This is sad, but I must put Dave Sims in the Confederacy of Dunces category for this post, and this follow-up one, which are his attempts to get us to look at the "root causes" of why people would join the Ku Klux Klan. Here is what I put in the comments of his second post:
Dave, I think the reason you are so perplexed as to why these "friendly, non-racist people" would join the KKK is... because they were not, in fact, non-racist.I don't suppose the "I know what I am talking about because I come from that part of the country" argument will go down some peoples' craws any easier than Susanna's did -- she merely got slammed by one of his commenters as basically having betrayed her roots. (Whoo.) But forging on nevertheless, let me say this:Please. I have lived in the South all my life. My mother's family is from Tennessee, my father grew up in Washington DC and Maryland during the Depression and World War 2. These people -- nice, friendly guys talking to another white guy -- pulled the wool over your eyes. Or maybe they don't feel that they are racists because they laugh at the Cosby Show on tv and don't think that lynching is okay anymore. Everyone has to live with themselves and most people choose to see themselves in the best light. And you, I think, are no racist -- you merely want to think of these people (so nice, so polite, so eloquent about their travails) as good people too. But they aren't.
They get the same reply from me as blacks do who join the Nation of Islam or some such pseudo-religious, racist organization, with the excuse that "there was no one else to turn to to help my people get ahead": Bullshit, sir and madam. There are a ton of groups poor white men and women could join, if join a group they must, to get help with getting a job or changing laws they think unfair, or whatever the other reasons were your aquaintances gave you. None of the other groups have the overtly and well-known -- to anyone who can see lightning, hear thunder, and is warm to the touch -- racist agenda of the Ku Klux Klan. I don't care how much money they donate to "good causes" and whatnot. I would tell your KKK-joining aquaintances that it doesn't matter how pretty you dress up after rolling in the garbage, you'll still stink.
The criteria for what gets some groups identified as detrimental to civilization is not based on a zero-sum equation. The fact that our major problem this decade happens to be Middle-Eastern terrorism and the groups that engage in it does not mean that other groups -- such as the Ku Klux Klan -- get some of the burden of evil therefore lifted from their reputation. The fact that there are racist groups among African-Americans (such as Nation of Islam), Mexican-Americans (La Raza), and so forth does not mean that racist white groups get a pass. They are all bad, and the people who join them passed up many perfectly legit organizations because the racist groups gave them something they weren't going to get from the legitimate groups. It has nothing to do with wanting a better job, and everything to do with wanting to lord it over (even if only in basement meetings) the "other" people you blame for your bad luck.
I will not say that Dave Sims is a racist. But he has made the mistake many well-meaning people make: he has granted the powerless (or those he perceives as being powerless) moral sanction for their actions out of pity for their state. He forgets that just because a man is "disenfranchised" does not mean he can't do evil.
(The title refers to one of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, "The Five Orange Pips." The story was written sometime in the late nineteenth century. If you read it you will see that the Ku Klux Klan already had quite a reputation by then. And I refuse to believe that a region so obsessed with the Civil War -- or as you might hear it termed in some parts of the South, the "War of Northern Aggression" -- can simultaneously produce people who have no idea of the reputation of the South's most notorious hate group. Of course, they must know -- or else, why would they think that becoming a Klan member (I almost wrote Klam -- hm, I think I will use that from now on) would be a great way of "put[ing] so many of the smart toffs’ knickers in a twist"?)
Update: the discussion continues. Dave replied to my comments, but I wasn't particularly satisfied with his reply:
Hi Andrea,And:Oh I know there are many out-and-out sorry-ass racists in the Klan, what I'm trying to say is there are people joining for other reasons than hatred of blacks. The clear sense I got from the guys I talked with was that they hated the government much more than they hated blacks, they hated how the government was using blacks (in their perception) to keep them down.
Admittedly it's a short hop from there to hating blacks themselves, but the guys I spoke with made the distinction.
And you cannot name another organization of any significant profile who genuinely has the interests of the poor whites at heart.
