During college, I took a course with a professor who asked us to come to her house, high above Portland, for Passover. While a few of us climbed the Columbia River Valley in a rickety station wagon, one of my classmates warned the rest of us that her husband was something of a “barbarian”: “you half expect him to be ripping into a mutton chop while he’s talking to you,” he explained.

Like this.

The description turned out to be a bit overdramatic, but the husband was nonetheless a rather intense thickly-bearded figure who suddenly engaged us in a heated debate about the impending peril of Islamic terrorism in the United States. He convinced none of us, of course, but concluded his remarks with the ominous suggestion that  once someone blew up Pioneer Square in downtown Portland, we would all change our tune.


We scoffed at the notion, of course. For anyone unfamiliar with Portland, I once ate a sandwich in Pioneer Square with someone behind me playing an acoustic version of “Sexual Healing” while two teenage girls made out in front of a sign-wearing preacher shouting about the evils of homosexuality while being shadowboxed by a homeless person who was standing immediately to the left of a goth kid playing the kazoo and doing a jig. So, really, who would bother scheming to blow up a place normally trafficked by hackysack hippies and pitbull-carrying drifters?

Well, someone just did. But I’m not sure whether it was Mohamed Mohamud or the FBI.

Mohamud, a 19-year-old Somali-American and Oregon State student, was arrested by the FBI on Friday for allegedly plotting to set off a car bomb at the annual Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in Pioneer Square. (Which brings up the most surprising aspect of this entire story: thousands of people attend a tree lighting ceremony in the heathen Portland?). According to the feds, Mohamud had a stated desire to harm women and children and attempted to remotely detonate a car bomb during the ceremony. He was subsequently taken into custody, kicking and screaming, and shouting “Allahu akbar.” So, violent terrorist thwarted, point to the feds, right?

Well, maybe—but not so fast. Glen Greenwald suggests in Salon, I think rather convincingly, that there is cause for more skepticism regarding the facts of the case and it seems altogether possible that “the FBI -- as they've done many times in the past -- found some very young, impressionable, disaffected, hapless, aimless, inept loner; created a plot it then persuaded/manipulated/entrapped him to join, essentially turning him into a Terrorist; and then patted itself on the back once it arrested him for having thwarted a ‘Terrorist plot’ which, from start to finish, was entirely the FBI's own concoction.”

I certainly have no interest in defending Mohamud who, when given the means, legitimately thought he was detonating a bomb that would obliterate two blocks and potentially kill thousands of Portlanders. He is clearly a warped individual and an attempted terrorist. But it does seem worth asking not only whether Mohamud would have posed any kind of legitimate threat without the help and prodding of the feds, but also the extent to which the FBI simply created a terrorist out of a disaffected teenager filled only with delusional fantasies and bluster until he was given the means to carry them out by the government. The circumstances of the case, I think, bring further into question whether the methods the FBI uses are actually protecting the United States from legitimate terror threats or simply concocting them in a self-perpetuating cycle.

From news reports probing Mohamud’s background, it seems clear that he was an impressionable and disaffected—probably mentally unstable—teenager who had become emotionally troubled after the divorce of his parents. The FBI, in fact, only began to monitor Mohamud after his father, an engineer at Intel, contacted them that he was concerned about his son’s growing extremism. Mohamud was, it seems, in many ways just a troubled teen who involved himself not only in fantasies of violence, but also in sex, alcohol, and partying at Oregon State.  But if his father turned to the FBI for some sort of intervention or help, he was obviously mistaken, as it would instead result in a sting operation that further encouraged his son toward terrorism.

