Jim Crow’s Muslim America

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Watch this video and join me in saying: Wow.

When Andrew Sullivan posted the video above, his Atlantic colleague, Ta-Nehisi Coates (who is black) piped up to say he thinks it’s unfair. Coates likens it to the dreaded media’s televising of the most ignorant Negroes they can find whenever something “black” happens, so America can assume we’re all that stupid. I dunno.

I think it’s valid to discuss, inasmuch as folks like these are just the unvarnished versions of those who think Obama’s middle name—hiss! boo! Hussein—actually tells you something about him. It might be that hideous things like this, from true cretins, are most useful in getting white folks to take a good, hard look in the mirror at themselves: Do I, deep down and with better than a fourth grade education, really agree with these morons? If so, what does that make me? There are plenty of well-educated folks happy to tell a TV camera that having a president with “Hussein” in his name is a nightmare. What’s the difference, really? Classy bigotry versus ignorant bigotry isn’t much of a choice.

Speaking of videos, you cannot miss Donna Brazile’s impassioned appeal to America not to be distracted by race. She reminds us that we need to be proud of how far we’ve come on race, and proud enough to remember that we’re better than Jim Crow. Because Jim Crow is all it is when we politely, or impolitely, demand that our fear of “Muslims” be accorded respect and deference. Let’s call inveighing against “Muslims” (we’re at war with them, you know) and “A-rab” middle names what it is: just another way to keep blacks and non-Christians at the back of the bus.

Like Brazile, I’m afraid that I’ll wake up in 31 days knowing that I’ll have to tell my bi-racial children their mother grew up under Jim Crow and they will, too. Vote for whoever you want, but here’s the bottom line: If you care whether or not Obama “really” is a Muslim, however expansive your vocabulary, that hideous video speaks for you.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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