage was built on those errors, the more ferocious the defense. This partr of the ritual is almost always delivered in a bullying, petulant, intimidating tone, which makes the previous smarminess all the more clearly phony.

-- The attack: The interlocutor is at this point accused of engaging in the same kind of error and smear tactics, forcing him to defend a point that has nothing to do with the pundit's own rotten journalism.

So far, most of these dance rituals also seem to include false claims of having run a normative correction of the original error; both Dobbs and O'Reilly mentioned such corrections in their "corrective" broadcasts for which no evidence of their actual publication appears to exist.

It's possible, thus, to construct a definition:

The kabuki correction: A non-correction by a member of the pundit class in which the pundit engages in an elaborate dance around the facts of his false reportage and never actually touches on those facts or even admits their existence, and winds up accusing his critics of bad-faith behavior in turn. The dance involves an acknowledgement only of lesser wrongdoing, typically involving a distortion of the original offense, accompanied by assurances of moral superiority on the part of the pundit, and finishes with a bullying turnabout in which the accuser becomes the accused. It usually is performed by a major pundit whose power within the media framework is such that their peers, as well as lesser media figures, are inclined to overlook the offense and accept the "correction" at face value.

The genuinely poisonous aspect of this behavior is in its gradual spread among the rest of the media. Once someone like O'Reilly or Dobbs performs this dance successfully, it becomes a model for the rest of the pundit class, as well as a kind of permission for running even the most outrageous nonsense as credible news.

Mainstream journalists love to pontificate about the lack of credibility of the blogosphere, constituted as it is of a pack of dirty fucking hippies with no ethics. But within their own ranks, this kind of journalistic rot is not only ignored, but condoned.

But this is the very reason the political blogosphere exists: because of ordinary citizens' growing outrage over the behavior of our supposedly "fair and balanced" media. And as long as the powerful pundits who hold the media megaphones are allowed to just dance their ways around any kind of accountability, to lie and smear without consequence, its importance and power will continue to grow.

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

Truth & Reconciliation, Part III: Living in An All-White Zone

--by Sara

I'm returning at last to the pile of notes from my week at the Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly in Portland at the end of June (so much to blog, so little time!). This post is the follow-on an earlier post on James Loewen, the author of Sundown Towns, who followed his first lecture with a workshop on how people from all-white neighborhoods can research the history of their own towns, and discover for themselves when and how sundowning happened.

Loewen's an eager evangelist for people who are interested in doing this research, since he believes that America will never fulfill its promise as a diverse and equal society until it starts coming to terms with its own past. And since this past is evident in the faces of every all-white community in America -- almost every one of which, Loewen asserts, is white by conscious individual and governmental choices that are now very sordid bits of long-forgotten history -- bringing these facts to light is a crucial part of the reconciliation process.

So, how do we get started? Between his two talks, Loewen offered some general thoughts on the ways racism still presents itself throughout our society, usually in ways so ingrained and subtle we hardly even see it. That's this post. After that, he provided specific research suggestions for people wanting to pursue the history of their own towns further. That'll be the next one.

Fresh Thinking On Discrimination
Loewen was emphatic that the first thing we need to do is get over the sense of paralysis so many of us feel. "We can't wait until we get ourselves right on race before we go do things. If we do, we'll never do anything." Loewen draws a clear distinction between prejudice, which is an attitude; and discrimination, which is prejudiced expressed in actions. We may not be able to eliminate our own internal prejudices; but there's a lot we can do to put an end to discriminatory actions -- once we're sensitized to them.

For example, Loewen challenged his audience to consider why they choose the neighborhoods they do. "If you live in an all-white neighborhood, you're part of the sundown problem," he said. If we want to live in a diverse, well-integrated society, that intention needs to be part of our housing choices.

For those selling a house in an all-white neighborhood, Loewen cautions that real estate and rental agents, employers, and others involved in the process of choosing homes have successfully perpetuated sundown neighborhoods by "steering" -- the practice of aiming whites to the "right" neighborhoods, and people of color to "other" neighborhoods. This process is also at work in the ways they market houses -- the media their ads appear in, for example. To change this, we need to ask our seller's agents pointed questions about how they intend to market our homes, to whom, and through what media. We need to make it explicitly clear that we're interested in attracting buyers from non-white groups. And those of us who are buying need to make it equally clear that we'd prefer to buy in a well-integrated neighborhood.

He also encouraged non-white members of the audience to consider buying houses in all-white neighborhoods, reminding us that "it only takes one black family to take a town off the list of sundown towns." And all of us, he said, should openly call into question the prestige that our culture still assigns to all-white neighborhoods. "Stigmatize them. They don't deserve that prestige. 'Greendale. Isn't that an all-white neighborhood? Why on earth would you want to live there?'" he laughed, wrinkling up his nose in distaste.

Next, Loewen held aloft a copy of the SkyMall catalog -- that ubiquitous rag stuffed in every pretzel-crumbed airline seatback pocket in the country. "This may be the most important catalog in the US today," he thundered with the dark zeal of an Old Testament patriarch, his white Amish beard adding to the effect.

Loewen told us he'd been collecting and tracking SkyMall catalogs for the past three years, collecting data on the first 100 photos in each issue that featured people's faces. And, excluding company presidents (who often figure in SkyMall ads), Loewen found exactly zero non-white faces in the catalog in all that time. "Just this month, I found the first ad with a colored face -- an African-American couple in a picture frame. That same issue also showed a young girl who may have been either Asian or Latina. But this is the first time I've seen this in three years...I think this is an outrage."

"What this says is that it's OK to do this," he continued, pointing out that most white people who look at SkyMall will utterly fail to notice that they're in an all-white media zone. Loewen readily grants that the publisher probably doesn't have racist motivations -- but, even so, it's producing racist results. This, he says, is the kind of thing we can productively be bugging airlines and catalog publishers about -- though he cautioned us not to expect results. In response to his complaint to US Airways, one of the airlines that carries SkyMall, he got a letter explaining that "the catalog could not be racist because US Airways has an anti-racist policy." The person writing the letter seemed to assume that "having a policy" automatically makes the entire company a racism-free zone, and thus absolved from any further action.

Taking the Fight Local
Loewen, who lives in Washington, DC, is also mightily annoyed at the name of the city's NFL team -- "The Washington Redskins." "This is a lingering part of a long-standing pattern," he said. "It's flatly indefensible." He pointed out that a handful of newspapers around the country, including the Portland Oregonian, won't refer to the team by that name in their pages. "It's just 'the Washington team.' We can ask our own local papers to adopt this same policy."

Likewise, we need to challenge companies that give economic support to sundown towns by moving operations into them. "Take Greenburg, Indiana," said Loewen. "Honda's building a plant there. You have to wonder: are they doing this because it's a sundown town? Or despite that? We need to be asking them questions like this. What are they doing about it? How does this affect their non-white employees? Will they be hiring non-white workers?" Companies will only start considering this as an important criterion when we start making it clear that we expect them to.

For some reason, Loewen notes, governments at all levels often site new prisons in sundown towns -- a practice that ensures that mostly-minority prison populations will be guarded by mostly-white guards. And, in too many of these cases, "every person on the staff is not just white, but white racist." As Dave has written elsewhere, prisons are already a major breeding ground for racism of all stripes throughout the country; putting them somewhere other than all-white towns and insisting on an integrated CO staff may be one way of making them far less fertile.

Finally, we need to hold the schools accountable for what they teach our kids. "History is the worst-taught subject in US schools," said Loewen (who should know: his previous bestseller was Lies My Teacher Told Me, which cataloged the inaccuracies routinely taught in American history classrooms). "There are more teachers in history classrooms teaching out-of-field than you find in any other subject -- especially in the South and the Midwest. In fact, a striking number of history teachers are sports coaches." The upshot, says Loewen, is that kids don't get the kind of in-depth history education they need to be effective citizens.

To remedy this, he says, "visit your local school and see how history is being taught. Review the books. Talk to the teachers. Find out what the kids are learning about both national and local racial history. What's being slid under the rug? How are our kids going to be smart about racism if their education slides the topic under the rug?" Rather than do this on our own, he says, this is a good project for a service group or a church committee, or simply an interested group of parents or citizens.

The real fun, though, according to Loewen, is getting down into your local history and finding out just how your neighborhood, town, or county came to be all-white in the first place. He gave very detailed directions for how to do this, which will be coming up in the next post.

Pink Pistols: Ready, Fire, Aim

-- by Sara

The right wing has perfected the art of the great, fluffy, confectionary fantasy. They take one or two muddled factoids, add a generous gallon or two of their own scrambled preconceptions, whip it all up into an airy froth, then flash-bake in the heat of their rage until the thing inflates like a giant souffle -- which they then serve up to their media audience piping hot in the hopes that it will be completely consumed before it collapses.

The whole "lesbian gangs with pink pistols" silliness was a perfect example of this baker's art in action. At the remove of a few days, now that the whole thing has cooled into a sticky and embarrassing mess, I'd like to wind up our coverage of this with a look at the real-world facts that supported (and, ultimately, didn't support) Billoworld Baking's bizarre but fact-free confection of a story.

