The 2012 Republican presidential field, a hydra which self-destructively feeds on itself, had one more battle royale in Iowa. Fighting to a standstill, Romney, Gingrich, Santorum, and Paul bloodied each other. While the Tea Party GOP is still a house divided, their leading candidates share a common, uniting, go to issue: hating on the blacks makes for good politics; it pays substantial political dividends.
As Iowa demonstrated, be it Gingrich’s yearning to have lazy black and brown kids pick up mops and brooms as janitors in work houses, Romney’s nativist Klan inspired opines to keep “America America,” Santorum’s appeals to a belief that African Americans find sustenance by stealing from hardworking white people, or Ron Paul’s assertion that the Civil Rights Act (with its bringing down of Jim and Jane Crow) was an unfair intrusion on white people’s “liberty” and “freedom,” the Tea Party GOP remains addicted to the crack rock of dog whistle politics.
Decades after the founding of the Southern Strategy in the 1960s, the old school remains the true school. Ultimately for conservatives, demagoguing the negroes can still help stir up support among the white populist faithful.
Precision matters here. Research on public opinion and political behavior has demonstrated that not all conservatives are racist. However, racists are much more likely to be conservative–and to identify as Republicans.
Social scientists, historians, psychologists and others have developed an extensive vocabulary to talk about the lived politics of the color line. These terms include such notable phrases as symbolic racism, white racial resentment, the white racial frame, in-group and out-group anxiety, ethnocentrism, prejudice, realistic group conflict, colorblind racism, systems of structured inequality, racial formation, and front stage vs. backstage racism.
In thinking through the politics of race at work in the white conservative political imagination, this seemingly disparate terminology is connected by a common thread. Race and racial ideologies are ways of seeing the world, of locating people and individuals relative to one another, and are a cognitive map for making sense of social relationships. While shocking to outsiders, the type of racism played with so casually by Gingrich, Romney, Santorum, Paul and other conservatives is a type of “common sense” for their public.
For example, the audiences that cheer Romney’s speeches about a country that is lost, one led by an anti-American usurper, are not necessarily “bad people.” They are motivated by a sense of belonging, and made to feel special by virtue of being “real Americans,” part of a special tribe anointed with unique insight and wisdom by their oracles.
Likewise, those who embrace Gingrich’s habit of stereotyping “inner city blacks” as lazy, unmotivated, and criminal, probably identify as “compassionate conservatives,” or “good Christians.” There is no intended malice on their part. To them, “everyone knows” that these observations about black and brown people are “true.”
Rick Santorum’s Iowa speech on the nature of black people’s greed and degeneracy is an especially instructive example of this broader pattern:
“It just keeps expanding – I was in Indianola a few months ago and I was talking to someone who works in the department of public welfare here, and she told me that the state of Iowa is going to get fined if they don’t sign up more people under the Medicaid program,” Santorum said. “They’re just pushing harder and harder to get more and more of you dependent upon them so they can get your vote. That’s what the bottom line is.”
He added: “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.”
“And provide for themselves and their families,” Santorum added, to applause. “The best way to do that is to get the manufacturing sector of the economy rolling again.”“Right,” responded one audience member, as another woman can be seen nodding.
There are several elements at work here.
First, poverty in America is racialized. The image in the public imagination is of black welfare queens, or illegal aliens birthing “anchor babies” who live off of the government tit, profiting from food stamps and the generosity of the American people. The white poor rarely, if ever, enter the picture. Second, black people are in a parasitic relationship with white Americans (Santorum’s “someone” else). In sum, black people are “lazy,” and a dependent class, unable to take care of their families except for the generosity and benevolence of white people.
The most powerful part of Santorum’s appeal to his white audience in Iowa is the implication that black people are receiving some type of “reparations.” For Santorum and the Tea Party GOP, blacks are plagued by “bad culture” and are existentially prone to poverty. Therefore, in a country where labor, capitalism, and citizenship are inexorably connected, blacks are outside of the political community.
In the age of Fox News and the Right-wing echo chamber, one cannot forget how the conservative imagination is constituted as a dream world: it is a mature fulfillment of some of the most sophisticated propaganda in the post World War 2 period.
In this imagination, it does not matter that whites are the majority of America’s poor.
It does not matter that most people on public assistance and welfare in Iowa are white.
It does not matter that there is a deep history which explains how conservatives have spun a fiction about black and brown poverty while ignoring structural economic inequality, and how many of the policies endorsed by the Tea Party GOP in the name of economic austerity and punishing people of color (who are coded as “the poor” or “unproductive citizens”), also disproportionately harm the white working and middle classes.
This local type of common sense helps to explain the feelings of defense, denial, and injury that many white conservatives exhibit when challenged about the racism of the Tea Party GOP and the Right-wing establishment. While the leadership and media elites from which they take their cues skillfully play the race baiting game, rank and file Fox News conservatives simply feel aggrieved at the suggestion that anyone would take their common sense understandings of the world to be racist, bigoted, or based on false understandings about the nature of racism and white privilege in the Age of Obama.
In the same way that a fish does not know that it is wet, the politics of nativism, an authoritarian-like embrace of the politics of us and them, and a fear of the Other, are so central to contemporary white populist conservatism, that they are taken-for-granted assumptions about the nature of the world.
Moreover, politics is essentially about the creation of an imagined community. The stump speeches about evil liberals who hate America, the cheering of dying cancer patients who lack insurance, the booing of gay soldiers, and the numerous fictions about the economy, science, the Constitution, and public policy more generally are taken as divine gospel. These fictions are standing priors for contemporary conservatives which help to mark out the boundaries of their political world.
During an election year, and as a function of a highly polarized 24 hour news environment, it is a given that the incumbent president will be the target of vicious attacks by the out party. By implication, the election of Barack Obama, America’s first black president, has amplified all of these tensions. The election of a member of the racial out-group has made the stakes especially high for white conservatism. Obama is anathema to the Tea Party GOP soul, the living embodiment of a world turned upside down, for no man who looks like him could ever be leader of the free world, where whiteness is inseparable from being “American.”
By implication, there is a short line from the white racial appeals of Gingrich, Santorum, Paul, Romney and others directly to President Obama. He has been called “the food stamp president” and a “ghetto crackhead.” Obama is stained by the Birthers who say he is not an American citizen. The appeals to American exceptionalism are naked arguments that a black man like Obama cannot help but be outside of the “normal” political culture of this country. It has also been implied that President Obama is a perpetual “they,” a member of a marginalized group who by association is lazy, anti-white, unqualified, and an “affirmative action baby” that somehow managed to steal a presidential election and win the popular vote.
Many may laugh at such a formulation. However, the Tea Party GOP, Iowa voters, and others who clamor to participate in the Republican primaries, would take such claims as common sense knowledge. For people of color, the outsider, the Other, and those who are not (in their eyes) “quintessentially American” (and thus have to prove their authenticity to the white conservative gaze), this is not your country.