Andrea's comments have made me wonder how much any of us really know about the Klan today. Had I not had that encounter with actual Klansmen I'd hold as uninformed and ignorant a stereotype of them as some commenters (it's not to be implied here that I include Andrea as uninformed or ignorant) here hold.Since very few commenters on these threads speak of actual experiences with the Klan itself, positive or negative, or encounters with Klansmen, I'm left to conclude that pretty much everybody's dealing with second-hand information.
I wonder if there'd be a market for a book taking an honest look at the Klan today, trying to figure out why people who at least profess non-racist views join it, what the majority of Klansmen actually think and believe and how they come to terms, as Andrea says how they live with themselves, joining an organization with such a dark history, even if they repudiate that history?
Well, thanks, but -- while none of my relatives (to my knowledge), ever had anything to do with the Klan, I sure as hell know that people they knew and grew up with did. And unfortunately there is still plenty of racism in the South. So much so that the idea of a "non-racist person" joining the Ku Klux Klan is laughable on its face. There is no reason for non-racist people to join the Klan in the South -- it's not as if the supply of white racists is running out down here. This is part of what I call the Bad Facts of Life in the South. I am not a Southern Culture-hater, but I am not going to close my eyes to its biggest flaw. So I said:
Dave, you missed or completely ignored my main issue, which is: no one who is not racist joins the Ku Klux Klan. I do not care what your friends told you. I do not care that they say they joined "because they hate the government." Its reputation is that set in stone, and there is no amount of whitewashing that you or anyone else can do to that organization that will cause it to be considered as respectable as the Rotary Club.I am beginning to feel as if I am banging my head on a brick wall. Maybe that explains the headache I had this morning.As for there being no way these men can fight the powers that be, there is something called "the political process" which is no secret, which only someone with strong delusions -- such as a paranoid, racist, KKK member -- can believe that they are actively prevented from participating in in this country. I didn't bother to name any other groups because a) I didn't feel like doing your homework for you -- you are the one who is so worried about these poor, disenfranchised men; and b) I actually thought that you could bring to mind a few yourself -- the Republican Party and the various Baptist churches come to mind as options that a disenfranchised Southerner might find attractive. That is, if he didn't mind giving up the added perks of getting to parade around in sheets and pointy-hooded masks, burning crosses on lawns, and other atavistic acts of social defiance.
As for the repeated claims of these people that they don't "hate blacks" being held up by you as proof that they aren't racist -- that has been the line of segregationists and other racists since day one. They don't "hate" the Negros -- they just think they ought to be kept separate from whites, Among Their Own Kind. It's not "hate" to want to raise up the white man to his lawful place at the top of the human food chain -- it's just God's law that the black man was to be subordinate to the white man. And they'll bring up the Bible, where it says that God gave certain privileges to the Children of Ham and Sem and that other guy I always forget. (Moe? Larry?) Of course they'll tell you they don't hate black people: that's what they tell themselves! Like I said, I grew up here, I know the milieu. Please don't play the "we don't really know anything" game. You may be ignorant, but I'm not. I have had to hear things like my own great-aunt expressing dismay at the sight of a little white girl and a little black boy holding hands, of hearing my father complain that Bob Seeger -- Bob Seeger -- was "nigger music." My father was an educated man with a degree in Political Science from Georgetown University (I have his degree, printed in Latin), back when a degree from that school meant something. True, before the alcoholism set in he would never have let words like that slip his lips, but as he aged and stopped caring all hell broke loose. In Jack Daniels veritas -- these kinds of things have a way of coming out eventually down here. And currently I live not one half-hour's drive away from Polk County, Florida, which is on the FBI list as one of the top three KKK activity hotspots. Don't tell me I don't know what I am talking about.
(Note: trackbacks to Susanna's two posts added.)
Posted by Andrea Harris at June 9, 2003 02:49 AMThis has been a tough one for me. The Klan is pretty much indefensible, and no one on either side of this argument has seriously tried to defend it, but the crux of the biscuit, as I see it, is this: does the Klan take people who may or may not be racist and inexorably turn them into racists, or can we safely assume that anyone interested in the Klan is already a racist?
