Race in America: J's Manties in a Bunch, responding to D

This post responds to a post by J-Fave Daktari here.

Wherein I kind of lose it a little bit, and hope that it's still clear that I hold D in the utmost regard, it's just an issue that got my goat, and then got my goat's panties in a bunch. --J

Wow. I'm kind of surprised to read this from you at this point, D. Sooooo many things. I agree with you that Carmen VK's racial identification is imprecise, but racial identification is by nature (as you point out) imprecise. Many, many countries have considered themselves to be races unto themselves, and they can't be said to be wrong any more than they're right.

"There have been times when I have thought that these shifting ideas about what to call POC was merely a way to prevent white Americans from having any sort of voice in the race discussion. As long as you can shout down the majority group by making them feel prejudiced for daring to open their mouths, you own the direction and tenor of the discussion. Bad form, I say."

My jaw HIT the floor here. Let us say, at best, I think you over-estimate the extent to which "People of Color" think/care about what the majority does. That is, while "proper" identity terms have been at times used quite certainly to make others feel prejudiced, I would basically scream out loud that that is not why they were developed. They were developed, in my educated amateur-ish opinion, because after black Americans finally got a fucking VOTE in what we would be called by majority culture, which was only 40+ years ago, we had and have trouble figuring out what it should be. It shifts constantly as we try to find our identity constantly, and debate what we want to emphasize, own, spurn, celebrate, face up to in terms of the willy-nilly thing that is "black culture" in the US. Race, and culture, are impossible to precisely define, but I would definitely say there is a "pole" around which the African-American/black culture centers, and a "pole" for majoritarian culture, primarily the culture of those who don't necessarily have to give explicit thought to race. (There are of course many other poles, especially for the other large racial minorities, but let's confine ourselves for the moment.) That is to say, and I'm trying not to be shrill here, but honey, the terms black, Negro, Colored, African American, Afro-American, Black-American and others are not about you. We're not shifting around to annoy you (the bulk you--majoritarian culture), we're shifting around because we want a term that will do the impossible.

Let me give you a brief parallel: so, I work on food. I recently listened to a talk by the fantastic manager of the Toronto Food Policy Council, Wayne Roberts. He pointed out that the term "food security" lacked an immediacy and confused people, especially post-9/11. The accepted definition of food security is something like "access by all people at all times to enough and appropriate food for a healthy and active lifestyle", but post-9/11 people think more in terms of "secure from attack." Hunger and malnutrition are neither sufficient because they don't inherently entail the issue of access (the prevalent, by far, cause of hunger/malnutrition/food insecurity); food sovereignty is a growing term but lacks common currency in the Global North, over-emphasizes an ideal of the nation-state, isn't clear as to what group is the appropriate unit of "sovereignty", etc. Similar problems evolve from "food democracy." All this is to say, there is no one term that can encompass what we need to encompass within food justice circles. We can't all agree, and the terms in favor shift all the time. We're not doing this, certainly, to keep people from understanding or speaking about food. We're doing it because it's impossible to have the "one right term." The same is true, if not more so, for terms for racial groups.

Then you go into the "we're all human" and "we're all mixed race" and "we're all out of Africa." Well, those things are all true, but the years of research debunking a deep biological meaning for race simply mean that its primary importance and meaning comes from the social. And just because something is socially defined doesn't mean it's not real, it's just different in kind than a strict biophysical property. "Race" is a social construct; but then so are the identities "Christian", "Hindu", "Atheist" "Agnostic" "Democrat" "Republican" "Anarchist" "Bat-shit Crazy Follower of Ayn Rand's Fucked Up Ideas." Yet we'd never argue that "there's no such thing as Christians", or "look, all religious beliefs and lack thereof originate from humanity's inability to know and understand everything; I'm going to say we're ALL agnostic because all faith or conviction against faith hinges on the problem of 'a-gnostia' (the word I think I just made up meaning "a state of not-knowing")".

I mean, yes, of course it's important for us to emphasize, identify with, realize and cherish our shared humanity. And race is not all-defining and should not be; even under slavery, race was not *all* that a human being was, master or slave (though it did determine, if you were a slave, nearly all of how you would be seen by others one could argue). The fact that we share a common ancestor is relatively immaterial to all this, because as you imply the biology of it all is a red herring.