You people may have built and improved this country, but it is not yours. For the Tea Party GOP and the populist conservatism of the present moment, you people are just guests. They will remind you people of that fact at every moment.
Why? Because it is common sense. Didn’t you know that?
Newt Gingrich has repeatedly shown that he is an existentially ugly person. Therefore, his repeated comments about the black poor, and “inner city” communities, where people “don’t have a work ethic” are not at all a surprise. Time has demonstrated that “compassionate conservatism,” an oxymoron if there ever was one, is not particularly kind, just, or humane.
As demonstrated by his Wednesday editorial on the website Human Events, Newt Gingrich is apparently wedded to the idea that young black and brown kids should have the “privilege” of becoming janitors in their schools in order to learn about the value of “hard work.”
There are any number of problems with this argument. Primarily, Gingrich is recycling the ugly and deeply racist belief that black people are inherently lazy: poor children who don’t see people around them working apparently grow up to be lazy adults, who are on welfare, dependent on the state, and have no understanding of how to put in an honest day’s work. He gives no consideration to the stigma that child janitors would experience, and the taunting and bullying that would inevitably result from being one of the students who carries a pail, mop, or broom around their school.
Newt Gingrich is also blindly ignorant of the issues surrounding structural unemployment in poor inner city communities, and where it is not a deficit of work ethic or drive, but a lack of desperately wanted job opportunities—especially for young people—that drives urban poverty. Given the Right-wing’s assault on unions, and the social safety net, more broadly, Gingrich’s smearing of school janitors as an enriched and craven class of greedy public employees is just more red meat for an agenda that wants to destroy the American middle and working classes.
In all, Newt Gingrich is offering up a Dickensonian fantasy of workhouses in which African American wastrels and street urchins learn the value of hard work from benevolent white folks like him.
Of course, Newt Gingrich’s children, and those of the moneyed classes who he represents, would never be asked to pick up a mop and broom at their schools—as their kids’ responsibility is first and foremost to prepare and study for college, and the bright future which awaits them.
And I must wonder, what lessons have the children of the financier class, the trust fund baby and inherited money types who brought about the Great Recession, been taught about the value of hard work from observing the destructive behavior of their parents during this time of economic calamity?
Over the years, I have developed a pretty thick skin regarding these matters. However, there is something particular offensive about Newt Gingrich’s repeated insistence that poor black kids become janitors in order to learn about the merits of “hard work” that demands engagement. It would seem to his eyes that janitors are disposable people with easy jobs. Moreover, to him, a janitor’s job is so simple that anyone, even an elementary or middle school student, could do it well.
As the refrain goes, the personal is political. I am the son of a janitor. I try not to break kayfabe, or to drop the mask too often. Nevertheless, sometimes it is necessary to speak up for yourself, as well as for the many other people who may not have either the privilege, or opportunity, to speak truth to power.
In that spirit, please take this as an open letter of sorts to Newt Gingrich (and the particular brand of compassionate conservatism which he represents).
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My father was a hardworking man. He was not perfect. He took his job seriously and worked for many years as a janitor. He did this with pride, integrity, and self-respect. My father rarely took a sick day, and worked in this job for several decades, retiring only in his late 70s. Work meant a great deal to him, and he would eventually pass away about a year later. I warned my father that without a sense of purpose, and isolated from the many people he befriended at his job over the years, that he would not last long. I was (sadly) proven correct.
These are not details designed to elicit a tear; they are details of a full life, the human experience that stands behind words such as “janitor,” “teacher,” “unions,” and “working class.” These are perennially good titles, now transformed into slurs, by people like Newt Gingrich and his conservative brethren.
My father was a boss, a confidante to his coworkers, and advisor to the men and women he affectionately called his “crew.” His work was at times dangerous, involved long hours, and a good amount of responsibility.
No elementary, middle, or high school student could do my father’s job.
Growing up, I was embarrassed that my father was a “lowly” janitor. His job title was technically “senior maintenance supervisor.” I used that whenever I had the chance. When one’s friends are the children of doctors, lawyers, and white collar professionals, you learn to improvise.
There would be many awkward moments, when my father, the janitor, would have one of his three or so pagers go off in the company of my friends. We could be at a bowling tournament, a movie, or a birthday party, and inevitably one of those beepers would ring.
Those who did not know the facts of the situation would ask if “he was a doctor.” I would answer “no, my father just has an emergency that he has to take care of.”
Unlike in Newt Gingrich’s twisted dream, janitors and their families are not rich. My family had good Christmases, an occasional vacation, and nice Sunday meals. My father’s pay kept me in nice clothes, indulged my hobbies, and helped me (with some hefty student loans and grants) to go to college. My father’s work, in combination with my mother’s, kept us comfortable. We were not middle class, or even solidly working class by most measures. Somehow, we were okay.
A janitor’s job is also about personal relationships. I will not pretend that my father’s position as a janitor at a large Ivy League university was typical. He made sure that I met interesting people; I could take the day off of school, follow him around, and go to the library. He would leave me with different professors or graduate students so that I could talk to them about politics, history, or philosophy. Because my father worked there for many decades, he was part of the university community. My father took that role seriously.
For example, there were many occasions when he made sure that international students had a place to eat and go for the holidays (at times, this welcoming space was our home). My father, the janitor, was a union man and took great pride in how he always fought for the rights of the part-time staff—a group that he felt was always “getting a bum deal.”
When people needed jobs, oftentimes young men who were recently released from jail, or career ex-cons, they could come to my father. He would size them up. If they passed his personal test of being honest and direct about their situation(s), my father would go with them to human resources, vouch for their reliability, and put them on his “crew” so that they would learn how to do “right.”
My father also had some fun times at his job. He loved to talk about how, on one afternoon, he had to show a student from rural China how to use an American style toilet. My father joked that “the young man made it this far, I didn’t think using one of our toilets would be so complicated.”
There were sad times too.
On more than one occasion my father, a janitor, had to take up a collection for a student to send home to their family, to help them buy a ticket if there was an emergency, or to subsidize the funeral expenses for one of his crew, or the part-timers, who didn’t have his years of seniority, and pay.
No child could do that job.
My father only wanted me to get a job where my hands would be clean, and I would not have to pick up other people’s messes. I have, fingers crossed, more or less gotten that far. It has taken some years, and a bit of growth. But now, I am finally proud to be the child of a janitor. Those millions of us who were taken care of, provided for, and raised by working class folks such as maids, home health care workers, and janitors, have much to hold our heads high about.
These people are the real “job creators” in this country: they pay bills, provide for their families, and donate to churches, mosques, synagogues, and charitable organizations.
Working class people like my father help to sustain communities and neighborhoods.
Whenever Newt Gingrich and his brand of 1% percent plutocrat conservatives besmirch the working people of this country, people like us and our kin, we need to speak up. There is no shame in our lineage. And all of us need to say thanks, to acknowledge those janitors, maintenance people, and the like who work in our schools, office buildings, apartment complexes, and take care of our aged and sick parents and relatives. They deserve our respect; unfortunately, they rarely receive it from the American people.
