Mau Maus and Madrassases: Huckabee's (Deliberate and Racist) Slip of the Tongue

 

I'm fascinated by a conversation that has developed at several blog sites in the past day or so, about what Mike Huckabee meant when he recently made what he is calling a verbal gaffe as he stated that President Obama grew up in Kenya.  In particular, I'm intrigued by Huckabee's reference to the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya and the possible involvement of Obama's father's family in that event.

After Mollie Wilson O'Reilly posted her reflections about Huckabee's comments at the Commonweal blog site, an interesting conversation developed in which one poster, unagidon, pointed out that if you google the phrases "What’s wrong with Kansas" and "Mau Mau," you get about 7,800 hits.  That remark (and a bizarre attack of another commenter on Attorney General Eric Holder re: DOMA in the same thread) led me to google the phrases "Eric Holder" and "Mau Mau."

Whereupon I discovered some 4,340 hits, one pointing to a Facebook site called "President Obama making a big mistake" that contains a reference to "Mau Mau Holder," and others speaking of "Oba-mau-mau" and "mau-mau-er Al Sharpton."  There seems to be a whole demi-monde out there of barely concealed racist discourse on right-wing political internet sites, in which the term "Mau Mau" is being used as a  nasty slur term for people of color, akin to the term "macaca," which Virginia Republican senate candidate George Allen let slip in 2006.

Because I grew up in Arkansas and live here now, and have watched Rev. Huckabee at close range in the political life of my state, I find it difficult to imagine that he did not use the term "Mau Mau" in connection with the president and his family without malice aforethought.  And without knowledge of the racist way in which this term is now being applied on many anti-Obama and right-wing political websites in the U.S.

And I'm now discovering I'm far from the only person who's suggesting this.  Here's the analysis of Jim Jenkins in the Commonweal thread to which I pointed readers above:

This is out-and-out blatantly pandering to the most racist elements in American politics. Huckabee and his fellow Republicans and “birthers” know it. They all speak in code.

To the ears of anyone who grew up in the south like I did, when Joe Wilson shouted at President Obama during a joint session of the Congress, we know that Wilson cut short his remark [he's not that stupid]. We know what he was really saying was, “You lie, n—-r!”

I first heard this phrase while playing as a child at a neighbor’s house shouted at a TV screen when Martin Luther King was being interviewed. I remember this because after reporting it to my parents at the dinner table that night, there was no more playing after school at that neighbor’s house.

I think Jim Jenkins is right.  I'm convinced that Huckabee's use of the term "Mau Mau" and his attempt to connect it to the president and his family in a completely false and manufactured parable about Obama's upbringing that we're being told is a slip of the tongue was deliberate.  And I believe it's deliberate race-baiting.

It's race-baiting designed to appeal to the solid white base of the Republican party in the South, among whom Huckabee is now the front-runner among GOP candidates.  The stronghold of the religious right, which is where Huckabee's support is primarily situated, is in the part of the nation that became solidly Republican in the period following Nixon's Southern strategy, which was designed to herd disaffected Southern Democrats into the Republican party after Lyndon B. Johnson pushed through the Civil Rights act.

And I find that Jim Jenkins and I aren't the only ones proposing such a reading of Huckabee's slip of the tongue the other day.  At his Daily Dish site yesterday, Andrew Sullivan reports a note from a reader of Sullivan's blog, who says that he grew up Southern Baptist (the denomination in which Huckabee is ordained), and remembers frequently hearing the term "Mau Mau" in connection with David Wilkerson's book The Cross and the Switchblade as he grew up. The book featured an inner-city (New York City) gang of youths named the Mau Maus.  Sullivan's reader concludes, 

That is still what I think of when I hear the term, and I would be willing to bet that SoBap Huckabee has more than a passing acquaintance with the book. So it’s not just about blackness, it’s about rampaging big-city gangs.... (The lead Mau-Mau was Nicky Cruz, a Puerto Rican.)

Another posting of Andrew Sullivan yesterday links to commentary by Time writer Joe Klein, who states, 

These comments, however, and his subsequent lie that he really meant Indonesia not Kenya, really show a demented, perverse sensibility, and they demonstrate some of the ugliness at the heart of Obama hatred.

