Is this supposed to be the racism of Phil Robertson? It's not racist. I don't believe him to be racists. He has black grandchildren. No one has ever accused him of racists acts. It's inarticulate but I don't believe it to be racists.
It's not overtly antagonistic on the surface and I don't think he
consciously meant any harm by it, but every part of that answer is loaded with very clear and very troubling prejudices bubbling furiously under the surface.
I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once.
"I didn't see it, so it wasn't a problem." You can't wave away the treatment of blacks in the pre-civil rights era with "welp, out of sight, out of mind." You couldn't have grown up in Louisiana in that era and not have seen Whites Only and Colored Only signs all over the place; You couldn't have never heard through the grapevine that boy, there's been a disturbing amount of violence against blacks in this state; You can't have seen the civil rights movement come to a head and thought "These are the actions of a race contented with their treatment." Whether or not he saw mistreatment actually occurring, there's no way he wasn't aware it was an issue. Waving that away on the technicality of "It never happened directly in front of my eyes" is intellectually dishonest, and the underlying implication that the race's issues were blown out of proportion is violently inappropriate.
Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. Im with the blacks, because were white trash.
Oh, they were viewed on a similar social stratum as a group that has the word 'trash' in it? That's not damning at all. This statement is less "They were viewed equally as good as my kin" and more "They were viewed equally as bad as my kin".
Were going across the field.... Theyre singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, I tell you what: These doggone white peoplenot a word!...
I'm sure the fact they lived in a state that was fourth in the nation in lynchings and the fact that they minded their Ps and Qs around their white colleagues are totally unrelated. Not exactly the best state of affairs for candid discourse.
Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.
A blanket conflation of welfare and entitlement as part-and-parcel with the black community, and a direct implication that the acceptance of assistance from these programs moves people away from happiness and away from God.
As a two-faced answer, it's one for the books.