That’s Mighty White of You, ‘Cock-Asians’ (the Right Wing’s Term)

You can't make up the racist right-wing crazy that wants to repudiate the term Caucasian as a descriptive category for white people, as used by government agencies like the Census bureau.  Apparently, those on the right have a problem with people from the Caucuses Mountains, which include Chechnya, being referred to as white people, in describing their ethnicity or race.  Because they believe it refers to individuals they consider Asian, not good proper western European white people, they go further to make a racist, sexist slur out of the term. Bo Sears, and his resisting defamation project is part of the broader white supremacist movement...but not the Caucasian supremacist movement. The white supremacists are celebrated on the right, notably at and by CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Conference) where these groups host seminars arguing for the domination of America exclusively by those who are white, and western European in descent and preference.  Other people, including our indigenous peoples, are second class at best, if they're considered legitimate Americans at all.
The right tries to protest that they are not racists, but they do not repudiate people who think like this. Therefore, the term fits, and it fits so tightly that they aren't going to be getting rid of it any time soon, any more than they will be shedding their skins.

Cross posted from where I originally wrote it, on MN Progressive Project:

That’s mighty white of you, ‘Cock-Asians’ (the right wing’s term)

by Dog Gone on April 22, 2013 As we come down from the suspense of last week’s terrorist events, and our nation’s armed response to it from the democratic mayor, governor, and president, I am struck by several of the partisan divides in how we respond to such events that highlight the problems of polarization, and especially right wing ignorance.
Last week, the day after the marathon bombing, U.S. News and other media reported the two year study by the Constitution Project on the worse than useless efforts of the Bush administration in engaging in torture post-9/11.
Does anyone here think that the right wingers would be calling for torture if the bombers had not been recent immigrants, and were typical right winger White Supremacists? Not bloody likely.
During last week, we had one (alleged) bomber shot while wearing a suicide vest, trying to injure law enforcement with explosives, and engaging in what became a fatal shootout for both the older of the two bombers, and for an MIT campus law enforcement officer. Over the weekend, the other suspect was taken into custody.
Immediately we have a right wing nut, New York state senator Greg Ball, calling for torture — because never mind that it produced nothing of value, nothing of intelligence that could not better have been acquired through other techniques of traditional interrogation that work so much better, that have greater morality and legality.
And once again we have the GOP representing the ‘value’ party of stupid AND vicious, falsely labeling that patriotism. As noted by the Huff Po:

Greg Ball @ball4ny
So, scum bag #2 in custody. Who wouldn’t use torture on this punk to save more lives?
7:52 PM – 19 Apr 2013
134 Retweets 84 favorites

In the same time period, we have the Constitution Project noting about the failure of torture, as reported by the United Press International:

The use of torture, the report concludes, has “no justification” and “damaged the standing of our nation, reduced our capacity to convey moral censure when necessary and potentially increased the danger to U.S. military personnel taken captive.”

It makes the right FEEL good to abuse people towards whom they are hostile or antipathetic, and the right consistently engages in that kind of emotional rather than rational thinking. It reflects both the violent tendencies of the right along with the absence of objective, fact based thinking. It also reflects deeply held beliefs and attitudes that are never going to attract African American, Latino and Hispanic, or Asian American voters, no matter how much they spend or campaign to achieve broader voter outreach.
This is about stupidity and the desire for revenge, the desire to hurt someone we have in custody because we can, not because it is genuinely productive to do so, and certainly not because it is useful to do so, or moral to do so. Don’t confuse a conservative with the facts; they won’t accept them anyway. It will, as we saw with the Bush administration, encourage them to lie however, about their actions and the results of their actions. We’ve seen repeatedly that the right will lie up a storm to justify doing what they want, no matter how wrong, no matter how bad it is. They will find every justification they can think of to do so, and frequently double down on their pretexts after getting caught being wrong, and lying. Notably this has been true of Dubya and his puppet-masterVeep Cheney.
But the other thing the right has to do to justify torture is to look at the person they wish to torture as less of a human being, as less than themselves, as a very specific kind of ‘other’. In the case of immigrants, they are not American, so we can abuse them to our hearts’ content; in the case of naturalized Americans, they are not AS American, their Americanization doesn’t count in the balance. If someone is not white, preferably male, and Christian – preferably of the extreme or fundamental religious right – then they don’t count as human either; in all cases, this is true of people who are Muslim, or who the right perceives as Muslim-like, such as Hindus and Sikhs.
Rather- as we have seen year after year at CPAC – the right likes to distinguish between European and white, and everyone else. In their eyes ONLY white European descended Americans in the United States, who have ancestors who came here a number of generations back, should be the dominant governing and economic demographic.
Just when we think the right couldn’t show themselves to be more racist, and more ignorant, we have opposition to the census designation of people from the Chechnya region of Russia, in the Caucuses Mountains, from which the more technical, more official term for ‘white’ is derived. Yes, the right wing nuts are objecting to the two bomber suspects being identified as white, AND they are objecting to the word Caucasian being used for white people – or Cock-Asian, to turn it into a further racist slur. It is important to demonize the Chechens generally, and the bombing suspects specifically, as ‘other’. If you are on the right, it is essential to dehumanize people when you want to justify torturing them, and to distance yourself from them as much as possible; that is absolutely fundamental.
As noted today in an article by Salon, “Are the Tsaernev brothers white?”, the right has gone even deeper into the bizarre, hateful and stupid:

So why are the Tsarnaev brothers not white, at least to right-wingers? Is it only because they’re Muslim? Muslim immigrants? Or is it because they’re “bad,” and whiteness must be surrendered when white people are bad?
Over its long history America has regularly featured a process of sorting white from non-white, even among European immigrant groups. I’m not a huge admirer of the now-dated whiteness studies academic movement, but those scholars did help illuminate the way various groups of European immigrants, particularly the Irish, but also Jews, Italians and Eastern Europeans, “became” white over time, in a complicated process of determined assimilation, gradually lessening prejudice by existing “white” society, and most important, the arrival of newcomers to take the place of the scapegoated non-white other, alongside the definitive non-white scapegoats, African-Americans. Embracing racism and xenophobia, sadly, could be a shortcut to white status for previously non-white European immigrants.
These days, though, Americans of Russian or Chechen descent are unambiguously categorized as “white” by the U.S. Census Bureau, which says it counts as white all “people having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa. It includes people who reported ‘White’ or wrote in entries such as Irish, German, Italian, Lebanese, Near Easterner, Arab, or Polish.” As I wrote Friday, the anguished outburst of Ruslan Tsarni, the brothers’ uncle in Maryland, was the quintessentially American cry of a newcomer wanting to be identified as a good, patriotic American – not necessarily as white, but certainly not as suspicious “other.”
So conservatives’ insistence the Tsarnaevs are absolutely not white is curious, to say the least.
Coincidentally or not, this weekend I got an email from Bo Sears, the head of Resisting Defamation, a conservative organization lobbying for the rights of white Americans as a “diverse demographic affinity group,” with the subject line “No to Caucasian.” Sears wrote:

Now that the diverse white American peoples are becoming a minority in many states, counties, and cities, we wanted to let you know that we have the right to name and label ourselves. And we don’t like being called a word that sounds like “cock-Asian.”

It would be easier to take Sears’ request seriously if he wasn’t appearing to take offense at the “Asian” part of Caucasian (with the kind of juvenile reference to “cock,” which had frankly never occurred to me), and also if he wasn’t regularly complaining about an “anti-white narrative” in the mainstream media and calling me personally an anti-white racist. But I wrote him back to ask what he thought whites should be called, whether he sent his broadside against the term “Caucasian” because of the Tsarnaevs, and whether considered the Tsarnaevs “white.” He answered:

We are far too small an organization to attempt to speak affirmatively about a precise name & label for the diverse white American demographic affinity group..no, we’ve been working on the anti-Cock-Asian message in that email for a couple of weeks. Purely coincidence…based on an upsurge here and there to smother our diversity and nationality with “Cock-Asian.” …To answer your question: the only people who could say that the brothers Tsarnaev were among the diverse white American people would be the Tsarnaevs. You don’t quite understand that Resisting Defamation is not in the border-drawing, definition-making business…we merely resist the campaign of hate speech that we see coming at us
.

Interesting enough. But Sears also included a long exegesis of what it meant that that Tamarlan Tsarnaev had the name of the bloody 15th century central Asian-Muslim warlord Tamerlane, which he said was akin “to naming an American child ‘Stalin-Mao-Hitler.” Which seemed to indicate he considered the Tsarnaevs more Asian, or maybe “Cock-Asian,” than good old fashioned American white.

The right wing is eager to call for the torture of anyone they can identify and pillory as ‘other’, as ‘them’ in the us vs. them divide that classifies other or them as less than fully human, less than equal, less than deserving of humane treatment or moral and ethical response. The right erodes their own claims to humanity by supporting inhumane action, even as they are striving loudly and vigorously to deny the humanity of others. The only values on the right are failed ones. The extent to which they will distort and contort rational thinking and objective fact is a testament to how driven by fear, suspicion, and outright racist hatred to do so. It is one ore reason why,so long as the right remains who they are, as they are, that we cannot allow them anywhere near power, authority, or decision making. They do bad things when they have it, and they clearly want to do more bad things that will disgrace us and put us at greater risk, not protect us from harm. Rather, we need to be protected from them, from their violent tendencies, from their willful, hateful, racist ignorance and stupidity.
An afterthought – in case any of our readers are wondering if the right will be abandoning the word caucus – they might, but not because it has anything to do with Russia or the Caucuses region of Asia. It is a word derived from the Native American tongue used by the Algonquin Indian tribe. That might be too brown a term for them, if any of the scholars or pseudo-scholars ever bother to look it up.  No loss of voters for them if they do; they don’t seem to do well among Native American voters either, and are not likely to do so anytime soon.