I'm talking about the Mau Mau comment, especially. When I was growing up, Mau Mau was shorthand for: Extremely Scary Black People. The brutality of the Mau Mau rebellion was legendary (and, who knows, perhaps even accurate). It became a term of art in the sixties: to mau-mau was to intimidate white people. (As a young reporter in Boston, I covered a would-be black militant group that called itself, with brilliant irony, De Mau Mau.) To associate Barack Obama with the Mau Mau rebellion is to feed all the worst, paranoid fears of Glenn Beck's America--and, as any sane person knows, completely ridiculous.

In using the racially loaded term "Mau Mau," which floats through the sewers of some of the most virulently racist anti-Obama sites on the internet and therefore has charged significance for a sizable sector of the political right in the U.S., Mike Huckabee is playing an ugly racial game.  He's appealing to the longstanding racist and nativist sentiment of the American heartland, which has been in full reaction mode from the time an African-American presidential candidate with a Kenyan father appeared on the scene, and which went into hyperdrive when Obama was elected.

And, adding insult to injury, Huckabee is now slinging the term "madrassas" around, as Steve Kornacki reports yesterday at Salon.  Mau Maus and madrassases: we can, I fully expect, look for more of this filth--more of this attempt to employ fetishized terms loaded with racist and nativist significance--to fly around as the Republican candidates gear up for the 2012 elections.  Huckabee almost has to go the racist route, in order to build his base in the religious right of the Southeast.

Will Gingrich and Santorum compete by trying to stir and play to a racism that is never far beneath the surface among some of the ethnic Catholic enclaves of the Northeast and urban centers of the heartland to whom they're making a pitch?  I wouldn't be surprised.

This is going to be an ugly campaign.  And the worst dirt of all is going to be thrown around by the candidates who most loudly proclaim themselves to be advocates of good, old-fashioned Christian morality and traditional values.

Commentary on Gingrich's Presidential Aspirations Continues

Newt Gingrich and Wife Callista

Religion Dispatches has two good pieces today looking at (first essay) Newt Gingrich's attempt to re-create himself as the model Catholic presidential candidate, and (second essay) at the role religion and the religious right will be likely to play in the election.  Joanna Brooks surveys Gingrich's "new Catholic" rebranding.

As she notes, Gingrich is already playing to audiences who buy the current ideological party line of the Catholic hierarchy and apologists for the hierarchy--namely, that Western nations are succumbing to godless secularism, and only a return to religion and conservative moral values will heal all the ills that ail us.  Gingrich began to float this analysis--and his "new Catholic" image--in the 2008 elections with his Rediscovering God in America project, the themes of which he keeps stressing now in tours around the nation in which he and (third) wife Callista hawk a film they've made about John Paul II and his role in defeating communism in Poland.

And Sarah Posner explores the developing role of the pastors' policy briefings in the 2012 elections.  As she notes, this Iowa pre-election event is sponsored and funded by a secretive group called the Iowa Renewal Project, which featured only Mike Huckabee among GOP presidential candidates in the build-up to the 2008 elections, though Gingrich (who was not then running as a presidential candidate) was invited to speak, as well.  

This time around, the group has invited a number of GOP hopefuls, including Huckabee, Gingrich, Haley Barbour, and Michelle Bachmann.  Iowa is a flash-point for the religious right for two reasons: as one of the first primary states, it helps determine the course of the elections.  And because it has legalized same-sex marriage, it is under heavy attack from the religious right and the Republican party in general.

Finally, at Huffington Post, this recent article picked up from AP feed asks whether Gingrich's murky marital past will encumber him as he tries to rebrand himself as the model Catholic candidate in the 2012 elections.  As the article notes, in the plus column, Gingrich is a media darling who have helped him craft an image of himself as an articulate intellectual, and he's backed by "a fundraising juggernaut" (which no doubt keeps him on the radar screen of media outlets for whom money talks).  

But there are also indicators that key members of the religious right will not be on board with his attempt to rebrand himself as a "new Catholic."  The HuffPo article cites Jerry Luquire, head of the Georgia Christian Coalition, who says, "Newt Gingrich's election would send a terrible signal to anyone who's working to live a morally upright life.  I would find it very hard to vote for him."