Once more, I am proud to be a child of the working class. Are you?
If I Were a Mediocre White Man I Would Write an Advice Column For Poor Black Kids in Forbes Magazine
The President’s speech got me thinking. My kids are no smarter than similar kids their age from the inner city. My kids have it much easier than their counterparts from West Philadelphia. The world is not fair to those kids mainly because they had the misfortune of being born two miles away into a more difficult part of the world and with a skin color that makes realizing the opportunities that the President spoke about that much harder. This is a fact. In 2011.
Forbes magazine has posted a column by Gene Marks, a middle aged white guy, who wants to give advice to poor black kids about how to be successful in America. Of course, these young black kids read Forbes everyday and will internalize his wisdom. There is no poverty porn,noblesse oblige, white paternalism, compassionate conservative masturbation, navel gazing at work here. No. None at all.
Folks are all over his butt already. In fact, Gene Marks is about to become more popular than he has any right to be, both with the conservative, “blacks have bad culture crowd” (who will hold him up as a brave truth teller), and the anti-racist lecture circuit crowd (who is going to use his essay in Forbes as an object lesson in white privilege for years and years to come).
And like flies on a well formed bit of bovine scatology, black conservative apologists will soon start hovering over Marks’ essay as they instinctively rise to defend any assault on either people of color, or the black poor, by the white conservative establishment. Black conservatives are on retainer and are obligated to shuck, buck dance, and jive to earn their keep. Their appearance is imminent.
I am not a poor black kid. I am a middle aged white guy who comes from a middle class white background. So life was easier for me. But that doesn’t mean that the prospects are impossible for those kids from the inner city. It doesn’t mean that there are no opportunities for them. Or that the 1% control the world and the rest of us have to fight over the scraps left behind. I don’t believe that. I believe that everyone in this country has a chance to succeed. Still. In 2011. Even a poor black kid in West Philadelphia.
It takes brains. It takes hard work. It takes a little luck. And a little help from others. It takes the ability and the know-how to use the resources that are available. Like technology. As a person who sells and has worked with technology all my life I also know this.
If I was a poor black kid I would first and most importantly work to make sure I got the best grades possible. I would make it my #1 priority to be able to read sufficiently. I wouldn’t care if I was a student at the worst public middle school in the worst inner city. Even the worst have their best. And the very best students, even at the worst schools, have more opportunities…
It is difficult to imagine oneself in the shoes of another person. Empathy and sympathy are difficult traits to practice even under the best of circumstances. I also do not know what Gene Marks’ intentions were in writing his Forbes’ essay. However, I am mighty curious about the intentions of Forbes’ editors in publishing such a problematic piece of work.
Marks is likely a “nice” guy who is so awash in white privilege, class entitlement, and sexism (remember, discourses on poverty are almost always about both race and gender) that it is impossible for him to really imagine himself as the Other; yet, he is so arrogant that he imagines himself capable of understanding all people’s experiences, at all times, and in all places. This is the crux of White privilege–a sense of gross universality and normativity, a racial heliocentrism that allows a white person to generalize outward with authority on all things.
If I was a poor black kid I would get technical. I would learn software. I would learn how to write code. I would seek out courses in my high school that teaches these skills or figure out where to learn more online. I would study on my own. I would make sure my writing and communication skills stay polished.
Because a poor black kid who gets good grades, has a part time job and becomes proficient with a technical skill will go to college. There is financial aid available. There are programs available. And no matter what he or she majors in that person will have opportunities. They will find jobs in a country of business owners like me who are starved for smart, skilled people. They will succeed.
Predictably, Whiteness will also make Gene Marks into a victim, as “he is just trying to be helpful” and “how dare those liberals and race pimps tell him that he is wrong!”
Two truisms apply here.
One, you should write what you know. As revealed by his Forbes’ essay, Gene Marks does not know anything of the experiences of poor black and brown kids in inner city America. He has no access to their internal lives, his article also suggests a blinding ignorance of the realities of structural inequality in this country.
Two, a fish does not know that it is wet. Despite his lip service to the concept, Marks does not really imagine himself as privileged (as he would have not written such a piece, in the manner that he so chose), or that the life experiences of a self-described mediocre technocrat, one who somehow found himself a columnist for Forbes and the NY Times, are in any way exceptional or unique.
As we saw with Newt Gingrich’s ugly suggestions that poor kids should become janitors in order to teach those lazy blacks about the value of hard work, and Rush Limbaugh’s observation that poor kids on school lunch programs are greedy street urchins, Marks is a singer in a conservative chorus whose message is simple: you are poor because you are lazy; moreover, poor people want to be poor; poor black kids born to crappy circumstances can do better if they just tried harder…and are smart enough to show some initiative.
President Obama was right in his speech last week. The division between rich and poor is a national problem. But the biggest challenge we face isn’t inequality. It’s ignorance.
I do wonder what Gene Mark’s advice would be to lazy, dim, anti-intellectual, and entitled white kids (and those of the upper classes more generally) who were born on the 3rd base of life and think they hit a home run? Would his advice be the same for the white rural poor? What would Gene Marks tell the “new poor,” those formerly middle class suburban types who are couch surfing, living in cars, tents, or hotels? What wisdom does he have to preach from on high?
Many of these kids don’t have the brains to figure this out themselves – like my kids. Except that my kids are just lucky enough to have parents and a well-funded school system around to push them in the right direction.
Technology can help these kids. But only if the kids want to be helped. Yes, there is much inequality. But the opportunity is still there in this country for those that are smart enough to go for it.
I will let Gene Mark’s closing comments stand on their own: they are ugly poetry in motion.
Rush Limbaugh earned his racist bonafides a long time ago. He is also an existentially and unrepentantly ugly person. Therefore, his suggestion that the head of the Congressional Black Caucus needs to get a slave pass in order to “get off” the Democratic plantation is not at all a surprise. Moreover, that there are millions of petit authoritarians who pray at his sick and twisted mantle of Angry White Male Conservatism, is also not a surprise. Their love is just a symptom of America’s cultural rot, and a dysfunctional political discourse, one identified decades ago by the noted political scientist and historian Richard Hofstadter.
Ultimately, in the 1920s through to the 1960s, there was Father Coughlin; the last few decades brought us Rush Limbaugh. There is really nothing new in the game in regards to ugly talk that plays to Whiteness’s greater devils, as opposed to its lesser angels.
Of course, I will never understand why any self-respecting black person (or person of color more generally) would get in bed with the racially resentful, and bigoted strain of populism, that is the Tea Party GOP. And that black Conservatives reproduce the language of white supremacy, with the idea that principled, reflective, and politically sophisticated, utility maximizing black people–who have decided that the Democratic Party is more aligned with their interests–are on a “plantation,” is one part racial Stockholm syndrome, and two parts selling out for the sake of a dollar…as well as the psychic wages of a pat or two on the metaphorical head from their overlords.