About those Lesbian Gangs
As those who've been following our coverage may remember, this story was cooked up by "Fox News Crime Analyst" Rod Wheeler, who got on Bill O'Reilly's show a couple weeks ago and raised the perfervid specter of 150 lesbian gangs roaming the Washington, D.C. area -- and God only knows how many in other cities -- packing pink pistols and raping girls in order to convert them to homosexuality. He further claimed that this was the beginning of a horrific national trend that O'Reilly's viewers needed to be aware of.

Boggled by this preposterous claim, our friends at the SPLC went to work almost immediately to nail down the facts regarding these "gangs." Late last week, they issued an Intelligence Report -- which, predictably, found that Wheeler's story was bogus in almost every detail:

Gaithersburg, Md., Detective Patrick Word, president of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Gang Investigators Network, an intelligence-sharing organization of 400 criminal justice professionals in Maryland, Washington, D.C., and Virginia, said there is no evidence whatsoever of a lesbian gang epidemic in his region. "Our membership reports only one lesbian gang," Word told the Intelligence Report.

Sgt. Brett Parson, a member and former commander of the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department's Gay and Lesbian Liaison Unit, also questioned Wheeler's numbers. "We have 150 to 175 total gangs in the D.C. area, and out of those only nine where the predominance of members are female," he said. "You simply can't make the jump that they are lesbians. I think it is fair to talk about violence and female gangs. But to sensationalize or marginalize a community by making a statement like that seems irresponsible."

Confronted by the Intelligence Report, Wheeler was unable, in several phone and E-mail exchanges over a two-day period, to specify a single law enforcement agency or officer, police report, media account or any other source he relied upon for his D.C. area lesbian gangs claim. But he insisted that his report was accurate and that any law enforcement officer who disagrees is "out of touch." "For some reason or other, these organizations don't lay it on the line because they don't know what is going on on the streets," said Wheeler. "This is a serious crisis and the so-called experts are missing it."

The only specific instance of actual violent lesbian gang activity that Wheeler cited on "The O'Reilly Factor" was a May 19 attack on a 15-year-old boy who was stabbed near a transit station in Prince George's County, Md. "And the police found out that it was a group of six women who identified themselves as being members of a lesbian gang that actually attacked this young man," Wheeler told O'Reilly.

According to a June 15 article in The Washington Post, however, two of the three individuals arrested in that assault were teenage males, though the article did note that, "Metro officials said the fight was between two gay and lesbian gangs that operate in Maryland."

An extensive Internet search seeking to verify O'Reilly's assertion in the introduction to Wheeler's interview that a lesbian gang called Dykes Taking Over is "terrorizing people" in Philadelphia turned up only one possible source. WCAU-TV, a local NBC affiliate in that city, reported in 2004 that a small group of 8th-grade girls at a West Philadelphia middle school were allegedly "bullying, groping and harassing" other girls in gym class with "gay remarks." The report made no mention of the 8th-graders using pink pistols or other weapons.

Similarly, O'Reilly's introductory mention of a Tennessee lesbian gang called Gays Taking Over that is "involved in raping young girls" appears to have been based solely on a highly dubious Feb. 28 television report from WPTY-TV, an ABC affiliate in Memphis, Tenn. Featuring dramatic "reenactments" of high school bathroom rape scenes shot in grainy black-and-white footage, the lengthy segment's vaguely salacious claims about local high school girls being raped and "sodomized" with "sex toys bought on the Internet" was based almost entirely on the lurid musings of a single Shelby County gang officer.

Titled "Violent Femmes," the sweeps-week segment was so thinly sourced and grotesquely sensationalized that it's difficult to believe that any professional journalist found it to be credible. And it wasn't. Under intense pressure from local gay and lesbian activists, the affiliate's station manager finally admitted that WPTY-TV's reporters had neither independently verified the gang officer's overheated claims nor obtained any documentary evidence such as arrest records or written police reports to substantiate their tale. As the station grudgingly conceded, "Our investigation did not turn up widespread violence in schools due to this."

The third case O'Reilly referenced, the assault on 29-year-old Wayne Buckle in New York City last August, did actually occur. Buckle was whipped with belts and stabbed by women who identified themselves as lesbians. But there is no evidence the women are members of a criminal gang, and O'Reilly failed to report that the attack was prompted, according to the New York Daily News, by Buckle spitting, cursing, and flicking a cigarette at the women after one of them rebuffed his sidewalk sexual advances.

It's obvious that Wheeler concocted his tale by connecting some very flimsy dots, and then tried valiantly to arrange them all into a picture that he could sell to O'Reilly's audience. And O'Reilly, ever on the lookout for a new outrage that will pander to his viewers' prejudices, jumped onto the bandwagon without a second thought or a moment's question.

We've asked it before, but really need to be asking it again: Why is this man still on the air?

About Pink Pistols -- The Group
Yes, there really is a group called the Pink Pistols. It's a gay shooting club with 46 chapters in 32 states. "I have no idea how many members we have," sighs spokesperson Gwen Patton. "Somewhere between seven and ten thousand. It's hard to know, because there are no dues and no membership forms. You're a member if you say you're a member."

Founded in 2000, Pink Pistols is one response to the very real threat of gay-bashing. Its chapters hold events at local gun ranges to teach GLBT members gun use and gun safety; helps members choose and purchase appropriate firearms; and walks them through the process of getting legal carry permits in places where they're available. Well aware of the deep conservatism of American gun culture, they also see themselves as ambassadors bridging the wide gap between the gun and gay communities.

According to Patton, this defensive knowledge has served quite a few of the group's members well. "One of our members stopped a home invasion -- she and her partner were "the gay couple in town," and this guy was just out of rehab and hit them because he thought they had money. She ended up shooting him in the neck. Another member -- this was before he joined Pink Pistols -- used a gun to protect himself from a bashing. Some guys followed him out of a bar, intent on doing some damage. He turned around and pulled out a .38. They said, "Holy shit, he's got a gun!" -- and ran off. And these aren't the only cases -- there are plenty more."

Patton is bemused by the fact that her group has suddenly found its way into the news, and can trace the origin of much of Wheeler's misinformation to articles that have been published over the past two months. She recalled the Dykes Taking Over article in the Philadelphia paper in June; and WPTY-TV's subsequent coverage. Not long after that, re notes, the Arcadia College newspaper did their own take. "That article talked about a group of girls who weren't a gang, but just sick of being picked on.," said Patton. "The article was also about the reactions of straight kids who don't like it that the gay kids are standing up for themselves."

Around the same time, Patton got word of an article in the National Observer that talked about a new marketing trend among some handgun manufacturers, who are trying to appeal to women by making guns with pink accessories. Patton found this so funny that "I did a quick member survey to see if anyone had bought one. Only one person answered the survey saying they had a pink gun -- but I think that may have been a goof."

"The National Observer article had one brief sentence at the end mentioning our group. What I think happened is that Mr. Wheeler grouped us all together, because he saw the name of our organization at the bottom of that article.

"And then I started getting phone calls -- first from Radar Online, saying Bill O'Reilly had had this guy on. I had to explain to the reporter that we're not criminals, we're a law-abiding group focused on self-defense, and we abhor this kind of thing."

Patton's generously charitable about Wheeler's mischaracterization of her group. "I don't think Mr. Wheeler was deliberately telling falsehoods. I think he was probably under deadline, got a little rushed, and misspoke. I give him the benefit of the doubt -- these things happen. He just got a little ahead of himself. And the fact that he belongs to a church in Maryland that's rabidly anti-gay has nothing at all to do with it."

Interestingly, stressed Patton: "At no time has Fox, Mr. O'Reilly's show, or Mr. Wheeler talked to us directly." She has made it clear, on her blog and elsewhere, that her group is still awating an apology.

About Pink Pistols -- The Guns
Like the Pink Pistols gay shooters, actual pink pistols do really exist. Patton has found two sources for them -- for anyone who wants one, which is apparently a very limited market. "The gun manufacturers do this to market to women," she says. "And it doesn't work."

There are persistent rumors that Glock makes a pink 9mm pistol. Like so much about this story, this isn't exactly accurate -- but it's not entirely wrong, either. The Glock 9mm is made with a number of ceramic components, which some third-party ceramics coating companies are customizing with colorful patterns. (One good example is here -- no pink guns, but it's quite obvious these people could readily produce one if asked.)

According to Patton, the Israeli manufacturer Bul recently made a pink pistol as well. "The lower part of the weapon is made of a fuschia-colored polymer. I know people who bought them as goofs, because they're such an ugly thing. Nobody wants to buy these." She noted that Charles Daly, a large gun distributor, liquidated the last of them at fire-sale prices -- and, due to their unpopularity, probably won't be making any more.

According to a 2003 press release, the Brady Center for Handgun Control is deeply concerned about the trend toward brightly-colored pistols, fearing that guns will be mistaken for toys by curious children.

Cleaning Up The Mess
This episode has probably put a bullet, so to speak, in Rod Wheeler's career as the "Fox News Crime Analyst." The SPLC report notes that Wheeler has made over 500 appearances on MSNBC, Court TV, and Fox. His personal website (which is now down) featured endorsements from Bill O'Reilly, who hailed Wheeler as "America's most recognized and trusted authority on crime analysis and law enforcement"; and Tony Snow, who beamed, "We turn to Rod Wheeler to help us better understand and solve some of these terrible crimes in America." Nice references for a guy who only spent seven years doing actual police work: the SPLC found a 1994 Washington Post article describing how Wheeler's career as a cop ended when a drug test turned up positive for marijuna. Wheeler still maintains that the samples were mixed up and that he was "exonerated." However, he also never returned to the force after that.

