OPINION
4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, AUGUST 18, 2017
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
JEREMY FELDMAN, Circulation Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
OUR VIEW
E
ach week we recognize those people and organizations
in the community deserving of public praise for the good
things they do to make the North Coast a better place to
live, and also those who should be called out for their actions.
SHOUTOUTS
• U.S. Coast Guard Cmdr.
Patrick Culver, who transferred
command of the cutter Alert
last Friday to Cmdr. Tobias
Reid after two years at the helm.
Culver now heads to Washington,
D.C., where he will be chief
of drug and migrant interdic-
tion. Reid comes to the region
Edward Stratton/The Daily Astorian
Cmdr. Patrick Culver, left, trans-
from North Charleston, South
Carolina, where he was the exec- fered command of the U.S.
Coast Guard cutter Alert to
utive officer aboard the cutter
Cmdr. Tobias Reid, right, Friday.
Hamilton for the past two years.
The transfer of command ceremony was overseen by Rear
Adm. Pat DeQuattro, deputy commander of the Coast Guard
Pacific Area, who called Culver a consummate professional who
leads from the front.
• The Seaside Chamber of Commerce, organizers and vol-
unteers who put together and staffed last weekend’s 36th annual
Seaside Beach Volleyball Tournament, which drew more than
3,000 players on about 1,450 teams to compete on the beach for
championships in a host of different divisions. Huge crowds of
family members, friends and other spectators cheered them on,
and according to organizers, the four-day event has been recog-
nized since 2011 by the World Records Academy as the coun-
try’s largest amateur beach volleyball tournament. Chamber of
Commerce Executive Director Brian Owen said over the years
the tournament has grown from five courts on the sand to 154
now. “There’s nothing like it,” Owen said. “For a small town
having one of the world’s largest beach volleyball tournaments,
it’s a blessing.”
• U.S. Bank and Mo’s Seafood and Chowder, which each
made recent donations to charitable causes on the North Coast.
U.S. Bank gave a $3,500 grant to the Way to Wellville’s
Clatsop Kids Go program, which is an in-school program
designed to help children develop healthy behaviors and positive
attitudes around physical activity, nutrition and well-being. Mo’s
Seafood and Chowder donated $3,930 — all of its proceeds
from its recent grand opening in Astoria — to the Assistance
League of the Columbia Pacific, which will use the money to
help schoolchildren in need through the organization’s philan-
thropic programs.
• Portland Timbers soccer players Roy Miller, Darlington
Nagbe and Lawrence Olum, who earlier this week visited with
patients at Providence Seaside Hospital and then children at
Warrenton Grade School as part of the team’s community out-
reach program. The three players were also joined by the team’s
mascot, “Timber Joey,” as well as Seaside High School grad-
uate and Timbers staffer Kai Davidson. After the school visit,
they also conducted a free soccer clinic followed by a ques-
tion-and-answer session at the Warrenton Soccer Complex.
• The congregation of North Coast Family Fellowship in
Seaside, which has greatly increased monthly food donations to
the South Clatsop County Food Bank. The Seaside church’s
pastor, John Neagle, challenged the congregation to try and
contribute more for the food bank than it has in the past, and
the congregation responded by increasing its monthly dona-
tions from 500 to 800 pounds of food previously to 800 to 1,400
pounds each month now. The food bank’s regional manager,
Karla Gann, said the increased volume has had a significant
impact in helping those who need it and amounts to about one-
tenth of all donations that the food bank receives.
CALLOUTS
• The Columbia-Snake River Irrigators Association, which
asked the Trump administration to sidestep endangered species
laws by convening a panel that could exempt up to 13 imper-
iled salmon and steelhead species from the act. The associa-
tion, which represents farmers in Oregon and Washington state,
asserts that the costs of saving the federally protected endan-
gered salmon species and increasing the runs along the river sys-
tem are unsustainable. The Cabinet-level committee that would
convene is called the “God squad” because its decisions can lead
to extinctions of threatened wildlife. Critics are calling the asso-
ciation’s request a publicity stunt and said it could hurt fishing
companies and others that depend on healthy salmon runs. Fish
counts this year along the Columbia and Snake rivers have been
well-below the 10-year average.
Suggestions?
Do you have a Shoutout or Callout you think we should know about?
Let us know at news@dailyastorian.com and we’ll make sure to take a
look.
The other inconvenient truth
By CHARLES BLOW
New York Times News Service
D
onald Trump chose Trump
Tower, the place where
he began his presidential
campaign, as the place to plunge a
dagger into his presidency.
Trump’s jaw-dropping defense
of white supremacists, white nation-
alists and Nazis in Charlottesville,
Virginia, exposed once more what
many of us have been howling into
the wind since he emerged as a
viable candidate: That he is a bigot,
a buffoon and a bully.
He has done nothing since
his election to disabuse us of this
notion and everything to confirm
it. Anyone expressing surprise is
luxuriating in a self-crafted shell of
ignorance.
And yet, it seems too simplistic,
too convenient, to castigate only
Trump for elevating these vile
racists. To do so would be historical
fallacy. Yes, Trump’s comments
give them a boost, grant them per-
mission, provide them validation,
but it is also the Republican Party
through which Trump burst that
has been courting, coddling and
accommodating these people for
decades. Trump is an articulation
of the racists in Charlottesville and
they are an articulation of him, and
both are a logical extension of a
party that has too often refused to
rebuke them.
