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“Are you calling me a racist?”
The libertarian case for racism.
In “I Can’t Breathe,” Matt Taibbi’s book on Eric Garner’s murder he writes, “You could reduce…Fox News and afternoon talk radio to a morbid national obsession that could be summarized on a t-shirt: ‘Are you calling me a racist?’”
It’s a passage I found myself turning to regularly during the Trump years, when right wing figures bristled at being called racist merely for supporting an explicitly racist party that took power by appealing to white nationalism.
The media spent a lot of that period asking itself whether being a Republican was the same as being a racist, and one commonsense answer that cropped up a lot was, “It may not mean that you are racist, but it does mean that you’ll accept racism as the price of GOP rule.”
I was reminded of this by the current episode of Backbench, Canadaland’s national politics podcast. This week, host Fatima Syed interviews a listener who sent an angry email to the show after hearing voters for the People’s Party of Canada called “racist.”
https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/14-a-conversation-with-a-ppc-voter/
The caller was angry because he was not a racist: he’s a “libertarian” who wants low taxes. At the start of the interview, he insists that the manifestly racist People’s Party is not racist.
But as Syed points out the explicit racism in its platform its extensive ties to avowed neo-Nazis, the caller’s position gradually shifts — from denying racism to describing racism as a universal factor in all parties.
Finally, he acknowledges the party’s racist ties but excuses them as the price of low taxes — “You gotta take the good with the bad.”
Interestingly, the caller was able to speak intelligently about the nature of systemic racism and identify it as a serious problem.
He just doesn’t think it’s as big a problem as high taxes.
This is what we mean when we talk about saying the quiet part out loud.
