Reply to That Really Cool Guy Jeff Goldstein, Part I

INTRODUCTION. I was hurt--hurt--by Jeff Goldstein's reply to me last night. He seems to think that I believe him an unreconstructed racial bigot like the guys who murdered and mutilated Emmett Till or the white townspeople took pictures as they celebrated the latest lynchings of their black neighbors. Or maybe he believes that I think he follows Ann Coulter's indulgence in racial stereotypes and anti-black cheerleading.

But that's not true at all. How can I think that after I've seen all the testimonials to Goldstein's wit and really cool guyness? Tonight's hymn of praise was from John Cole of Balloon-juice.com: ". . . the best blog in the world is now back after a lengthy hiatus." And didn't Goldstein quote somebody as referring to him as the "funniest guy on the internet" last night?

And who am I to disagree? Goldstein's Protein Wisdom is funny, ironic, intellectual, and upscale all at the same time. I sum all that up with the term "The Fluff Right" which I, of course, mean as a term of endearment. Goldstein is such a Really Cool Guy he couldn't be a racist.

And besides Protein Wisdom practically held a parade for me a couple of days ago. Even last night, my name and affiliation were featured at the top of Goldstein's reply post. You just can't buy publicity like that.

Of course, I guess one could think me ungrateful for referring to Jeff's "color-blind" rhetoric as being worse than crude racism. And that's what we need to discuss here. The whole debate over the legitimacy of color-blind rhetoric revolves around oppression. In the seventies, the United States began emerging from the brutal racial oppression of the segregation era. If the forty years since the seventies has seen so much progress that there is at present either no racial oppression or only inconsequential oppression, then the color-blind idea of acting as though racial justice was the reality would be common sense. But, if racial oppression continues to be a significant part of the lives of black people, then it is necessary to discuss how "color-blind" arguments relate to current modes of racial oppression.

My argument, and I'm hardly the only one who thinks this, is that racial oppression continues in new forms today and that"color-blind" arguments are used to formulate racist attitudes toward blacks, rationalize racial oppression toward blacks, and to disparage any attempt to remedy racial oppression and its consequences. In other words, the rhetoric of color-blindness is part of the contemporary system of racial oppression. In that context, the purveyors of color-blind rhetoric are a unique evil. Because they are smart and sophisticated manipulators of political language, they have had a pervasive effect in promoting the politics of white racism. In this sense, stealing the magic words of liberalism is more of an evil than mouthing the discredited rhetoric of segregation.

The only way to get a handle on contemporary racial oppression is through a comparison with segregation. So, here we go.

SEGREGATION AND OPPRESSION. In "Letter from Birmingham Jail," MLK wrote in the context of his discussion of civil disobedience that "[w]e know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed." For King, white people are "the oppressor" and blacks are the "oppressed" who are demanding freedom. He follows up with an detailed account of white oppression--the lynching and drowning of black people, police beatings, the "airtight cage of poverty" in which blacks live, the refusal of services at hotels, restaurants, the segregated drinking fountains and bathrooms, and the endless personal humilitations such as never being addressed with a title of respect like "Mr." or "Mrs." Needless to say, such a recitation does not do justice to the poetry of King's writing and the way that he brought the violence and moral sickness of segregation home to his readers in one of the great sentences of American writing. * (See bottom of post)

King also emphasized the enormous psychological and spiritual damage inflicted by segregation, lamenting the "ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in [his daughter's] little mental sky," and the "inner fears and outer resentments" and "degenerating sense of nobodiness plaguing adults." Of course, blacks had other responses to segregation and slavery before that as well. In particular, King neglected to mention the ways African-American traditions embodied a determination to overcome slavery and segregation, a powerful sense of mutual love and self-sacrifice among African-Americans, and a willingness to extend that love to white people despite everything. All of these elements can be seen in Boston King's memoir from the 1790's, the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, the statements that the Marsalis brothers and Ozzie Davis made in Ken Burns' Jazz, and in the writings of contemporary black feminists like bell hooks and Angela Davis.

Jeff Goldstein seems to believe that my reference to racial oppression is a matter of "white guilt." I'm surprised and somewhat disturbed that a really cool guy like Jeff wouldn't think that sensitivity to oppression would be a matter of empathy, of reading materials like "Letter from Birmingham Jail" and thinking about what he would think or feel if he had been subject to the physical and psychological violence of American racial segregation. Or why he wouldn't be disgusted, repulsed, or nauseated by what whites were doing? If I remember right, Rousseau defined "pity" in the sense of feeling another's suffering as one's own as something fundamental to human beings. Certainly, the purveyors of slavery and segregation took pride in not feeling any pity for the black people they were oppressing. That was part of the inhumanity of the system of racial oppression that fluorished in this country through the seventies. That's also part of the inhumanity of the crude racists like the people who sent the threatening letters to the black Boise State football player who's marrying a white cheerleader or Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. But, that lack of empathy (or pity in Rousseau's sense) is something that also seems to characterize Jeff Goldstein. It's something he has in common with all the haters referred to by Mahablog.

