MANSFIELD: The “Quacker” Gift That Keeps on Giving

By Mansfield Frazier

Phil Robertson, the patriarch of the bearded clan of duck hunters currently enjoying fame and fortune with the A&E program Duck Dynasty, was the absolutely perfect holiday gift for progressives. His outlandishly racist and homophobic comments will prove to be a boon for the left in the 2014 election cycle … and perhaps far beyond.

As conservative politicians with presidential ambitions are forced to support his backwoods brand of theology and revisionist racial commentary, they dig themselves into a hole they won’t be able to get out of once — and if — they ever come to their senses; which, admittedly, is a big “if.” The line these defenders of foolish remarks are drawing in the sand by supporting this crazy “quacker” (whose claim to fame is that his family invented a realistic duck caller, thus the term “quacker”) will turn into a chasm that swallows them up at the ballot box come the 2016 presidential elections.

By comparing homosexuality to bestiality and lumping gays in with “drunkards, slanderers and swindlers,” Robertson certainly will score some cheap points with the backwards base of the conservative movement, and his comments about blacks happily singing as they picked cotton down in Louisiana is a “freebie” since offending this demographic doesn’t cost the right wing anything … these are votes they were never going to receive anyway. But his remarks are so beyond the Pale most mainstream Republicans are refusing to openly associate themselves with such nonsensical, lunatic fringe sentiments.

Bit it’s actually helpful to the progressive cause when kooks like Robertson come out of the woodwork and make hateful comments that are supported by those on the far right. They reignite the cultural wars and serve to energize the left by providing ample evidence the “post-racial” society touted by the Pollyanna-ish as corporeal is still a myth … at least for the nonce.

Robertson’s comments about happy blacks bring to mind the old Richard Pryor joke about two men working out in the fields down south. One of them is wearily singing: “Nobody knows the troubles I’ve seen.” The other man turns to him and says, “Why you keep singing them old slave songs … we free now, just shut up and pick the damn cotton.” Indeed.

The statement by Robertson that, “I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once,” is supposed to be proof positive that none occurred; something my mother, who was born and raised in Monroe (the part of Louisiana the Robertson clan hails from), would strongly disagree with.

She and other young blacks often couldn’t wait until they gained their majority before they got out from under the oppressive and brutal system of apartheid that existed in that part of the state. She left home at age 16 (which wasn’t all that unusual at the time) and her memories of her upbringing were such that she rarely went back, even to visit.

And here’s how such brutal bigotry hurt black progress: Had the racial climate not been so offensive my mother might have stayed home in Monroe, finished high school, and perhaps even gone on to college (which she had dreams of accomplishing, since she certainly had a keen enough mind to excel in an academic environment).

But blacks in Monroe who expressed such ambitions were considered “uppity” and punishment for not knowing one’s “place” could be swift — designed to quickly extinguish such ambitions, strangling them before they could take hold and be acted upon.

So, instead, at age 16, Nettie Mae married an older man who took her to Birmingham (which wasn’t a whole lot better she said), soon got a divorce after discovering he was a drunk and a brute, moved to Cleveland with her infant daughter, and then spent much of her adult life slaving away as a supervisor in a garment manufacturing factory — until much later in life she met my father and married for the second time. But I digress.

What Robinson is giving voice to is the tired old segregationist trope that until the advent of the civil rights era … that is, “until outside agitators came down from the north in the early ’60s and stirred up the ‘colored’ folks by filling their heads with crazy notions that they were just as good as white folks, everything was fine and dandy all over the south,” which, of course, was total bullshit.

In the now infamous GQ magazine interview where he made his redneck rants, Robertson stated, “They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’ — not a word!”

Of course it never would occur to Phil Robertson and others of his ilk that during that ugly period of our history blacks would never, ever let a white person hear them utter a complaint about the unfair racial caste system they lived under … since they would not care to be visited in the middle of the night by armed groups of men wearing white robes, carrying torches in the shapes of burning crosses.

Sure, officially slavery was over at the end of the Civil War, but the mental plantation, the Jim Crow laws that created slavery by another name, still were in existence one hundred years later … but of course whites like Robertson could not (indeed, would not) comprehend that reality.