According to the FBI affidavit, the sting began in earnest when the feds intercepted a seemingly innocuous email exchange between Mohamud and a man living in the northwest frontier province of Pakistan, which was suspicious solely because it is a region where “Islamic militants frequently reside.” The December 3 email read: "salamz bro. it's me, i made it 2 OMRA, [praise be to god] if u wanna come, theres a bro that will contact you about the proper paperwork u need 2 come... i cant go online 4 a while,, i hope 2 see u soon"

Although “OMRA” would typically refer to a pilgrimage in Mecca, the agent concluded that they must be speaking “in code to avoid detection,” and that the above email was therefore an invitation for Mohamud to join in terrorist activities. Mohamud then replied to the email that  “yes that would be wonderful, just tell me what I need to do [God willing]. always wanted to see the ka’bah.” But Mohamud hit a dead end when his attempts to contact another party that would help him reach Mecca/Pakistan fell through. So he secured a fishing job in Alaska—but he was prevented from boarding his flight, because he had been placed on the “No Fly List.”

Instead, an undercover FBI agent contacted Mohamud and arranged a meeting where he was asked what he would be willing to do “for the cause.” Thus, at this point the FBI had been tipped off by a concerned father looking to help his unstable son filled with bluster and impotent rage, saw him discussing a visit to either Mecca or Pakistan, found him too incompetent or disengaged to follow through even with that, but now surrounded him with a “friend” who further pushed him toward jihad.

Given a variety of choices on how to help “the cause,” Mohamud expressed interest in becoming “operational” and, after being instructed to think of a target, suggested Pioneer Square in Portland. The undercover officer offered him praise, saying that “he loved his idea.” The agents then helped him plan the attack (saying that they “were impressed” with his work), gave him money to buy materials for bombs and to pay his rent, and actually built a bomb for him. After a test of an actual functioning bomb on November 4, they filmed a written statement in which explained his reasoning, and eventually helped him to detonate a fake bomb on the 26^th. As Greenwald sums: “he had no history of violence, no apparent criminal record, had never been to a training camp in Afghanistan, Pakistan or anywhere else, and -- before meeting the FBI -- had never taken a single step toward harming anyone.  Does that sound like some menacing sleeper Terrorist to you?”

Yet, the U.S. attorney in Oregon suggested that "this defendant's chilling determination is a stark reminder that there are people -- even here in Oregon -- who are determined to kill Americans,” while the FBI suggested a statement released by the Department of Justice that even though the bomb was fake “the threat was very real.” But was the threat “very real” until the FBI became involved?

The methods used by the FBI in this case closely mirror those used in numerous others, including the arrest of the “Newburgh Four” in 2009, accused of plotting to bomb New York synagogues. In that case, as Ted Conover explains in Slate, the FBI informant offered congregants of the local mosque $25,000 and other gifts if they would help him pursue jihad. The four unemployed and impoverished ex-cons, one of which was described as a paranoid schizophrenic who collected his urine in jars, were seduced in this case entirely by an offer of $250,000 and a BMW—the informant himself wrote that the men were participating “for the money. … They're not even thinking about the cause.”

Beyond legal questions of entrapment, the actual utility of invading often impoverished ethnic communities with promises of money in exchange for committing acts of terrorism seems, at best questionable. One ex-FBI agent and terrorism expert complained to Businessweek: “We’re interested in catching terrorists, not people who have mental problems and wonder what it would be like to blow up the Sears tower but they can’t get out of bed in the morning.”

In fact, the circumstances surrounding the Mohamud case immediately reminded me of the Indian-born British salesman Hemant Lakhani, who was convicted of providing material support to terrorists when he sold a stinger missile to the FBI. As Petra Bartosiewicz explained on This American Life, however, Lakhani was an “amazingly incompetent illegal arms dealer” and a “lair, shameless braggart, and a snob” who not only claimed to the FBI that he could obtain a missile, but equally improbably that he could secure a submarine and plutonium. When Lakhani proved unable to supply the FBI informant with the missile he guaranteed, the government actually provided the missile to him so that he could sell it back to the FBI. Lakhani was not so much a terrorist-in-waiting as he was an immoral liar with a pathological need to be liked who was provided by the FBI with both the means and motive to commit an act he had no philosophical commitment to.

