We already know quite a bit about Senator Tom Cotton and his willingness to torpedo talks with Iran, spearheading the infamous 47 Senator letter. Since it behooves black folks to also examine candidates (and he is running for something) about where they stand on issues that directly affect us, figured I’d do a little digging into his opining on us.
Took all of about 5 seconds with the google. Thank you Emma Rollins at Slate
Arkansas Senate candidate Rep. Tom Cotton has earned some flack for his Harvard Crimson columns, in which he at turns compares a golf cup to battle, calls libertarians “sanctimonious,” brushes off feminism, and says affirmative action is “superficial” diversity. A new trawl through the archives shows Cotton wrote a review for the Harvard Salient, the university’s conservative political journal, of America in Black and White by Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom. The thesis of the book seems to be that Democrats refuse to accept how much better life is for black people today (read: in the late ’90s) than in the pre-war era.
She quotes from his piece:
Common sense, however, has never been the forte of race-hustling charlatans like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. Unfortunately, it also seems lost on supposedly educated people like Roger Wilkins, Lani Guinier, and Derek Bell.
They and other leaders of the civil-rights establishment-one of those many groups that lives off the capital of a noble heritage-blithely ignore all data on racial attitudes in America, as well as all trends of behavior that prove the sincerity of those attitudes. They state that racism is still “as virulent and as obvious as weeds in a garden,” racism is “worse today than it was in the ’60s,” and that “white men are the most lying creatures on the face of the earth.”
These are not unintelligent people. They could pass the QRR and can analyze trends and data. They know, however, that to acknowledge the incontrovertible arguments of this book would be to marginalize themselves even more than has already been done. If race relations are better now than at any time in our history and would almost certainly improve if we stopped emphasizing race in our public life, what would the self-appointed ‘civil rights leaders’ have to do with themselves? For this reason, they continue to make hysterical and wholly unsubstantiated claims that inflame public opinion and create a gnawing cynicism in the American people.
Um. No. Just no.
After you get past the standard bigot boiler plate terms like “race hustling” and “charlatans” lobbed at Rev. Jackson and Rev. Al, in case you are not aware, the “supposedly” educated folks like Roger Wilkins, Lani Guinier, and Derrick Bell (whose name he got wrong) are brilliant scholars on the subject of race and racism and oh yes, they are black.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author and distinguished professor Roger Wilkins was born in 1932 in Kansas City, Missouri. Wilkins attended the University of Michigan, receiving his B.A. in 1953 and his J.D. in 1956, interning with Thurgood Marshall at the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. Following graduation, Wilkins worked in several capacities as an advocate for justice. Beginning his career as a caseworker in the Ohio Welfare Department, Wilkins went on to work for the U.S. Agency for International Development and then as assistant attorney general under President Lyndon B. Johnson. Wilkins’ interest in legal issues and equality stems partially from his family’s background. His uncle, Roy Wilkins, was executive secretary of the NAACP from 1955 to 1977. In 1972, Wilkins began writing for the editorial page of The Washington Post just as the Watergate scandal was breaking. His critically informed editorials about the issues leading up to President Richard Nixon’s resignation won him a shared Pulitzer Prize, along with reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and cartoonist Herb Block. He then moved to The New York Times, where he served as the first African American on its editorial board as well as a columnist. Subsequently, Wilkins worked for the Institute for Policy Studies, The Washington Star, National Public Radio and CBS Radio. He continues to be a major commentator and analyst on American public policy and social justice issues.
Lani Guinier is the Bennett Boskey Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She became the first woman of color appointed to a tenured professorship at the Harvard Law School. Before her Harvard appointment, she was a tenured professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School where she had been on the faculty for ten years. Professor Guinier worked in the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice and then headed the voting rights project at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in the 1980s. Professor Guinier has published many scholarly articles and books that are accessible to a more general audience, including The Tyranny of the Majority (1994); Becoming Gentlemen: Women, Law School and Institutional Change (1997) (with co-authors Michelle Fine and Jane Balin); Lift Every Voice: Turning a Civil Rights Setback into a New Vision of Social Justice (1998); The Miner’s Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy (2002) (co-authored with Gerald Torres). Professor Lani Guinier has written a new book, The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America (forthcoming Beacon Press 2015. In her scholarly writings and in op-ed pieces, she has addressed issues of race, gender, and democratic decision-making, and sought new ways of approaching questions like affirmative action while calling for candid public discourse on these topics. Professor Guinier’s leadership on these important issues has been recognized with many awards and by ten honorary degrees, including from Smith College, Spelman College, Swarthmore College and the University of the District of Columbia. Her excellence in teaching was honored by the 1994 Harvey Levin Teaching Award from the graduating class at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the 2002 Sacks-Freund Award for Teaching Excellence from Harvard Law School.
Last but certainly not least Derrick Bell, who we lost to cancer in 2011.
