The video of the black gay Tea Partyer getting harassed by angry leftists has been widely circulated and commented upon, and the reason I can’t stop thinking about it is not only because it demonstrates in a microcosm the nastiness of the left (I should probably say “the Jim Crow left” — more on that later), but because it is the most perfect example I have seen of pure non-narrativism. I don’t know whether that’s a word, but maybe it should be. Not only is the black gay Tea Partyer himself a triple narrative violation, but people on the left hate to be caught in a multiple violations of their own narrative, which is they are never racist, and never homophobic. (For an especially jaw-dropping example of leftist homophobia, see Michelle Malkin’s post, and check out the video.)
Gateway Pundit was the first to link the video of the harassment of the black gay Tea Partyer (there are at least three of them). The whole thing is pretty chaotic, but thanks to Glenn’s link to a post by Looking at the Left I found a thorough breakdown of the scene with pictures and dialogue, along with an interview with the man himself, Leland Robinson:
That man with the Gadsden flag turned out to be Leland Robinson, 51, a Denver native. I was reminded of another black man who was waving a Gadsden flag at an SEIU event in St. Louis in 2009. Kenneth Gladney was viciously attacked and hospitalized by SEIU thugs for his thought crimes.
As I spoke with Mr. Robinson, a school teacher interrupted as he had decided to teach Leland a few union thug lessons.
The man said he was a school teacher and felt that he deserved sympathy because after 14 years of work, he made only”Forty-something thousand” a year. With the entire benefit package, we all know that this figure soars. And that’s for working 180 days a year. He claimed that without the union, he’d be making $8 an hour.
At this point, an aggressive woman with a purple SEIU shirt assailed Robinson with a flurry of insults.
“That’s your problem. You’re an entrepreneur, so you don’t work. You don’t know what work is until you get into an educational area. … You’re uneducated, unethical, immoral, and you don’t know what life is. That’s your problem. Why don’t you go behind that fence where you belong? Why don’t you go back with your own kind?” She said this indicating towards the bottom of the Capitol Steps, where a couple of hundred tea partiers were gathered listening to speeches.
Um, excuse me for interrupting with a rhetorical question, but can anyone even begin to imagine the outcry if a white conservative had told a black person to “go back with your own kind”?
Next, this lady in red rudely got in Robinson’s face.
Lady in red: “I asked you a question: Do you have any children? That you claim, that you claim.”
Robinson: “Do I need children to understand what’s going on?”
Lady in red: “You need children to understand education.”
Robinson: “No I don’t.”
Bystander: “What did you mean when you said does he have any children that he claims?“
Lady in red: “Because he’s such a free spirit and an entrepreneur, I would assume that he’s not supporting children.
(To Robinson:) You are a big-mouth take-care-of-yourself man. You don’t care about anyone.”
At this point, police interceded. Seeing a lone black man being shouted at by union goons, they decided it was better that he joined the tea party protest at the bottom of the stairs, where he would be safe. Robinson told me that he had never attended a tea party before, and had never belonged to any political organization.
When I asked the lady in red why she was so incensed at Robinson, a man she had never spoken to in her life, she said “He comes here dressed to the nines, look at him. He is portraying someone not from this community.” She admitted that her assumption that this black man has children he doesn’t support was racist, but said “What I said is racist, but I am not a racist.”
It sounds like she thinks that a taxpayer who doesn’t want to pay 100% of the Cadillac retirement and health benefits of state workers is too greedy to pay for his own children.This is putting a nice spin scrubbed of racial animosity on the incident. But this moment also highlights an insidious form of Liberal racism. Mr. Leland said that he is accustomed to double hostility from liberal Democrats not just because he is conservative, but doubly so because he is a black who is not behaving as they think a black man should behave. They feel free to hurl their venom on him because he stands up as a free and successful man, proud of his achievements, who is not dependent on their party. He rejects their liberalism and their party’s race identity politics and openly states that both have done harm to black families and individuals in America.
