Republicans have learned to disguise their intentions so well, in other words, that the disguise has seeped into and transformed the intention. Even without directly engaging the progressive argument, conservatives may absorb, by some elusive osmosis, the deeper categories and idioms of the left, even when those idioms run directly counter to their official stance.
After years of opposing the women’s movement, for example, Phyllis Schlafly seemed genuinely incapable of conjuring the prefeminist view of women as deferential wives and mothers. Instead, she celebrated the activist “power of the positive woman.” And then, as if borrowing a page from The Feminine Mystique, she railed against the meaninglessness and lack of fulfillment among American women; the difference was that she blamed these ills on feminism rather than on sexism. When she spoke out against the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), she didn’t claim that it introduced a radical new language of rights. Her argument was the opposite. The ERA, she told the Washington Star, “is a takeaway of women’s rights.” It will “take away the right of the wife in an ongoing marriage, the wife in the home.” Schlafly was obviously using the language of rights in a way that was opposed to the aims of the feminist movement; she was using rights talk to put women back into the home, to keep them as wives and mothers. But that is the point: conservatism adapts and adopts, often unconsciously, the language of democratic reform to the cause of hierarchy.
I think that they’re saying that blackface is just as malicious as drag, ie., not malicious at all. But that if they’re not allowed to pretend to be black and make racist jokes, all to celebrate white pride, then why should other people get to “pretend” and celebrate queer joy?
They’re saying “if I can’t do it from a moral standpoint, you can’t do it from a legal standpoint.”
But their actual honest reasoning, the one that they whisper to themselves before going to sleep after praying to white corporate Jesus, is, “fuck those people different than me. I’ll sleep well knowing that I have the power to make others suffer.”
Technically blackface isn’t banned, is it? Why use it as an example?
-Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind
I think that they’re saying that blackface is just as malicious as drag, ie., not malicious at all. But that if they’re not allowed to pretend to be black and make racist jokes, all to celebrate white pride, then why should other people get to “pretend” and celebrate queer joy?
They’re saying “if I can’t do it from a moral standpoint, you can’t do it from a legal standpoint.”
But their actual honest reasoning, the one that they whisper to themselves before going to sleep after praying to white corporate Jesus, is, “fuck those people different than me. I’ll sleep well knowing that I have the power to make others suffer.”
They want to make themselves feel better about being racists: “Well if drag is ok, then blackface is too!”