By debunking the red herring, you haven't really said much about the actual import of the situation I'm afraid. Tiger's deal is a complicated one, and the race aspect originates in a combination of internalization/indoctrination and earlier solidarity. That is, the rules under slavery were "one drop of black blood makes you black". Impossible to enforce in real life, of course, but certainly true in terms of if a black ancestor could be reasonably identified for you, you were automatically not white. If you were fair-skinned and, say, had some kind of social status, and it wasn't your father or mother but perhaps grand or great-grand that was black, you might hold onto not being a slave or total second-class citizen. But first class was closed to you.

Well, a couple hundred years of that attitude, and African Americans/black (which I use interchangeably for blacks within the US) internalized a lot of it. Self-policing means that if you have, let us say, "some drops", and (primarily these days) some subset of typically black phenotypes, you are considered "black." There is/has been a lot of push-back from mixed race people, but let us remember that openly mixed-race kids has only stopped being of some significant degree of social note in your own lifetime, I'd think.[Addition: Outside of this internalization, "claiming" mixed race individuals as black was in part solidarity and strategy, I think, as also until relatively recently, being identifiably mixed race was almost as much of a problem/stigma as being black. So mixed race children were forced to live the social experience of their black parents to some extent, both while they were raised and to an extent as adults I would think; identifying as black was a statement of solidarity, and a strategy in coalition-building to fight all racial prejudice. Beyond that, claiming mixed race people as "black" allowed blacks to point to many successful African Americans as role models and counter-examples for our supposed inferiority. But many, many of the early successful African Americans were mixed -- their success came in part from either "passing" as white, or from advantages gained from, say, a white father who supported his mixed-race kids with one of his slaves. But once they had achieved great things, through either mechanism, it was useful and quite sensical to say, both for the sake of our own role models and to "prove" something to majority culture -- "See! You see! Black people CAN do that; we ARE as smart, as capable! Your own standards say one drop of black blood makes you black; well look at him/her! Black, powerful and proud!" The rhetorical usefulness of this quite drops if you start talking about mixed race explicitly, beyond which, since race *is* more social than biological, it makes perfect sense in that atmosphere to claim mixed-race people, who would've been equally discriminated against where they could be identified, as black. Since it's socially constructed, they were black, because they were treated as such.-end Addition]

As far as "I read a recent blog post on Feministing wherein people say that if a minority calls me an epithet, it's just being rude, but if I call a minority an epithet, it's a hate crime, I wonder how f*#@'d up our ideas about race have really become", I thought we'd already had this conversation. But in any case, something well reflecting of my opinion of this is here and I address it directly here. I'm heavily indebted to this essay by Stanley Fish. I disagree with much in the article, but not with the overall point here: "The hostility of the other group is the result of [racist] actions, and whereas hostility and racial anger are unhappy facts wherever they are found, a distinction must surely be made between the ideological hostility of the oppressors and the experience-based hostility of those who have been oppressed." The details of this formulation may be more arguable in a world where oppression is more subtle, but its substantial truth, I think, remains.

It seems to me your panties got rightly in a knot over some of the foolishness around Tiger. That foolishness, however, doesn't invalidate all race, just as the East Anglia data set debacle doesn't invalidate Global Climate Change. We may be much closer to a world where "Money and fame make everyone colorblind", but we are not there. Money and fame makes a lot appear colorblind, and we are perhaps closer to that than the world of the joke

Ques: "What do you call a black, Harvard-educated bank president?"
Ans: "A nigger";

but we are no more wholly in the wealth & fame colorblind world than we are wholly in the one of the joke.

Frank Ricci: Firefighter, Successful Supreme Court Litigant... Serial Suer?

Dahlia Lithwick writes at Slate about Frank Ricci's penchant for filing suits over jobs. In what might be irrelevant background, a pattern of sour grapes, or a person "repeatedly victimized by a cruel cadre of employers, first for his dyslexia, then again for his role as a whistle-blower, and then a third time for just being white," the recent victor along with the others of Ricci v. DeStefano also just might be "a serial plaintiff—one who reacts to professional slights and setbacks by filing suit, threatening to file suit, and more or less complaining his way up the chain of command." Ricci, who will testify during Judge Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings, is, as Lithwick says, thus "not the typical GOP heartthrob." The GOP's stance on discrimination lawsuits seems to be along the lines of J-Friend Dan's philosophy of complaining. As he once said: "I don't believe in complaining about things you can't do anything about. On the other hand, I don't really believe in complaining about all the other stuff either." Switch "complaining" with "lawsuits" and you have the Republican philosophy, or its seeming one, regarding lawsuits for rights infringements (see their repeated attacks on tort lawyers and all that rigmarole).

