Les Jones

East Tennessee > Racist Blount County?

"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies."
 -- Groucho Marx

Bubba is back, temporarily at least, guest-blogging at Facing South. That's good, though I don't agree with what he has has to say. In a nutshell, Bubba thinks two incidents in his and my home county somehow prove it's racist, and I disagree.

With its proximity to the main campus of a major university (the University of Tennessee in Knoxville), it’s own four-year college (Maryville College, consistently ranked as one of the top 10 liberal arts colleges in the South), some of the highest ranked public schools in the state, the home of East Tennessee’s regional airport, and host to some of the millions of visitors from around the world to the nation’s most visited national park (the Great Smoky Mountains), you’d think Blount County would be a progressive community that embraces diversity.

You’d be wrong.

Bubba then points to two cases of racist behavior that occured in Blount County and Maryville this year - talk of violence against blacks at a school, and vandalism of a Hispanic grocery store - which he apparently thinks disproves any notion that this is a community that embraces diversity.

In so doing, he commits exactly the same kind of category error that racists frequently make - attributing the characteristics of members of a group to the group as a whole, and vice versa.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying Bubba is a racist. I am saying that he's making a sweeping generalization of a group based on the behaviour of a small number of individuals in that group. Specifically, he's extrapolating the behavior of less than a dozen people to the other one hundred thousand people who live in the county, himself excluded, of course.

Although it would be disingenuous to suggest a correlation at this point, Blount County is also one of the most Republican counties in East Tennessee, which happens to be the most Republican region in the Red State of Tennessee.

One suspects that this is the real reason for the post, but it's another category error. The fact that the county voted Republican in the last election doesn't mean the people involved in those incidents are Republican. For what it's worth, Blount has gone blue in the past, and it will again in the future when the Democrats can field another good candidate. The red/blue division is a pretty crude statistical tool to hang your hat on.

Look, I used to be a yellow dog Democrat, and I considered it almost an article of faith that most Republicans were closet racists at best, and probably members of the KKK at worst. I used to imagine that Republican candidates I didn't like (e.g., Pat Robertson) would be knocked out of an election when incriminating racist statements were revealed in Technicolor video with surround sound. It's now a well-entrenched part of the modern liberal fantasy world view that all Republicans are racists and no Democrat ever is, even when, like Democratic West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, they're former Grand Kleagles of the Ku Klux Klan and say stupid or outright racist things. If you can't beat 'em, call 'em racists.

Another example. Democratic Senator Zell Miller said some vilely racist things in the 1960s. Was he shown the door? Hardly. Instead he was invited to give the keynote address at the 1992 Democractic National Convention where Bill Clinton was nominated. It was only after Miller spoke at the 2004 Republican National Convention that Democrats mistook him for a Republican and dredged up those racist remarks, which they suddenly found offensive when attributed to someone on the other side of the fence.

In short, I think Bubba's analysis is mistaken and politically opportunistic.