Abstractions are easy to use in a game where the scoring of cheap political points is the goal. The low brow rhetoric that passes for reasoned political discourse in the Right-wing echo chamber is masterful for its ability to provoke, use symbolically rich speech, repetition, moral clarity, as well as certitude. In all, the Eliminationists of the Right-wing are expert propagandists.
However, it is easy to invoke a thing, when one does not have to face the reality of it head on. A skilled rhetorician can paint a picture with words that move the crowd; but, their power can also be subverted when the gimmick is exposed–when the audience sees the literal thing that is being used as an allusion and metaphorical prop. The illusion is broken. The magic is gone.
Rush Limbaugh loves to talk about black people and slavery. It is a fetish of his. While we may not cure him of this obsession, nor break the Svengali-like hold that Limbaugh has on his cult members, we can examine an actual example of the “slave passes” he so casually evoked last week:
I wonder if the Right-wing populists who fawn over Rush Limbaugh would find such references so funny if they could actually see a slave pass with their own eyes, or read some of the actual handwriting that attempted to reduce grown adults into children, human property who were limited in the most basic exercise of their rights?
White populist conservatives would probably sneer and reverse this truth-seeking into some twisted claim of “white victimology,” and “angry black people,” who are “unfair” and “emotional.” In fact, there are likely many conservatives, who in another decade would fancy themselves owners of human property, kings of the plantation, where the darkies knew their place, and everything was a Neo-Confederate, Southern GOP, Tea Party wet dream.
Their love of such abuses of history aside does not mean that we ought not to confront conservatives about their fictions at every opportunity, to hold them accountable.
Please indulge me some private-public talk for a moment. My black folks, we need to do a better job of protecting our history, the narratives that are generated about it, and how our struggle is made the fodder for political games by conservatives and liberals alike. No other group’s freedom struggle and suffering (our Jewish brothers and sisters especially, are to be held up as exemplars for how to protect one’s master story) is mocked with such ease, frequency, or with so few consequences.
These slave passes are not impersonal abstractions, curiosities of history, without meaning or weight. Slave passes were the naked and obvious demonstration of power by Whites, and the ability (or so they believed) to control black people–your kin and family–as human property from the cradle to the grave:
This is a slave pass and marriage acknowledgement from A. Greer to John Neely allowing the marriage of one of his male slaves to one of Neely’s female slaves, permitting that they do not let the marriage interfere with their work.
Where is the outrage? My people, my black folks, or are you so tired, the calluses so deep, that you have forgotten how to be upset?
History stares you in the eyes: Rush Limbaugh and his brethren slap you in the face every time they channel the glorious and proud history of black and brown folks, our sheroes and heroes, for their nefarious and dishonest ends. And you do nothing.
And some wonder, why in America, conservatism and racism, are one in the same.
“My name is Fountain Hughes … My grandfather belonged to Thomas Jefferson.” Hughes then begins a wily standoff with his white interviewer, Hermond Norwood, digressing into his opinions about babies wearing shoes (-22:00) and buying things “on time [credit],” decrying the Yankees throwing flour into the river (-11:10) and, finally, declaring he would shoot himself rather than go back to slavery, where “you are nothing but a dog.” (-10:00)
As part of its series commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, the Opinionator section of the NY Times is featuring a piece by Karenna Gore Schiff. Out of Time explores the politics surrounding the WPA’s efforts to record the oral histories of former slaves during the 1930s and 1940s.
There are some great nuggets here: the fights over memory and representation; the Dixiecrats hold over the WPA and its various artistic and historical projects; the fears of now freed people of suffering retaliation from whites in the Jim Crow South if their stories about the evil ways of white folks were too honest; and how the very idea of “documentary” projects were part of a broader populist turn towards everyday people–as opposed to “great” men and women–and the importance of their life stories and experiences to understanding the grand American narrative.
While it is fashionable in Republican circles to bemoan the federal government as a source of all evil, a bogeyman to be drowned in the bathtub, the WPA projects in particular, and the New Deal more generally, are powerful examples of how the State can do so much good.
It is chilling and inspiring to hear the ancestors speak across time. History is real. It ain’t even past. Some would urge us to forget the past, to embrace Whiteness’ necessary forgetting, and hold close an American political culture that is both amazingly nostalgic and also being grossly amnesiac. However, many of us are “political” by birth and identity in this country; we do not have the luxury of willful naivete or denial about the realities of power. What many white folks were surprised to see at OWS–where the protesters received an iota, a small dose of what people of color have been getting for centuries at the hands of the police–black kids learn as a life survival skill at 3 years old.
Caught Out of Time is not without its problems. As a teachable moment, it reaches back to the past and meditates on how the voiced experiences of former slaves are almost “Homeric” in the power. And lest we forget, it has not even been 50 years since Jim and Jane Crow white supremacy was formally undone in the United States. But in reaching back decades, Schiff recycles a near-lie about the Confederacy and the role of black Americans in the Civil War, one that is popular even into the present:
However, some slaves’ disapproval of the Northern army was genuine. Ward writes of “astonishing empathy” for masters and mistresses and documents touching and deeply humane instances of slaves acting beyond the constraints of bondage, like carrying their masters’ bodies over long distances to be buried at home. Furthermore, in the immediate human context of war, slaves’ interests overlapped with those of slaveholders; they wanted to protect food and livestock from incoming troops not only because they had been ordered to, but because their own sustenance was at stake.Not to mention the fact that, however cruel and twisted, intimate family bonds existed between black and white throughout the South. Adam Goodheart points out that at the dawn of the war, mixed-race slaves were more likely to join the Confederate effort (technically, the Confederacy never accepted them as enlisted troops but gladly put them to work): ”Human nature is a complicated thing.”
While an appeal to “human nature,” and a desire to go beyond “good guys” and “bad guys” in our historiography is laudable, this yearning for Black Confederates is a broken record that plays to the white, racist, neo-confederate crowd, a group which is desperate to rehabilitate the image of the South as something noble, their war of Secession a great struggle for “State’s Rights.”
In reality, blacks who “served” in the Confederate Army were the human property of their white owners, virtual mules and horses, and in few cases worked exclusively in non-combat roles as “free” laborers. As has been well documented, the Confederacy was a white supremacist, terrorist, military State, where the very idea of black men bearing arms was anathema to its foundational beliefs. The South would rather cease to be, than to offer up guns to black people, of any racial admixture, to fight in its defense.
Caught Out of Time continues with its near-lie here:
Harriet Smith’s soft, melodic voice conjures up the image of her as a girl, sitting atop a white fence watching the troops go by, surprised by the sight of “colored soldiers in droves,” and filled with wonder when a black orphan girl neighbor (who had had her arm cut off while operating a molasses mill) ran off with one of them. (-:55) (Part 2 of 4, -4:00) Approximately 300,000 black men would serve in the Union army (and thousands would also join the Confederate effort, including Fountain Hughes’s father, who was killed at Gettysburg) but the sight was particularly shocking to all Southerners in the early days of the war.
