Watching Rachel Maddow's interview of Jon Steward last night, I was struck by how reasonable both of them were trying to be. It's just too bad that neither of them--and none of us for that matter--live in a reasonable world. At times, such reasonableness in an unreasonable world itself became quite unreasonable--as when Stewart tried to explain that it was wrong to call Bush a war criminal, even though "technically" he is. It makes him sound like Pol Pot, Stewart explained.
Yes. Exactly.
If we want our presidents to not be war criminals, we need to make it sound like a bad thing. No, make that a really bad thing.
It's a conversation-stopper, not a conversation-starter, Stewart explained. Not a problem, I say. Arrest first, then converse. You see, Jon, It really wasn't cable news that started the Iraq War. It was George Bush & the neocons. They're the ones we should take of first. There are laws you know?
But that's just the tip of the iceberg of what's wrong with Stewart's understanding of the world. At his "Rally to Restore Sanity", Stewart's closing speech included a warning not to call folks like the tea baggers (another term he doesn't like, even though it was it their own) racists. Racists, apparently means folks in white robes. But the problem, of course, is today's "Racism without Racists" (aka "Colorblind Racism) as Eduaro Bonilla-Silva explains it in Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States--a new form of racism that has an explicit disavowal of individual racism built into its very core (as in "equal opportunity, not equal results), and yet serves very neatly to keep perpetuating a hierarchy of white racial privilege in our society, even while allowing specific blacks and other minorities to succeed individually.
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva identifies four central frames at the core of colorblind racism: "The central component of any dominant racial ideology is its frames or set paths for interpreting information," Bonilla-Silva writes. These four are:
(1) Abstract liberalism.
The frame of abstract liberalism involves using ideas associated with political liberalism (e.g. "equal opportunity," the idea that force should not be used to achieve social policy) and economic liberalism (e.g., choice, individualism) in an abstract manner to explain racial matters.
(2) Naturalization.
Naturalization is a frame that allows whites to explain away racial phenomena by suggesting they are natural occurrences.
(3) Cultural Racism.
Cultural racism is a frame that relies on culturally based arguments such as "Mexicans do not put much emphasis on education" or "blacks have too many babies" to explain the standing of minorities in society.
(4) Minimization of Racism
Minimization of racism is a frame that suggests discrimination is no longer a central factor affecting minorities' life chances ("It's better now than in the past" or "There is discrimination, but there are plenty of jobs out there).
Abstract liberalism is what allows colorblind racists to interpret themselves as "post-racial" and anyone who keeps talking about race (such as those who actually experience racial discrimination) as "the real racists".
This week there were three significant anniversaries observed: the 40th anniversary of the shootings at Jackson State (story on Democracy Now!here), which followed the Kent State shootings by 10 days, the 50th anniversary of the Anti-HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) demonstrations in San Francisco that signaled the de facto end of the McCarthy era, and the beginning of the 60s, and the 25th anniversary of the bombing of the MOVE house in Philadelphia (story on Democracy Now!here)which killed six adults and five children--and incidentally destroyed 65 other houses.
Together, these anniversaries highlight the outlines of highly significant political struggles over the past half century, struggles crossing many different lines, but all deeply implicated in the struggle against America's historical legacy of white supremacy. The mass resistance of the anti-HUAC demonstrations was directly inspired by the new wave of mass actions undertaken by the Civil Rights Movement, which some of the anti-HUAC demonstrators had directly participated in. Jackson State was a black college, whose students had long been subjected to racial violence. It was the only cite of police murders in the aftermath of the Kent State shootings. MOVE was symptomatic of the ideological disarray in the black community in the aftermath of the massive anti-civil rights and anti-black power secret police war waged by the FBI and other associated "law enforcement" agencies under the COINTELPRO program and other initiatives.
Compared to the earlier organizations destroyed, crippled or intimidated by the FBI and its allies, MOVE was relatively incoherent in its politics, but no moreso than its contemporary counterparts on the other side, white supremacist organizations such as those that Randy Weaver, of Ruby Ridge fame was associated with. If civil liberties and freedom from government tyranny, rather than white supremacy were the issue at hand, so-called "patriot" militias, Tea Baggers and the like would invoke MOVE at every opportunity, as the attack against them was far more blatantly unprovoked, and the opportunity for peaceful surrender virtually non-existent. The fact that the MOVE bombing remains a matter of historical obscurity, and is never cited by rightwing "patriot" groups is a glaring indication of the true racial politics of our time, much mellowed, perhaps, but still little changed in underlying structure.