I am reminded of an incident from childhood, and it’s pretty ugly, but I think it belongs here. In the early 1960s (when segregation and Jim Crow were very much alive) my parents took me on a road trip from up North in Philadelphia to stay at a lovely resort down South. There was a beautiful lake there and I wandered to the side of the lake to watch some ducks swim. An old white lady was also watching the ducks, and she engaged me in conversation. I don’t know why, but eventually she turned to the topic of race, by suddenly asking me point blank what I thought of President Johnson (who had only recently taken office, after JFK’s assassination). I thought it was unusual for an adult to be asking a kid such a question, so I sort of ducked and said “I don’t know” the way a kid will when confronted.
The woman scowled, and asked me loudly and angrily, “DID YOU KNOW HE’S PUTTING N****RS IN THE WHITE HOUSE?” I knew I was in “The South,” and I had heard my parents talking about “the race issue” down there, but I was shocked, as nothing had prepared me to be asked a question like that. Fortunately, she had not asked the question to hear my answer, but only by way of making her pronouncement. While she carried on, a well-dressed black couple also happened to be walking along nearby (this was a Sunday afternoon, so I assume they might have been to church earlier), and the woman then looked at me and exclaimed, “I HATE SEEING N****RS DRESSED UP!” Again, nothing had prepared me to hear a statement like that by an old lady. Later I told my parents, and my father explained patiently that there were a number of bigoted and ignorant people down there and it would take time for things to get better.
The white woman who harassed Mr. Robinson might not have used the N-word, but it her sentiment was eerily similar to the bigoted old woman who got in my face and whom I have never forgotten.
But racism does not exist on the left! Nor does homophobia! Hear hear!
I’m glad to see someone standing up to left wing Jim Crow racism and the homophobia that does not exist. In addition to not accepting the degrading and subordinate role which the left assigns to him for his race, Robinson also refuses the degrading and subordinate role the left assigns him for his sexuality:
I contacted Leland Robinson by phone and here is part of what he told me:
“When you are African-American or Hispanic it’s like” okay you were born black so that means you’re a liberal, so you’re born gay so you’re a liberal”. Hmmmm, I don’t know. I was born with a brain so that gives me the opportunity to do my fight.
I won’t quote it in its entirety, but read it all.
The guy is a hero.
I have rarely seen a more perfect illustration of how the left is hopelessly stuck in its bigoted narratives than their treatment of the black gay Tea Partyer.
Nor have I seen a more ringing indictment of identity politics, which of course is all about narrative politics. Whatever category they put you in comes with a scripted narrative, to which you must conform.
Those on the right who say that sexuality should not be treated like race have it half right. Race should not be treated like race! Why would any gay person who wants to be treated as a full citizen want to be subjected to the same condescending treatment to which blacks are routinely subjected? Why would any free citizen want to be assigned to a special category when that means having to think in a certain way and vote in a certain way?
So, I agree that it is wrong to treat gays like blacks. By his heroic example, Leland Robinson is an indictment of the concept.
In terms of the right to be free citizens, though, gays are like blacks are like Asians are like Jews are like Hispanics.
A few people on the right disagree, and one of the mistakes they make is by asserting that cultural views and attitudes from the past should be controlling on the present. As I have talked to Tea Partyers who think this way (and commenters here have made the same point repeatedly), I think it’s worth examining the idea that the views toward homosexuality from centuries ago are somehow binding on present day America.
I found a typical example of this view expressed at the website of a local conservative organization which supports the Tea Party movement.
…the men who drafted the U.S. Constitution considered sodomy a serious crime and it was never tolerated in either the original thirteen colonies or in Washington’s Continental Army.
Well, that’s undeniably true. And so what? If we are going to resort to prevailing opinions from certain eras, and if we are going to take the views of individual founders as authoritative, why stop with sexuality? What about slavery? What about the view that black people were inherently inferior to white people? That women were to be subordinate and should not vote? That the whipping post or ducking stool were appropriate punishments for various offenses? Why should the view of a founder on sodomy be any more controlling than his views on slavery, or for that matter his view of the age of the earth? I think it’s obvious that none of these views should be controlling on people today, and I doubt very much the founders would have wanted them to. After all, they were founding a country, and they wanted it to be based on the Constitution, not a bunch of petty narratives.
Not that my views are controlling either, but let me say for the umpteenth time that I think things like race and sexuality should not matter.
The people who think they should remind of that mean old white lady by the side of the beautiful southern lake.
UPDATE: Many thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link, and a warm welcome to all.