From his biography on the website dedicated in his honor:
In 1969, Derrick joined the faculty of Harvard Law School; in 1971, he became the first black tenured professor on the faculty of the law school. In 1973, Derrick published the casebook that would help define the focus of his scholarship for the next 38 years: Race, Racism and American Law. The publication of Race, Racism and American Law, now in its sixth edition, heralded an emerging era in American legal studies, the academic study of race and the law.
In 1980, Derrick became the Dean of the University of Oregon School of Law, becoming one of the first African Americans to serve as dean. That same year, he published a seminal work Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest Convergence Dilemma, 93 Harv. L. Rev. 518 (1980), in which he argued that white Americans would only support racial and social justice to the extent that it benefits them. His argument that the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown was driven, not by concerns over genuine equality and progress for black Americans, but rather by concerns over the nation’s emerging role as an anti-Communist military superpower, sent tremors through the legal academy. In 1986, Derrick resigned his position as Dean of Oregon Law in protest of the faculty’s refusal to hire an Asian American female professor. He returned that same year to Harvard.
…
In 1992, Derrick was invited to join the faculty of New York University School of Law as a visiting professor by John Sexton, his former student at Harvard and then Dean of the law school at NYU. Derrick loved teaching and was a beloved and popular professor and advisor at NYU Law. He taught his introductory and advanced constitutional law courses in a non-traditional and non-Socratic style, that Derrick called “participatory learning.” This pedagogy builds on the important work of Paulo Freire, and features each student as an active participant in learning. Derrick’s students were empowered, through their participation in a series of mock judicial cases, to teach themselves and one another the law.
In 1995, in honor of Derrick’s 65th birthday, Janet Dewart Bell established the Derrick Bell Lecture on Race in American Society at New York University School of Law. The Bell Lecture has the distinction of being one of the nation’s leading forums on race and the law. The 16th Annual Lecture, scheduled for November 2, 2011, will feature a presentation by Ian F. Haney López, the John H. Boalt Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, where he teaches in the areas of race and constitutional law. Previous speakers include: Charles Ogletree, Charles Lawrence III, Patricia J. Williams, Richard Delgado, Lani Guinier, John O. Calmore, Cheryl I. Harris, Mari Matsuda, Frank Michelman, Anita Allen, Kendall Thomas, Robert A. Williams, Paul Butler, Emma Coleman Jordan, Devon Carbado, and Derrick Bell himself.
During his long academic career, Derrick wrote prolifically, integrating legal scholarship with parables, allegories, and personal reflections that illuminated some of America’s most profound inequalities, particularly around the pervasive racism permeating and characterizing much of American law and society. Derrick is often credited as a founder of Critical Race Theory, a school of thought and scholarship that critically engages questions of race and racism in the law, investigating how even those legal institutions purporting to remedy racism can more profoundly entrench it.
Roll out the excuses.
Emma Roller reports:
Update: Here’s a comment from Cotton’s campaign: “Most college students think they know it all, and most who later look back on what they wrote in college-including Tom-would probably put things differently today.”
Um. Oh no. He’s worse. ‘Cause we have a voting record to look at which proves just where this cotton-pickin’ bale of bull dung’s priorities are. He’s considered to be extreme, even for a Republican.
David Atkins wrote in “The not-so-soft racism of Tom Cotton”
GOP representative Tom Cotton, telling a gross lie:
“(My dad) taught me early: farmers can’t spend more than they take in, and I listened,” Cotton said in the ad. “When President Obama hijacked the farm bill, turned it into a food stamp bill, with billions more in spending, I voted no.”
Of course, Cotton isn’t even in the ballpark of truth here. Food stamp bills have long been attached to farm bills in a cat’s cradle knot to encourage urban and rural legislators to vote for each others’ programs. It was the GOP who dissociated them in the hope of cutting food stamps. Obama had nothing to do with it.
But it’s worse than that. It’s no secret that food stamps (now called the SNAP program) have long been racial code for Republicans, even though a large plurality of SNAP recipients are white. When a Republican politician tells his base that he favors cutting food stamps but not farm subsidies, he’s using Atwater’s dog whistle, promising to deliver the pork to rich (white) agribusiness to boost their profits, while stiffing a lot of minorities (most of whom do work at least part-time) who would actually benefit the broader economy by receiving spending money.
Republicans bristle at being called racist in their policies: they feel that Democrats use every opportunity brand any conservative policy as racist. But that’s because they’ve grown so used to their own dog whistles that they don’t even realize that other people can hear them and take offense.
Sadly, to those white folks who sit glazed-eyed staring at Fox News, dog whistles are the sound of music, with Cotton as one of the new kids on the block pipers. Maybe one day, they will wake up and realize that following the sound and scent of l’eau de merde, has mired them in deeper and deeper economic shit.
Until that time… you listen up Tom Cotton. When you start running for president, or veep, don’t bother to make a truck stop in Harlem…or any other location where we descendents of slaves abide.
We don’t pick Cotton. And we can smell your scent and intent from miles away.
Cross-posted from Black Kos
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