It’s not that Democrats have
completely gotten this right, either.
Too often, in response to the conser-
vative impulse to punish, the liberal
impulse is to pity. Pity does not alle-
viate oppression; it simply assuages
guilt. The pity is not for the receiver
but for the giver.
But in the modern age one party
has operated with the ethos of racial
inclusion and with an eye on cel-
ebrating varied forms of diversity,
and the other has at times appealed
directly to the racially intolerant by
providing quiet sufferance.
It is possible to trace this devil’s
dance back to the passage of the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the
emergence of Richard Nixon.
After the passage of the act, the
Republican Party, the party of
Lincoln to which black people felt
considerable fealty, turned on those
people and stabbed them in the
back.
In 1994 John Ehrlichman,
Nixon’s domestic-policy adviser
and a Watergate co-conspirator, con-
fessed this to the author Dan Baum:
“The Nixon campaign in 1968,
and the Nixon White House after
that, had two enemies: the anti-war
left and black people. You under-
stand what I’m saying? We knew
we couldn’t make it illegal to be
either against the war or blacks, but
by getting the public to associate the
hippies with marijuana and blacks
with heroin, and then criminalizing
both heavily, we could disrupt those
communities. We could arrest their
leaders, raid their homes, break up
their meetings and vilify them night
after night on the evening news. Did
we know we were lying about the
drugs? Of course we did.”
The era that Ehrlichman referred
to was the beginning of the War on
Drugs. Nixon started his offensive
in 1971, declaring in a speech from
the White House Briefing Room:
“America’s public enemy No. 1 in
the United States is drug abuse. In
order to fight and defeat this enemy,
it is necessary to wage a new, all-out
offensive.”
The object of disrupting commu-
nities worked all too well — more
than 40 million arrests have been
conducted for drug-related offenses
since 1971, with African-Americans
AP Photo/Matt Slocum
Protesters, silhouetted against the evening sky, demonstrate in
Philadelphia Wednesday in response to a white nationalist rally held
in Charlottesville, Va., over the weekend.
being incarcerated in state prisons
for these offenses at a rate that is 10
times greater than that for whites,
according to Human Rights Watch.
In 1970, Nixon’s political strat-
egist Kevin Phillips told The New
York Times, “The more Negroes
who register as Democrats in the
South, the sooner the Negrophobe
whites will quit the Democrats and
become Republicans.”
The Republican Party wanted
the racists. It was strategy, the
“Southern Strategy,” and it too has
proved wildly successful. From
there this cancer took hold.
The party itself has dispensed
with public confessions of this
inclination — at least until Trump
— but the white supremacy still
survives and even thrives in policy.
The Republican
Party wanted
the racists.
It was strategy,
the ‘Southern
Strategy,’
and it too has
proved wildly
successful.
From there
this cancer
took hold.
The stated goals of the Republican
Party are not completely dissimilar
from many of the white nationalist
positions.
If you advance policies like a
return to more aggressive drug poli-
cies and voter suppression — things
that you know without question will
have a disproportionate and nega-
tive impact on people of color, what
does that say about you?
It says that you want the policies
without the poison, but they can’t be
made separate: The policies are the
poison.
And yes, this is all an outgrowth
of white supremacy, a concept that
many try to apply only to vocal, vio-
lent racists but that is in fact more
broadly applicable and pervasive.
People think that they avoid
the appellation because they do
not openly hate. But hate is not a
requirement of white supremacy.
Just because one abhors violence
and cruelty doesn’t mean that one
truly believes that all people are
equal — culturally, intellectually,
creatively, morally. Entertaining the
notion of imbalance — that white
people are inherently better than
others in any way — is also white
supremacy.
The position of opposing racial
cruelty can operate in much the
same way as opposition to animal
cruelty — people do it not because
they deem the objects of that cruelty
their equals, but rather because
they cannot countenance the idea
of inflicting pain and suffering on
helpless and innocent creatures. But
even here, the comparison cleaves,
because suffering black people are
judged to have courted their own
suffering through a cascade of poor
choices.
This is passive white supremacy,
soft white supremacy, the kind
divorced from hatred. It is permissi-
ble because it’s inconspicuous. But
this soft white supremacy is more
deadly, exponentially, than Nazis
with tiki torches.
This soft white supremacy is the
very thing on which the open racists
build.
The white nationalists and the
Nazis simply take the next step (not
an altogether illogical one when
wandering down the crooked path
of racial hostility) and they overlay
open animus.
This is apparently what draws
the ire, what leaves people aghast:
open articulation of racial hatred.
That to me is a criminal act of denial
that refuses to deal with the reality
that racism is also signified far more
subtly than through the wielding of
slurs and sticks.
White supremacy, all across the
spectrum, is what lights the way to
the final step as the Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr. articulated in his
“The Other America” speech in
1967:
“In the final analysis, racism
is evil because its ultimate logic
is genocide. Hitler was a sick and
tragic man who carried racism to its
logical conclusion. And he ended
up leading a nation to the point of
killing about six million Jews. This
is the tragedy of racism because its
ultimate logic is genocide. If one
says that I am not good enough to
live next door to him, if one says
that I am not good enough to eat
at a lunch counter, or to have a
good, decent job, or to go to school
with him merely because of my
race, he is saying consciously or
unconsciously that I do not deserve
to exist.”
Republicans, these people and
this “president” are your progeny.
That is the other inconvenient truth.