Comments appreciated — agree or disagree.
Comments
28 responses to “Breaking the narratives that enslave us”
Leland Robinson is an intolerable contradiction, and thus his existence is intolerable. For the narrative to retain validity, Robinson must be ignored or destroyed. He got uppity and made himself impossible to ignore.
Therefore, he is the human equivalent to scientific data that do not support the AGW paradigm.
Things are just as weird on the right.
Conservative? – Good! You get how the world works.
Black? – Yea! Party of Lincoln and it busts the narrative. Two points for our side (polishes chest).
Gay? – Glad to have your vote even if there is something wrong with you. Now sit down and shut up before you scare the children.
If he is of the libertarian persuasion he is lucky that so far no one (aside from his close personal friends) knows about it.
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We have two parties – one of two year olds and the other teenagers with their social cliques.
At least the teenagers paid attention in arithmetic class and can balance a check book.
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We are only 40 years on from the Pandora’s Box riots and the Stonewall riots.
I’m going to have to agree with your mom Eric. These things take time. What I want to know is – why so much?
And note: no one talks about it now but the whole Pandora’s Box thing was about getting the dopers off the Strip.
How do I know? I was there and asked some folks what was going on. I even had a drink at Pandora’s with my buddy Davidson. We were both in the Navy at the time. Uniform of the day was dress blues.
“…one of the mistakes they make is by asserting that cultural views and attitudes from the past should be controlling on the present.”
Ummmmmmmm…isn’t the name of this blog “Classical Values?”
http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/115786/
It’s good to see a rising awareness of the horrid results in implementing Identity Politics.
Question is, what is to be done with the multitude in the corporate world, in education, in entertainment and now in military who are forced through Sensitivy Training Classes which are designed to ‘set minds to the correct manner of thought’?
How can the policies of horrid Identity Politics be undone when everyone must mold to the one Collective Thought or die?
I suggest reading most everything written by David Horowitz “Radcal Son” @ The Freedom Center-David has written tomes on the subject for at least the last thirty years.
Again, it is delightful to witness awareness come alive. Finally.
I’m adding another great go-to Classical Liberal on the subject of Identity Politics, Thought Police and Language is Jeff @ Protein Wisdom; his early works 2003-2006 are exceptional.
Most unfortunate that many ‘center blogs’ went along with the Collective Groupthink and blew Jeff off years ago when it mattered most.
Speaking of narratives: try being a Jewish conservative or libertarian. If the Jewish establishment is to be believed, any good Jew is supposed to subscribe to “Jewish” (actually: New Class) notions of social “justice”, and anybody who dares to disagree will be looked at as an odd duck at best and ostracized at worst. Here is an example: http://bit.ly/fpGRsw
Orthodox Jewry (the only growing segment) is of course the exception to the rule, and expat Israelis are not reliable Deemocrap voter fodder either.
People tend to resist when subjected to “grieferism,” which existed long before that label was coined. In particular it’s objectionable to have every concession greeted with anger and a longer and more radical list of demands.
I saw the video, and I wouldn’t have known the guy was gay just to look at him. My impression of him was “wow, that guy really knows how to dress!” I heard him speak on Dana Loesch’s radio show and was even more impressed with the man. Leland Robinson is a man who wears many hats– and wears them all with style.
“…the men who drafted the U.S. Constitution considered sodomy a serious crime and it was never tolerated in either the original thirteen colonies or in Washington’s Continental Army.”
Many of the men who drafted the US Constitution also thought slavery was a valid institution. It was one of their big mistakes, at the very least for being inconsistent with their themes of individual rights and freedom. On that basis, we should feel free to discard their antipathy to gayness also.
I think what purple shirted union goon said was really a ringing endorsment of the Tea Party Patriot groups and their message.
“Why don’t you go back with your own kind?” The SEIU goon asked.
Brilliant. What a great question. Why don’t you go back to the people who refuse to judge you based on the color of your skin?
Why don’t you go back to the people who refuse to judge you based on your sexual orientation?
Why don’t you go back to the people who don’t have a preconceived notion of your “place” in the world?
I can’t think of a better idea. Come join us. We believe in limited Gov’t and personal responsibility. If you share those beliefs you have a place in the Tea Party.