Conover suggests this strategy is like “sending lots of little devils out into Muslim communities and getting them to sit on people's shoulders and whisper in their ears” and points out that there is no shortage of disturbed (or even seemingly normal) Americans who could be convinced to commit violent crimes given enough enticement. The government would certainly have its hands full if it conducted a sting operation of every teenage boy with violent fantasies and a willingness to act upon them if given encouragement, rewards, and means.  So it is worth asking whether the government’s tactics actually do anything to prevent actual terrorism or whether it simply allows them first to create, and then to chase, ghosts—thereby inflating the perceived risk of terror.

Meanwhile, the Corvallis mosque attended by Mohamud was firebombed by an arsonist. Greenwald concludes: "So the FBI did not stop any actual Terrorist plots, but they may have helped inspire one."

The answer is shari‘a.

Measure 755 “forbids courts from considering or using Sharia Law” when issuing rulings, which has been a notorious problem in a state where Muslims make up—at most—.04% of the population. The authors of the measure argued that it was direly needed in order to confront the impending “onslaught” on Oklahoman values by, presumably, invading hordes of Islam-o-bots riding camels down the Oklahoma freeway, lopping off the heads of unbelievers.

You think?

Of particular concern to supporters was the, admittedly appalling, ruling by a New Jersey judge that a Moroccan immigrant had not committed marital rape because he believed that, within his religion, marriage implied consent. While outrage is justified, the assumption that the judge was therefore “applying shari‘a” is a rather wishful, and probably willful, misreading by the Islamophobes.

The judge did not exculpate the husband because shari‘a “allows for” marital rape; instead, he simply ruled that the husband “did not act with criminal intent” because the man believed his actions were within his religious rights. So the judge was acting solely within the confines of American law—though his decision was egregious and later overturned by the New Jersey appellate court. Ironically, enough, the judge was guilty of excepting a man from the application of state laws because his religious views conflicted with that law—a kind of decision many conservative Christians may themselves appreciate.

Nonetheless, the media campaign in support of the measure, which was funded most prominently by the anti-Muslim organization Act! For America, seized upon this decision as proof that evil, evil “Shari’a law” was almost certainly coming to Oklahoma unless it was stopped:

Act! For America was founded in order to “provide American citizens a means to be a collective voice for the democratic values of Western Civilization, such as the celebration of life and liberty, as opposed to the authoritarian values of radical Islam, such as the celebration of death, terror, and tyranny.” But, interestingly, it’s not just death, terror, and tyranny that concerns them. No, no. Among the various other grievances cited by Act! For America in their dis-informational PowerPoint on Islam is that, ostensibly because of Muslim dietary restrictions, “Bacon and eggs are becoming harder and harder to get at British university cafeterias.” Those. Bastards.

As noted lovers of bacon and eggs, and apparently feeling asphyxiated by the icy death grip of the 15,000 or so Muslims in their state, Oklahomans passed Measure 755 by an enormous margin of 70-30%.

By no means do I purport to be an expert on Islamic law, but Measure 755 reveals the unsurprising fact that Islamophobes know virtually nothing about shari‘a beyond the Disney movie Aladdin:

So that Barack Obama seems like a pretty good guy, doesn’t he? He seems genuine, personable, good-humored in the face of constant attacks on his character and history. His off-the-cuff remarks on Labor Day were charming and he’s obviously an intelligent, shrewd politician. And most importantly for the average American voter, he passes the “but would you like to have a beer with him” test (sit down John Kerry, I wasn’t talking about you--not now, not ever). And Obama wouldn’t even buy you some awful pisswater Budweiser either—he’s a Goose Island man! So we’re settled: Barack Obama = decent fellow. Right?

BOOM! You’re wrong.

Not only is he a socialist (boo!) Muslim (double boo!) that wasn’t even born in this country (gasp!), but as Dinesh D’Souza recently explained, he is staunchly dedicated to postwar African anticolonialism!