Somehow, I doubt we'll be turning to him much any more. All that remains at www.rod007.com is one apologetic paragraph:

"During the O’Reilly Factor segment on June 21st, while engaged in a discussion on Lesbian gangs, I inadvertently stated that gang members carry pistols that are painted pink and call themselves the "Pink Pistol Packing Group." I was not referring to the gay rights group 'Pink Pistols' who advocates for the lawful rights of gays to carry weapons for protection. Further, I mentioned that there are "over 150 of these gangs" in the greater Washington DC area. What I actually meant is that there are over 150 gangs in the Washington DC area, some of which are in fact lesbian gangs. Lastly, I mentioned in the segment that there is this "national epidemic" of lesbian gangs. A better choice of words would have been to say that there is a growing concern nationally, and especially in major urban areas, of increased gang activity, which includes some lesbian gang activity.

I apologize for any misunderstanding this may have caused."

Let's give the final word to Rashad Robinson, the senior director of media programs for the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) -- the man who went on the O'Reilly show last week to try to set things straight . From the SPLC report:

[Robinson] said that while he wasn't pleased to see the inflammatory "Violent Femmes" segment used as a source for a national television "report" on Fox News, "I wasn't startled."

"The sad truth is that sensationalized, undocumented, fear-driven reports about [gays and lesbians] preying on children are proven to be a ratings winner, and the station managers and news producers know that because they're reporting about gays and lesbians they don't have to be as concerned about backing up their sensationalism with actual facts and figures....The O'Reilly segment essentially reported a national epidemic of lesbian gangs preying on young girls without offering up one solid figure or one credible source. This type of reporting creates a climate of homophobia and fear and perpetuates dangerous stereotypes of gay people and definitely helps feed into a climate of anti-gay discrimination and violence, which is a true national epidemic, but not one you're likely to see reported with such zeal by Bill O'Reilly."

Update: Commenter A Hermit hops into the wayback machine (nothing ever really goes away on the Internet), and comes up with Wheeler's old endorsements page. Go look: it's a virtual rogue's gallery of people whose questionable "news judgment" is on full, incriminating display. (Rita Crosby calls Wheeler "the best homicide detective I've ever met." Wheeler worked homicide? Really? When? Boy, there's a claim I wouldn't take at face value...)

Pink Pistols: A Second Shot

-- by Sara

Billo, God love him, wanted to make it right. Really. So he went to GLAAD and got a GBLT spokesperson -- Rashad Robinson, a black gay man with a Muslim name, just so nobody would fail to get the point about the kind of un-American types who dare to oppose him -- to come on the show and discuss how the pink-pistol lesbian story got so far off the rails.

Watch the "correction" turn into a pathetic attempt at self-vindication. Billo admits he got "a little carried away with that," but also assures us that he's "not afraid of the lesbians when I go out tonight." (News flash, Bill: They're not afraid of you, either.) But, as the film rolls on, it becomes more and more clear that he just can't accept any facts that might make him wrong. Robinson did a great job, and kept on pitching until the final second. But Billo, in the end, couldn't help himself. He just had to holler over him, rather that allow his guest to confuse the issue with actual facts.

If this is what passes as a "correction" in Billoworld, then the last doubt is gone: the "no-spin zone" was never anything but a "reality-free zone."

h/t to Watching Those We Chose.

Tancredo's traction

-- by Dave

Well, if you read the polling and the conventional wisdom, it's clear that Mitt Romney has just about sewn up the Iowa caucuses on the GOP side of the aisle. After Romney, apparently, because of the way John McCain and Rudy Giuliani have sunken from sight, it's wide open to the remaining field, including a number of second-tier candidates.

I wondered awhile back if Rep. Tom Tancredo, the most successful and prominent nativist since Millard Fillmore, might be the one to emerge from the pack and claim the "dark horse" role in the GOP race coming out of Iowa. Judging from the reportage by Mark Barabak in the Los Angeles Times this weekend, it seems as though he is indeed building momentum there:

A three-day Iowa swing, after the Senate bill's collapse last week, was a triumphal lap of sorts. But it was also a test: Would victory stoke the forces that helped kill the legislation? Or, Tancredo wondered, would followers say, "Geez, we've won the day. Let's go home now."

He needn't have worried. The people who burned up talk radio and filled the Internet with their fury, who blitzed the White House with their faxes and e-mails, who crashed the Senate switchboard with their indignant phone calls are still spitting mad.

"People want something done," said Al Manning, 50, the owner of a sandwich shop in Waterloo who drove more than 250 miles to hear the congressman speak twice over the weekend. "We need to stop the inflow of illegals, and we need to deal with the ones that are already in the country."

Those sentiments were echoed in numerous interviews at Tancredo campaign stops and a Des Moines presidential forum that drew hundreds of conservative activists. (Of the six candidates who spoke, Tancredo received the best reception, coming and going to standing ovations.)

This kind of reception is eerily reminiscent of Barry Goldwater's early campaigning in 1960 on behalf of the then-nascent conservative movement. As Rick Perlstein explained in his book Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, these early appearances ignited an eventual brushfire that led to his actual nomination four years later.

Goldwater sparked audiences in large part because he was skilled at delivering the idea that complex problems could be answered with neat and simple solutions -- a gift that Ronald Reagan later perfected. Likewise with Tancredo:

Some look at the immigration issue and see a complicated and confounding tangle of interests and emotions. Not Tancredo.

"I have a solution," he told a Friday night crowd of about 100 at the Quality Inn in downtown Des Moines. "It's a radical one. Scary. Enormously controversial." Then he paused and spaced his words for effect. "It's called: Enforce ... the ... law."

Of course, these neat and simple solutions have the toxic problem of neatly and simply overlooking hard realities; Tancredo's notion that we can simply induce 12 million people to "go back" by drying up their ability to make money ignores several hard facts, notably:

-- The effort to "enforce the law" as it stands is certain to result in a broad range of atrocities, of which creating concentration camps for the detainees is only one. Even more important is that the effort will break families apart; we know it will do this because it's already happening now.

-- The economic effect of removing 12 million people from a workforce in which the unemployment rate is already only 4 percent, and dropping, is incalculable. But rest assured that if Tancredo were to have his way, there would be many more jobs lost by white people than would be gained.

Not that this -- or any amount of facts, logic, and reason -- is likely to persuade either Tancredo or the angry whites who are lining up to vote for him in rural places like Iowa. As I've previously noted, many of these rural areas are the same lily-white regions that deliberately drove out their black populations a century ago, and they've become accustomed to having all-white towns.

So rather predictably, a lot of Tancredo's support comes from people who obviously are concerned foremost with defending white privilege:

Iowa, which hosts the first contest of the 2008 presidential campaign, seems an unlikely source of agitation over illegal immigration. Latinos make up about 4% of the population. But that represents a significant increase: Since 1990, Iowa's Latino population has more than tripled.

Many Latino immigrants — legal and illegal — work in the meatpacking plants, transforming parts of rural Iowa into communities that could pass for neighborhoods in Los Angeles, Orange County or Phoenix.

"All over Iowa you see pockets of these changes and that makes people nervous," said Steve Grubbs, a GOP pollster and former chairman of the Iowa Republican Party.

Or as Goldford put it, "People say, 'I grew up in this town. Why do I see Spanish signs everywhere?' "

Crime and drug abuse are nothing new in rural Iowa. But the problem has become worse in some places, and that has fueled the immigration debate.

"I knew when they started coming here we were in for trouble," Diane Watson of Altoona said of the growing Latino population. She left California more than 30 years ago after seeing "what happens when they move in five and six families in one home."

A vote for Tancredo is one way for Watson to register her upset. He won her over with his tough-but-amiable talk at the Quality Inn. "I think he's an honest man," she said. "He wants to protect our country."

But Watson, 63, her pink sleeves pushed up to show an armful of charm bracelets, is ready to do more.

Toss a "big net" over any illegal immigrants you find, she said, and "shoot, I'll drive a busload of them back ... I mean, they're criminals."

Tancredo can talk out his ass all he likes about how he can just induce illegal immigrants to return of their own accord. His followers know the score: in the end, it's going to come down to making them "go back" forcibly. It's all very simple to them too: These people are criminals, though of course none of them would describe anyone who committed any other civil violation -- say, getting a speeding ticket -- that way. But the name of this game is demonization, after all.

Hell of a way to run for president. But if Millard Fillmore could do it, why not Tom Tancredo?

Getting It Right on Hate Crime

--by Sara

From Martha Deller at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram:

Three men in jail over bomb at church

Three Burleson men who belong to a "radical Christian activist group" were in the Johnson County Jail on Friday night after a church deacon caught two of them attempting to ignite an explosive device on Independence Day at a church under construction in north Burleson, authorities said Friday.

Dayton Lee Calaway, 19, and Michael Philip Plaisted Jr., 18, were arrested Wednesday night near the Victory Family Church after they got bogged down in mud as a fleet-footed deacon chased them from the church in the 400 block of Northwest John Jones Drive, police said.

Two other people drove away, the deacon told officers.

An explosive device in a glass container was found propped against the church door. The suspects apparently tried to detonate the device twice before being interrupted by the deacon, police and Burleson Fire Marshal Stacy Singleton said.