Lithwick's piece is little more than a trifle, though it certainly paints Ricci in a different light (whether or not that's a fair different light is a different conversation) and makes one wonder why this wasn't brought up before now? Surely, this wasn't just discovered. And like I say, it might be irrelevant, but it could've been a choice part of the discourse anyway, considering how much the focus was on "being fair" to Ricci and his colleagues, who "earned" their promotions based on the standards given, regardless of whether the standards were the best ones to evaluate people with or were discriminatory as such Title VII was heretofore determined.

Firefighting in black and white: More on Ricci v. DeStefano (aka the New Haven Firefighter Case)

This continues an earlier J-Continuum/Anekantavada discussion about the discrimination case before the Supreme Court of Ricci v. DeStefano. Again on Slate, an article does a pretty good job covering a lot of the relevant territory. Although I won't get into it now in any depth, a couple of facts together seem to me to point to why the city got it right in throwing out test results and denying promotions to everyone from that round of testing (i.e. mostly white, one Hispanic, and no Black promotions would have resulted):

a) In their entries, Allan and Bazelon lay out a still-common history and present of discrimination against minority firefighters, such that majority Hispanic and Black neighborhoods have had and often still have majority white firefighting forces, and even further, have stratification such that the supervisory levels are quite disproportionately white, along with

b) In this case, the white firefighters are predominantly from almost-totally white neighborhoods (~95% white) outside of the city they serve, New Haven, while the minority firefighters are mostly residents of the city. In entry exams, city residents get a slight (5%) advantage, on supervisory applications, there is no preference for those who live in-city. (It seems to me that living in the place you serve as a civil servant is a logical thing to preference for, if not require or distinctly advantage -- there's something to debate here, but I think you should be an explicit member of the civic community you supposedly serve for a variety of reasons, and the very least, this should likely be preferenced/encouraged in perhaps positive-incentive ways if it were not to be required). Further, in this specific case, allegedly some of the white firefighters "joke on the phone about 'working in the ghetto.' [Black, female New Haven Firefighter Erika Bogan asked] 'How dare you, when you live in Madison or Guilford, come in here and take our money and go back to your communities and talk shit about New Haven?'" I don't know that this has entered the case, but such casual disdain -- even as a joke -- speaks poorly of a white "civil servant" who doesn't even live in the place he's "serving." (It just compounds the problematicness of the whole thing -- at least if he lived in the "ghetto" he'd have the social "right to speak" ill of it by being a part of the community, rather than an "outsider" ridiculing it.)

c) The tests were based almost wholly on memorization and technical details of firefighting, items which don't even (apparently) apply to the majority of cases faced by the New Haven dept. (which are emergency calls, often medical in nature, according to the article). In other words, the tests don't have an apparent relationship with the actual on-the-job performances and requirements of firefighting in New Haven.

d) The firefighter's union chose to support Ricci (the white firefighter), despite accepting dues from all the firefighters, of all races; when a court ruled they couldn't back Ricci in court, they still spent union funds supporting his case, despite protestations (and an impending suit) from Black firefighters. This seems to me to constitute another form of institutional bias; it clearly should've sat out of this case in this manner, attempting to see the interests of all of its members. (One could argue it sees this supposedly "neutral" test to be in the interest of all of its members, but when the vote went straight down racial lines, it seems to me paternalistic and institutionally (i.e. not individually or purposefully) racist to then honor the requests of the majority-white vote.

e) The way the test was designed and conducted -- little input or review by outside experts (to avoid potential cheating, apparently) and out of step with what appears to be best practices in many other municipalities -- seems to me to further indicate the possibility of systematic unfairness and, importantly, to indicate that it is not necessarily the best way to determine promotability. This is one of the cornerstones of the "disparate impacts" bit of discrimination law -- if there's a better way to assess ability that is less likely to affect races differently, then (from my lay interpretation) it appears the city did the right thing in vacating the test.