Again, “the thousands” who joined the Confederate Army did so not as free men, soldiers, fighting to “protect” the “Southern way of life.” This yearning to find the Black Confederate in the attic is also a sign of a bigger cultural, political, and intellectual malaise in America. We live in a moment where all opinions are framed as being equal; this culture of narcissism is advanced by a news media, one that on a daily basis, feels obligated to offer up both sides of a story in a twisted game of false equivalence.
The 21st century, opinion journalism driven 4th Estate, elevates stupid-talk and foolishness to the level of reasoned and principled discourse. For example, Birthers are given opportunities to peddle their smut, those “experts” who believe that tax cuts create economic growth are presented as legitimate authorities when the consensus is that trickle down and the Laffer curve are fictions, propagandists from the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institute, and the American Enterprise Institute are presented as “value neutral.” And when the Palins, Perrys, Bachmanns, Cains, of the world offer up some specious claim about the environment, the economy, or science, their “I believe it to be true, that is my opinion, and how dare you tell me otherwise you elitist!” is treated as fact.
In all, Caught Out of Time is an exercise in the power of outliers.
How much weight do we give to inconvenient facts that stand outside and apart from the consensus on a topic, of the narrative generated by the other data points? Ideal typical cases are handy; there is also much to be learned by those which do not neatly fit into our existing models. Yes, there were a few African Americans who held other black folks as slaves in the South. But, what does this tell us about the institution as a whole? Sure, there may have been a few Blacks, who for their own reasons, tried to find a way to join the Confederate Army. But what does that tell us about the totality of the Civil War, a struggle to defend white supremacy and human bondage as a way of life?
Imagine this helpful counter-factual or alternative scenario: should a journalist covering the Civil Rights Movement present the defenders of white supremacy as being “equal” to those little black boys and girls who simply wanted to attend an integrated school? Should a journalist elevate those who would blow up abortion clinics and kill doctors as being equivalent to those advocates who believe that a woman should have the right to control access to her own body?
Caught Out of Time, and the cult of false equivalence, is a cousin to these puzzles. A yearning for black Confederates, and folksy Gone with the Wind Song of the South stories about loyal slaves who carried their masters home on their backs, are outliers which tell us nothing about the story as a whole. These details are chaff for racism deniers, and those invested in the Lost Cause and “nobility” of the white supremacist, Secessionist struggle called the Confederate States of America.
The editors of the NY Times–a journal of record, containing “all of the news fit to print”–would have better served such a great piece on the voices of the ancestors, and the WPA’s efforts to preserve them, by deleting such distracting and unnecessary fodder.
[The editorial choices made relative to the Times' piece also begs the following question.
Where are those many more common examples of slaves who poisoned their masters and his/her family, burned down barns, destroyed property, killed their overseers, served as Union spies, kicked their owners off of the plantations, or whipped whites in the street when the Union Army finally liberated an area?
I guess those stories are not a neat fit for the "human complexity" presented by Caught Out of Time.]
Goodbye Herman Cain. You will be missed.
Unable to weather repeated charges of sexual harassment and infidelity, the Herman Cain train has finally gone off the tracks. Yet, even by the unique and unconventional standards of the 2012 Republican presidential primary field, Herman Cain was a spectacle and one with a unique advantage.
I signaled to Herman Cain’s potential in February 2011 in a controversial essay on here on Alternet, where after his break-out speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, I described it as a race minstrel-like performance. There, with everything but blackface cork, Cain channeled his dead black grand pappy with a semi-literate Southern drawl, told white folks that racism is a fiction (and that they are in fact the real victims of bigotry in the Age of Obama), and validated a belief that black people like Herman Cain those who don’t complain, make trouble, or participate in the Civil Rights Movement are the way forward.
In total, Herman Cain was a fantasy projection and type of racism shield, an Anti-Obama, who could soothe the anxieties of racially resentful white conservatives. While Cain’s shtick did not rise to the level of comedian David Chappelle’s character Clayton Bigsby, black white supremacist; it was, in many ways, a genius performance. He was Sarah Palin mated with the Boondocks.
At the time, I was widely criticized for daring to suggest that Herman Cain was channeling such an offensive stereotype. My analysis proved prescient. In time, other observers either borrowed the meme, or were clearly inspired by it.
Unfortunately, many of those who ran with my suggestion that Herman Cain was performing as a race minstrel for the pleasures of his white conservative public, did not understand the depth of the claim. I was not trying to engage in name calling, or to get a snicker from the public, by calling attention to Herman Cain’s racially infused Tomfoolery. Rather, my deeper point was that Herman Cain’s race minstrel performance was a carefully crafted means towards an end.
Herman Cain was the mouthpiece for the unrepentant id of the New Right. He could advocate for the most extreme aspects of their ideology behind a mask of black incompetence, and down home mannerisms, that could potentially protect him from criticism. In addition, conservatives could deploy the race card at will to defend their chosen son: Herman Cain was a black cheerleader who could advance some of their most onerous and extreme policy positions.
The Herman Cain New Age Race Minstrel Show ended in the only way that it could. In keeping with the routine, Cain was brought down by his own arrogance and narcissism. He had grand plans and schemes that he could not fulfill. Because the race minstrel was a white supremacist fantasy that embodied fears about African American’s citizenship and freedom in the aftermath of the Civil War, he was a bumbling fool, and an incompetent who was not fit for democracy. And of course, the race minstrel lacked impulse control. His libido and craven pursuit of white women what was an unattainable prize would be his ultimate undoing.
From his willful embrace of ignorance on matters of foreign policy, a “9-9-9″ tax policy cobbled together by secret advisers (and likely borrowed from a videogame), dreams of electrified fences and moats to kill illegal immigrants, rampant and almost cartoon-like levels of Islamophobia and Christian nationalism, whistling Dixie demagoguing of blacks who are not Republicans as being on a plantation, and of course his purported propensity for sexual harassment and adulterous behavior, Herman Cain played the role of race minstrel for the Tea Party GOP with aplomb and zest.
In all, the Herman Cain candidacy was a thing of ugly beauty. Cain began his presidential primary run with the priceless and under-used phrase “awww…shucky ducky,” seasoned it with a spiritual sung at the National Press Club, and offered a funereal oratory for his campaign that concluded with a quote from the Pokemon cartoon series.
Herman Cain caught lightning in a bottle. He combined the worst aspects of Tyler Perry’s various TV and film exercises in black buffoonery, the denigrating humor of Amos N’ Andy, and the tropes of 19th century race minstrelsy into one show. While some observers will try to divine some deep and symbolic meaning about race in the Age of Obama from Herman Cain’s brief and shining moment in the 2012 Republican primaries, the lesson here, is in fact, more basic. Give people what they want. In this case, the white populists in the Republican Party wanted a black man who told them that they are not racists, Jim Crow wasn’t that bad, and “our blacks” are better than “those other” blacks who happen to be Democrats.