As authorities were investigating at the church, they were notified of a fire on undeveloped land behind a north Burleson residential subdivision. A nearby resident reported seeing a vehicle drive away.

On Thursday, Jered Michael Ragon, 18, voluntarily went to the police station for questioning after Calaway and Plaisted implicated him, police Detective T. Catron said. Police called a MedStar ambulance because Ragon's feet were burned, and a emergency medical crew treated him at the station.

Ragon had gotten gasoline on his feet as he tried to destroy evidence from the church fire in the field, and his feet were burned, Catron said.

Calaway, Plaisted and Ragon face charges of arson at a place of worship, a first-degree felony that carries a maximum sentence of life in prison, Singleton said.

They remained in the Johnson County Jail in Cleburne on Friday night with bail set at $30,000 each. Ragon also faces a charge of tampering with evidence; bail was set at $5,000.

The glass container from the church and evidence found in the field have been sent to a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives lab for analysis, Singleton said. The ATF and the U.S. attorney's office are reviewing the case to determine whether federal charges will be filed, he said.

Search warrants served Thursday night and Friday morning at Ragon's and Plaisted's homes uncovered evidence that was also sent to the ATF lab, police said.

Cmdr. Chris Havens, the Police Department spokesman, said the suspects boasted about belonging to a leaderless group of 10 or 15 who share a belief that society has become too focused on self-improvement and self-gratification and has lost focus on the glorification of God.

"They admit to being Christian and being brought up Christian, but they believe there should be one denomination and one church, not multiple denominations," Havens said.

"They did not say they had a name for their group, other than they were a radical Christian activist group. That was the way they explained their group," he said.

The suspects said the group has three levels of involvement: Bible study, consensual fighting and destructive acts. Because one of their beliefs is free thought, however, participation in all three levels is not mandatory, they told police.

The three admitted to being in a core group of seven that created the explosive weapon as a test to draw attention to the demise of society and to see whether the device would work, Havens said.

"They believe that the past generations have accumulated trash and are responsible for making younger generations clean up their mess," he said. "They're trying to make a statement and get society's attention regarding that."

That's why two of the men said they were involved in an earlier fire in a recycling bin at CentrePoint Church on Alsbury Road, Singleton said. That fire burned the materials in the bin but did not damage the church, he said.

None of the men has a criminal record, he said.

A fourth suspect, a juvenile, was not arrested because the others said he was not involved, Havens said.

Authorities are trying to learn the identities of the others in the core group, he said.

"We put them in the category of a domestic terrorist group," Havens said. "We hope to discover the names of other individuals involved and if other devices have been prepared along with any plans they may be talking about to further their cause."

Burleson police have no evidence to link the group to an arson fire and vandalism two weeks ago at the Bethesda Baptist Church of Saginaw, Singleton said.

"We don't have anything that leads us to believe they've been anywhere else right now," he said.

When fascism comes to America, this is precisely what it will look like: cults that incite violence, firebombed churches, the young men caught up in a noble cause; the emphasis on national purification; the hostility toward religions (even other Christian groups) that don't hew to their orthodoxy; the belief that the world is corrupt ("accumulated trash") and the only answer is eliminationist violence against those they believe are doing the devil's work.

And we cannot count on all of them to be this inept. The only mistake these guys made was not in testing their device somewhere more remote before inflicting it on their local churches. If they are connected to other groups, this event may simply be an additional point on an upward learning curve -- one mistake the next group won't make again.

On the plus side, the Burleson Police deserve all kinds of credit for doing everything right. It's heartening to know that there are police commanders, even in deepest Texas, who recognize domestic terrorism when they see it -- and are willing to put those words to it, flat out, in the media. The fact that they're also not immediately dismissing this as an "isolated incident," but looking for ties between this group and others (and this crime and others like it) shows a level of awareness of how these groups work that's been too often lacking in the handling of similar events.

And the fact that the crime itself -- arson against a place of worship -- is backed up by a serious law carrying stiff penalties demonstrates once again how important hate crimes laws are in protecting everyone's rights. The same laws that protect synagogues and mosques are now being brought to bear to defend the Victory Family Church and its members. These young men were trying to "send a message." Thanks to that law, Burleson has a potent means of responding with a message of its own: You do not speak for us, we do not support what you did, and anyone who does likewise had better be prepared to sacrifice a few decades of his life in return.

If more police departments continue to handle proto-fascist eruptions like this one with the same knowledgeable competence, it will go a long way toward keeping these small events from becoming the national norm.

Sunday Rant: Why Do People Hate America?

Ziauddin Sardar

-- by Sara

Glenn Greenwald has a perceptive take on the new Pew global polling data which shows steep declines in worldwide admiration of America through the Bush years. Greenwald notes that some bloggers attribute this to better information networks ("the pre-Internet era was not the Dark Ages," he counters) or post-Cold-War shifts in perception; or to our own hubris in believing in a fantasy of America The Good that nobody else really ever bought into.

But, says Greenwald, none of these is quite right. America's high standing in the postwar world was indeed real. And the reason it persisted for so long was simply this: "the good that the U.S. did in the world outweighed the bad." Nobody ever really thought we were flawless or blameless; but they did tend to trust our essential goodness of heart, and admire our foundational values. We could be stupid and thoughtless on an epic scale; but even then, the rest of the world usually understood that we were, somehow, trying to accomplish something worthwhile. And, though our blunders were many and sometimes catastrophic, it happened often enough that our initiatives really did make things better for our intended beneficiaries.

The discussion around Greenwald's post might be amplified with another perspective: that of British futurist Ziauddin Sardar, an orthodox British Muslim of Pakistani parentage who is one of the UK's more visible public intellectuals. In recent years, Sardar has made a career out of explaining the Muslim world to the Brits, mediating and translating between the Western and Near Eastern cultures on the pages of the Observer and The New Statesman and frequently on BBC news shows as well. (It's interesing that nowhere in the US media do we have a similarly trusted Muslim media figure who can help us bridge the most important cultural chasm of our times. Wonder why that is?) A iconoclastic outsider, Sardar is unsparing in his critiques of both cultures, issuing insights, warnings, and alternatives on either side that have made him indispensable to a European audience that increasingly sees itself caught in the middle.

In 2003, Sardar (with co-author Merryl Wynn Davies) wrote a small book called Why Do People Hate America?. It was a rampant bestseller across Europe, and did much to frame the popular argument overseas for the current resentment people feel for this country. In the book, he explains the animus behind the 9/11 attacks to a wondering Western world, accusing the US of four kinds of imperialism which he describes as existential, cosmological, ontological, and semantic.

Existentially, he says, "the US has simply made it too hard for other people to exist. In economic terms, this is a stark reality for the majority of the world's population…the US has structured the global economy to perpetually enrich itself and reduce non-Western societies to abject poverty." The good intentions Greewald invokes were, with increasing frequency over time, exposed as not much more than a mask for a new form of colonialization -- and recently-liberated former colonies didn't take long to react badly to that piece of the agenda. This disenchantment accelerated through the 90s, as those who once admired our commitment to human rights soured on us, and as globalization proceeded apace and "democracy" increasingly became a euphemism for policies that supported multinational corporations in their rape of the non-American world. On this front, American credibility abroad started tanking during the Reagan years, and has been in free fall ever since. Too many people have figured out that their very existence, as states and as individuals, continues only at our pleasure.

Cosmologically, Sardar argues, America has essentially taken on the role of global God. "America is seen as the prime cause of everything. Nothing seems to move without America's consent; nothing can be solved without America's involvement." By its sheer overweening omnipresence, says Sardar, America has colonized the future of the entire world. Taking over the role of all-seeing, all-knowing planetary power, it has infused the country's actions with an unbounded hubris that has, in turn, created fear and loathing everywhere else.

Of course, we don't see ourselves this way. To Americans, "freedom" means, more than anything, the freedom to choose the future that you desire, and enjoy every opportunity to pursue it. Our Founders recognized that this "pursuit of happiness" was a fundamental good, and an essential quality of a healthy democracy. The suggestion that we've effectively foreclosed that option to the citizens of most of the other countries on earth seems incredible on its face.

But, according to Sardar, this is indeed how the small nations of the world experience us. They want our money and support in order to advance. They desire access to our markets, and stable, durable democratic governments modeled after ours. There was a time when we gave such aid generously, in the name of global stability and keeping Communism at bay. Now, it comes with so many strings attached that to accept aid from the US (or its proxies, the IMF and WTO) is to put your nation and its future generations into economic and political bondage. Even worse: like the Russians, even if you decide you don't like our terms and don't want us in your country, if you've got something we want, you won't have much choice about whether or not we're there. And even if we do leave you alone, don't ever doubt that Big Brother is still watching your every move.

Again, this cosmological imperialism started taking off in the late 80s, and has accelerated to this day. Now, in most of the rest of the world, you can't do anything -- build a dam, feed your peasants, protect your collapsing environment -- if someone in the US has other ideas about what should happen. If you can't justify it in terms of American interests, forget about it.

Ontologically, Sardar points out that America's tendency to divide the world into "good" and "evil" -- while holding itself up as the sole defining exemplar of "good" -- only exacerbates the hypocrisy other nations perceive when the US commits grave wrongs or fails to live up to its own ideals. At the same time, this unwarranted belief in our own perfection gives Americans a tin ear for valid criticisms coming from other quarters.