It is against this background that Arizona has passed a law against ethinic studies programsas TPM reports:
In Part I, I dealt with the introduction and transition of Gerard Alexander's WaPo commissioned editorial, "Why are liberals so condescending". In Part 2 and Part 3 I dealt with the first two of the four liberal narratives Alexander cites as manifestations of so-called "liberal condescension." This diary deals with the third such narrative.
If Alexander's second narrative has a germ of truth to it, he more than makes up for that with his third purported liberal narrative of condescension: conservative exploitation of racial prejudice. It should be obvious that overt racism of the kind that was commonplace until the 60s and 70s is no longer socially acceptable in most places, and plays a relatively insignificant role in mainstream politics. But that hardly means that race no longer matters, or that more subtle forms of racial politics are not powerfully at work. One can see this quite clearly in the composition of the two parties, as measured by Gallup in June of last year ("Republican Base Heavily White, Conservative, Religious"):
With figure like these--a Republican base that's 89% white--it boggles the mind to hear anyone pretend that race has no impact on politics. Examples of racial messages in political campaigns are both abundant and notorious, as well. But above all, for the purpose of refuting contrary claims by conservatives such as Alexander, we have the testimony of one of the GOP's most influential party operatives, Lee Atwater. From Wikipedia:
In his book, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory by Yale historian David W. Blight describes in detail how the history of the Civil War-its meaning, cause, purpose and effect-was completely rewritten to reflect the views of Southern racist ideology over a period of 50 years after the war. Blight describes the interactions of three different broad visions of Civil War memory-reconciliationist, emancipationist and white supremacist-which contended with one another over time. Eventually, the reconciliationist narrative, which had its roots in revulsion at the sheer horror of the war itself, became completely subsumed by the white supremacist narrative, simply because the South refused reconciliation on any other terms, thus resulting in the virtual elimination of the historically accurate emancipationist narrative, which did not fully re-emerge until the Civil Right era in the 1950s and 60s. I wrote about Blight's book at some length in my December, 2008 diary, "American Amnesia: The Cost of Accommodating The South".
In turn, something very similar to the process Blight describes has been underway to rewrite the history of the Civil Rights Movement itself, and the recent uproar over Harry Reid's clumsy remarks about Obama's appearance and speech is a classic illustration of that process at work. Another example is the Facebook invitation I recently received to attend the Republican Party of Los Angeles County's "first annual" Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Legacy Awards Dinner. The event description began:
Please join the Republican Party of Los Angeles County as we honor two great Republicans who embody the courage and spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr. - A Republican who stood for individual responsibility and spoke eloquently and boldly in defense of liberty and justice for all.
The dreams of Dr. King live on in scores of Republicans today. This year our first annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Legacy Award will be presented to Star Parker and Walter Allen.
This crude attempt to reinvent King as a conservative Republican is laughable to anyone the least bit familiar with the real King, a democratic socialist well to the left of the entire white political spectrum. Most particularly, as I pointed out in my 1995 MLK Day essay republished here last night, "Martin Luther King - A Different Drum Major", King's concept of character-as reflected in his speech, "The Drum Major Instinct"-was the polar opposite of the acquisitive conservative ideal, touted by the likes of Parker.
This is republished from the current issue of Random Lenghts News.
Racism by Another Name
Wild Claims About Obama's Birth and His Healthcare Plan Have A Pernicious Racial Subtext
By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor
During the 2008 elections, serious questions were raised about the eligibility of one of the major party candidates to hold the office of President. Born outside the continental US, it was unclear to some if he had been born on US soil. And so members of the opposite party took quick action to lay those concerns to rest.
In May, 2008, Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were co-sponsors of Senate Resolution 511, which affirmed that Senator John McCain was a "natural born citizen" as required by the Constitution, regardless of being born in the Canal Zone when its legal status of the Zone was unclear.
Unlike John McCain, Barack Obama clearly was born on US soil. His Hawaiian birth certificate has been posted online, as have birth announcements from two Honolulu newspapers. But Republican lawmakers have done the exact opposite of their Democratic counterparts, not only failing to decry a baseless conspiracy theory ("Birtherism") that Obama was actually born in Kenya, but sometimes actively encouraging it.