Of course, it might just not be funny, ironic, or intellectual forJeff's to be empathetic to those who are suffering oppression. Perhaps Jeff believes in a general refusal to empathize in the way that Thoreau, Emerson, or Nietzsche attempted to universalize a refusal of human empathy. If that's the case, I'm not funny or ironic at all because I can readily say that I would have been so pissed off about segregation if I was a black guy that I probably would have done something to get myself killed. Even as a white kid, I did lots of things that would have gotten black guys killed under segregation.

Contemporary Racial Oppression. There are two questions that come up in relation to the current racial situation. Can the current race relations be characterized as racial oppression and what role does color-blind rhetoric play in relation to contemporary race relations?

Segregation was many things, including the denial of political rights to African-Americans, the attempted restriction of African-Americans to menial employment, the segregation of amenities, poorly funded schooling, routine personal humiliation, and a system of legal and extra-legal violence to enforce all those things. While many of these things are not part of the current system of race relations, racial oppression seems to have been shifted rather than eliminated. Blacks can vote and hold office, but African-Americans find that the Republicans play on white racism to win votes and that the Democrats fail to represent black views and interests because of the Democrats' fear of racial backlash. African-Americans are just as much a third-rail of American politics as social security.

Blacks** are still subject to police shootings and beatings, stop and frisk campaigns targeted on young black men, racial profiling in traffic stops, and differential sentencing. For poor black men and young black men in general, police abuse is a pervasive part of life. For middle-class and professional blacks, the abuse seems more sporadic but still represents an extremely aggravating denial of equal dignity with whites in their positions.

Blacks are allowed into hotels, restaurants, and retail establishments as customers, but are subject to slow and negligent service, various kinds of racial maliciousness, find themselves followed by security in retail establishments, and have to pay higher interest rates on various kinds of loans. Even though African-Americans can get into the door as customers, they can't expect to be treated as welcomed and valued, in other words as human beings in the full sense of the word.

Needless to say, blacks are also subject to relentless stereotyping in the news media and entertainment outlets. The standard treatment of the stereotyping of black women is Patricia Hill Collins' Black Feminist Thought. Spike Lee's Bamboozled is a brilliant representation of the ways in which black professionals feel they have to accept the insulting comments connected with stereotyping as a price of holding their positions and maintaining their income. On a lower level of the social scale, the black guys I worked with at a restaurant in Philadelphia felt constrained to listen to all the racist jokes told by the cops who stopped by for free food. They didn't like it, but they also didn't feel free to express as much outrage and disgust as I did.

To be black is to be subject to arbitrary and capricious white authority, forced to pay a higher price for housing and other amenities to white owned institutions, and vulnerable to both big and small humiliations perpetrated by white people. It adds up to oppression and there are a large number of African-American writers who portray blacks as an oppressed or persecuted group. In his efforts to be "really cool," Goldstein refers to this as the "trope" of oppression and conveys a sense of boredom with it all. Of course, an affected boredom has always been a part of being a really cool guy. So there's no surprise there. But racial oppression is not just a literary figure (although it is that), it's a significant part of life on both sides of the racial divide.

Color-Blind Rhetoric and Contemporary Racial Oppression. As I remember the color-blind argument from William Bennett's "Race and the New Politics of Resentment," it rested on three ideas. First, there is the concept that the U. S. should be a "color-blind" society in which people are no longer viewed in terms of race, but are seen and treated as individuals. Bennett quotes King's "I Have a Dream Speech" but the general effect of Bennett's references to King is to view King's work as an essentially American effort rooted in Thomas Jefferson's claim that "all men are created equal" in the Declaration of Independence. Other than asserting that Bennett is wrong about the goal of color-blindness, mistaken in his understanding of King, and deceptive in his claims about Jefferson, I'll pass this by.

Bennett's second claim is that Americans have so much progress on race relations that "race-based" remedies to the legacy of segregation are no longer necessary or appropriate. Here Bennett is referring primarily to affirmative action programs but other issues that come within the purview of his claims about race-based programs include school busing, job discrimination laws, and policing. Arguing that we should act as though we already have a color-blind society, Bennett believes we should eliminate all remedies for all the problems created by white racism.

There is a test for the sincerity of Bennett and other advocates of color-blindness. How do they respond to incidents of white racism? If the advocates of color-blindness were sincere in believing that there should be such a high level of racial justice in the country, one would think that they would be particularly outraged by manifestations of racial oppression by white people. It's quite the opposite though. Rather than being outraged by white racism, Bennett is extremely wary of black complaining. Bennett emphasized his belief that blacks complaining of job discrimination should have to prove specific intent to discriminate rather than just establish a pattern of not hiring blacks, paying them equally with whites, or promoting them. Bennett's sympathies seem to be with the racist employers rather than black employees.