In 1965, when I talked of spending my two-week vacation by going south to assist in the registering of black voters who had historically been denied the franchise, my mother was dead set against it. She graphically recounted for me the terror of her childhood when “nightriders,” as she called them, spread fear throughout the black communities of Monroe … simply because they could. The law never stopped them, because they were the law.

My responsibility, she assured me, was to stay alive, to be around to raise my two children, her grandchildren; in her mind there were plenty of others available to fight the civil rights fight. When I reminded her that she’d participated in the demonstrations and carried signs on the picket lines when blacks mounted the campaign to force the May Co. Department Store in downtown Cleveland to hire blacks back in 1947, she had a ready answer: “I wasn’t afraid … your father, and seven or eight other black men, were standing across the street from where we were demonstrating every day, and they all had pistols in their pockets — and they damn sure would have used them if they had to.”

Nonetheless, it’s been one of the few (and perhaps greatest) regrets of my life that I didn’t participate in the heroic struggles in Birmingham, Selma, and on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. My mother’s fears aside, I still should have gone south and stood up. Maybe I’ve been attempting to make up for failure then by fighting a good fight now … but with my pen.

Because the blacks in Louisiana (and all over the south) had learned to hide their true feelings behind a happy face — that never should have been confused with genuine acceptance of their reduced circumstances.

Assuredly some blacks during that era had been so spiritually broken they meekly accepted their subservient position; indeed, such mental states still exist in the black community in the form of low goals and lower expectations for a better life. But back then — as now — it was a situation of unequal power, and it simply meant blacks didn’t trust any whites enough to show their true feelings, Phil Robertson included. So it’s easily understandable as to why he thought them “happy” in their miserable conditions.

But let’s look at outcomes. Robertson’s family (which he characterized in the interview as “white trash”) was able to rise to be millionaires, but the blacks in that part of Louisiana, for the most part, are still mired in poverty. The American Dream of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is still too often denied to persons of color, and that’s what America’s racial animosity is really all about.

A black man could very well have come up with the idea for the duck caller Robertson’s family riches are based on (in fact, rumor has it — from some of my momma’s kinfolk who still reside in that part of Louisiana — that the duck caller was invented by a local black man and stolen from him … however, that’s only a rumor) but would that black person have access to the credit from any local banks that would be necessary to turn the idea into a viable business model? In other words, would white Monroe bankers want to see a black family get rich? You know the answer to that one.

Try as Phil Robertson might to mentally turn back the clock — like a duck flying backwards — the time in America when women were in the kitchen, gays were in the closet, and blacks were in the back of the bus are thankfully long gone … in spite of the fact they are still much pined for by racial revisionists who considered them to be the “good ‘ol days.”

A&E initially suspended Robertson for his comments, but in the face of criticism from his bigoted base of supporters, a week later the network put corporate profits over conscience and capitulated by putting him back on the air. But — surprise! — the story didn’t end there.  Not by a long shot.

A few days later, a 2009 video surfaced of Robertson preaching at a Christian retreat, Bible in hand, telling his flock of followers that the mistake their young men are making today is they’re waiting too long to marry — “… these boys are waiting ‘til they get to be about 20 years old before they marry ’em … you got to marry these girls when they are about 15 or 16.”

Now I know the laws are strange down in Louisiana, but I didn’t think they were this strange. Sex between adults and 15-year-olds is statutory rape in all 50 states the last time I looked.

Can’t you just see the executives of A&E cringing and squirming? The real fear on their part has to be … what else has Robertson said that’s been captured on video? They can, of course, take some solace — at least for the nonce — in the fact he didn’t say that the underage bride should be a cousin or niece … but who knows, he just might have said something just as wacky at some point in the past.

Civil and gay rights groups shouldn’t let this pass; they should join together and launch a national boycott of A&E’s advertisers. This is an issue that should remain in the public eye at least through 2016.

Robertson has made his pile; he and his family are set for life. And our Constitution guarantees him the right to freedom of speech … but that doesn’t guarantee his supporters in the realm of politics the right to freedom from consequences; they should be made to pay, and pay big time.

 

 

 

From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.

 

 

 


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