Blogger/videographer Mike Stark has produced hilarious tapes of various Congressmembers trying to avoid his straightforward questioning, and a July 31 poll by Research 2000 commissioned by the Daily Kos website helped to explain why. While only 11 percent of all Americans believed that Obama was not "born in the United States of America", 28 percent of Republicans believed he was not, and 30 percent said they were not sure. Only a minority of 42 percent of Republicans said they believed that Obama was born in the US, compared to 93 percent of Democrats and 83 percent of independents. Similarly, only 47 percent of Southerners believed Obama was born in the US, compared to 93 percent of Northeasterners, 90 percent of Midwesterners, and 87 percent of Westerners.
While there could be any number of reasons people might believe such a confused claim, a wide range of scholars, researchers, and activists specializing in race relations readily recognize a racial component, which has also cropped up in the "tea parties" and health care protests as well, in language, symbolism and the persistence of wild fantasies ("death panels", "pulling the plug on grandma", etc.) with a paranoid dimension similar to past racist narratives.
In the first two diaries of this series, I've first reviewed the nature of colorblind racism and its role in facilitating other forms of racism today, and then applied that analysis to an earlier discussion here at Open Left. Now it's time to turn our attention to the recent conservative racist attacks on high-status minorities as "racists"-specifically, attacks against President Obama and Supreme Court nominee Sonya Sotomayor. Put simply, my argument is that colorblind racism serves as the scaffolding that enables white supremacists-such as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Newt Gingrich, etc.--to project their racism onto the minority figures whose highly visible success puts the lie to their ideology of white superiority.
Racists have always projected the disowned, loathsome aspects of themselves onto racial others. Now that racism itself has come to be seen as socially unacceptable, it's only natural, in one sense, that racists should project their racism onto racial others as well-particularly onto individuals whose very existence refutes their worldview. Yet, the functional logic involved cannot dissipate the bizarre aspects of hearing Rush Limbaugh, such a well-confirmed racist, hurl that charge at prominent people of color, and not be roundly condemned as himself being a racist.
I've altered this diary significantly from my original intention, for a number of reasons, but the functional purpose remains the same-I want to illuminate the nature of racism today, it's relationship to racism's past, and how we may more effectively combat it.
One last thing to keep in mind before taking the jump: Although the old racism has largely passed away, just as slavery did after the Civil War, the new racism largely determines how we see race, just as the Southern segregationist view of race came to dominate racial understanding in America toward the close of the 19th Century.
Yes, we have a black President. But people are genuinely shocked when, in an unguarded moment, he acts like a normal black man. What's more, he knows it was a gaffe, in the Versailles sense: he accidentally told the truth.
Last weekend, in the discussion of my diary "More Than Gatesgate", a couple of troubling response patterns emerged. One was quite clearly an example of what's come to be known as "colorblind racism," as described in my previous diary, the other was something more subtle, the use of a legitimate caution about blindness to class privilege to attempt to sabotage a straightforward discussion about race, rather than enrich it. While we still have plain old-fashioned racists like Jeff Sessions walking around, by far the biggest problem we face in race relations lies with these sorts of attitudes, which in turn allow the racism of a Sessions, a Limbaugh, a Buchanan or a Beck to continue relatively unquestioned. It's for that reason that I want to devote some serious attention to what went on in that diary discussion.
Inevitably, the people who participated may feel picked upon-particularly since they seemed to have arrived with a victim mentality already intact (the former much more visibly than the later). But, then, heat, kitchen, yadda-yadda-yadda. It's precisely by dealing with what's right in front of us that we learn how to deal with what's right in front of us.
Before I begin with the analysis, I want to float a few proverbs or sayings to help guide our way:
(1) A struck pig squeals.
(2) What you see depends on where you stand.
(3) There are none so blind as those who will not see.
(4) A truth that's told with bad intent beats any lie you can invent. (William Blake)
Last weekend, in the discussion of my diary "More Than Gatesgate", a couple of troubling response patterns emerged. One was quite clearly an example of what's come to be known as "colorblind racism," the other was something more subtle. I want to discuss both those responses in some detail in a followup diary, as well as the much more virulent, in-your-face racism of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and others, which I will look at in a third diary. But before plunging into that discussion, I think it's absolutely necessary to refresh people here on the nature of colorblind racism, since that is the centerpiece of my approach to understanding what was going on, and what was being misunderstood. Of course, what played out here at Open Left clearly pales in comparison to the outright racist attacks now being launched against President Obama, which I also want to address in terms of an integrated framework, where the relationship of colorblind racism to other factors it enables is substantially different. To do this, I'm going to heavily plariarize a diary of my own from earlier this year, "A Three-Ring Circus On Race This Week", while also bringing in additional material and setting up the discussion for the two diaries that follow.