As Greenwald notes, this wasn't always the case. The world has never been particularly blind to America's flaws; but as long as the good we did outweighed the bad, they were willing to give us the benefit of the doubt. Besides, for most of the postwar era, the choice was between us and the Soviets -- and most people knew whose side they preferred to be on.

Ironically, the Cold War forced us to be our best selves -- if only to play up the very real differences between Us and Them. Taking the high road, whenever possible, allowed us to burnish our image as the international Good Guys, and thus project our soft power around the world. And the desire to keep other nations close and retain our influence encouraged us to listen to them closely, and treat them like more like family -- as successful empires have always done with their member states.

But, when the Cold War ended, we lost all our incentive to Do The Right Thing. As the world's sole remaining superpower, it was too easy to start just doing what we wanted, and justifying it anyway we pleased. The "family" aspect of our empire turned abusive and ugly. And, since we were deep in the conservative phase of our own political cycle at the time, there was also no shortage of power-hungry social dominators standing ready to capitalize on this historic opportunity by seizing the levers of power and aiming the US toward a future based on their own fear, hubris, and greed -- and no strong progressive side to stop them. The Cold War enemy was gone; but the imperative to carve the world up into "good" and "evil" persisted. We have now chased the conservative movement's demons all the way around the world; and, as so often happens when people pursue their own shadows, we have become the thing we most despise in the process.

Fourth and finally, Sardar says, America insists on wielding semantic power to control the very definitions of words like democracy, justice, freedom, human rights, fundamentalism, a free press, terrorism, and so on. In doing this, it deprives other nations of the right to envision and develop their own indigenous versions of these concepts for themselves. They're only allowed to use these words as we define them. And, as a result, the very discourse of human rights, both here and abroad, has become very pinched and narrow.

We find it hard to accept that Muslim nations might develop their own forms of religious democracy that include the imams as a fourth branch of government -- and yet such democracies have existed in the Muslim world for 1500 years. We've developed a view of justice that privileges property and capital; in other parts of the world, justice may be defined in ways that privilege other values, such the health of the community or its common holdings, or the rights of future generations. Even liberal Americans can be rather fundamentalist in their insistence that these words have only one meaning -- our meaning -- and anyone else who doesn't share that precise definition is wrong. If we are going to have any kind of productive discourse about our global future, Sardar insists, we're going to have to let go of this semantic hegemony.

Furthermore, Sardar points out, when the US imposes its definitions of these concepts on other nations, the results are usually wildly inconsistent, varying according to pattern that can only be interpreted as opportunistic. To American leaders, "human rights" means one thing when heroic Chechen "freedom fighters" are struggling against Russia; and quite another when an important trading partner like China brutalizes its own people. The hypocrisy of these fluid definitions has done much to destroy other nations' trust in America's vaunted moral authority. Sardar believes that by seizing the power to define the way core human ideals are both envisioned and expressed, and then corrupting those definitions, America has deprived other countries of the epistemological means to name and claim their own futures.

Based on Sardar's observations, it seems clear to me that Greenwald is right. There was an American Age in which our nation was held in very high regard around the world, trusted and admired in spite of its obvious flaws. The above arguments -- Sardar's and mine -- make it clear that much of our loss of standing in the world can be traced to the end of the Cold War, and the directions in which the right wing of this country has steered us for its own purposes in the nearly two decades since.

It was one thing when our errors were well-meaning, and people knew they could trust our intentions. But after 1990, our underlying good motives became far less clear; and, at the same time, the errors began to appear far more deliberate and egregious. And from 2000 forward, as the Bush years rolled on into 9/11 and then Iraq, the world's other nations were forced to abandon the fantasy that the American people, as distinct from their leaders, were basically of good heart and could be trusted to do the right thing eventually. Electing Bush -- twice -- has only confirmed what they had increasingly suspected through the 90s: that the amoral quest for global power they were seeing from American-backed institutions-- both governmental and private -- was proceeding with the full sanction and blessing of the American people. At that point, all confidence vanished.

It's been all downhill ever since. And the worst part is this: Our decisive role in fighting World War II earned us a run of global goodwill that we coasted on for the next 50 years, even as our actual policies grew increasingly less peaceable and benign. And, on the flip side, the bad karma of our decisive role in Iraq (and in trashing Kyoto, and abandoning the International Criminal Court, and the fact that we now build Soviet-style gulags and torture people in them) is going to cling to us for the next 50 -- no matter what or how much we do to make up for it in the decades ahead.

Those who remember America The Good are passing, leaving the world in the hands of those who only have memories of America the Evil. Any PR person can tell you that a good reputation lost takes Herculean efforts to regain. Of all the battles that await us, this one may be the hardest -- and, realistically, it's one we probably shouldn't expect to win in our lifetimes.

Hate crimes and the victim

I was deeply saddened to read this account of the death of David Ritcheson, the Latino teenager from Houston who was brutally assaulted last year by a couple of white-supremacist punks:

David Ritcheson's wounds finally seemed to be healing. After the Mexican-American teen was beaten nearly to death and sexually assaulted in 2006 by two young men yelling “white power” slogans, he struggled to overcome immeasurable physical and emotional trauma. But there he was in April, testifying at a congressional hearing in favor of hate-crimes legislation, publicly recounting the horror he had endured. Dressed in a smart suit, the cherubic high-school senior from suburban Houston spoke in a clear, strong voice. “I appear before you as a survivor of one of the most despicable, shocking and heinous acts of hate violence this country has seen in decades,” Ritcheson said. Yet in the aftermath, “as each day passed, I became more and more aware of everything I had to live for. I am glad to tell you today that my best days still lay ahead of me.”

Yet his wounds evidently continued to torment him. On Sunday, Ritcheson, 18, died after leaping from the upper deck of a cruise ship in the Gulf of Mexico. A trip he’d planned as a summer escape with some buddies ended instead in tragedy. His parents, who flew to Mexico to meet up with the ship, returned to Texas with Ritcheson’s body on Thursday. Now the FBI is investigating the circumstances surrounding his death. Among the unconfirmed reports that have already surfaced: that passengers and crew members tried to talk Ritcheson down and set out mattresses to catch his fall; that he was seen drinking in the ship’s dance club Saturday night, and that one girl told her mother before Ritcheson’s death that she’d overheard a young man mention to his friends that he wanted to jump overboard. Many questions remain unanswered, says the family’s attorney, Carlos Leon, but “ultimately, whatever David did that morning was absolutely related to what had happened to him and the pain he was in.”

What's especially sad about this case is that there was so little anyone could do; the scars inflicted by hate crimes are uniquely deep and cruel, and rarely do they heal readily, even with the finest counseling and best family support. A study of bias crimes against gays and lesbians noted this:

Victims of hate crimes undergo higher levels of psychological distress, including post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anger, than victims of other crimes, said Greg Herek, PhD, research psychologist at the University of California, Davis, who spoke on the impact of anti-gay/lesbian victimization at the briefing. Herek, whose research was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, attended the White House conference as APA’s representative.

Hate crimes can cause victims to view the world and people in it as malevolent and experience a reduced sense of control, Herek said. According to his research, hate crime victims needed as much as five years to overcome the emotional distress of the incident compared with victims of nonbias crimes, who experienced a drop in crime-related psychological problems within two years of the crime.

Undoubtedly David Ritcheson's wounds were deepened by the grotesque humiliation he suffered at the hands of the thugs: they violated him with a plastic pole and scarred him by pouring bleach into and over him. But that kind of extreme violence is also part of the nature of hate crimes, as I explained in Chapter 5 of Death on the Fourth of July:

While data and studies have given us a pretty clear picture of the typical hate-crime offender, no one has ever compiled a psychological profile of the typical hate-crime victim. This is partly because these victims are notoriously difficult to study; most of them are so traumatized by the crimes that they often refuse to participate in such work.

Mostly, however, it's because hate crimes can happen to literally anyone and can occur at any time, in no small part because of the random elements in the perpetrators' victim-selection process -- that is, most victims are complete strangers to the offender, chosen only because of their perceived membership in the target group. Nearly any race, religion or sexual orientation can inspire bias-motivated violence, and indeed one need not even actually belong to the target group to fall victim to a hate crime; witness the not-insubstantial number of heterosexual victims of gay-bashing.

That said, it is clear that in twenty-first-century America, minorities are far more likely to be victims of hate crimes than anyone else. In 2001, for example, 10,898 of the 12,020 victims of hate crimes reported to the FBI were various kinds of minorities. A pattern of victimization risk also emerges from the data: race is the most common motivator, with African Americans the most vulnerable targets; Jews and gay men are the second- and third-most likely targets, respectively.

Perhaps just as significant, the data reveals that these are more likely to be violent crimes. Criminal-justice expert Barbara Perry points to FBI statistics that reveal wide disparities in the levels of violence between bias crimes and "normal" street crimes. "It is apparent that hate crime . . . is much more likely to involve physical threat and harm to individuals, rather than property," she writes:

Consequently, such victims are also more likely to be at the receiving end of excessively brutal violence. To the extent that hate crime perpetrators are motivated by fear, hatred, mistrust, or resentment of victims, for example, they are more likely to engage in extreme violence -- violence which is beyond that necessary to subdue the victim.