I’ve been seeing this kind of rhetoric tossed around, and it bothers me a little.
First, many, many salaried employees have benefits. Retirement benefits, the employer-paid insurance benefits, etc. Yet never do you hear (for instance) a corporate executive corrected like this if he claims to make $250,000 (by way of example). If I’m filling out a loan application, or applying for a job, I put down my salary, not my total compensation.
So I think this “this figure soars” point is extremely lame and inconsistently made.
“working 180 days a year” is another stupid point, without the information that a full work year is about 216 days. I think pretty much everyone is, too, aware that teachers have the summers off. Try getting a job for two months at decent pay, sometime. It’s not so easy.
I note these things as someone who helped vote Charlie Crist out of office because he permitted the teacher’s unions to screw over education reform here. It doesn’t help to make lame points, IMO.
Experience and a few good teachers taught me to be careful about backing contemporary standards onto another time. Those people were dealing within their own context, one which advanced the status of the individual citizen into the relative stratosphere. Beyond that, they built self-correction into the system because they knew it would come in handy later. The undeniable disconnect between “all men are created equal” and toleration for slavery glares at us today. It just goes to show that even a bases-loaded grand slam home run in the bottom of the ninth inning can leave something to be done.
I place this in the “But some of my best friends are Black/Gay/Jewish/etc.” defense. Those people attacking are liberals, and therefore, by definition they are not attacing because they are racists, homophobic, anti-semitic, etc. Being liberal is the get out of jail free card for political correctness.
@Slartibartfast: all that may be true. In fact is true, but so are the “charges”. Lying with statistics is an old dodge.
When the public unions [and especially the “for the children” teachers unions] are willing to admit what they get the taxpayers to pay for, we can’t let them control the “narrative” about pay.
I teach public budget, and have been warning [especially my public employee students] for a decade now that not only were the union-driven “total compensation packages” unsustainable but that they would bankrupt state and local govts and break the unions.
On average, public union compensation contains at least 50% more than wages/salary in it. It not unfrequently rises to more than 60%. Private compensation rarely rises above 25%
Whether that is fair/useful/sustainable is definitely an argument worth having.
So. Include *all* the compensation. [And even if you include non-class attendance days, very few teachers work more than 200 days per year. It’s as if the ordinary worker got 10 more weeks of paid vacation a year. Many would consider that a benefit. Oh. And many teachers use that 10 weeks to seek advanced degrees paid for by their districts to get even more compensation.]
“I found a typical example of this view expressed at the website of a local conservative organization which supports the Tea Party movement.
…the men who drafted the U.S. Constitution considered sodomy a serious crime and it was never tolerated in either the original thirteen colonies or in Washington’s Continental Army.
Well, that’s undeniably true. And so what?”
I’ll guess their point was (is) that there is no way in Hell the Constitution, or any state Constitution, could possibly have a right to gay marriage in it.
That’s my problem with gay marriage: making an end run around the legislature to the judiciary to find some liberal jackass who’ll say that yes, our Constitution contains a right to gay marriage.
If the legislature votes for gay marriage, fine. If the judiciary imposes it, extremely not fine.
Excellent point, if true. FWIW, my total (private sector) compensation is 1.28 times my base pay; I just looked that up.
Some years ago I worked with a woman who was quite liberal, while I was mid-stream in my conservative phase. Like most liberals/progressives, she had a real high opinion of herself based on her enlightened views.
One day she and I were having lunch together along with two of our colleagues, another white male like me and a black female. She was relating to all of us the goings-on she and some other male colleagues had been up to recently when working an assignment in a college town. One night they all went out bar-hopping and at one of the clubs the guys thought it would be “funny” to dance with any and all over-weight, unattractive women at this night clubs. She told us how she got back at them, and I quote, “I showed those guys that night though, I started dancing only with black guys”.
Her faux pas was so glaring that I changed the subject immediately. She thanked me later for bailing her out and told me she had apoligized to our black colleague. I got in a mild dig, given our political differences. We never discussed politics again, oddly enough.
I put a link to this post on Facebook; no comments, just the link. Someone I know commented that ‘the difference is the left never puts racists and homophobes up as national speakers!’.
Really? Al Sharpton? Farrakhan? Robert Byrd? None of those ring a bell?
