Wednesday, September 23, 2009

The Emergence of Racial Apologists in America

The appearance of Racist Apologists has been expected now that the national discussion on racism has been joined. Racial Apologists differ from their less articulate brethren in they attempt to offer extended convoluted loquacious polemics to remove the obviousness of racist behavior from any conflict exacerbated by race. It should be noted that Racial Apologists in the American publishing world is well over a century old, harkening back to the antebellum period of American history. In later years the debating opposition that Frederick Douglass faced were all highly articulate Racial Apologists (RA). Recently, I have become uncomfortably aware of the increasing presence of RA's in the commentary sections of published articles involving racial conflict or postings of reports covering organizations espousing racial hatred. More on the modern re-emergence of the RA phenomena below the fold.


Even though the appearance of RA's in the commentaries sections of articles or posts covering race is a new tactic, RA’s have already adopted a "party Line" argument that often appears quite prominently in their commentary. This RA argument is essentially political in nature and states the following, “If you disagree with anything that Obama says, the liberals will call you a racist!" The goal of the RA's is to flood the commentary section with long winded theoretical discussions top heavy with irrelevant rebuttals to any post or article dealing with the race problem in America. This has a depressive effect on those readers who are interested in reading the thoughts and ideas of people who have experienced racism in their daily lives or people who sincerely want to remove the curse of racism from American society.

One website I recently visited had a very long in-depth post concerning the impact of race on the proliferation of sub prime mortgages that ultimately contributed to the collapse of the housing market. The commentary section for this article had been invaded by one individual RA whose postings accounted for over one third of the commentaries appearing in the section. The current increase of RA activity over different liberal/progressive websites is a harbinger that signals extremely difficult times ahead for progressive/liberal use of the internet as an organizing tool for the upcoming 2010 elections.

Thus far the RA's cannot prevent articles whose topics address the racial issue in America from being published on the internet. However, as described above, they have found that they can flood the commentary sections of such posts with their regressive views. I have called these tactics DOD commentaries, where DOD stands for “Denial of Discussion”.
(In many respects the function of DOD is similar to the denial of service (DOS) attacks that hackers use to shut down internet websites.)


What is the overall effect of these DOD tactics? Each author of a post, yes even those who publish rants, is looking for meaningful feedback from his/her readers. Feedback is very important enriching and learning experience for any author. DOD tactics discourage this exchange between reader and author, as the source of feedback, the commentary section has been effectively commandeered by persons (RA's in the case of racial posts) with radically different ideological agendas.

It is important to note that the use of this tactic need not be confined to posts/articles concerning race. Obviously DOD tactics could be used to prevent discussion of any controversial subject, such as Apartheid in the Israel - Palestinian lands of the Middle East, or Genocide and Rape in Darfur, etc. Whereas the internet covers the globe, one should not expect that input to commentaries can only originate here in the United States. Progressives have a history of demonstrating that once riled up, Progressives can get going and deliver the goods. But Progressives also have a history of falling asleep again once they have secured their victory. We caught the right wing conservatives off guard in the Presidential campaign with our unique use of the internet as an organizing tool. Now the right wing conservatives are back on the job, working on ways to disorganize our websites and frustrate communication in our portion of the blogesphere.

At this point, I would like to go off topic just for a moment…...
Years ago, before the advent of the internet, online communication was limited exclusively to point to point operations with dialup modems. The majority of these modems were 300 bit per second (37.5 characters per second) acoustic coupled modems. To use these acoustic coupled modems, you had to manually dial the phone number of the trunk line to the target server, and wait for the modem whistle to indicate that the target server had picked up the phone. Once the server answered and sent out its high pitched whistle, then you had to manually place the telephone headset onto the modem in the correct position to allow the communication exchange to proceed.

In those days the main facility for communications were known as bulletin boards, which supported alphanumeric ASCII text only. Bulletin boards were initially setup by individuals and some computer hardware mail order businesses who were selling components to hobbyists building their own personal home computers. For example, you could log onto a memory supplier’s bulletin board and browse the types of memory chips that were in stock and on sale. Not long after the advent of the bulletin board, computer kit builders were posting technical questions concerning either clarification of engineering specifications or the applicability of certain devices to their respective hardware. As the market for computer hardware expanded so did the informational storage capabilities of the billboards. This eventually led to a new class of billboards totally dedicated to special interests, having absolutely nothing to do whatsoever with the building of home computers. Obviously many of these new social bulletin boards were dedicated to political interests and were nicknamed BOF’s for “Birds of a Feather” boards. The conversational structures of these BOF boards were similar to the commentary sections of Blog posts appearing on the internet today.

Initially, in the bulletin board world, anyone with a computer with modem software, a modem and a phone line was free to participate in the message exchanges. However, as with all new forms of innovation, it was no time before the profane and the ugly raised the nasty side of text messaging, and soon registration became a mandatory requirement on all boards. However, registration merely required a participant to provide a “user name”, similar to the registration requirements of today’s internet sites. The next step in the evolution of the bulletin board was to include “chat rooms” where users could post and comment on anything they desired. Some chat rooms opened online on their own, totally independent of any bulletin board.

One day while browsing various chat room sites, I discovered that the John Birch Society had opened up a bulletin board with a chat room. Being a curious liberal, I visited their site and logged onto their chat room, mainly as an observer. Within a few days, their chat room exploded into controversial arguments between the Birchers and others accessing their chat room. The following week I found that although I could still access their Bulletin Board, I could no longer access the chat room. A message would come up stating, “Access to the Chat Room is now restricted. For registration please write to the Supervisor, in care of ##### #####, #### Street, #####, Massachusetts.” The information that I was able to gather concerning this restricted chat room was that the room was made available only to verified members of the John Birch Society. However, certain members of other organizations whose ideology was in strict accordance with the Birch society were granted password entry at the discretion of the supervisor. Needless to say, I never visited that particular chat room again.

Returning to the topic…..
I personally view this earlier pre-internet experience as a paradigm for the infiltration problems that are starting to show up in the liberal/progressive sector of the internet Blogesphere. The infiltration of RA’s (or any other opponents of the progressive/liberal agenda) actively onto liberal/progressive websites constitutes a serious challenge to the continuing task of providing accurate strategy information for progressive causes via these channels. Whereas the American progressive/liberal stature is virtually non-existent in the MSM, we must jealously guard these proven political channels as being crucial to our survival and influence in immediate scheme of things.

Some liberals will argue that access to our website by the general public regardless of their ideology is a 1st amendment right and should not be restricted in any fashion. Some feel so strongly in this regard, that they will champion this belief even if it eventually results in the demise of the entire liberal/progressive sector in this country. On the other hand, those who believe there must be some restriction when the presences of destructive tactics such as DOD actions are verified on the website will immediately encounter the question, “What can we do about it?” It certainly is not enough to leave recognition of such behavior to the site’s webmaster, and a complaint system designed to identify a person or persons of negative intent is bound to run into fairness issues.



At the beginning of this post I was addressing just the problem with RA infiltration of racially orientated post/article commentary sections. However, from a more general perspective once properly registered anybody can start posting Blogs. Assume that a large number of conservative opposition people register and start posting Blogs, each of which addresses a substantive matter but is written so as to sporadically interject conservative ideology/rhetoric statements in a very subtle manner into the Blog text. Will the webmaster be able to provide all of the filtering necessary to stop such posts? I raise these issues now while there is time to intelligently discuss them. We can ignore these problems only at our own risk and peril.

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