... What we also know about the victims of bias crime is that they are substantially harmed well over and above what befalls victims of the simpler versions of the same crimes, perpetrated with ordinary motives (what is known as the underlying or "parallel" crime behind these acts, such as simple assault, vandalism or threatening); for instance, some studies have found that bias-crime victims often experience post-trauma psychological stress syndromes similar to those experienced by rape victims, because the sense of violation can be so profound. The result is a commingling of shame, fear and rage.

"Short-term, the impact is the acute, intense paranoia of 'Do I go out of my house? Do I have deliveries brought in, or can I trust that person, either?'" says Susan Xenarios, director of St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center Rape Intervention Program/Crime Victims Assessment Project in Long Island, New York. "The other extreme is pure rage. Or sometimes you get rage and fear together, and that's hard to stabilize." And over time, she adds, "if you don't deal with the crisis reactions, they become worse."

"There's something different about being attacked simply for who you are -- for your basic identity as a person, as opposed to being selected for what you have or what you are doing," says Joan Weiss, executive director of the Justice Research and Statistics Association and former executive director of the National Institute Against Prejudice and Violence, who studied bias crimes and their victims extensively between 1981 and 1992. "This is not to minimize the harm that befalls people in any kind of violent crime. But when your identity is assaulted as well, it creates another level of trauma. And we see this manifest itself with bias-crime victims in all kinds of ways: severe depression, a heightened level of persistent anxiety, extreme withdrawal, a profound sense of isolation."

Indeed, one of Weiss' studies -- a survey of violence in the workplace -- found that bias-crime victims were significantly more likely to experience psychophysiological symptoms, some of them debilitating, than people who had experienced non-bias-related crimes. And although white victims of bias crimes were just as likely as non-whites to experience increased trauma, non-whites were more likely to adopt certain defensive behavioral postures as a result, including watching their children more closely, making themselves "less visible," and moving out of their old neighborhoods.

There is also a secondary level of victimization that can occur with hate crimes: they create a fear of exposure, particularly if the kind of minority group to which the victim belongs experiences real discrimination or social difficulties in the community anyway. Lesbians and gay males are the most vivid example of this; most of them fear, not unreasonably, that merely admitting to being the target of a hate crime implicates them as homosexuals, essentially forcing them "out of the closet" when in many cases they have personal and professional reasons to keep their status private. More to the point, gays and lesbians can in many states lose their jobs, face evictions from their housing, or may be denied access to public services and accommodations, and legally so—all if their sexual orientation is disclosed as the result of a gay-bashing assault.

This is true of other minorities as well, particularly immigrants, many of whom may fear deportation if they report a crime perpetrated against them, and may themselves mistrust authorities if they come from a culture with a corrupt or oppressive police force. In communities with a history of conflict between minority groups and police, this distrust is often amplified. "So even if you promise them that this is not going to be an issue if they press charges, they don't believe you," says Joan Weiss. "Why should they believe you? It can feel too risky."

In addition, other obstacles arise in such situations: language barriers can create misunderstandings; many minorities may not even be aware that what has befallen them is a serious crime; and cultural differences and private fears can prevent the victims from being completely forthcoming. A person from a traditional and deeply law-abiding background who has stolen a kitchen knife in the process of defending himself during a bias crime may well lie about the theft to police out of simple fear of being in trouble with the law for committing even the minor crime that the theft represents.

All of these factors combine to make hate-crime victims, and minorities especially, deeply reluctant to even participate in an investigation, and ultimately less likely to report the crimes as well—something that the studies of bias-crime victims have repeatedly observed. This in turn raises the critical role played by police and other law-enforcement officials, particularly prosecutors, in their handling of both the victims and the crime scene itself.

When I wrote Death on the Fourth of July, I became much more interested in what befalls the victims of these crimes, and set about intentionally refusing to focus on the perpetrators of the crime (in this case, a group of young locals led by a violence-prone thug named Chris Kinison), though I do of course discuss their motives and behavior. But the deeper nature of hate crimes is revealed, I think, is revealed by understanding what happens to people who are their victims -- the extraordinary fear, the profound pscyhological effects both for the short and long terms, and of course the broader community effects, particularly the terroristic effect on the generic targets of the crimes.

The chief victim in the Ocean Shores case that the book was about -- a Vietnamese immigrant named Minh Hong -- was permanently and irrevocably scarred by his experience. He is, like most such victims, someone who deserves better. So did David Ritcheson.

Hate and the military

Last year, the Southern Poverty law Center issued a report on the growing infiltration of white supremacists within the military, in no small part because of the Pentagon's need for fresh cannon fodder in Iraq.

Now, according to a followup report by Joe Jackson at Port Folio Weekly, it's becoming painfully self-evident the military has little intention of changing things.

Jackson describes the extremist activism of a Navy PIO named John Sharpe, who also operates a couple of far-right Catholic organizations out of his home that specialize in classic anti-Semitic hatemongering:

The questions concern his involvement with the Legion of St. Louis and the IHS Press, which he runs from his home in Carrolton, Isle of Wight County. In March 2007, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)—a national watchdog organization that tracks hate groups and racism—identified them as among "the most nakedly anti-Semitic organizations in the entire radical traditionalist Catholic pantheon." This pantheon is bound by the certainty that Jews, Masons and others have conspired to topple the Catholic Church for 300 years. The SPLC’s report, entitled "The Dirty Dozen," claimed that "Sharpe blames the 9/11 attacks not on Al Qaeda but on ‘Judeo-Masonry.’" Sharpe’s writings were quoted, including his assertion that the "temporal power that the Jews have achieved since . . . 1798 is both pervasive and relatively unchallenged."

Jackson goes on to note that Sharpe's activities only heightened concerns raised by the SPLC about the infiltration of extremists and gang members in the ranks of soldiers being recruited for service in Iraq:

The timing could not have been worse for John Sharpe. In Summer 2006—one decade after the Pentagon declared a zero-tolerance policy for racist hate groups—the SPLC reported that recruiting shortfalls caused by the war in Iraq have allowed "large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists" to infiltrate the military to get training for a race war. The SPLC, citing interviews with Department of Defense investigators and its own monitoring of racist magazines and Web sites, estimated the numbers could run into the thousands. "We’ve got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad," DOD gang investigator Scott Barfield told the SPLC’s Intelligence Report. "That’s a problem." The New York Times publicized the report, followed by the national and international media.

One consequence of the coverage was the perception that the military was sweeping the problem under the rug. "Recruiters are knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join the armed forces," Barfield said, "and commanders don’t remove them . . . even after we positively identify them as extremists or gang members." The military downplayed a neo-Nazi presence in the ranks, Barfield added, "because then parents who are already worried about their kids signing up and dying in Iraq are going to be even more reluctant about their kids enlisting if they feel they’ll be exposed to gangs and white supremacists."

What stands out is the official response -- denial, denial, denial:

The SPLC called on then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to appoint a task force and design a new response, but on Sept. 26, 2006, Under Secretary of Defense David Chu wrote to the SPLC that their findings were "inaccurate and misleadingly alarmist. Extremist activity is antithetical to the values of our armed forces. We already have the ‘zero tolerance’ policy that you recommend." The fact that Scott Barfield resigned from the military on Aug. 15, 2006, after being reprimanded for violating regulations on interactions with the media, added to the perception that the Defense Department did not like an airing of its dirty laundry.

"There’s an old saying: ‘The military will never admit to having a problem until they have a solution to the problem,’" said Hunter Glass, a former sergeant with the 82nd Airborne Division and now a nationally recognized expert on gangs in the military. Barfield, who reportedly felt "burned" by the military and media alike, could not be reached for this report, but Glass—who knows him and is reportedly his mentor—verified his claims.

"I wouldn’t doubt that there are thousands of gang members in the military right now," Glass said from his home in Fayetteville, N.C. "This is all gangs – black, white, Latin." For FY2006, there were 1.36 million active duty personnel in the U.S. armed services— 512,400 in the Army, 352,700 in the Navy, 179,000 in the Marines and 317,400 in the Air Force. "If, as the Pentagon says, only one percent of these might be gangbangers," that comes to at least 13,600 gang members, though Glass personally feels the number could be as high as 15,000.

"Think about it," he said. "Fifteen thousand gang members released on the streets of America after Iraq is over, trained in arms and combat by the best military in the world." What hits the press is only the tip of the iceberg, he fears. "Among the extremists, you’re on a mission . . . these guys are secret agents in their own minds." The problem is one for the future, he said, "and it’s huge."

This isn't a problem affecting just the Nazis, gang-bangers, and other violent personalities worming their way into the military. It also affects the many more formerly normal, non-racist recruits who have been dragged into multiple tours of duty in Iraq, regardless of the profound psychological effects of such treatment. This includes many people whose evaluations have recommended they not be returned for duty. There's a reason to call Iraq the Timothy McVeigh Finishing School.

This will, I fear, become a significant component of the predictable surge in far-right activity that is almost certain to manifest itself in the USA over the next couple of years, especially as Democrats and liberals expand and entrench their hold on power. We're essentially re-creating the conditions that arose in Germany and Italy after World War I: scores of angry, disaffected and psychologically damaged war veterans, poised to organize into a political force aimed at "rebirthing" the nation and its heritage.