Not much of a difference to split, I suppose, but this is where I see the schism.
Posted by: CGHill at June 9, 2003 at 08:59 AM"If you read it you will see that the Ku Klux Klan already had quite a reputation by then."
Decidedly so. It's founder, Nathan Bedford Forrest (a former slave trader and one of the more brutal southern generals) left the Klan because it had become too violent.
Posted by: Ken Summers at June 9, 2003 at 09:00 AMI think Dave Sims was expecting to get pure, unadulterated, homogeneous, stereotypical, evil, ingnorant, uninformed, monolithic racism - and then had to confront actual people.
KKK is like Hitler - once the term enters the conversation, reasoned discussion becomes well nigh impossible.
Dave had to confront the thought that maybe at least one member of the KKK had a rational greivance and was not irredeemably wicked - and that's just not the meme, is it?
What I don't understand is why anyone with a brain in the Klan does not realize that the taint won't ever go away - and then quit, and reorganize on more rational and publicly acceptable lines.
Posted by: Parker at June 9, 2003 at 09:06 AMI thought the same thing, Parker.
Even if you accept the assertion that not all clan members are violent, rabid racists...you still have to think that anyone who would join expection to a) make a difference with regard to the causes Dave mentioned as being important, or b) be taken seriously by anyone, given the history of the group, is a complete idiot. Valid points or not.
Posted by: Demosthenes at June 9, 2003 at 10:41 AMAndrea, I noted your position in the post I wrote last night about the Klan threads at Mac-a-ro-nies. I will likely have more to say on the topic. I don't know whether Clubbeaux is a neo-Confederate or not, but much of his rhetoric is lifted directly from SCV, League of the South and Council of Conservative Citizens materials. (I get the feeling he is scanning or typing it in without attribution.) He seems to be doing the 'my own personal journey' thing to impress people, but it ain't so. i've done considerable research on the movement and recognize their propaganda from a mile away.
Posted by: Mac Diva at June 9, 2003 at 09:59 PMOne does not join an organization like the Klan without subscribing to it's beliefs. Period. Perhaps generations ago there were members in certain areas who had to join, just as the Postmaster in a small town in 1937 Germany had to join the Nazis, regardless of personal feelings. Those days are long past. Today membership in the Klan carries far more liabilities than benefits. If one is poor and needs to ally oneself with those who can provide a leg up, well, there's a dilema. Kiwanas Club or the Klan. Hmmm. Does the Kiwanas Club have FBI trying to infiltrate? Will Kiwanas membership keep me from elegibility for a security clearance if I'm lucky enough to score a Government job? The Klan will.
People join the Klan for only one reason. They join the Klan because water usually seeks it's own level. Scum want to be with scum.
Northeast Texas, I know those scumbags.
Given that Mac Diva is quite the closet bigot in her own right, I wouldn't really take much that she says on racism at face value. Do your own work; come to your own conclusions.
Posted by: David Perron at June 10, 2003 at 12:27 PMWell, I do know of one person who was not racist (against blacks, anyway) and joined the Klan. It was in the late 70's/early 80's (long time ago). Back then, in NC at least, one could join by mail. This guy did just that. He was quite black. Resulted in a huge front page picture of him and his membership card in the Charlotte Observer and a whole lot of mockery of the Klan in that area for sometime thereafter.
Other than that one specific exception, I'm with Andrea on this one all the way.
While it's true that Mac Diva has her own issues of extremism, she's not wrong about the Klan. And she and I have agreed on other issues that have nothing to do with race--e.g., the Agonist's plagiarism.
However, the crux of the argument still lies on Sims' experience with, as far as I can tell, three men who insisted they weren't in the Klan for any racist reason. Three. By his sixteen-year-old interviews with those three men, he paints this rosy picture of the Klan TODAY attracting poor whites who, he insists, cannot get their issues redressed by any other group, and so they are forced to join this organization of racists. Because they don't think anyone else is listening.
Uh-huh.