f) Scalia apparently said at oral argument that he doubts the city would've done the same thing had the situation been reversed and almost exclusively black firefighters got promoted. ARGH. That just sounds so FUCKING ignorant to me. For one thing, that seems unlikely -- actually, if someone can point out an example of that happening, I'd like to know, because the very fact that all blacks doing better than all whites on a job exam seems to be rare if not non-existent points to me to the persistent and lingering problems of institutional racism, which is the very spur for the city's interpretation of the law that Ricci is challenging. Besides which, if that happened, wouldn't the white firefighters seem likely to challenge it? And wouldn't they, perhaps, have a point? One cannot simultaneously maintain that the white firefighters would be right to challenge the results in that case, and that they are right to challenge it in this case, without the logical implication that the point is that the white firefighters are entitled to do better automatically. And the white firefighters would likely be right to challenge it should the results have been nearly all-black. And if the city's behavior in THAT case would possibly be illegal, it is possibly illegal in this case. To be logically consistent, if he's going to find for Ricci in this case, Scalia would have to think that a case where only blacks were promoted would be prima facie legal, I think. (Despite the Latin, I'm not making a specific legal claim since I know nothing about the practice of law.) Bottom line: that sounds potentially discriminatory to me. In the end, this objection sounds suspiciously like "Oh, the city is just too obsessed with promoting BLACK PEOPLE," which is a stone's throw from "Political Correctness is ruining us all" and a good ways down the road, but on the same road, as calling them "Nigger lovers." Really, Scalia just disgusts me with that (though I know that's in part visceral and not logical, but it still, to me, trades on racial anxiety in a deceitful way.)

Anyway, I actually did talk at length about all that. Ooops. Time for showering and eating and writing actual academic work.

So, I'll leave off here with a quote from what seems to me to be a (rare) exceptional bit of writing from Slate (and an exception to much of Bazelon's recent production, despite my overall fondness for her as a writer based on memories of articles I liked long ago):

To young black firefighters like Mike Neal and Erika Bogan, that sounds like a solution. "We want to be on a level playing field," Neal says. "We want everything to be given to us on our merits." Ricci's group, on the other hand, feel as if they've already earned their promotions based on merit. They did what the city told them to. It's hard to imagine how they'll feel right about starting all over again.

Neal and Bogan's conception of merit is different from Frank Ricci's. It's easy to see why. Ever since the test results came out, the black Firebirds and the white plaintiffs have had opposing interests. Stretching back further in time, back over the decades, the two groups also see the history of the department through a different lens. For Frank Ricci, the past is a story of ethnic heritage and family pride. For Mike Neal and Erika Bogan, it's a story about breaking the lock on hiring that kept their people out.

Maybe promotions based on an assessment center would serve the city better, in the long-run, by testing for the abilities fire captains and lieutenants most need. Or maybe there are just a lot of firefighters well-qualified to do these jobs and a scant number of openings. "It seems like guys on both sides of the line feel like they've been cheated, like there just aren't enough positions to go around," says William Gould, the white captain. He supports Frank Ricci. But he can see what this fight looks like from the other side. If New Haven could start over, maybe it could also admit outright that it has more deserving firefighters than it has rewards. The city could come up with a measure for who is qualified for the promotions, rather than who is somehow best. And then it could choose from that pool by lottery. That might not exactly be fair, either. But it would recognize that sometimes there may be no such thing.

Rebuffs for conservative attacks on Sotomayor: Liberal Talking Points for the day

If you're so inclined as to come to the defense of the "most conservative Supreme Court pick Obama could have made", HuffPo blogger-reporter Jason Linkins reviews how (arch-conservative) Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has argued that "courts make law" (as conservatives are accusing Sotomayor of saying as a reference to "activist judging") and empathy and the racial background/history/experiences of a candidate were brought to bear in the nominations of Alito and Clarence Thomas:

This all comes courtesy of HuffPost reader Doug Schafer, who is of the opinion that journalists ought to avail themselves of this citation from Scalia whenever the "judges don't make law" canard arises. I agree!

Additionally, Sotomayor's critics are up in arms over the fact that she has admitted that her ethnic background has an affect on her decision making process. Who does she think she is? Well, as it turns out, she probably thinks she's being very similar to Justice Sam Alito:

ALITO: Senator, I tried to in my opening statement, I tried to provide a little picture of who I am as a human being and how my background and my experiences have shaped me and brought me to this point. ... And that's why I went into that in my opening statement. Because when a case comes before me involving, let's say, someone who is an immigrant -- and we get an awful lot of immigration cases and naturalization cases -- I can't help but think of my own ancestors, because it wasn't that long ago when they were in that position. [...]