Look, I’ve never been a tremendously huge fan of Obama’s candidacy or his presidency. Although he is a constitutional scholar, he has refused to repudiate and end blatantly unconstitutional and inhumane practices introduced by his predecessor; he is staunchly dedicated to protecting and furthering corporate power; and, for all his alleged “radical” progressivism, supports obviously homophobic policies. The list goes on. Really, the best you can say is that he’s not actively making shit worse, which I guess is something of an improvement considering his idiot predecessor and idiot competition. To sum: so far, not so impressed.

But these constant bullshit attempts to question Obama's allegiances or Americanism by fabricating ties to "un-American" ideologies really needs to stop. Like, really really. Because increasingly it seems that more and more conservatives have divorced themselves from anything remotely resembling reality and headed for the greener pastures of some collective cuckoo dreamworld where up is down, left is right, and black is racist socialist Muslim. Nothing positive has ever emerged out of a political discourse built on an increasingly tangled web of hateful fictions.

Bottom line: to call Obama (a free-market capitalist if ever there was one) a socialist is to defame socialists everywhere. And to claim that his political decisions are most strongly influenced by African anticolonialism is… well, it’s just so profoundly stupid. It's so ahistorical and so fabricated that it wouldn't even be worth talking about if it wasn't so obvious that it's going to catch on.

D’Souza’s argument doesn’t even make any internal sense. He begins by expressing complete bafflement over Obama’s support for center-left causes like progressive taxation or energy independence: “The President’s actions are so bizarre that they mystify his critics and supporters alike.” So how could Obama (and, you know, hundreds of millions of other Americans) believe such bizarre ideas? Because (like millions of other Americans, apparently) he is an African anticolonialist, of course. Come again?

Even more obvious, though: if Barack Obama were an anticolonialist, would we really still be prosecuting a “war on terror”? Would we continue to have military bases around the world? Would we continue to treat the entire world as a personal unmanned drone playground?  In other words, would we continue to be--you know--a colonial power? Of course fucking not. I know that, you know that, and I bet Dinesh D’Souza knows that too, even if he preposterously concludes that “colonialism today is a dead issue.”

So why write an article that makes absolutely no sense and introduces historical ideologies well outside mainstream American thought?

Not only because it manages to combine already ridiculous, but widely believed claims, that Obama is a socialist and a dangerous foreign element into a tidy package. But also because, as Adam Serwer notes, it is reflective of the fact that conservatives “want to talk about the fact that our blackety black president is blackety black.” It lends itself nicely but somewhat subtly to the widespread belief that Obama is a radical black man that wants to expel white Americans from society, “that having a black president makes the United States somehow analogous to African Third World countries run by bloodthirsty despots.” It takes pre-exisitng fears and reconstitutes them into a new fabricated image of white anxiety: America under the rule of Robert Mugabe.

Once when I was little (went by "One Scoop" back then) I made fun of the dorky kid in school. It is my perpetual karmic retribution that I have to share a planet with these morons.

For those who know me, it may seem rather odd to read me continually defending religious believers since I am myself openly irreligious. Like most people who define themselves as atheists, I have never found any convincing evidence for any sort of “god” at all, and I am all but certain that there is no anthropomorphized god-figure acting in the world. But I also recognize the possibility that my own way of understanding the world around me is so strongly conditioned by the modern, secular, rational world that I simply cannot perceive the divine acting upon us.

This, I believe, is what true skepticism looks like. Skepticism cannot be simply holding militantly to your own beliefs and forcing others to provide a burden of proof. It is also constantly questioning your own beliefs and worldview as well. And this holds equally to religious and non-religious people.

Christopher Hitchens has long been one of my favorite journalists. Not only is he an engrossing writer willing to criticize sacred cows, but he is a drunken curmudgeon from a bygone era of drunken public intellectuals—he is a gin-soaked, high-brow Andy Rooney with actual wit but without the unseemly dementia and eyebrows. And like any good public intellectual, his best quality is the ability to piss everyone off, myself included. His support for the Iraq War has been problematic at best, his tendency toward misogyny is distasteful and, most importantly for this discussion, his association with the so-called “New Atheists” is unfortunate.

