Again, that seems to be him speaking for Iowa Republicans, not for himself.
In fairness, Iowa Republicans are the craziest kind (though Iowa as a whole tends Democratic). This is Steve King’s state, after all.
I still think it’s wrong to say Cohen was talking about conservatives in the state of Iowa. He made an assertion about cultural conservatives and Tea Party sorts, and he not only didn’t look for evidence, the evidence that does exist contradicts what he says.
Would there have been less of a brouhaha, or no brouhaha at all, if he’d swapped in “reactionary” for “conventional”?
I won’t argue that the article isn’t horribly written and reflects the author’s assumptions about whatever group it’s discussing moreso than anything about the actual group.
It would have been a different claim. Reactionary by definition means a smallish group of people with very strong views. “Conventional” makes it sound like the opinion being held is pretty normal - and it’s not!
That’s precisely the contradiction. He says that Republicans and Tea Partiers are “not racist”, and now he turns around and says that Tea Partiers were the people he described as having “a gag reflex” triggered by the sight of an interracial couple. The two are obviously mutually exclusive, given that such a gag reflex is necessarily rooted in racist attitudes. If Cohen disputes that last premise, then we’re back to the “just plain stupid” hypothesis.
Indeed – which makes Cohen’s “I meant extreme Tea Party people” explanation all the more risible, unless he’s willing to expressly admit to limited facility with the English language.
I’ll be the first person to this acknowledge this doesn’t reflect positively on his intellect. But there’s probably a ton of people whose ideas about slavery have been inaccurately colored by cultural memes and depictions that treat the issue lightly, as a minor blight on our history rather than the evil-making insanity that it was. At least he’s ballsy enough to admit his flawed assumptions and explain why he thought that way.
Colbert destroyed Cohen last night.
To me, that column about slavery indicates how intellectual lazy Cohen is and how he isn’t qualified to be a political commentator. I’d expect a political commentator to have at least some familiarity with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which is a landmark book that had significant political influence in the US. I fully expect him to write a column soon where he tells us he’s never heard of The Jungle or Thomas Nast or The Federalist Papers.
But aside from that, he was around when Roots was first show on TV. There were only 3 networks at the time, and that was a major event. And while a lot of the horrors of slavery are downplayed in Roots (because it was television), there’s still a lot of awful stuff. The female slaves are raped on the passage over. Kunta Kinte has his name beaten out of him. His foot is chopped off when he tries to run away. His daughter is sold away because she learns how to read. Then she’s raped by her new owner.
And then there have been other films that received widespread attention and depicted slavery very cruelly (Amistad or Beloved for example). He’s really had his head up his ass if he thought slavery wasn’t that bad.
Yes: not qualified. Nor are his editors qualified. Nor are their bosses. WAPO’s editorial / op-ed pages are a mess.
Josh Marshall wrote a decent column on the guy. He first notes that Cohen is 72 - but let’s face it, the Civil Rights Act was passed in, what 1964? Cohen would have been 24 at the time. Sheesh.
No, this is a little different. Josh Marshall:
Is Richard Cohen a Racist? - TPM – Talking Points Memo
I had to laugh. I’ve seen the personality type that JM alludes to. Is it a familiar one to my fellow posters?
He’s makes it clear that he was taught to disregard anything that villified slavery. Why would he believe Roots was truthful when he’d been raised to disregard Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a lie?
I understand why people think Cohen is an idiot for writing that piece, but I don’t get the outrage over his self-professed ignorance. The article raises some interesting questions: do cultural biases distort how Americans see the past? Do Gone With the Wind type portrayals, where the priorities of white Southern debutantes matter more than the liberties of the enslaved folks toiling in the background, warp our perspectives, causing us to not even see the horror that should in reality distract us from the plot? Imagine a GWTW type story set in 1940 Germany. Would people be enthralled with Scarlett O’Hara in that setting?
How many other people from Cohen’s generation were taught what he was taught? Is there any wonder that so many white people dismiss the problems affecting the black community, when people like Cohen are under the impression that slavery was fairly benign?
I agree this “confession” marks Cohen as too insular and ignorant to be a professional commentator, but if more people were as honest, race discussions wouldn’t be so difficult.
I cosign, you with the face.
A Jewish friend and I were talking about Twelve Years a Slave the other day. She kept going on and on about how horrible slavery was. “Why, it was like the Holocaust! It WAS a holocaust! I just didn’t know it was that bad! OMG!”