Herman Cain, master of the racial authenticity game, fashioned himself as a real black man as compared to President Barack Obama. He reminded his audience of this fact at every opportunity. They lapped it up. Sadly for Herman Cain, just as Michael Steele and other black conservatives learned long ago, the love and affection of the White Right is instrumental, and the devotion to their mascots is temporary, with a limited shelf-life.
As of Saturday, Herman Cain was barely the flavor of the month. Black Walnut has melted; Cornbread is now stale; it is time to go home or perhaps begin a second career as a traveling bluesman and motivational speaker, for Herman Cain’s unlikely saga as a 2012 Republican presidential primary candidate has yielded more than enough material to last a lifetime.
Internet celebrities and the pundit classes are tussling with one another about the apparent rediscovery of the (rightfully) much maligned book the Bell Curve, and its broader claims about the relationship between race and I.Q.
The story so far: Andrew Sullivan of The Daily Beast offered some comments on a piece featured on Alternet regarding the need for pure research, and how one should not avoid uncomfortable scientific findings for reasons of political correctness. Ta-Nehisi Coates chimed in, there he offered a series of great posts on how for some folks these matters are indeed personal, and exist outside of some faux commitment to methodological and scientific positivism. All parties involved have been kind to WARN. Consequently, I decided to do like George Clinton with Parliament, and to just sit back, nod my head, and vibe with the exchange.
A few folks emailed me regarding my opinion on the race-science-I.Q. fracas. I always try to respond when readers have a query–it makes me feel important; and what is blogging if not an exercise in gross narcissism? To point, my thoughts on this matter are as follows…
****
As a member of the hip hop generation who came of age in the 1990s, I thought these matters of race and I.Q. were settled. In the year 2011, I remain surprised that anyone would take such quackery with any measure of seriousness.
Let’s take a trip down memory lane for a moment. We should not forget that the Bell Curve was a shocking book at the time of its release, as this explains much of the current upset over Andrew Sullivan’s observations about race and I.Q. testing.
In the United States, the period of the early to mid 1990s was highly charged political. Black nationalism was being rediscovered through hip hop, Farrakhan and others were frequently featured on the evening news and the Donahue Show, New York and Los Angeles were sweltering with inter-racial tensions, Buchanan and Duke were flying their racist bonafides as mainstream figures in the Republican Party, and Angry White Men like Rush Limbaugh were blowing up the public discourse.
The Bell Curve hit hard because it was “scientific” (i.e. it had numbers and figures). Moreover, the “finding” that African Americans were biologically defective, supported claims by the Conservatives and New Democrats about social disorganization, the ghetto underclass, black “pathologies,” and the undeserving poor. On a macro-level, the Bell Curve was a “scientific” complement to the onward march of neoliberalism, the continuance of the Reagan regime’s assault on the State, and Bill Clinton’s promise to end welfare as “we know it.”
The Bell Curve, was also a proverbial slap to the face of the black professional classes–as well as politically active and engaged college students–who saw themselves at the vanguard of a new black politics, had helped to bring down Apartheid, and were now rediscovering Brother Malcolm and his claims on racial justice and black respectability.
Ultimately, the race science hustle of the Bell Curve flamed out. The book’s methods and data were eviscerated, and its authors shamed by most mainstream social scientists and other researchers. However, the pain caused by that book still remains, as it is part of a long history of pseudoscience which has advanced white supremacy both in the United States and abroad.
As this often comes up in my classes, I shake my head at any claims about the relationship between I.Q. and race. The variables, and measures, used in support of those types of arguments, are specious and poorly constructed. Race itself is a social category with no fixed attributes. Intelligence is contextual. The history of I.Q. tests are so burdened by a foundation of eugenics and phrenology (which included such absurd practices as the weighing of human brains), that the legacy and context of “intelligence testing” should raise an immediate, Mr. Spock-like eyebrow, for all critical thinkers.
There is a slippery slope here. If we are going to entertain some link between I.Q. and race, we might as well keep searching for the Jewish gene for intelligence, or taking posture photos of the entering freshman class at universities such as Yale and Harvard.
As my colleagues who study educational testing and psychology tell me, while extreme outliers on I.Q. tests do in fact “tell us something,” the gross aggregate of I.Q. data is a function of education, wealth, access to resources, and cultural/social capital. I.Q. tests measure these variables; they do not capture some universal type of absolute intelligence.
In all, these debates about I.Q. and race are fascinating, in so far as they reveal how so many folks still believe that science is “neutral.” To borrow from Foucault, science is part of a regime of truth and knowledge; it serves certain interests, goals, social arrangements, and power. Science as a field, practice, and pursuit, legitimates certain relationships between categories of people, and types of personhood. Science has not been, and likely never will be, a process that is not value-laden.
Or as the legendary W.E.B. DuBois put so well, why should there be any surprise that white scientists would come up with a test that repeated and inevitably showed black people to be intellectually deficient? I call such work “piss poor.” DuBois was more kind. He labeled it “utter rot.”
As always, history is the greatest teacher on these matters. And these Internets are indeed a treasure trove of information:
1. The U.S. military was deeply involved in I.Q. testing during World War One. Their result was a predictable one: black Americans were ill-suited for combat, cowardly, and not fit to be officers. According to these tests, while white enlistees had an average mental age of 13, blacks were only 10 years old. Reality causes upset here: World War One, the exploits of such units as the Harlem Hellfighters, and non-white colonials in the service of France, muddied up the race-science-I.Q. triad. So how did the white, race science hustlers, get around these findings…
2. Working through the logic of the I.Q. race game is great sport. When black northerners outscored white southerners on these test, the outcome is either conveniently ignored, or an explanation is offered that the I.Q. test is still valid, but the sample is skewed because all of the smart negroes went North while the mass of the negro population is still sub-standard intellectually. In these moments, the white supremacist agenda of the I.Q. race practitioners is made naked and clear: they reasoned backwards from their findings to justify their own in-group superiority. Funny, if the consequences were not so sad.
3. The actual tests from the early to mid 20th century are rich textual examples of how intelligence is local, socially constructed, and a function of other variables–as opposed to something inherent, innate, and fixed. Here is an example of one of the intelligence tests used by the U.S. Army that justified a Jim Crow military (as well as restrictive immigration policies against those Southern and Eastern Europeans judged to be of “undesirable” stock):
Imagine you are in a large examination room. An examiner and demonstrator stand at the front of the room, and orderlies around the room in various places to check that nobody is cheating. Here are the instructions, following which the printed test page is presented to the men being examined.‘This is test 6 here. Look. A Lot of Pictures … Now watch.’ Examiner points to hand [picture with one finger missing] and says to demonstrator, ‘Fix it’. Demonstrator then draws a finger. Demonstrator does nothing, but looks puzzled. Examiner points to the picture of the hand, and then the place where the finger is missing and says to the demonstrator, ‘Fix it; fix it’. Demonstrator then draws in a figure. Examiner says, ‘That’s right’ … During the course of this test the orderlies walk around the room and locate individuals who are doing nothing, point to their pages and say, ‘Fix them, fix them’, trying to set everyone working. At the end of 3 minutes, the examiner says, ‘Stop! But don’t turn over the page.’