I guess what most pisses me off on this is the people I know who cannot seem to believe that a Democrat/liberal/socialist EVER does anything bad or wrong, that ALL problems are due to the Republican/conservative/libertarian types. I actually had someone say that the root of all our current problems is found in ‘that bastard Reagan’ having been President… I guess it’s not enough to blame Bush, have to go back a couple of decades for Reagan, too.
Talk about not being able to break the narratives that enslave you.
It always seems insulting to me when gays try to pretend their experience is like being black in segregated America. Go tattoo “gay” on your forehead and then come back and chat about it. YOu can make choices about how out you want to be. They can’t do that.
And I also don’t get the “I’m born that way and so you have to accept me” argument. Someone sexually attracted to children can make the same argument. No, calm down, I’m not equating gay sex to child molesting. Not even close. Most people, myself included, don’t care what consenting adults do to each other.
Back to the narratives that enslave you. Even though you experience prejudice, it is not like being black. But you need that right? Otherwise, people can make the argument that gay marriage is like polygamy – something that society as a whole can choose to accept as good or bad behavior.
You are pounding the wrong drum. Sodomy laws are on the books and ignored by gays and straights – so why is it so much worse for men to do it to men? Get them off the books and as for polygamy v/s gay marriage, make the point that you are only asking for benefits for one partner – not mulitple – so it is NOT the same.
Stop trying to hone in on the black experience. It is just insulting. Instead make the real argument: You don’t think your behavior is bad and you think it would benefit society to allow gay marriage.
But like your parents said, that would take time for people to come around and see it your way and you don’t want to wait. It is just so much easier to take to the streets and hold others hostage with your demands or get in the face of someone who disagrees and call them a racist homophobe.
I’m not the first one to say this but it’s worth repeating: White liberals hate black and gay conservatives so intensely because they are a threat to their own self image. They’re a threat to their entire world view and they find that very upsetting.
New Class Traitor,
I am that oddest of ducks – a libertarian Jew belonging to a Reform Temple. It is so no fun that I don’t even go to High Holy Days services any more. Well the kids are grown. And they are as Jewish as I could make them under the circumstances. And as libertarian.
That’s your problem. You’re an entrepreneur, so you don’t work. You don’t know what work is until you get into an educational area
I’m sorry . . . . WHAT?
An entrepreneur “doesn’t work?” WTF?
Note that the harrassing “teacher’ is a fat lesbian, hardly someone to single somebody else out.
After the umpteenth repetition of the phrase “Black gay Tea Partyer”, I couldn’t help but flash back to this famous scene.
Yeah, I got some WTF on me over that one. Every single entrepeneur that I know…every single one…works twice as hard as people who are just salaried grunts.
I say that as a salaried grunt.
And the reason this is so (you’d have to hang out with entrepeneurs to see this, I think) is that for most people, the business they’re attempting to make work is it for them. It’s their only income, and they are by far the largest driving force behind it. If business is slipping, they’re the first ones in the traces to try and keep things going.
If they’re teaching the history of collective bargaining in Wisconsin in schools, they should also be teaching how entrepeneurship actually works. Also: economics. I think more harm to small business owners comes from this insane idea that they don’t work hard, and are rich to boot, than from anything else.
You don’t think your behavior is bad and you think it would benefit society to allow gay marriage.
But like your parents said, that would take time for people to come around and see it your way and you don’t want to wait. It is just so much easier to take to the streets and hold others hostage with your demands or get in the face of someone who disagrees and call them a racist homophobe.
Huh?
Did someone say that?
Or even imply it?
Am I missing something?
I would hate to think that words are simply being put in my mouth by some human who fears identifying himself.
As a conservative lesbian I can personally attest to the liberal viciousness heaped upon any ‘victim’ pawn who refuses to spout the progressive party line. We are indeed a threat to the Left-wing political narrative.
Conservative gays are also perceived as a threat by many folks on the Right as well. We take heat from both sides of the political spectrum as the GOProud flap at CPAC demonstrates.
But whether we ‘fit’ into any movement’s preconceived notions, we’re still out here standing up for what we believe in. And I think that fact shows that the neat and narrow narratives on both sides of the political fence are ripe for change.