Still waiting for some kind of evidence to back up those claims. I see a lot of what he thinks and feels, but not a single factual article referenced. Hell, he hasn't even given us the text of his original newspaper article, or even told us if it was printed. For all we know, his editor nixed it.
I'm with Peter on this one. Anyone who joins the Klan knows what they're joining, and if they don't, they're either lying or idiots.
Posted by: Meryl Yourish at June 10, 2003 at 02:31 PMAndrea:
"I will not say that Dave Sims is a racist. But he has made the mistake many well-meaning people make: he has granted the powerless (or those he perceives as being powerless) moral sanction for their actions out of pity for their state. He forgets that just because a man is 'disenfranchised' does not mean he can't do evil."
I am truly impressed that, after reading his awful, awful bilge that you are good-hearted enough to give him such an eloquent and balanced response.
MacDiva is right. What he wrote is mostly boilerplate right-wingerism. You can trace some of it right back to the fifties, if not earlier. And I mean, like nearly verbatim cut and pasting.
You say he was duped by those reasonable sounding Klannies. I would agree. I would also say that, by trying to sound reasonable, he is using the exact same tactic on us.
Meryl, spot on.I do have a question about your last sentence:
Couldn't they be both?
Posted by: tristero at June 10, 2003 at 04:45 PM"And you cannot name another organization of any significant profile who genuinely has the interests of the poor whites at heart."
I don't suppose organizations who don't care what color you are count? YMCA? Traveller's Aid? Red Cross? ACLU (barf)? Only white-specific ones - KKK, Aryan Nation, NSDAP, etc. - count?
"The clear sense I got from the guys I talked with was that they hated the government much more than they hated blacks"
More than, as in addition to...
I'm of Nordic extraction, but they don't throw me out of the local Portuguese-American club. Can't join, but I can sit in and talk - even during policy meetings.
Also, besides talking to some decent-seeming people, go check out the Klan's website.
Hm... visit the KKK website, have them get my IP... I don't think so.
Then again, there is always Anonymizer. Using their free trial, I went to Google and looked up Ku Klux Klan. On the links page that followed, I found this link to a Fun Page for Kids! See what it said:
Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Youth Corp. Its OK to be White! Its YOUR
right! Thomas Robb National Director. Youth today, Leaders Tomorrow! ...
How... Ugggghhhh.... And there isn't just one KKK site, but several. Most of them have rather innocuous Google blurbs, such as:
KKK - Ku Klux Klan - Items concerning the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) for sale, including
historical books, museum pieces, photographs, robes, leaflets, videos, and ...
Description: History books, museum pieces, memorabilia, collectibles, research items and more about the Ku Klux Klan.
Yay. Fun for the whole family. Strangely, I could not form within myself the desire to click on any of those links. Excuse me, I think I'll go disinfect my hands and boil my keyboard now.
Posted by: Andrea Harris at June 10, 2003 at 10:26 PMUmm, you need to check out Mac Diva's little hitjob on Silflay Hraka on his/her(?) Silver Rights blog. Hraka criticized Clubbeaux' comments, and has ridiculed a lot of racialist aspects of society as retrogressive. For that, Hraka (and Clubbeaux) are getting slammed as KKK recruiters. I can't speak to Clubbeaux, I'm only a sporadic visitor, but I stop by Silflay Hraka pretty regularly. In Silflay Hraka's case, Silver Rights / Mac Diva / Mac-a-ron-ies slurs appear to stem from some absurdly bad, sloppy misreadings of a couple of Bigwig's posts. Silver Rights is also encouraging people to "keep an eye" on Clubbeaux and check up on his political activities, listing his name and city.
Geez, where do you go from there? Publishing a street address and home phone? Inviting people to give Clubbeaux a little love tap if they see him?
It's pretty absurd that somebody who supposedly is a champion of civil rights would stoop to slander and intimidation... This is really grim.
Posted by: Omnibus Bill at June 10, 2003 at 10:43 PMI wonder if Mac Diva has looked into the abyss lately.