The same is the case in every sphere of contemporary racial discrimination. In her classic The Alchemy of Race and Rights, African-American legal scholar Patricia Williams documents the way that white politicians used color-blind rhetoric to justify the mob killing of young black men, police assaults on young black men, and keeping black people out of upscale stores. As Williams explains, the irony of all these kinds of cases is that color-blind advocates identify blacks as a "group" who deserve these kinds of discriminatory behaviors and white racism has nothing to do with these issues. I've seen the same kinds of arguments made in relation to the stop and frisk campaigns, the racial profiling of black motorists by police, and store security systems. In all these cases, color-blind arguments are used to justify contemporary racial oppression.

Instead of trying to create a "color-blind" society by opposing white racism, the main effort of the color-blind advocates is to thwart the efforts of both ordinary African-Americans and African-American advocacy groups to oppose racial oppression. What's interesting to me is the interaction between the purveyors of discrimination and white racial violence and the color-blind advocates. For Williams, the people perpetrating the discrimination and violence are bigots in the same sense that George Wallace was a bigot during the 1960's. In this context, the color-blind advocates are generating "intellectualized" ideas of black inferiority, using those ideas to defend what could be called the "primary" bigots, and working to prevent the enactment of any kind of remedy for racial profiling, job discrimination, and the like.

As a practical matter, the loyalties of the color-blind advocates are with the primary bigots rather than black people. In fact, given the adoption of color-blind rhetoric by primary bigots that Eduardo DeSilva demonstrates in Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States, there is now a substantial overlap between the primary bigots and color-blind advocates (57ff). Ultimately, however, the color-blind advocates are more of an impediment to racial justice because their rationalizations do serve to perpetuate racial oppression than the actions of primary racist jerks. For advocates of color-blindness like William Bennett or Jeff Goldstein, defending and perpetrating racial oppression is a significant part of their lives.

Bennett's third claim is that the racial consciousness of black people is essentially the same as white supremacy. For Bennett, segregation was immoral because it was a form of "color consciousness" and African-American consciousness of themselves as a group or a race is just as immoral, and ultimately just as racist, as white racism. In this context, any African-American who criticizes racial discrimination or racial injustice is thinking about black people as a group and is therefore being racist. That's why freshmen often claim that Jesse Jackson is a racist because he complains about racism. That's also how critics of efforts to remedy racial injustice argue that affirmative action programs are unjust because they involve racial preferences.

But this argument goes deeper because it implies that black people are racist for thinking of themselves as black people at all. The cleverness of this rhetorical strategy is that it provides a theoretical basis for condemning the relatively strong group consciousness that was rooted in the resistance of black people to slavery and segregation. This is probably why clever people like Jeff G like color blind rhetoric. It turns the tables on blacks and makes them the evil racists.

But this is also where Bennett and the color blind activists outsmart themselves on race the same way that the right in general outsmarted itself by invading Iraq. What the practitioners of color-blind rhetoric are doing this third claim is providing a basis for claiming that black people are morally inferior to whites.

In other words, the advocates of color-blindness are engaging in a form of primary racism. Before desegregation, Southern racists had fairly elaborate theories of white racial superiority and black inferiority. Since desegregation, whites have largely retreated from these kinds of claims (except for works like The Bell Curve) and formulated their sense of racial superiority indirectly through the relentless stereotyping of blacks. However, the advocates of color-blindness are going back to direct expressions of white racial superiority. What makes whites superior from the color-blind view is that they believe in individualism and treat people as individuals. What makes (non-conservative) blacks inferior from the color-blind view is that they have a group racial consciousness that's just as racist as that of Bull Connor, George Wallace, and Strom Thurmond.

Color-blindness means that clever guys like Jeff G. can have it all. They can dissociate themselves from low-class, ignorant bigots as well as inflammatory writers like Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin. They can get the upper hand on the white liberals who support efforts to do something about racial injustice because white liberals tend to also have strong convictions about individualism. And finally, they can feel intellectually and morally superior to most black people, a position that's very congenial within a white culture of conservatism that has been historically imbued with white supremacy. In many ways, the rhetoric of color-blindness is the most effective formulation of white supremacy yet.

And that's what makes the advocates of color-blindness a particular evil in American society.

Postscript on Magic Words. I haven't read the Stanley Fish article, but one way to understand the current disaster that's engulfing American conservatism is that the failure of the Bush administration in general and the Iraq War in particular has meant that conservatives have lost control over all the magic words in American political life. Words like "defense," "security," "honesty," "ethics," "competence," "intelligence," and "effectiveness" are being pushed over to the Democratic and liberal side every time George Bush, Dick Cheney, or Alberto Gonzales opens their mouths. There may come a time when right-wingers consider "weenie boy" to be more of a compliment than anything else.























**Note to PW readers. What follows are also facts of contemporary American life. If you're skeptical of these things, ask your black friends or go to your local book store and check out books by non-conservative black authors. You'll be surprised.