The Mark 2010

Rush Limbaugh isn’t a segregationist, but his message of racial disharmony is as plain as can be.

More of Rush Limbaugh's racial obsessiveness:

Throwing all caution to the wind, he's calling for the return of segregation. Or is he?

Some earlier Limbaugh commentary to set the scene:

Hey, Barack Obama has picked up another endorsement: Halfrican American actress Halle Berry. "As a Halfrican American, I am honoured to have Ms. Berry's support, as well as the support of other Halfrican Americans," Obama said.

He didn't say it, but – anyway, there are those out there – greetings.

Then there was Obama, the "magic Negro." We should remind ourselves that he's been at this sort of thing as far back as the 1970s.

Hey, what's a racial slur or two, and an approving reference to Jim Crow? Can't you coloureds take a joke? According to some on the right, after all, he's just being ... humorous. And indeed, here is what he has to say for himself on that subject:

Well, that's what we always do here. We do parodies and satires on the idiocy and the phoniness of the left.

Do they have a point? Well, admittedly they do – to a degree. Limbaugh has matured considerably from his "take that bone out of your nose and call me back" days. He's become a master ironist, recalling that irony always implies a double audience. Most recently, with the emergence of so-called "dog-whistle politics," irony is achieved through the use of code, a use that comes with its own plausible deniability ("Code? What code?").

But this isn't Limbaugh's game. There's method in his "humour" – when he's being humorous, that is, rather than straightforwardly hateful, as in, "Let's face it, Obama's Black, and I think he has a chip on his shoulder."

As Think Progress points out in reference to that comment, Limbaugh's Obama discourse is racialized to the hilt:

This is not the first time Limbaugh has characterized Obama as an angry black man. On his radio show in March, Limbaugh said Obama "has a chip on his shoulder, and his wife does too, and they are some angry people." Limbaugh has also chastised people for being afraid to criticize the little black man-child referred to Obama as "Barack the Magic Negro," complained that he “disowned his white half” and warned that Obama is of "Arab-African" descent. Nevertheless, Limbaugh says race is not an issue for him.

Well, yes it is, Rush, from your intertextual reference to "Little Black Sambo" to the repeated use of the angry (dangerous) Black stereotype, to the racial sniping about Obama's origins.

But irony does kick in when, for example, he picked up on a progressive Los Angeles Times piece that had addressed the "Magic Negro" trope – the benign Black with strange powers who suddenly appears to assist whites in a jam (which I believe goes back at least as far as Jim in Huckleberry Finn, and is parodied in the character of "Chef" in South Park).

He was allegedly sending up the (African American) writer who, in a short thinky piece caricatured by Limbaugh, identified the trope in current American political discourse. But Limbaugh was also, by going on and on as he does, perpetuating his deliberate racialization of the Obama candidacy. That's what matters to his hard-core listeners, after all, not excursions into literature and film.

By the same token, his latest commentary about segregated school buses, on one reading, is just a call for a "colourblind" America in an era of racial polarization that he blames Obama for perpetuating. Rejecting out of hand the assurances from local law enforcement that the incident in Belleville St. Louis was one of bullying, not of racism, he says:

I think the guy's wrong. I think not only it was racism, it was justifiable racism. I mean, that's the lesson we're being taught here today. Kid shouldn't have been on the bus anyway. We need segregated buses – it was invading space and stuff. This is Obama's America.

Now this is layered stuff. Rush is not stupid, and he shouldn't be underestimated. He cheerfully joins in with other race-baiters like Michelle Malkin, and Drudge, but there's a textured elegance to what he does.

He is accusing the Black students of racism, and at the same time lampooning the Left’s view that racial discrimination can generate reactive justifiable anger and violence. This is not, of course, the Left’s view, but it encapsulates a fairly common conservative accusation.

Where does this lead? he asks rhetorically. Why, to Jim Crow in reverse, which is still, of course, Jim Crow.

But at the same time, Rush is the one who is introducing race into the discussion: in fact, he is constructing a racial discussion. The police chief in Belleville quickly withdrew his earlier suggestion that the incident was racial in character. The black student who broke up a second attack on the white student didn't believe the incident was racial: other white kids on that bus have never been attacked, he said. It was just a case of bullying.

How "post-racial" can you get? But Limbaugh wasn't about to let this opportunity slip through his fingers. He and his shrieking cohorts insisted upon re-writing the narrative as a racial parable, with no evidence whatsoever – indeed in the teeth of the evidence. It was damn well going to be an instance of reverse racism with the alleged condoning of a black president, and that was that. Race war looming on the horizon. Helter Skelter.

This, then, is the underlying message of Limbaugh on the Belleville incident, and it's one that his listeners will absorb through the pores. Is he calling for segregation? No. But he's pushing an apocalyptic racial-panic politics whose poisoned roots lie firmly implanted in the sordid Jim Crow era.

Any day now he'll find a way to use the n-word. Count on it. All in fun, of course. Just sending up the Left. And in the present ergotized American political climate, that could add another few million listeners, who don't give a damn about "parody" or irony, if they even understand the concepts, but get the message directly intended for them.

In the proud tradition of on-air conservative demagogues like Gerald L. K. Smith and Father Charles Coughlin, Limbaugh is just telling it like it is.