What's even more disturbing, though, is that the top brass at the military seem all too willing to create those conditions.

O'Reilly and the pistol-packin' mamas

-- by Dave

We have long been aware that Fox's Bill O'Reilly has a marked propensity for credulousness when it comes to far-right conspiracy theories; he has a history of transmitting ideas from extremists and making them appear reasonable and factual when in reality they are simple lunacy spun from whole cloth.

Of course, New World Order theories have been getting fresh circulation in recent weeks from the likes of Glenn Beck and Ron Paul, but those hardly hold a candle to the completely whacked-out theory offered by O'Reilly late last week on his daily Fox broadcast, as the SPLC's Susy Buchanan and David Holthouse report:

A "national underground network" of pink pistol-packing lesbians is terrorizing America. "All across the country," they are raping young girls, attacking heterosexual males at random, and forcibly indoctrinating children as young as 10 into the homosexual lifestyle, according to a shocking June 21 segment on the popular Fox News Channel program, "The O'Reilly Factor."
Titled "Violent Lesbian Gangs a Growing Problem," the segment began with host Bill O'Reilly briefly referencing for his roughly 3 million viewers the case of Wayne Buckle, a DVD bootlegger who was attacked by seven lesbians in New York City last August. Deploying swift, broad strokes, O'Reilly painted a graphic picture of lesbian gangs running amok. "In Tennessee, authorities say a lesbian gang called GTO, Gays Taking Over, are involved in raping young girls," he reported. "And in Philadelphia, a lesbian gang called DTO, Dykes Taking Over, are allegedly terrorizing people as well."

After this introduction, O'Reilly went to a split-screen live interview with "Fox News crime analyst" Rod Wheeler.

"Tell me what's going on," O'Reilly said.

Wheeler, a Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department officer-turned-paid Fox News commentator, launched right in: "Well, you know, there is this national underground network, if you will, Bill, of women that's lesbians and also some men groups that's actually recruiting kids as young as 10 years old in a lot of the schools in the communities all across the country," he reported. "And they actually carry a number of weapons. And they commit a number of crimes."

Wheeler asserted that "we've actually counted, just in the Washington D.C. area alone, that's Washington D.C., Maryland, and Virginia, well over 150 of these crews. … And they — like I said, they recruit these kids to be members of these gangs."

O'Reilly asked, "Now, when they recruit the kids, are they indoctrinating them into homosexuality?"

"Yes," Wheeler answered. "As a matter of fact, some of the kids have actually reported that they were forced into, you know, performing sex acts and doing sex acts with some of these people."

Flabbergasted by the sheer depravity of it all, O'Reilly nevertheless forged ahead. "I never thought of this," said the host of the "no-spin zone." "It makes sense that, if you had lawless gay people, they would do this kind of thing. You associate homosexuality more with a social movement, not a criminal movement. But you're saying this is all over the country, detective?"

"It's all over the country," Wheeler replied. "I mean, you go from New York to California to wherever you want to name, you can see these organizations." Next came the pink guns. "Now, the other thing, too, that our viewers are going to find very, very interesting, is the fact that they actually carry—some of these groups carry pink pistols," Wheeler said. "They call themselves the pink-pistol-packing group. And these are lesbians that actually carry pistols. That's 9-millimeter Glocks. They use these. They commit crimes, and they cause a lot of hurt to a lot of people."

So, what exactly was the basis of this report?

Turns out that Wheeler is not exactly the kind of source one would consider reliable:

Confronted by the Intelligence Report, Wheeler was unable, in several phone and E-mail exchanges over a two-day period, to specify a single law enforcement agency or officer, police report, media account or any other source he relied upon for his D.C. area lesbian gangs claim. But he insisted that his report was accurate and that any law enforcement officer who disagrees is "out of touch." "For some reason or other, these organizations don't lay it on the line because they don't know what is going on on the streets," said Wheeler. "This is a serious crisis and the so-called experts are missing it."

According to Wheeler's personal website, he is a member of Jericho City of Praise, a conservative Christian megachurch in Landover, Md., whose leadership publicly advocates against equal rights for gays and lesbians. The website details Wheeler's 500-plus appearances on MSNBC, Court TV and Fox News Channel shows including "The O'Reilly Factor," "On the Record With Greta Van Sustern," and "Hannity & Colmes."

...Wheeler told the Report that he spent seven years in professional law enforcement before going to work as a corporate security officer for McDonald's Corp., a job he has since left. These days, Wheeler is a "food defense specialist" for the American Institute of Baking. Just this spring, he publicly warned that the Big Mac is vulnerable to bioterrorist attacks at "250 points" during production.

So, what about the factual basis for the report?

Er ... what factual basis?

The only specific instance of actual violent lesbian gang activity that Wheeler cited on "The O'Reilly Factor" was a May 19 attack on a 15-year-old boy who was stabbed near a transit station in Prince George's County, Md. "And the police found out that it was a group of six women who identified themselves as being members of a lesbian gang that actually attacked this young man," Wheeler told O'Reilly.

According to a June 15 article in The Washington Post, however, two of the three individuals arrested in that assault were teenage males, though the article did note that, "Metro officials said the fight was between two gay and lesbian gangs that operate in Maryland."

An extensive Internet search seeking to verify O'Reilly's assertion in the introduction to Wheeler's interview that a lesbian gang called Dykes Taking Over is "terrorizing people" in Philadelphia turned up only one possible source. WCAU-TV, a local NBC affiliate in that city, reported in 2004 that a small group of 8th-grade girls at a West Philadelphia middle school were allegedly "bullying, groping and harassing" other girls in gym class with "gay remarks." The report made no mention of the 8th-graders using pink pistols or other weapons.

Similarly, O'Reilly's introductory mention of a Tennessee lesbian gang called Gays Taking Over that is "involved in raping young girls" appears to have been based solely on a highly dubious Feb. 28 television report from WPTY-TV, an ABC affiliate in Memphis, Tenn. Featuring dramatic "reenactments" of high school bathroom rape scenes shot in grainy black-and-white footage, the lengthy segment's vaguely salacious claims about local high school girls being raped and "sodomized" with "sex toys bought on the Internet" was based almost entirely on the lurid musings of a single Shelby County gang officer.

Titled "Violent Femmes," the sweeps-week segment was so thinly sourced and grotesquely sensationalized that it's difficult to believe that any professional journalist found it to be credible. And it wasn't. Under intense pressure from local gay and lesbian activists, the affiliate's station manager finally admitted that WPTY-TV's reporters had neither independently verified the gang officer's overheated claims nor obtained any documentary evidence such as arrest records or written police reports to substantiate their tale. As the station grudgingly conceded, "Our investigation did not turn up widespread violence in schools due to this."

O'Reilly so far is simply pretending that the report was accurate; he's refused to respond to SPLC inquiries.

Evidently, the "no spin zone" is increasingly resembling the Bizarro Universe.

Hate crimes and the law

A recent piece by Laura McPhee in Nuvo illustrates one of the real reasons to pass them: hate groups have proven propensity to exploit their absence, as we are seeing currently in Indiana, one of only four states not to have a bias-crime statute on the books.

The piece details a couple of hate crimes -- one involving a vicious assault on an African American man by some young white punks, the other an even more brutal murder on a gay man -- that occurred in the past year in different locales in Indiana. More importantly, it explores the ugly brew of right-wing disinformation that has kept the legislation from passing:

Forty-six states and the District of Columbia currently have what is known as Hate Crimes Legislation. While the laws vary in language and scope, most HCL defines hate-motivated acts based on race, religion and ethnicity bias as criminal. The majority of states also include hate-motivated acts based on sexual orientation (32) and gender (28).

“Hate crimes do more than threaten the safety and welfare of all citizens,” concluded the New York state Legislature, upon the passage of the state’s Hate Crime Legislation in 2000. “They inflict on victims incalculable physical and emotional damage and tear at the very fabric of free society.”

As recently as Feb. 22, 2007, Hate Crimes Legislation has been defeated in the Indiana General Assembly.

HB 1459 would have amended Indiana law to allow judges to impose stiffer sentences to those found guilty of committing crimes “knowingly or intentionally … because of the victim’s color, creed, disability, national origin, race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or sex,” just as it currently does to allow stiffer sentences to those who commit crimes against police officers, pregnant women, children and other designated victims.

The measure died on the House floor due to lack of support and overwhelming opposition.

While Indiana is one of only four states in America to not have Hate Crimes Legislation, in accordance with the federal Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990 law enforcement agencies are required to report incidents to the FBI in which a committed crime was motivated by bias against race, religion, ethnicity and sexual orientation.

... For nearly 20 years, Indiana lawmakers have declined to pass Hate Crimes Legislation in Indiana due to pressure by the powerful Evangelical lobbyists and the fundamentalists they represent who oppose it.

"It is wrong for the government to mandate special rights for the homosexual lifestyle -- a lifestyle that many consider immoral," contends Evangelical lobbyist Eric Miller, founder of Advance America, whose opposition to Hate Crimes Legislation is that it "represents an attempt to give special protection to homosexuals and cross-dressers."

"Victory in Indiana!" proclaimed a February 2007 e-mail bulletin from Monica Boyer of The Indiana Voice for the Family, "Hate Crimes Legislation [is] Dead!" after HB 1459 died in the Indiana General Assembly.