And that goes down the line. When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because of religion or because of gender. And I do take that into account.

[WATCH.]

And, in a related way, the criticism over "empathy" fits the same "this-was-once-deemed-okay" mold. My experience teaches me that only robots lack empathy, and that most people value it. Yet, ever since President Barack Obama cited it as a focus of his, in his search for a replacement for Justice David Souter, the whole notion of "empathy" has been treated as an alien thing that threatens the sanctity of court decisions.

That's weird! In July of 1991, "empathy" was one of the major selling points presented at the nomination of Justice Clarence Thomas...

And speaking of Supreme Court Joke Justice Joke Clarence Thomas, HuffPo's Trey Ellis writes:

When a middling black student from Holy Cross goes on to Yale Law School, graduates in the middle of his class and is rated by the American Bar Association between "qualified" and "not qualified," the right festoons him with laurels. Clarence Thomas, you see, reaffirmed the comforting notions many in the right have about the supremacy of white maleness. George the First nominated him clearly because any black jurist would do and there he stands today, a reassuring beacon of black inferiority.

(I'm not saying that the first George Bush wouldn't have picked a more qualified black arch conservative if there had been one laying around. In matters of race the first George Bush wasn't such a bad egg.)

Nevertheless, for the far right his nomination was a wet dream and the humiliating effect on competent black folks is the same.

Sotomayor's been dealing with this crap for years. The LA Times reports today that in law school she sued a white-shoe Washington law firm for the exact same kind of white-male- supremacist attitudes the right is regurgitating her way right now...

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Hypocrisy's ok when I do it.

Ending anti-racism?

J-truly is not going to get into this right now, but all should go read this post by Guerrilla Mama (h/t Quin on PunkAssBlog h/t Field Negro h/t Daktari II) on how she's decided she's not teaching anti-racism workshops any more. Her basic point(s) seem to be that, from her point of view, "anti-racism" education isn't achieving its goals, because those who seek to take it are either seeking to avoid a pending racial lawsuit or to build radical/racial cred without changing, acknowledging, or challenging white privilege. That many in her experience learn the language of anti-racism and use the language more towards being hip than towards changing their way of being -- understandable because of how hard it is to challenge yourself on a deep level, but completely antithetical towards the actual content and message of anti-racism. The commenters are fantastic and explore a lot of expansions, variations, and critiques on her point, with a discussion of how/whether normative white culture encourages/allows for a separation of words and deeds, intent and action, such that it matters more that you say your consciousness is changed or raised to understand racial issues than whether or not you change your behavior and how you conduct yourself day-to-day to reflect such a thing. And beyond that, how, in the G-Mama's mind, those who do earnestly wish to learn and challenge have such a wealth of material written about race, racism, privilege, anti-racism, etc. that a workshop is not just unnecessary but a crutch to avoid doing the hard work it does and will require to make changes to oneself and the world, and how all that material anyway is secondary to what someone on there calls radical honesty, and the ability to be aware of and try to address other people's perspectives. The point is, she says, everyone gets it wrong, but so many (white) people with no "training" achieve a more or less radical understanding by learning and only making new mistakes. When you find out a certain term or tone or approach is alienating or preserving systematic racism, you try a new term, tone, or approach, and also, you talk to those affected, learning from them and with them, with an openness and desire for understanding and change that is an important pre-condition for effectively learning what she might teach in anti-racism, but is a prereq that is (apparently) only rarely met in her experiences for such training.

So apparently, I actually am going to comment on this.

My quick dois centavos is that during my brief time at a Fortune 500 company making consumer products, we had Diversity Training, and its been one of the single most useful things I've experienced. Prime among the important lessons is something referred to obliquely, and in a different manner, on G-Mama's comment board: The Golden Rule is wrong. That is, don't treat others as you want to be treated, because that assumes everyone is like you, and they aren't -- whether they share your race, gender, religion, culture, or not. (But it especially may be true if they don't.) Treat others, get this, as THEY want to be treated. And how do you know how that is? Only through dialogue, by asking and by understanding and learning, through trial and error, will you know how that is -- but it is more likely to work and generate a good and healthy relationship than assuming they want to be treated as you do. (I've found this IN.VAL.U.ABLE. in personal relationships.)