Stephen Jay Gould sums up the results of the test, administered to over one million people:
[T]hree ‘facts’ rose to the top and continued to influence social policy in America long after their source in the tests had been forgotten.
1. The average mental age of white American adults stood just above the edge of moronity at a shocking and meager thirteen … The … figure became a rallying point for eugenicists who predicted doom and lamented our declining intelligence, caused by the unconstrained breeding of the poor and feeble-minded, the spread of Negro blood through miscegenation, and the swamping of an intelligent native stock by the immigrating dregs of southern and eastern Europe.
2. European immigrants can be graded by their country of origin. The average man of many nations is a moron. The darker peoples of southern Europe and the Slavs of eastern Europe are less intelligent than the fair peoples of western and northern Europe. Nordic supremacy is not a jingoistic prejudice. The average Russian has a mental age of 11.34; the Italian, 11.01; the Pole, 10.74 …
3. The Negro lies at the bottom of the scale with an average mental age 10.41. Some camps tried to carry the analysis a bit further, and in obvious racist directions. At Camp Lee, blacks were divided into three groups based upon intensity of color; the lighter groups scored higher …
4. Pushing back is fun. In the 1970s, Professor Robert Williams, a magisterial and accomplished man, turned the tables on the academics and scientists who advocated for the use of I.Q. tests to rank and place children in schools. Featured in a great episode of the sitcom Good Times, the BITCH test (or Black Intelligence Test for Cultural Homogeneity) made clear how these questions of innate ability and smarts are anything but.
Take the BITCH test and see how well you do. Are you a high achiever? Or are you on the lower end of the BITCH distribution?
High comedy: so Ginger White’s business partner preferred to date black men, but she disliked black women’s hair. Hmmmm…the plot thickens. How twisted indeed is the intimate relationship between blacks and whites, feet intertwined mid-coitus on the cotton bale, but the mystery of the hair has too much symbolic weight to overcome?
What a sick society we are; white supremacy truly is a poison that has hurt us all.
If the visitor logs to my site We Are Respectable Negroes are any indication, there are many people who are curious as to the race of Herman Cain’s “mistress” Miss Ginger White. As a service, I will try to offer some guidance on this most vexing and pressing issue of public concern.
First things first, there is only one race of people on this blue marble called planet Earth (allowing for hobbits and Neanderthals), and that is the human race.
Clarifications aside, in our contemporary nomenclature while she may be light, bright, and damn near white (as the expression goes), Ginger White is a black woman.
As a student of race, and a keen practitioner of “race science,” her features, habitus, and “energy” are dead giveaways to my eye.
Does she claim the tribe? I do not know.
Yes, there is a long history of passing in the black community (as well as in others too).
Could Ginger White play that game and slip by the hypodescent rule, crossing over to whiteness in New Orleans, and dancing at an octoroon ball? Damn straight. Could she go to Latin America or Brazil and reverse the one-drop rule, where any bit of “white” ancestry makes you anything but “black?” Absolutely.
Could Ginger White move to New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles and reinvent herself as a “white woman,” turning her back on her kin and people? Yes. It happened all of the time.
Folk wisdom and life experience are also good aids in matters related to the race game. I asked my mother, a black woman from the South, about Herman Cain’s habits. She said months ago that he was a womanizer and had an “arrangement” with his wife. I ask moms if she thought Ginger White was black. She laughed and reminded me that a man of Herman Cain’s age and social background would see a “high yellow,” and “damn near” white woman who had “good hair” as the ultimate prize. He would mess around with a white woman, but Cain would keep a light-skinned woman as his status symbol.
Commonsense goes a long way on these matters. It can also be easily deceived and tricked. So folks, what clues do you use to win the “guess what box to put this racially ambiguous person in” game? Is it their energy and way? Skin color? Cues and hints in speech? Other tricks?
And when we play this game, we are often wrong. One, either because said person refuses to acknowledge their racial group, and gets upset when “outed.” Or two, our lens is just off, and sometimes we encounter a person whose lineage we just can’t place.
Do tell, I bet you have some legendary faux pas to report…all players in the race game do.
Blacks have historically suffered the income inequality and job scarcity that the Wall Street protesters are now railing against. Perhaps black America’s absence is sending a message to the Occupiers: “We told you so! Nothing will change. We’ve been here already. It’s hopeless.”
The Scooby Doo mystery about the relationship between race and the OWS movement continues…
The Washington Post is jumping on the bandwagon with their own version of the game Where is Waldo?, with an opinion piece by Stacey Patton entitled, “Why African Americans Aren’t Embracing Occupy Wall Street.”
This penetrating essay, written by a memoirist, citing a comedian named “Alter-Negro” as an expert source, offering up a conspiracy between cable, cell phone, cigarette, and liquor companies to depoliticize the black leadership class in service to the interests of corporate America, commenting on the predatory evils of commercial hip hop, and pondering if the black church has lost all political and moral authority, is a fun read.
It is not a deep political analysis; nor is Patton particularly insightful as she takes a shotgun approach to the relationship between race and OWS.
[A question: who gets to determine the minimum threshold for when the Occupy Wall Street Movement is sufficiently "diverse?" Is there a census, a quota, a barometer, do we have to read tea leaves and chicken bones to know when this magical moment has occurred?]
However, her essay is useful as an entry point for working through why black folks have not flocked to OWS in mass.
Thus, some working working questions and hypotheses:
1. Jaded, well-earned, cynicism. Where was OWS, and the white folks who make up its base, when black and brown people were catching hell this last decade? If OWS is so concerned about a broken economy and a general sense of grievance about austerity and government retrenchment, many, if not most, were deaf of ear to the concerns of people of color, specifically, and the poor, more generally, on such issues as police brutality, predatory banking and mortgage practices, wage stagnation, and a broken labor market. Why should black Americans be expected to ally with people who appeared to be none too concerned with these issues, until they, quite literally, hit home?
2. Exhaustion. Black folks have been either 1) at the forefront of social and political change in this country, or 2) their struggles have served as models for organizing and resistance by other groups. Perhaps, now is the time for white Americans to carry the weight.
3. Common sense. Black folks don’t want to go to jail, understand that their interests are not served by a racist criminal (in)justice system, and know that they will be treated differently by police, judges, and the State, than the (relatively) privileged white folks who make up the backbone of the OWS movement.
4. The failure of the black political leadership class. In the post-Civil Rights era, black political elites have struggled with obsolescence. Many are trying to get their shine back by connecting their glorious struggles of decades past to those of the OWS movement. But, are the models of black political mobilization from the 1950s and 1960s going to upset power, and create social and political change, in the Age of Obama?
5. Experience and vision. Black folks have seen this all before. We know that OWS ends with a whimper and not a bang. Thus, given the perils of the economy, a general sense of instability and political malaise, and a wisdom born of experience, many in the black community are getting ready for what comes two or three steps down the road. As Stacy Patton smartly alludes to, since black Americans have long known that the game is rigged, we are not at all surprised by the Great Recession and the new Gilded Age.