To be fair, it should be noted that Hitchens has been far less shrill in his criticism of religion than the insufferably smug certitude of people like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett—elite snobs so obnoxious they thought to label themselves “Brights” (a label even Hitchens finds distasteful). While Dawkins spends the majority of The God Delusion essentially arguing that religious people are inherently dumb people, Hitchens’ book god is not Great (while not entirely eschewing this tendency) tends to focus more on certain religious practices that are clearly abhorrent to modern liberal sensibilities. So I was disappointed to see him pen a recent article on Slate arguing that “the taming and domestication of religious faith is one of the unceasing chores of civilization.” I have two brief points to make.

First, what does it mean to “tame and domesticate” religion?

Talal Asad has suggested that defining anything as “religious” is really a way of marking it distinct, and therefore necessarily separate, from other forms of public life. Many Americans, even religious Americans, easily keep their private religious lives largely separate from their public life. But others may not so easily draw a clear distinction between private religious beliefs and the rest of their everyday lives. Many religious people both in the United States and outside it inhabit a world in which the sacred is omnipresent and omniscient; they interpret the events of their lives through the lens of religious texts; and they may hold values and desires that differ dramatically from secularists.

So, from a rational viewpoint it might be easy to mock someone who sees the Virgin Mary in a sunspot on the window of a tacqueria. But for someone with a particular way of understanding the world around them, this is perfectly reasonable and expected. And while American culture is obsessed with the prevention of suffering, many religious people believe that enduring pain is a necessary element of redemption (Catholics, for instance). And as Saba Mahmood explains, Western critics may understand veiled Muslim women as victims of patriarchal religious authority, but many of these women actually choose to veil themselves—not because they “don’t know any better,” but because they live in a world in which piety is more important than liberal notions of “freedom” or “choice.”

My point is that religious people often inhabit dramatically different worlds than Hitchens or I do. What he is really promoting, I think, is the elimination of religious ways of living in the world that don’t conform easily to secular, liberal values. “Taming and domesticating” religion really means privatizing religion and making certain practices and beliefs more palatable to secular observers. Hitchens and his ilk are essentially arguing to forcefully integrate religious people into a secular, rational, scientific, nationalistic, democratic, capitalist world. And this is, in reality, a form of colonialism.

Such an argument is premised on the uncritical belief in the superiority of what Hitchens terms “civilization.” While he is absolutely correct that many religious practices and beliefs are utterly abhorrent to any reasonable liberal observer, can we honestly say that science, nationalism, or capitalism have proven themselves any less prone to violence or any more democratic than religions have? 

Mainstream science has long been central to racism and colonialism; homosexuality used to be defined as a mental illness “cured” with electroshock; transorbital lobotomies were once considered a solution to even minor problems. What contemporary scientific practices will seem utterly barbaric in fifty years? Capitalism is responsible for millions of deaths through conquest and war, it has created unbelievable social inequality and suffering, and has increasingly deracinated the world of any meaning beyond the accumulation of consumer goods and personal wealth. And the modern-nation state has proven itself time and time again to be the most efficient vehicle for the wholesale slaughter of humanity ever conceived.

As Asad questions in On Suicide Bombing, why are we so repulsed by individual acts of religious terrorism, but completely accepting of even more destructive forms of state terrorism? Americans continue to believe the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were somehow justifiable, but would be utterly horrified if the same action was perpetrated by a non-state actor. Why? This is not to defend religious terrorism by any means, but simply to ask why we are increasingly so quick to criticize abhorrent religious practices but so accepting of the equally (if not more) destructive practices of “civilization”?

I’ve heard that the best way to make a successful blog is to repeatedly post on the same topic over and over until the four (maybe) people who read it get bored. And then also intersperse it with smug, pedantic commentary on trivial issues. So, anyway, about this thing in New York…

At this point, there is probably little left to be said--when Ron Paul is the voice of reason, you know things have lost any semblance of sanity--but it might be interesting nonetheless to think about one controversy with an eye toward another. No doubt you will remember the outrage expressed by many Muslims across the world when the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published a series of cartoons in 2005 that depicted Muhammad (thus violating Islamic law), including one in which he wore a turban made of a lit bomb emblazoned with the shahada.