Posted by: Andrea Harris at June 11, 2003 at 12:00 AMJust in case anybody takes anything Meryl Yourish says seriously you should know she’s quite the expert herself when it comes to lying.
In the comments to Cut on the Bias’s article on my Klan posts she says of me:
your statement that the Klan is an organization now filled with non-racists...
I’ve asked her numerous times to reproduce that statement, since I’ve never actually made it. She’s a liar pure and simple, and if anybody wants to call me wrong on this factual assessment all you have to do is find the “statement” I made that the Klan is an organization now filled with non-racists. Meryl herself has ducked at least three direct requests for the reference, she'll run away from this one too. Liars have a way of doing that.
Funny, of all the other comments I see here it appears that only Andrea gets anywhere close to understanding what I was actually trying to say. That she disagrees with it is her right, of course, I’m just overjoyed that somebody actually is able to reasonably correctly restate my argument.
Posted by: Clubbeaux at June 11, 2003 at 12:20 AMHi Omnibus Bill,
I've got a lawyer checking out exactly what that idiot who does Silver Rights has committed, legal-wise. I'll keep you posted. It's an interesting question of nascent blog law.
Maybe it'll be nothing, but still, giving my name and hometown, incorrectly identifying me as a "white supremacist" and accusing me of "recruiting activities" and asking his readers to keep tabs on my activities sure sounds a lot like actionable harassment to me.
It's still amazing to me that people thought that I was in any way defending the KKK, excusing anything they've done or that anybody who can tie their own shoes supposes I think they're anything but a despicable, vile, racist organization -- which I've said numerous times, my whole point was puzzlement that people who reject violence and who don't profess racism join such an odious organization as the Klan. Really makes you wonder what drives them to it.
Parker got as close as anyone here to understanding what I was getting at, I wish he'd read the whole post and give a considered critique, it'd be valuable.
But then only about ten percent of America has the intellectual capability to actually read for content anyway. As the comments here show.
Posted by: Clubbeaux at June 11, 2003 at 12:51 AMI think, Clubbeaux, that the point that others are attempting to make with you is that the Klan is in fact a racist organization. Klan literature is virtually a confession of racism. Your coming up with an extremely tiny number of Klan members who ostensibly joined the Klan for non-racist reasons doesn't negate the fact that the Klan is racist. There are doubtless members of the Baath party that were for more Democracy; that doesn't make the Baath party a bastion of Democracy, now, does it?
That said, I don't think making an (in my opinion, at least) ill-supported argument makes you a racist. If you were to start declaring that your opponent in argument "ordered" his wife from Korea, as Mac Diva has done, then you begin to look a bit suspect. In my view, at least.
Posted by: David Perron at June 11, 2003 at 06:55 AMAnybody who read what I wrote will see that over and over and over I SAY the Klan is a hateful, racist, vile organization, that that's my entire POINT. I have never written a sentence mildly approving of anything the Klan has ever done, it's a true testament to these idiots' prejudice that they think I have.
All I have done is say "Hm, isn't it puzzling that some guys who renounce violence and aren't professing racism join the Klan? I wonder why they would." If I thought the Klan was anything other than a vicious bunch of racists it wouldn't surprise me that these guys were joining, now would it?
It's called "intellectual curiosity," something the Meryl Yourishes and Silver Rights of the world are innocent of.
Posted by: Clubbeaux at June 11, 2003 at 07:51 AMI just think it's rather credulous of you to think that because they say they're not racist, they're really not. Who on earth would join the Klan for non-racist reasons, when they could organize themselves under a less...infamous name toward the same ends?
I just think you're buying into something that's just not true. People joining the Klan and disclaiming racism is likenable to people organizing under the Nazi party and claiming zero anti-Semitism. It's possible, sure. But if someone pastes a Nazi or Klan label on his or her self, I'm going with the idea that they're doing so for the usual reasons.
Posted by: David Perron at June 11, 2003 at 10:12 AMIf that's impossible, then why are we encouraging Eastern Europe to join the EU and "dilute" it's fascist tendancies? I don't think either extreme is correct in this argument.
