Deal Me in

Most readers of the New York Times understand what they are going to get when they decide to check out a Maureen Dowd column.

She's irreverent, biting, snarky and loves to call people names. Not only does she despise most conservatives, she's also not a big fan of pansy liberals either. She has been critical of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton during this primary election, and occasionally she makes some good points about the candidates.

But, often she just goes off the deep end. Like in this beauty.

Look, I'm not even going to address the ludicrous assertion that Obama is some kind of effeminate loser who might be more worried about his figure than the needs of Americans. Remember, it was Dowd who claimed that Michelle Obama's quips about her husband's flaws actually showed that Michelle doesn't respect him as man. Anybody who has watched the Obamas interact knows that there is no doubt that Michelle respects her husband as a man because she always treats him like one.

Nah, what really shocked me was this little nugget in the column.

They also cringe as Bill continues his honey-crusted-nut-bar meltdown. With his usual exquisite timing, just as Pennsylvanians were about to vote, Hillary’s husband became the first person ever to play the Caucasian Card. First, he blurted out to a radio interviewer that the Obama camp had played the race card against him after he compared Obama’s strength in South Carolina to Jesse Jackson’s. And then, with a Brobdingnagian finger-wagging on the screen, he denied it to an NBC News reporter.

Hold up, you mean that Dowd believes that in the centuries preceding this election, white folks have never played the Caucasian Card? That the whole race card thing is something Negroes do, not white folks?

Get fuck out of here.

See, it's these type of offhand comments that give me the best insight into how a person really things. That whole Caucasian Card things was a throwaway thing for Dowd, just a little catchphrase she threw into her column to add a joke. She probably didn't spend more than a few minutes thinking of that quip, and I'm sure it was well-received by thousands of her liberal readers.

The only problem is that it's totally steeped in bullshit.

Don't believe the hype; if a race card exists, white folks were dealing that motherfucker before we even learned the rules to the game. White folks are the Stu Engar's of the World Series of Race Poker. They haven't lost a jackpot yet.

Seriously, if Dowd really believes the Caucasian Card is some sort of new phenomenon, how does she explain all those acquittals by all-white juries of Klan members who killed or maimed civil rights workers?

She must not be aware of the wave of race riots that swept this nation during the Civil War because white folks were pissed about having to fight for niggers who were getting all these special benefits. Maybe she is just ignorant about the white backlash that occurred after Reconstruction because Southerners and Northerners thought the government was favoring black people.

Did she forget that white folks burned down entire black towns because they were convinced that niggers must be getting some sort of sweet deal if they were doing better than white folks? Has she read about the rationale used by racists to keep black folks out of unions? To suppress their votes?

Has she even studied history?

I really hope not.

Because if Dowd is aware of these basic truths about American history and still made her flippant comment, then that means she doesn't care about misrepresenting the past for a few laughs. If she's just ignorant, then that is regrettable, but it can be fixed with information. But, if she actually knew that truth and thought it was worth ignoring to make her readers chuckle, well that's a much more serious deception.

Far too many white folks are convinced that black people have a magical get-out-of-jail-free race card. Whenever we complain about racism and they disagree with us, white folks then accuse black folks of using this card. It's an easy way to minimize our complaints, while also painting black people as unreliable, emotional liars. It's the favorite tool of conservatives, and, as this election has shown us, quite popular among liberals as well.

The "race card" is always in play in a country that has failed to have ongoing and substantive conversations about race. In fact, the most common complaints of every ethnic group stem from this country's racial history. The emotions behind these complaints have been mined by politicians of every color and have yielded the impressive ore of power for many. Contrary to what Dowd thinks, white folks playing the race card is not a new thing.

That card's been on the table since Satan first bluffed Eve into eating that apple.