My friend is 76 years old and socially/politically liberal. If she’d ever tried to downplay slavery around me, I’d be pissed off and I’d stop hanging around her. But I can only think positive things about her revelation. It’s better now than never.
I don’t have a single opinion about Richard Cohen. I didn’t know the guy existed before this thread.
The “outrage” is less towards Mr. Cohen, I think, then towards his employer. Cohen inspires little more than pity. Most of the anger is directed at the Washington Post, who continues to employ a blithering idiot. Cohen is a bad writer, pure and simple. His ideas are stupid, he is stupid, and his columns are stupid. He should be fired (alongside other WaPo writers like Jennifer Rubin).
I’d expect somebody commenting on an article to have some familiarity with the article. 
Yeah. The problem with condeming someone for admitting ignorance, based on the attitude that “OMG, you’d have to be a racist idiot to think something like that!”, is that it makes it that much more difficult to get people to admit their own unenlightened biases and assumptions. Having a particular political leaning doesn’t make one immune to this either.
“Why, of course everyone knows that slavery was a shameful atrocity!” Um, no, not everyone “knows” that. The whole topic is rife with misconceptions and blinkered thinking. Even on this board, I’ve seen people expressing the idea that slavery was financially burdensome on planters, so expensive and inefficient that it supposedly went against the ruling class’s economic self-interest to perpetuate it and that ultimately, it was both whites and blacks who were harmed by this “irrational” institution. Really? Where does this thinking come from? It’s not supported by fact and its not supported by common sense, either.
It describes a handful of conservative Dopers for sure. The ones who reflexively defend all profiling and stereotyping of blacks and defend the Low-IQ Negro Theory, for example.
Because not being ignorant is a fundamental part of his job.
Sure, we’re all going to have blind spots, but that’s a pretty damn huge one, and it’s about something that sits smack in the middle of the history of the United States.
A story about Richard Cohen from Jonathan Schwarz of the A Tiny Revolution blog:
[QUOTE=Richard Cohen]
I learned that slavery was wrong, yes, that it was evil, no doubt, but really, that many blacks were sort of content. Slave owners were mostly nice people — fellow Americans, after all — and the sadistic Simon Legree was the concoction of that demented propagandist, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was a lie and she never — and this I remember clearly being told — had ventured south to see slavery for herself. I felt some relief at that because it meant that Tom had not been flogged to death.
[/QUOTE]
Er, that quote just proves BrightNShiny’s point – Cohen is unfamiliar with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, just as a creationist is unfamiliar with evolutionary biology or an anti-vaxxer is unfamiliar with medical science. Having heard of something and being familiar with it are two different things.
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make here. “Slavery was a shameful atrocity” and “Slavery was economically inefficient and harmful to the masters as well as to the slaves” are orthogonal assertions, either of which can be accepted or rejected independent of the other (the most sensible conclusion in view of morality and historical evidence is that both are true).
Okay, but if someone in his position admits to being fed lies his entire his life about slavery that have distorted views towards the institution, I don’t see what sense it makes to criticize him for this admission.
What would be worse is it he didn’t make this admission and acted like he’s always understood the truth about slavery, racism, white privilege, the whole shebang *in spite *of an biased upbringing. That’s the type of hubris that I run into all the time, and it annoys the beejeebus out of me.
Like monstro, I’m not coming into this discussion with any strong opinions about Cohen. I’m just saying its seems unreasonable to attack him for writing that “OMG, slavery is bad” article. If the dude is indeed an idiotic bigot, I’m not seeing it in that article.
In my opinion, the attitude that slavers were irrationally maintaining a system that incurred more costs than gains to them only makes sense to someone who harbors misconceptions due to biased cultural programming. It derives from the same assumption that Cohen admitted to having, that slavery consisted of benevolent slaveowners who took care of grateful slaves.
Slaveowners were not “benevolent”. They were rational actors motivated by capitalism and power. They were about making money by any means necessary even if it came at the expense of other people’s humanity and civil rights. The Confederacy is history’s clearest example of what a plutocracy looks like.
In short, it is harder to see slavery as an intentional set of atrocious actions taken to accomplish a selfish, purposeful goal if one is under the impression that the slave-owning elite were bumbling fools who didn’t know what was good for them. So I disagree that these ideas are independent and orthogonal from one another.