Mitt the Flip’s Song of the South 0
Chauncey Devega mercilessly dissects Mitt the Flip’s Southern Strategy Dixie dog whistles.
A nugget:
By proxy, these racially driven attacks on Barack Obama are really an assault on Black Americans. We are positioned in the White Conservative political imagination as perennial outsiders and second class citizens. As the late Joel Olson smartly observed, in the American political tradition, and in a country founded as a herrenvolk society, to be black means to be an “anti-citizen.”
He’s quite right, you know.
I’m a Southern boy. I know how to decode the damned code.
Aside:
We recently came into possession of a DVD of Disney’s Song of the South. Until then, all I had seen of the movie were the animated bits about Br’er Rabbit that used air on Walt Disney’s television show when I was a young ‘un.
The casual implicit racism, which was quite mainstream when the movie was filmed less than a long lifetime ago, made my skin crawl.
That is the America of the Southern Strategy and the Republican Party.
I doubt that I could watch the movie again, however amusing the animated bits might be (and even the portrayals of the animals in those fables was infused with racist imagery).