"This was a clear case of people making their voices heard, and some legislators standing up for what was right," said Micah Clark, executive director of the American Family Association of Indiana.

Like Boyer and Miller, Clark contends that by defeating Hate Crimes Legislation in Indiana, "The good guys won on this issue, and a bad bill was averted."

Once again, for the record: There is nothing in either the Indiana bill -- or for that matter in the federal legislation that recently passed the House -- that would give "special rights" to homosexuals or cross-dressers. The laws as written clearly would protect all citizens equally from bias crimes, including anti-gay bias that targets non-gays. Moreover, the law isn't about "protecting" any group or another -- it's strictly about stiffening the sentences for people who are committing crimes, which are not a form of protected speech in any case.

It's also worth noting, perhaps, that even to the extent that the laws are intended to create some kind of protections for various victim groups from terroristic criminal acts, there is nothing "special" about the rights that might arise from these. It is, in fact, well within the scope of the law to punish such acts for the full scope of harm they cause. We are, after all, simply talking about protecting basic human decency and the rights of equal opportunity and association -- which are the rights that are under assault when hate crimes occur.

You'll also note that there has been a real lack of media attention to these two crimes:

While Evangelical groups and conservative lawmakers from Indiana continue to defend their opposition to Hate Crimes Legislation, local and national human rights groups and bloggers are beginning to take notice.

And while much of this focus questions why Indiana continues to not enact Hate Crimes Legislation, others are also beginning to question why so few Indiana media outlets are reporting the beating of Dexter Lewis or the murder of Aaron Hall.

On June 6, Bloomington Alternative Editor Steven Higgs published an editorial asking why The Indianapolis Star has yet to cover Hall's murder.

"The case should have been big news," Higgs contends. "Yet The Star left the Hall murder to the Jackson County media, the never-to-be-trusted Indianapolis and Louisville television stations and bloggers ..."

We untrustworthy bloggers have also been pointing out something that Leonard Pitts remarked upon regarding the supposed media bias involved in black-on-white crimes: namely, the reality is that actual bias crimes against minorities are grossly underreported, especially in contrast to gruesome black crimes in which no bias motive is detectable.

More to the point, there is a reason that skinheads and hate-group organizers of various stripes despise bias-crime laws: They send precisely the kind of message they don't want to hear -- namely, that both their communities and society at large acgtively condemn crimes undertaken against victims chosen simply for their identities.

As I've explained previously, a significant aspect of the mindset of bias-crimes perpetrators is the belief that not only does society silently condone their actions, but that it is a kind of heroic undertaking on behalf of their communities.

Silence, for the thugs who like to beat and murder people just because they belong to an "out" group, equals tacit approval.

That's what Indiana continues to tell its young haters, and the results are coming home to roost.

Likewise, in continuing to attack attempts at passing a federal bias-crime statute, national Republicans beholden to powerful elements of the religious right are doing the same strange kabuki dance, with the extremist right as an appreciative partner.

Truth & Reconciliation, Part II: James Loewen on Sundown Towns

-- by Sara

As the statistics here show, lynching was largely (though not entirely) a Southern phenomenon. But the North and West had other -- more subtle but no less devastating -- ways of dealing with their own African-American populations -- which is why sociologist James Loewen's two presentations on the phenomenon of sundown towns formed an interesting counterpoint to Sherrilyn Ifill's talk discussed below.

If you think the town you grew up in didn't have a race problem because either a) it wasn't in the South, or b) it was all white, Loewen -- the author of "Sundown Towns" and an active Unitarian himself -- has news for you.

"When I started researching this subject, I expected to find three types of sundown towns," Loewen recalled. "I expected to find small towns that were all-white because they'd expelled their black populations; suburbs that were all-white because they excluded blacks (and usually Asians and Jews, as well) from the very beginning; and then a third class of places that were all-white simply because African-Americans never got around to coming there.

"And what I discovered was that this third class is virtually non-existent. If you're an American who grew up in an all-white neighborhood, you need to realize that it was, almost certainly, all-white by intentional design."

There was a time when there were very few cities in America that didn't have a significant black population. "Between 1863 and 1890, they did live everywhere," Loewen asserts. Freed slaves spread far and wide throughout America, seeking to put down roots in places Jim Crow couldn't reach them. But reach them it did: within just a couple of generations, these towns began systematically harassing their black populations in a wide variety of ways designed to get them to move elsewhere.

"Between 1890 and 1940, there came what I call "the great retreat," said Loewen. Throughout the west and north, small towns and large cities -- some as large as St. Louis and Omaha -- expelled their African-American populations. In a nod to the conference venue, he mentioned that Oregon's history was particularly heinous: "I don't think there was a town in the state that wasn't a sundown town," Loewen noted. "The only place in the state you could live if you were black was in the center of downtown Portland."

The term "sundown town" refers to the signs that some of these towns put at their city limits, which typically said things like "Whites Only After Dark." (Some of them were far less polite.) However, most sundown towns didn't bother with overt signage: my own hometown of Bishop, CA never actually put up signs; but the police and certain other citizens made it their business to confront black visitors and advise them of the town's policies regarding their presence overnight. Innkeepers refused to rent them lodging as late at the 1980s. (And if you think sundowning was just out in the sticks, note that this was happening just four hours up the highway from LA.)

Loewen, who encourages anyone with details about specific sundown towns to register their stories at his website, ticks off names and places in a rapid-fire staccato. Pierce City, MO drove out its black population in 1901. Tulsa drove out two-thirds of its black community 1908. Norman, OK followed suit in 1912 -- Loewen recalls that a fraternity at the University of Oklahoma hire an all-black band for a party; found it had run afoul of the new sundown law; and had to cancel the dance and pay to put the band on the next train out of town so they wouldn't face police harassment. Viana, IL didn't go sundown until 1954 -- which led to a riot in which houses were destroyed. Anna, IL drove out its African-American population in 1909, and is still all white to this day.

There are regional wrinkles to the pattern. "I expected to find maybe 10 sundown towns in Illinois, and maybe 50 across the US," said Loewen. Instead, he's found over 500 in Illinois alone -- and estimates that there may well be over 10,000 across the US. The movement was apparently strongest in Illinios, Indiana, and Ohio; and weakest in the South. He's only found six sundown towns in Mississippi. "Sundown towns are rare in the south, particularly the 'traditional south,' he notes.

In the west, sundowning campaigns often included the Chinese as well. "The Chinese were almost 20% of Idaho in the 1880 census," Loewen recounts. "But in the mid-1880s, they were driven from Wyoming, Idaho, rural California, Seattle (though that lasted less than a week), and Tacoma (more permanently). Humboldt, California drove them out in the late 1880s; and the town didn't have another Chinese resident until the 1960s."

In small towns, it's typical for people to swear that sundowning happened after some kind of ordinance was passed -- though Loewen finds it remarkable that, even though he's looked, he's never found a single town that actually has such an ordinance recorded on the books. Nor has he found deliberations on a sundown law reflected in the minutes of any city or county meeting. Still, it's clear that city resources were often brought to bear to enforce this extra-legal intention. Loewen showed a slide of a "6 o'clock siren" mounted on a city water tower, which everybody in town knew had been installed to announce the curfew on blacks in town every evening. "That's city government in action," he noted. "You don't put up a thing like that on city property without somebody's approval." In other towns, the job of enforcing this unwritten law fell to the police force.

As the Portland example demonstrates, most of the African-Americans displaced by sundowning were left with nowhere to go but the inner cities. And so it happened that sundowning in small towns and suburbs across the country gave rise to the inner-city ghettos of the 20th century. And this, in turn, created an entirely new flavor of sundown town: the covenanted suburb to which white city residents fled in response.

"Most large cities had -- and many still have -- sundown neighborhoods," Loewen pointed out. "Many suburban developments, starting around 1905, were built with legal restrictions to ensure that only whites would ever live there. Often, city governments passed laws requiring that sundown deeds be included in any new subdivision they approved." By the 1950s, federal housing policy further reinforced these covenants by requiring developers to include them as a condition for federal funding.

Loewen recommended the 1947 film "Gentlemen's Agreement," which centers on the agreement by which the city of Darien, CT covenanted to kept out Jews and blacks. "And it was very effective," notes Loewen: the 1950 census found 200 African-Americans in Darien -- all of whom were live-in domestic help.

The interesting thing about all this, says Loewen, is that there are strong inverse correlations between sundown neighborhoods and the relative economic health of a region. "Detroit is an economic disaster zone. It's also among the most segregated cities in America. All five of the Grosse Pointe communities were founded as sundown suburbs, for example." This pattern, he says, recurs: ethnic vitality correlates with economic vitality virtually everywhere in the country, and cities that remain segregated do so at peril to their own well-being.

The practice of sundowning began to wind down around 1970, as fair housing laws were passed from the federal level on down, opening the nation's housing stock to all qualified buyers, regardless of race. However, Loewen says, it still lives on in Sunbelt cities catering to retirees from the Northeast with a sundown proposition; and towns (like Darien today) in which the police still pull African-Americans over for "driving while black."

Loewen, like Ifill, is hopeful that we've reached a point where we can begin to deal openly with this history, and begin to move past it. To that end, he offered a second talk -- a workshop filled with specific suggestions that individuals, groups, and communities can use to begin the process of truth and reconciliation where sundowning is concerned. Those recommendations will be the topic of the next post.