WHAT ABOUT WHITE SUPREMACY ?

What about white supremacy? Well, there is the ideology or are the ideologies of white supremacy on the one hand. We have nazisms and different sorts of kkk groups and even different kinds of minuteman organizations, each with a somewhat different white supremacist ideology.

Then there is the reality of the ruling elites being primarily white, which is a sort of operational definition for top-down ruling class white supremacy, the social reality of white supremacy and it can be suggested by the economic and political facts and other social facts which sees the predominance of political and economic power in the hands of whites. You could call this structural racism or national oppression or think of it as some sort of caste oppression. It seems to me that in the United States there is a substantial hegemony of Whites over Blacks and Whites over Hispanics.

The recent struggle in Kansas City over membership of a Kansas City Missouri park board appointee in the Nativist Minuteman Civil Defense Corps illustrates both aspects of white supremacy.

On the one hand be have the Funkhouser political machine, clearly white and clearly in power. One can almost hear the theme song to the original "Outer Limits" as one listens to the Mayor speak, "We control the horizontal. We control the vertical." On the other hand we have Semler who is part of an organization that is perhaps one or two steps removed from more obvious hate groups such as nazi or kkk groups. So we have a very controlling Mayor and an appointee who is not quite a nazi but definitely in a group that is so far to the right that it has to constantly try and remove overt white supremacists from its ranks.

I wonder if Funkhouser would have made the same First Amendment arguments about Semler if she was a member of a very openly racist organization? If Semler showed up at park board meetings with a swastika armband would he be more concerned. I don't know if anyone has put such a question to him. I wonder what former mayor Charlie Wheeler would have done?

Of course Funkhouser presented himself as something of an insurgent within the white political establishment. He also plays off of his position as purportedly someone who is primarily interested in crunching numbers though I must admit I haven't heard any real numbers from the current mayor in the news media. Of course that is sort of a funny combination in the first place, an insurgent accountant.

Being a member of the white community Mayor Funkhouser is he going to be perceived as a default representative of the white community. Yet as mayor it seems to me that he ought to be trying to embrace those outside his own eccentric clique. He appears to have failed in taking into account the views of others. In this case, most, if not every Hispanic has been offended by his apparent embrace of Francis Semler and the Minutemen Civil Defense Corp.

The fact is that Francis Semler and the Minuteman Civil Defense Corp are not as acceptable to most Hispanics as they are to Mayor Funkhouser and the white oriented talking heads of the local community. Anyone who researches the various Minuteman groups ends up running into a lot of overt hate speech, violence baiting, and overt white supremacist ideology. Frankly, I think many whites and blacks have also been deeply offended by the Mayor's stony indifference to those outside what sometimes looks like a narrow personality cult.

In the case of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corp the main thing you find out about the organization seems to be some sort of scandal about the way funds have been raised and spent without any accountability by its leader, Chris Simcox. Of course Funk came on as a white bread accountant who is supposed to fix the sidewalks and sewers of KCMO. He purportedly has a sort of no nonsense businesslike approach to things. Yet it seems that Mayor Funkhouser did no homework investigating the nature of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corp, otherwise wouldn't the prudent bean counter have been revolted by the poor accounting of the MCDC? It seems he has a low awareness of racism and white supremacy as a system of which he is a part. In short, when it comes to racism, he is a clueless white boy. Of course this aphasia for matters of race is also suggested by his effort to repudiate "politics".

The Mayor and his closest associates apparently eschewed "politics". They were going to run the mayor's office without politics. Part of this naive openness means they did little to vet appointees. Is Semler an appointee? I think she is and was given some limited vetting but I have no idea when the issue of her membership in the Minuteman Civil Defense Corp became known by the Mayor or his staff.

Anyway, the politics of race caught up with the city even if the Mayor somehow seems to tower above the situation as if he had nothing to do with it. So we have seen the La Raza convention of 2009 leave Kansas City, Missouri. Reportedly this means that from six to twenty millions of dollars will not be pumped into the local economy. Ouch!

The mayor has delivered a moving defense of Francis Semler's First Amendment rights and her right to associate with whomever she chooses. It is the closest thing to an emotional response we have seen at this point in the Mayor's tenure. To some extent I appreciate his argument and I do not see Frances Semler as some sort of ogre, but I don't know that her rights would be violated if the mayor chose to replace her. It seems to me that an appointee is something very similar to an employee. Sometimes they are the same. Other than being an uncompensated position it seems that any board member could be removed by the Mayor for any reason without violating the Constitution of the United States.

I have gotten the distinct impression that a he and a lot of other whites think of the whole dispute as an irrelevant and absurd drama foisted upon the mayor by unreasonable individuals in the local or national leadership of La Raza.

Furthermore, I have heard a lot of elite white opinion and a lot from Semler and the Mayor. Both have presented their point of view with some effectiveness. So folks like the RUCKUS commentators and La RAZA's other antagonists have representedn LA RAZA's position to the public. The views of La Raza have not been on television or highlighted in the local media. So I am including some facts that I got from the local newspaper Dos Mundos.

For example, an effort has been made to say La Raza leadership has made some sort of crazy or ill advised decision. Yet more than a few local organizations of considerable merit supported the withdrawal of the La Raza convention from Kansas City. They are Westside Clinic, Guadalupe Center, Mattie Rhodes Center, Westside Housing Organization, and Hispanic Economic Development Corporation. These organizations see the Minutemen as something worse than a Nativist neighborhood watch organization concerned about immigration issues. They see it as more akin the kkk or nazis, only this time the racism is focused on Hispanics.

I would have liked to see the La Raza convention in Kansas City. It doesn't mean that I, Kansas City or the mayor ever had a right to that convention. A local Hispanic newspaper, Dos Mundos reported October 25, 2007 in a story by Edie R.Lambert that, "Janet Murguia, a Kansas City, Kan., native and head of the NCLR: [said] 'This is a very sad day for me. The mayor has failed to take direct action and we hold him fully accountable … The Minuteman is a group that has undeniably sown division and intolerance wherever it has gone and whose members have harassed, intimidated and menaced human beings, often simply based on their appearance.' ”

So it was a sad day for all of us, yet there is an effort to paint Murgia as somehow taking a far out position. If anyone has to worry about looking far out it isn't Murgia, it is Funkhouser.

Some whites, like Funkhouser, see the Minuteman organizations as something less disturbing than those of us with a progressive political consciousness. Are they just insensitive beneficiaries of a white supremacist system that leaves them in a position to be satisfied and content with maintaining the status quo? That may be the material basis for their denying the violent and extremist taint of the Nativist movement. So white supremacy in power tends to be blind to ideological racism perhaps because it knows that at the end of the day the ideological extremists are only small potatoes compared to, well, the big potatoes like Mr. Potato head himself, Mark Funkhouser.

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