Speaking of healthy relationships, G-Mama has a rather good post highlighting and praising this excellent entry on IllDoctrine, the Hip-Hop video blog (which I believe in turn I found a while back via EpicFu, meant to start following, and never did). I have no idea who this "Aster Roth" kid is, but J Smooth's smoothly produced vlog is a fantastic commentary (Aster Roth apparently played at Rutgers and joked "ironically" that he was hanging with "nappy headed hos", apparently not with malice but as a joke that, um, didn't work.) J Smooth:

[This] illustrates where a lot of us are at right now with race in america. We're in a new place right now. We're not in The Promised Land, but we're a few steps further down that road than we've ever been before. And as we make progress, we get more comfortable. And as we get more comfortable some of us get a little... extra comfortable. We start acting as if coming closer together means not having to care how our words affect each other. We start assuming we can make any kinda joke or use any kind of epithet without any kind of second thought because now that we've made all this progress - everyone's always gonna know we don't mean it like that.

Right?

Nooooooooo! That is not how this thing is gonna work!

...In any healthy relationship, the closer you get, the more you care about how you affect each other...and yet, somehow, in our racial interactions, we tend to forget that. And start thinking coming closer together means we can care less about how we affect each other.

See the whole thing here.

J Smooth couldn't be more right about relationships, racial or otherwise. Something we've said in my family is that being close to someone doesn't mean you get to treat them however you want because they already know that you love them; it means taking *extra* care to treat them right. It does mean that they will see you at your best and worst, and sometimes, it's all you can do to behave decently, or even sub-decently. But all the more because those times are going to happen, whenever you can, you should put out the extra effort, not the lower or below-average one. You appreciate them because you love them, you don't love them so you can depreciate them. J-Smooth:

The whole process of getting closer is becoming more aware of [the] constantly evolving boundaries [in the relationship], and getting better at respecting them... In any healthy relationship, the closer you get the more you care about how you affect each other... somehow in our racial interactions we tend to forget that, and tend to think that as we get closer to together, we can care LESS about each other's boundaries... 'Respecting each other's humanity is such a PAIN in the ASS, do we really have to do this FOREVER? Can't you guys just lighten up so I don't have to respect you anymore? Isn't the whole process of Coming Together As One so that I don't have to care what YOU think?

Anyway. J Smooth's points are good ones, and echoes something I posted before by Ta-Nehisi Coates:

"I never thought the fact that there was a magazine called Heeb gave me the right to address my Jewish buddies as such. More to the point--I never wanted to. ...What's the big beef? ...I don't get white people who have a hard time with this--you call your mother "Mom," I call her Ms. Phillips--same deal here. Nigger means one thing when used amongst a group of people with similar experiences, and something else when used by people outside of that experience.

So yeah. Go read, learn, see this good shit that I found by going down the rabbit whole of following the damn links on people's damn blogs. (How DARE they be so good, make me spend all this time reading them? =p

Links:
D-Constructing-D (General goodness)

Quin on PunkAssBlog (wherein the author, a white male, decides he needs to reconsider and start to take seriously the issue of "white male privilege", including the privilege he previously exercised of avoiding all discussions of gender or race)

Field Negro

Guerrilla Mama Medicine

Ill Doctrine

Killing Them (Minorities) Softly

Gotta call attention to this post at Feministing, which is in turn calling attention to this op-ed from NYT columnist Bob Herbert. F-ing makes additional great points on top of Herbert's -- that point being that the murders of minorities, especially non-white children, is wildly unequal, with a number of murders having taken place in Chicago this year, around 36 children apparently, a grim statistic pretty much unremarked upon in comparison to school and university shootings in majority-white schools. Feministing's Samhita says

"I actually think that Herbert is giving them an easy way out suggesting that it is just that mainstream media frequently overlooks the deaths and murders of people of color. When people of color are involved in the death or murder of a white person, that is definitely headline news..."

and

while Herbert is suggesting that the stories that cover the murder of women of color, poor people and other disenfranchised communities, it is not just that they are overlooked, it is that they are strategically woven into the narrative of good verse evil. White women are pitted against communities of color, contrasting innocent verses guilty.