White Americans necessarily bought into a lie as they earned the wages of whiteness. Now, the emptiness of the bargain is exposed. White America simply does not have the political maturity, one born of experience and struggle, that is common to black and brown people in this country. Now they are waking up. Perhaps, White America should put on its critical thinking-political swaddling clothes all by itself? Hope may be born from this experience: White folks may not develop a Blues Sensibility, but maybe, just maybe, they can develop a whee bit of an ear for the sorrow songs.
6. A function of numbers. The percentage of a given population who participates in any type of organized political behavior is not large. The percentage of a given population who participates in political behavior that can be described as “civil disobedience” is rather minuscule. For example, social scientists suggest that the tipping point for an idea to become infectious, and then spread throughout a society, is that approximately 10 percent of a population must buy-in. Yes, just 10 percent.
By implication, and allowing for the indifferent, most folks are free riders who assume that this rather numerically small number of voices speak for the mass public. Ultimately, OWS is comprised of a minority of the general population. To expect African Americans and other people of color to participate in mass–what is a minority of a minority–is unrealistic, and a false barometer for how “diverse” the OWS movement actually is.
7. A thought on strategy and realpolitik. Perhaps, OWS is best served by being a group comprised of the upset, momentarily disenfranchised, and alienated privileged classes? Given the deep linkages in the white popular imagination between black people and “unAmerican” political radicalism, perhaps OWS will be more effective precisely to the degree that it is perceived as speaking for the silent majority–a group that by definition excludes black Americans?
How do you explain the lack of diversity in the OWS movement? Or are these concerns based on a false premise, i.e. that OWS is in fact “diverse,” but the media and the pundit classes are looking in the wrong places, invested in marginalizing the movement?
What hypotheses would you offer to explain the relative lack of participation by black people, other racial minorities, and the white poor, in OWS? How would you correct this dynamic?
Occupy Wall Street and the hundreds of occupations it has sparked nationwide are among the most inspiring events in the U.S. in the 21st century. The occupations have brought together people to talk, occupy, and organize in new and exciting ways. The convergence of so many people with so many concerns has naturally created tensions within the occupation movement. One of the most significant tensions has been over race.
This is not unusual, given the racial history of the United States. But this tension is particularly dangerous, for unless it is confronted, we cannot build the 99%. The key obstacle to building the 99% is left colorblindness, and the key to overcoming it is to put the struggles of communities of color at the center of this movement. It is the difference between a free world and the continued dominance of the 1%.
In my research and writing on the relationship(s) between race, power, inequality, and political culture, I often reference Joel Olson’s concept of “white democracy.” A complement to Joe Feagin’s white racial frame, white democracy is a deceptively simple construct, with much explanatory power, and offers a theoretical lens that neatly groups together many other (seemingly disparate) findings.
Olson’s piece on whiteness, the OWS movement, and white privilege is meme worthy, and as such, deserves as wide an audience as possible. “Whiteness and the 99%” is dispassionate; this is its strength. The essay is also wonderfully transparent as it grapples with white privilege, the Left, and liberal racism, in a way that is provocative, yet accessible.
As I am fond of saying, I don’t have time to hold the hands of white folks and do any teaching about how they should get their house in order. Olson, as a member of the tribe, is imminently more patient and kind.
To that end, he smartly crystallizes the problem of white privilege and the OWS movement down to several key points.
Olson suggests that liberal colorblindness does the work of white privilege, and by implication, white supremacy. White democracy is real. The racial state is not an aberration in American history, rather it is the norm. Liberal colorblindness is given life through the white racial frame. This creates a “distorted white mindset” which sees the interests of people of color as “special” and “particular,” while the interests of white folks are deemed “normal”:
Left colorblindness is the belief that race is a “divisive” issue among the 99%, so we should instead focus on problems that “everyone” shares. According to this argument, the movement is for everyone, and people of color should join it rather than attack it.
Left colorblindness claims to be inclusive, but it is actually just another way to keep whites’ interests at the forefront. It tells people of color to join “our” struggle (who makes up this “our,” anyway?) but warns them not to bring their “special” concerns into it. It enables white people to decide which issues are for the 99% and which ones are “too narrow.” It’s another way for whites to expect and insist on favored treatment, even in a democratic movement.
As long as left colorblindness dominates our movement, there will be no 99%. There will instead be a handful of whites claiming to speak for everyone. When people of color have to enter a movement on white people’s terms rather than their own, that’s not the 99%. That’s white democracy.
Olson’s latter point is a neat reframing and statement of what critical race theorists and others have described as white/liberal “universalism,” wherein the interests of whites (as the in-group) go uncommented upon and uninterrogated because they are a “given.” Consequently, the interests of White people, and Whiteness more generally, are not framed in terms of race. The irony is rich: Whiteness and White people do of course have racialized group interests–American history is a testament to this fact–they simply do not name them as such.
Like Olson, I too have similar worries about OWS. I am happy to see organic efforts such as Occupy the Hood, and moves by local groups to make issues of identity and racialized power more central to the OWS agenda. Nevertheless, I remain concerned that white group interests, white experiences, white politics, white understandings of the good life, white history, white humanity, and white concerns, remain normalized by OWS.
To counter this tendency towards a de facto embrace of white privilege as the status quo ante, Olson concludes “Whiteness and the 99%” with a set of helpful questions which challenge the OWS movement to remove their White (and middle class) blinders. He suggests that OWS should:
Occupy everything, attack the white democracy
While no pamphlet can capture everything a nationwide movement can or should do to undermine the white democracy and left colorblindness, below is a short list of questions people might consider asking in movement debates. These questions were developed from actual debates in occupations throughout the U.S.
Do speakers urge us “get beyond” race? Are they defensive and dismissive of demands for racial justice?
If speakers urge developing “close working relationships with the police,” do they consider how police terrorize Black, Latino, Native, and undocumented communities? Do they consider how police have attacked occupation encampments?
If speakers urge us to hold banks accountable, do they encourage us to focus on redlining, predatory lending, and subprime mortgages, which have decimated Black and Latino neighborhoods?
If speakers urge the cancellation of debts, do they mean for things like electric and heating bills as well as home mortgages and college loans?
If speakers urge the halting of foreclosures, do they acknowledge that they take place primarily in segregated neighborhoods, and do they propose to start there?
If speakers urge the creation of more jobs, do they acknowledge that many communities of color have already been in chronic “recessions” for decades, and do they propose to start from there?
These are challenging questions that could serve as powerful rubrics for decision-making and agenda setting.
As is my habit, some questions in the interest of sharing:
For those on the front lines of the OWS movement, are Olson’s suggestions being heeded? Would they be met with a positive response? Is OWS actively interrogating white privilege?
Or are the knee jerk, “it’s about class and not race” ideologues, limiting the conversation, and enforcing their own version of political correctness which marginalizes the broader interests and concerns of black and brown people?