In that earlier diary, I discussed two different theoretical constructs. The first, Social Dominance Theory (SDT), is more general, a theory of group dominance in hierarchically organized societies that is entirely general in nature. The second is Colorblind Racism. SDT was initially developed as a way of describing how hierarchical societies are organized, not how they change, but it does provide ready insight into how change can come about, as various elements are replaced or reprioritized even while overall functional relationships remain largely intact, as I will discuss below. Colorblind Racism should be seen in terms of SDT as a replacement ideology. It took the place of pre-Civil Rights Era racism, which took somewhat different forms in the North and South, but in both places involved assumptions of racial inferiority which were backed up in custom and law.
While it presented itself as a break from the racism of the past-which in some respects it certainly was-it nonetheless continues to function as a means for maintaining the same system of group dominance-blacks over whites, with other races taking on a middling position. This formulation does, however, allow for exceptional individuals to rise above the general condition of their racial group, but (a) this individual success does not translate back into fundamental change in group status, and (b) neither does individual success guarantee that one will be treated commensurate with that success in any given situation-as, for example, when you're a black Harvard professor who has trouble getting into your house, and someone-however innocently--calls the cops on you.
The essence of political power is the ability to define. The ability to define "us" and "them". The ability to define what is "good" and "evil". The ability to define what is and is not a political problem. The ability to define political ideals, and the meanings of words. Hegemonic power is the ability to define without even trying, without anyone even noticing, much less objecting. And the first order of business of oppositional politics is to contest-not just a single definition, but the very ability to define.
"Don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining."
That's what the NY Post did this week with its cartoon portraying President Obama as a murdered chimpanzee. First, the Post asserted its hegemonic capacity to define by publishing the cartoon. Then, when an uproar ensued, it asserted that capacity again, by denying what it had done. And then it asserted that capacity a third time, by defining itself as apologizing, when it was actually doing the exact opposite-continuing to attack those who called for the apology.
Hegemony matters, because, quite frankly, without challenging hegemony, Obama's presidency and the Democratic trifecta are ultimately doomed to fail. Hegemony is all-encompassing, touching on every aspect of politics, indeed, touching on every aspect of our culture, from which our politics comes. By proclaiming himself a "pragmatist" and eschewing ideological confrontation, Obama has placed himself at a distinct disadvantage. Arguably, he lacks a fundamental grasp of hegemony works. Either that, or he fails to appreciate how fundamentally it limits his options. Or he's playing 111-dimensional chess and he's getting all the rest of us to do his work for him. But any way you look at it, the response to the Post's cartoon is taking up the mantel of counter-hegemonic struggle, and raising it to the highest level.
I had been planning all along to write something about race this weekend, if only to play some catch-up. But then the circus came to town. In one ring, we have the NY Post's ("Let's pretend it's really not"-) racist cartoon ("Let's pretend it's really not"-) threatening the life of the President. In the second ring, we have Attorney General Eric Holder daring to speak the truth about race relations (always dangerous when a black man does that in mixed company)-that we're a nation of cowards when it comes to dealing honestly about race, and it's time to get over it-and the ensuing hissy-fits. In the third ring, we have Congressman James Clyburn, pushing back hard against the hypocritical grandstanding Southern governors who were trumpeting their toothless intentions to refuse money from the economic stimulus.
What all these events had in common was the age-old welter of confusion that surrounds all matters racial in our unfortunately-still-white supremacist society. And so before I address any one of them in any depth, I want to write about something I intended to deal with before any of them blew up into high-profile cable news fodder. And that would be the ongoing economic realities of race and class as reviewed, analyzed and discussed in the "State of the Dream 2009" Report, discussed by co-author Dedrick Muhammad on Democracy Now! this week.
But since all these other stories popped up this week, it seemed to me, for clarity's sake, that I should first take a step back and talk about the larger framework of race and white supremacism in America. My perspective is informed by two related theoretical perspectives. ("Theoretical" in the scientific sense: an organizing framework of causal mechanisms that explains a significant realm of empirical data.) One is a general theory of group dominance across societies and across time. The other is a specific theory of how white supremacy has reconfigured itself in America following the Civil Rights revolution. Together with the underlying empirical data surveyed in the "State of the Dream" report, these theories allow us to gain a clear-eyed perspective on racial matters in America and the world today.
STATE BLOGS