Go and read both, and ask yourself how much you heard about this case, where in West Virginia a black woman's kidnappers

"forced her to eat rat droppings, choked her with a cable cord and stabbed her in the leg while calling her a racial slur, according to criminal complaints. They also poured hot water over her, made her drink from a toilet, and beat and sexually assaulted her during a span of about a week, the documents say."

I myself didn't know anything about this, that it had even ever occurred, until I listened to an old Democracy Now! podcast. Hopefully, I was just intensely in dissertation mode and it really was big news, hopefully I was in a bubble and missed the huge national attention turned to this horrific incident, the public questioning of ourselves as a country and what could be done to prevent this, and the deaths in Chicago, and the deaths and injustices heaped on everyone of every color, no less against blacks or Latinos or Asians or gays and lesbians or transgender or anyone else than against white heterosexuals, because riddle me this -- can you imagine a white woman being kidnapped by six black people, tortured by them, called racial epithets, and raped, and her story not becoming a lasting national memory? Certainly, part of it would be its memorability as "man bites dog" (or "black supremacists attack whites"), that is, because it is a less familiar story, but doesn't the familiarity of black-on-white crime, its quasi-quotidian quality, disturb one in and of itself?....

Incidentally, another great post on racism in Pennsylvania

On Slate, here. "Swing-State Rednecks: What Murtha and Obama get wrong about race and class in western Pennsylvania," by Dennis B. Roddy. Read one of the few pieces of evidence that Slate hasn't gone completely to shit (though it's NOT by a regular writer, by the by).

Random Bit from the Internet

This guy, talking about Livonia, "whitest city in America." It's a good piece, and I'd only want to point out that the dude may be right about the binary nature of the comparison being (somewhat) unfair ("cities" being 100,000 people+, the ranks of which Livonia joined in the last census), since it actually may be better than the richer and more gated communities not far from it and all over the Detroit area. (Which is not to say Livonia is not also relatively well-off as a city, it's just no Grosse Point Blank.)

Why the impulse to vote for "That dude/tte I can have a beer with" makes sense: a progressive perspective

I've just been thinking about, and talking about with J-Mom, the whole "I'mna vote for a normal guy/gal, cuz I don't want no uppity folks with no horse sense makin' decisions for my country," phenomenon of the past few election cycles (or at least, the perception of the increase in this impulse in the past few elections).

Now, certainly this comes in part from the anti-education strain of "progressiveness" in the Republican propaganda, and some of it is a naive "he's a person, just like me, who understands my troubles." (And certainly, in the case of, say, Bush, it's completely artifice since he comes from a family with deep roots in Eastern elitism, wealth, Ivy League, etc.)

But in talking to J-Mom, I remembered myself of just eight years ago; before I became a news junkie, I assumed that basically the US system was ok, and just needed some mild reform to fix. Sure, politicians were politicians, but there wasn't a rot at the core. And I don't think I used to be a purely dumb person -- I just hadn't done the research, in effect.

Just like it takes a certain disposition to be ok with atheism -- to come face to face with that existential crisis of "this is all there is" and to accept it -- it takes a certain disposition (and exposure) to be ok with the fact that our government really, really ISN'T basically ok. That is, pretty much all of our politicians are out for themselves, and not the public good, to a greater or lesser extent. AND, our government has done some pretty horrific things in our names (Iraq is just the latest; cf. the Contra War/Iran-Contra, overthrowing Mossadegh and installing the Shah in Iran, intervention in Haiti, the "Spanish-American War," support for Augusto Pinochet, the Viet Nam war and the Gulf of Tonkin, etc. etc.). (This is not to say that people are inherently out for themselves; I don't believe in "human nature" in that manner of speaking (we're also not inherently cooperative; we're both at the same time, far more complex and more/less reassuring) -- but politicians, by the nature of what they have to do to get where they are, are overwhelmingly out for themselves, imho.) Having taught a class highlighting these actions by our government (as well as going through my own realizations) I know how hard it is to accept that the US is not "#1", unless we mean "#1 at looking at for ourselves using heavy artillery." We're just not a nice people on the world stage.

Any road -- it's much easier to accept that our government is made of good people who occasionally err, than that the elected politicians are basically out to preserve the status quo of American Empire. And if you do believe that there are forces out to preserve the advantages of the elites, it makes far more sense to try and find someone "normal," who won't betray your interests, because they share your optimism, your jingoism, your sense of being slighted, your religion. Basically -- Republicans. It's not just an appeal to prejudices (though that's part of it) -- it's an appeal to the belief that we are in control of our own government; that we can believe in something, and that the scary prospect of fundamental change in the system needn't be so seriously considered. After all, if our government is so cynical, we are complicit in it -- and who needs that on top of other problems?

