HOW BULLSHIT WORKS, PART 32,456,798.

Sometimes one little thing just shows how they do so perfectly that I have to call it out. At Right Wing News and other wingnut outlets, Walter Williams goes on and on about how terrible it is that schoolteachers are indoctrinating your children to believe that white people are treated differently than black people in this country. Can you imagine! Here's one of Williams' laugh lines:

But the propaganda and lunacy go even deeper. Jacqueline Battalora, professor of sociology and criminal justice at Saint Xavier University, informed conference participants that “white people did not exist before 1681. Again, white people did not exist on planet earth until 1681″ (http://tinyurl.com/lkoqj9b). That’s truly incredible. If Professor Battalora is correct, how are we to identify William Shakespeare (1564), Sir Isaac Newton (1642), John Locke (1632), Leonardo da Vinci (1452) and especially dear Plato (428 B.C.)? Were these men people of color, or did they not exist?

Har de har har. Now here's what Battalora was talking about, from her book: When American colonists devised their early anti-miscegnation law, which law was "neither derived from the statutory laws of antiquity nor from the common law of England but was a creation of colonial North America," they took a while to refine their phrasing, starting with "free borne" women who should not marry "slaves" but proceeding finally to a new distinction:

The Maryland law of 1681 includes the first appearance of the term "white" used to designate a distinct group of humanity in law, and served as a corrective to the antimiscegnation law of 1664 that had the unintended effect of encouraging slaveholders to promote the very marriages the law expressly intended to discourage (Arch. Md. 7: 203-205). The law provides that freeborn English or "white" women who enter into marriage with a slave of African descent do so "to the satisfaction of their lascivious and lustful desires" and to the "disgrace not only of the English but also of many other Christian nations" (Ibid. at 204). This language reveals important perceptions and reflects persuasive efforts to shape a human group now being referred to as "white."

Whatever you think of Battalora's scholarship, it's obvious that she didn't mean that darker and lighter people did not exist before that law -- she was talking about a specific and real legal event. I don't know whether Williams knew this or not, but it probably wouldn't matter if he did -- indeed, other conservatives express similar incredulity even when they demonstrate awareness of what Battalora is talking about. The mere idea that the category "white" might not be God-given is risible to them.

Don't let it get around, but I really do try to get what these guys are saying and, at least going in, admit the possibility that they have some kind of argument. But so often -- I'm tempted to say increasingly , though it may just be that I'm noticing it more -- conservatives are so obviously just making propaganda out of whatever sticks and mud they find lying around that I find myself tuning out and assuming they're full of shit from the get-go.