Posted by: Ian S. at June 11, 2003 at 12:06 PM"Nazi party and claiming zero anti-Semitism"
Bullshit.
The Nationalist Party were around long before Hitler brought his anti-Semitism to it.
The ______________ American Club in my college is, by definition, racist, in disallowing members who aren't ________________, and yet we don't call them racist or assume racism to be a necessary point in joining.
Oh wait. Is that racism or 'ethnic pride?'
Posted by: e.w. at June 11, 2003 at 01:30 PMUh -- e.w.? Anti-semitism was part of European culture way before Hitler was a little Schickelgruber zygote. I rather doubt he had to "bring" anti-Semitism to the party -- probably every political party in Germany was stocked full with anti-Semites. He just, how shall we say, made ridding the world of Jews the focus. But let's not depend on my faulty knowledge of history; here's a link to some essays on anti-semitism throughout history.
As for the "Blank-American" groups -- sure they are discriminatory. But racist? I didn't know that Italians, Armenians, and so on were separate races. Ethnic groups are not races -- nor do I believe that these various ethnic groups promote the superiority of their ethnic group over all other ethnic groups and claim that their ethnic groups deserves to be the dominating one. (I am sure there are exceptions, but as a general rule that is not the case.) The people generally known as "white" come from a variety of ethnic groups. That is why the "white power" nonsense is considered racism but Polish-Americans getting together in a club of their own is not. People will form groups of like individuals, but this is not always wrong. It's when the aim of those groups is well-known to be adverse to the general public welfare that we start labelling these groups as being beyond the pale.
Posted by: Andrea Harris at June 11, 2003 at 02:25 PMLet's note for the record that I didn't equate anti-semitism with racism. It was an analogy, nothing more.
And yes, I know you got that part, Andrea. Some others didn't.
Posted by: David Perron at June 11, 2003 at 04:01 PMDamnit, e.w., here I was hoping to dance around Godwin a bit and you beat me to it.
Anyway, I think it's rather like someone saying "I don't hate the Jews - I'm a National Socialist because I like buses that keep to their schedule!"
Posted by: andy at June 11, 2003 at 07:17 PMI'll say it again in more detail. There was a time when folks who were not neccessarily racists either joined the Klan or at least coexisted with it because the Klan was a major force in many areas of the Country. For instance, Harry Truman's Senate Race in prewar Missouri, he allied himself with Boss Pendergast because he couldn't stomache the Klan, knowing Pendergast was a crook. I have my political disagreements with Harry Truman but I damn well know he wasn't a crook. Mr. Truman allied himself with the lesser of two evils. All his political advisors told him he was crazy to take on the Klan.
Today the Klan has no political and very little economic power.
Clubbeaux seems to have taken at face value what those three sheetheads told him. I don't know him, haven't read enough of his Blog to have an opinion, no reason but time, I only have so much.
I will say that I've seen very little written stating that Clubbeaux supports the Klan, we are mostly incredulous that he fell for it.
If I were to claim belief that nonracists join the Klan for other reasons I'd take that as prima facie evidence that I didn't belong in that ten percent of intellecually capable Americans.
Clubbeaux – you said “only about ten percent of America has the intellectual capability to actually read for content anyway”
That’s an interesting statistic. Do you have a link to the study (and to the questions asked) that produced these results? If this is true, I wonder how we, as a nation of dunces who probably can’t read anything more complicated than a bubblegum wrapper have managed to survive and even thrive for so many years.
Or are you just making stuff up? I have nothing against making stuff up, I like fiction - but if you’re going to attempt to paint others as liars and idiots who lack ‘intellectual curiosity’, your audience has to believe that your intellect, morality curiosity and grasp of the facts are superior.
Bigoted, ersatz statements and name calling aren’t usually the tools for a successful argument - but what do I know, I’m just an American. I’m sure you have detailed links and references for your statement about our limited-to-nonexistent ability to read for content. It would be nice to see them.
Posted by: mary at June 12, 2003 at 09:34 AM