So I get it, on a certain level. It requires me to remember who I was before, when I was an occasional news watcher, and didn't realize "how deep the Rabbit Hole went". As I've said to many people, I read several hours of news a day to get the understanding I have -- who among us can do that? Of course people buy a lot of bullshit, I'm sure I do too, but being a professional researcher with more flexibility than any non-academic worker, it's not that I'm smarter, it's that my training is in doubting everything and verifying it with 8 sources. (It is true that we are trying to avoid teaching critical thinking to our kids -- as Paulo Freire said -- paraphrased -- you can't expect the system that oppresses people and uses them as workers to educate these same people about the true nature of the system and how to fight it. So while we're all complicit in this, and every person has some responsibility to educate themselves, there's also the odds stacked against them.)

I came to these ideas in part because it also explains the PUMA phenomenon, that is, those that identified Hillary's struggles with their own and thus continue, or continued to support her, despite the fact that their background is as similar to hers as Bush's is. What they shared was a sense of aggrievement -- and it seems to have clearly (from non-PUMA's perspectives) overshadowed all of their goddamned sense, since the last thing a Clinton stood for was real change. (Implicit in all this is my belief that Obama won't, alas, bring real change either, but at this point, it is refreshing to hear someone voice true ideals I believe in, even if I am extremely skeptical they'll follow them.)

Of course, this strain of discourse flows from, I believe, a deeply cynical place, a place right at our founding where, Howard Zinn convincingly argues, there was not the same strain of deep racism, as class lines held people together more closely. He gives evidence in his fascinating (if hard to slog through sometimes) People's History of the United States that the Color Lines separating the interests of poor whites and poor blacks were not only not preexisting, but consciously constructed, rather than the result of some kind of natural racial antipathy.* This is, interestingly, possibly the same font as the invention of "White Trash," a construction I read about briefly from a book on the floor of J-Friend Lindsay's place, left there by one of her roommates. Knowledge comes from the darndest places -- it argued essentially that White Trash was a consciously employed derogatory term to further separate White and Black class interests in common. But... digress.

So I can understand the impulse to have someone "just like you," rather than an elite who will preserve elite interests, as they always have. And I understand the willfull self-delusion to construe political figures as being normal folks, rather than believing the alternative -- that they're deeply cynical, self-serving elites deploying cultural signals to appear like you, though they are not you. It's hard to admit that, and not forget that -- because doing so gives up the last vestiges of easy control over a system gone awry, and few wish to look into that abyss...

And seriously, PUMAs? If Dems can convince themselves that the real sexism Hillary faced means her elite background has something in common with the trials of everyday women/folks, then I can have some sympathy for the delusions necessary to believe Palin's moose-skinning is pertinent to the dream of having someone who knows your troubles be in charge. (Even if I believe in the end that it is deeply, deeply... wrong.)




* From Zinn's People's History, Chapter 2:

In spite of such preconceptions about blackness, in spite of special subordination of blacks in the Americas in the seventeenth century, there is evidence that where whites and blacks found themselves with common problems, common work, common enemy in their master, they behaved toward one another as equals. As one scholar of slavery, Kenneth Stampp, has put it, Negro and white servants of the seventeenth century were "remarkably unconcerned about the visible physical differences."...

...[Historian Edmund] Morgan concludes: "Once the small planter felt less exploited by taxation and began to prosper a little, he became less turbulent, less dangerous, more respectable. He could begin to see his big neighbor not as an extortionist but as a powerful protector of their common interests."
We see now a complex web of historical threads to ensnare blacks for slavery in America: the desperation of starving settlers, the special helplessness of the displaced African, the powerful incentive of profit for slave trader and planter, the temptation of superior status for poor whites, the elaborate controls against escape and rebellion, the legal and social punishment of black and white collaboration.
The point is that the elements of this web are historical, not "natural." This does not mean that they are easily disentangled, dismantled. It means only that there is a possibility for something else, under historical conditions not yet realized. And one of these conditions would be the elimination of that class exploitation which has made poor whites desperate for small gifts of status, and has prevented that unity of black and white necessary for joint rebellion and reconstruction.