This will be an interesting election to track closely.  And as I keep saying, most interesting of all will be watching the reaction of "traditionalist" Catholics who profess a strong commitment to traditional family values when it comes to their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters, but whose commitment to these traditional values often appears to be considerably more elastic when it comes to Mr. Gingrich and his three marriages.

Mark Silk on the Revival of the Crusades as 2012 Election Cycle Begins

As a follow-up to what I posted yesterday about Rick Santorum and his recent remarks about the crusades, I'd like to point to a very valuable posting on the same topic at Mark Silk's Spiritual Politics blog.  Mark kindly provided the link in a comment on my Santorum posting yesterday.

Mark notes he happened to be teaching the history of the First Crusade right when Santorum opined that the crusades were not in any way an act of Christian aggression, and that "the left" has revised the history of that bloody period due to an animus against Christendom.  He provided students with a copy of Santorum's remarks, and then let them comment.

And they found Santorum's take on the crusades ridiculous.  They did so because they had just been studying Fulcher of Chartres' account of the crusaders' actions in Jerusalem in 1099.  For those who want to read this account, which is regarded by historians as an exceptionally accurate depiction of what happened when the crusaders took Jerusalem, Paul Halsall of Fordham University has made the text available online at his Medieval Sourcebook site, using the text provided by August. C. Krey in his The First Crusade: The Accounts of Eyewitnesses and Participants (Princeton: 1921).

As Mark Silk notes, it appears that the call to crusade is back as the 2012 election cycle approaches.  And as Karen Armstrong, whose work on the crusades is now a classic source for the history of that period, noted several years ago, "We simply cannot afford this type of bigotry."  

Not any longer.  The price is too high--for Americans, for the global community.  The shameless pandering of politicians like Gingrich, Huckabee, and Santorum to the religious right feeds on our ignorance, counts on our remaining ignorant.  One of the key educational challenges we face in the U.S. is expanding our knowledge of other cultures and other religions.  

As the Pew Forum's study of religious knowledge in the U.S. last fall revealed, knowledge of religion in general--including Christianity--is abysmally low precisely in those areas of the nation dominated by the religious right.  In those areas of the nation on whose votes Messrs. Gingrich, Huckabee, and Santorum are counting.

In order to do better as a people, we need to know better.  The onus is on us to inform ourselves.  And for people of faith who continue to be duped by the empty, self-serving showmanship of the family values crowd, that means, I would propose, taking the kind of close critical look at politicians like Rev. Huckabee that David Corn and John Brummett take per Max Brantley's summary today at the Arkansas Times blog.

More on the Newt

More on the Newt now running for the Republican presidential slot in 2012:

Huffington Post has a video clip of Gingrich calling for Obama's impeachment due to the recent decision about DOMA.

And Jeff Zeleny has an article in today's New York Times suggesting that, just as I have foreseen, Gingrich is now seeking to position himself as the Catholic candidate par excellence, to play to the religious right.  And that to some of Newt's fellow Catholics for whom right-wing politics trump the niceties of theology and morality, it won't matter a whit that he preaches about the sanctity of one-man-one-woman-for-life marriage--against the gays--even though he has been married three times.  With affairs in between.

And speaking of potential Republican presidential candidates trying to jockey for the favor of the religious right, Judge Andrew Napolitano certainly backed the oily, pseudo-avuncular but mean-as-a-snake Mike Huckabee into a corner yesterday, in an interesting discussion of the constitutionality of DOMA.  As Frances Martel notes, though Rev. Huckabee began his argument with the disclaimer that he's not a lawyer, that didn't cause him to miss a beat, as he immediately asserted that the Obama administration's DOMA decision is "legally wrong."

The 2012 election cycle is going to be interesting to watch.  I predict it will be one of the slimiest, most unabashedly mendacious eruptions of religious and moral hypocrisy by so-called defenders of religion that we've seen in a long time on the American political scene.  The big question: will the American people finally open their eyes to what these folks really intend--to the way in which they are acting as front men for corporate groups whose real agenda has nothing at all to do with the sanctity of marriage or the defense of life, but everything to do with consolidating their control of the political process and enriching themselves even more, at our expense?