The reaction in Europe and America ranged from a didactic South Park episode (redundant, I know) that taught us all a valuable lesson about the evils of censorship to alarmist outrage about the threat of “Islamofacism”: “Today the censors may be coming for some unfunny Mohammed cartoons, but tomorrow it is your words and ideas they will silence. Like it or not, we are all Danes now.” Fuck, I wish. The general gist  these reactions shared was reaffirmation of the secular liberal values of freedom of speech and press. As conservative commentator Daniel Pipes wrote at the time:

Pipes, like many other Americans, argued that the defining characteristic of “Western civilization” was its reverence for free speech, including the right to insult and blaspheme, and therefore, censoring any speech that was intentionally insensitive, offensive, and blasphemous to a group of people would be a violation of basic liberal principles.

Yet on August 16, Pipes wrote that the Islamic Center in Manhattan should “be barred from opening” because it “carries the unmistakable odor of Islamic triumphalism” and might “give reason to worry that this center will spread Islamist ideology.” But even if concerns about the Imam at the center were not preposterously overblown, and even if it were a meeting place for ultra-conservative Muslims, would it not still fall under the very principles Pipes believes are the crux of Western civilization itself?

What is particularly fascinating is how many activists and commentators have consistently used words like blasphemous, sacred, and insensitive to describe their objections to the Islamic center. Journalist Charles Krauthammer, in a widely-published editorial entitled “Sacrilege at Ground Zero,” rather frighteningly criticizes Mayor Bloomberg for his “expansive view of religious freedom” before going on to argue that “although America is a free country” it is acceptable to prevent buildings that “offend local sensibilities”—particularly for reasons of “common decency and respect for the sacred.” Thus, one would assume here that Krauthammer believes that when a speech act or a public assembly offends sensibilities toward the sacred, it can and should be restricted.

So what did Krauthammer have to say about the Danish cartoon controversy? He criticized any Muslim felt outrage at the blasphemy, of course. Moderate Muslims who condemned violence while expressing disapproval with the cartoons were, for Krauthammer, endorsing “the goals of the mob without endorsing the means. It is fraudulent because, while pretending to uphold the principle of religious sensitivity, it is interested only in this instance of religious insensitivity.” Indeed.

In the book Is Critique Secular? anthropologist Saba Mahmood argues that, for many Muslims, the Danish cartoons were offensive less because they were blasphemous than because they insulted a person who was, for them, very tangibly real, with whom they had established a personal and loving relationship. (It is, one would suspect, the same reason that Christians tend to be upset when you drop a crucifix into a steaming bucket of piss). Even as they condemned the violence, she suggested, such Muslims nonetheless felt the sense of grief, sorrow, and anger that comes after a personal affront on a close friend or family member.

Now, to think that allowing Muslims to congregate in the general vicinity of where 9/11 victims died is an insult "to the victims and their families" is, of course, the result of incredibly ignorant Islamophobia. But perhaps this whole controversy suggests a much greater similarity between the sensibilities of “the West” and the Islamic world than the former wants to admit.

I made the mistake a few days ago of turning the channel to CNN only to find Dr. Laura Schlessinger discussing with Larry King her recent, repeated use of the "n-word" on the radio and her subsequent decision to end her show. She explained her decision this way:

Voice of dissent? How noble! Against what, exactly?

The most immediate problem with this statement, of course, is her utter failure to comprehend the First Amendment. The First Amendment does not grant you the right to say whatever you want (even if it’s in your mind and in your heart!) in a public forum without any repercussions whatsoever or prevent your show/sponsors from being boycotted by groups or individuals. Any such policy would, in fact…wait, for it… violate the First Amendment, which does prevent the government from restricting your right to free speech in a public forum. So, Dr. Laura’s hunt for her alleged “First Amendment rights” is likely to be as meaningful and fruitful as O.J.’s ongoing search for the “real killer.”

Unsurprisingly, no one demonstrates a complete lack of understanding the First Amendment more than the former Governor of Alaska and Vice Presidential Candidate (think about that for just a moment... that's enough), Sarah Palin, who chimed in with the eloquent tweet:

Remember, folks, it’s neither American nor fair to openly criticize racism.

More maddening, however, is Schlessinger’s refusal to understand basic American history. And so it is worth going through a brief refresher:

Modern scientists and social theorists understand race as a social construction lacking any biological basis. Historians, too, have found repeatedly that what we have come to call “race” did not, in fact, exist in the earliest days of the American colonies. Colonial Virginia, for instance, originally had both white and black unfree laborers, who often served as indentured servants. There is, in fact, a famous record of one African indentured servant fulfilling the terms of his contract, acquiring land, and owning servants of his own.

Over time, however, this labor model became problematic. Land was scarce and servants fulfilling their indenture demanded more and more of it. The end result, as Edmund Morgan demonstrated decades ago, was rebellion. The elite responded to the rebellion with be a series of slave codes that would increasingly codify slavery with blackness and visa versa. Poor whites would now identify with the ruling class precisely because they, simply by being white, were “free” as opposed to blacks who were necessarily enslaved.

Enter the Declaration of Independence: “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” The hypocrisy of this sentiment was not lost on the founding generation. Jefferson, in particular, struggled with the inherent contradiction between authoring the mellifluous phrase and owning (and impregnating) slaves. And so it is here, ironically, in the climate of the revolution that racism comes into being. It was the need to justify bondage in a nation that proclaimed universal liberty. If African Americans were said to be inherently inferior, their inferior economic and social position could be justified. And so emerged during this time an industry of scientific and Biblical justifications for slavery and racism.

The word “nigger” served an integral part of this process. By the nineteenth-century, the word had become both entirely pejorative and pervasive. As law professor Randall Kennedy summarizes, the word would come to accompany “innumerable lynchings, beatings, acts of arson, and other racially motivated attacks upon blacks. It has also been featured in countless jokes and cartoons that both reflect and encourage the disparagement of blacks. It is the signature phrase of racial prejudice.” It was a term used not only to disparage African Americans, but to mark them as a separate and distinct from whites—indeed, from humanity itself—and therefore unworthy of freedom. The word would outlast slavery, becoming central to life not only in the Jim Crow South but, as David Roediger has shown in The Wages of Whiteness, in northern cities as well, where working-class whites needed constantly reinforce their own whiteness.

So Dr. Laura, like many white people before and after her, misses the deep historical meaning inextricably attached to a white person using the word—not because African Americans and “liberals” want to keep race alive after the Civil Rights Movement "killed it"—but because race “exists” as a result of four-hundred years of American racism that simply cannot be erased and is not dead. African Americans use the word (“on HBO” or otherwise) in an ironic way, in an attempt to re-appropriate the word and shift its meaning away from denigration and toward one of camaraderie and support. Certainly, not all African Americans support using the word in this context or think about it with this kind of intentionality, but that is where the root of this impulse lies. The real question in this whole debacle is why any white person would, knowing this history, ever want to use the word in the first place.

But the entire debate is a microcosm of a larger phenomenon that seems to have taken contemporary American politics by storm: why do so many white people all of a sudden feel oppressed, like they are victims of "reverse racism"? Why is Glenn Beck convinced, seemingly without any basis at all, that Barack Obama has a “deep-seated hatred for white people or white culture”? Why do off-the-cuff and out-of-context remarks by Shirley Sherrod or Sonia Sotomayor become enormous political scandals and, apparently, evidence that white people are the real victims of racial discrimination? Why is the inability to say the deeply hurtful pejoratives with long histories of violence attached to them without angering people suddenly a violation of basic rights? What the fuck is up with this guy? White people’s recent obsession with, and politicization of, their own alleged oppression is one of the most interesting, perplexing, and problematic trends in recent American history and it needs an explanation.