RSI--1, Protein Wisdom--0

I decided to replace this post next to Goldstein's original response. In relation to that, I've collapsed all the comments into one.

Introduction--Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom and I seem to have concluded the first round of our debate over racism and oppression. I put up three posts on the topic and Goldstein replied to one of them. But there hasn't been any further posting for a week. So, I'm assuming that the lull in the action means that round one is over. And the first round was definitely mine. I attacked from the outset, put Goldstein on the defensive, and scored point after point as I went along. For his part, Goldstein seemed to have lost much of his hip mojo and ended up reciting his talking points in uncertain and unconvincing ways. In fact, there were some points that Goldstein didn't seem to understand. Of course, George Bush was barely able to get through his talking points in 2000 and 2004 and he still got elected President. But the collapse of the Bush presidency and the broad rejection of neo-conservatism, the religious right, and conservative talk radio have put the entire right-wing under just as much a cloud as the left. And Goldstein is going have to do a lot better if he's going to convince anybody other than the dittoheads who constitute the Protein Wisdom Collective.

Framing. Goldstein is completely wrong about my framing of my initial response. He writes that I think of him as someone who "affects a pretense of hipness." To the contrary, I sincerely believe that Protein Wisdom "is funny, ironic, intellectual, and upscale." I view PW's hipness as an achievement rather than a pretense.

Likewise, I don't view Goldstein "an annoying lightweight, and not really worth much of [my] valuable time." True, I don't view Goldstein as having a lot of academic gifts, but there are many kinds of talent in the world and Goldstein has a lot of ability and energy for re-packaging the standard views of the right-wing in "funny, ironic," and "hip" ways. Of course, given that traditional right-wing views on war mongering, race, gender, sexual orientation, and other issues are morally abhorrent, Goldstein's efforts to re-package these views in more attractive ways is also morally abhorrent. This is especially the case because right-wing institutions like the Bush administration, the Republican Party, evangelical churches, conservative talk-radio, and prominent conservative spokespeople like Ann Coulter have lost whatever intellectual and moral credibility they had. Thus, Goldstein (and other bloggers on the "fluff right") are particularly insidious because they're trying to find ways to repackage views that deserve the broad condemnation they're currently getting in American society.

Far from believing that I'm wasting my time with Protein Wisdom, I believe that it's important to engage and counter the Protein Wisdom point of view as a way to oppose the destructive (or cancerous) influence of the right-wing on American society. Obviously, satirizing Goldstein as a "really cool guy" and his views as "the fluff right" is a way to contest the thing the core of the evil that Goldstein is purveying--the idea that right-wing views are hip.

Given that Goldstein completely misunderstood my framing devices, I thought it was necessary to explain this in some detail.

Goldstein, King, and Racial Moderation. Goldstein doesn't do any better with Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" and he writes like he knows it. Like other right-wingers, Goldstein wants to quote King's "content of their character" line as if that was the only thing King ever said. However, he starts hestitating and prevaricating as soon as I began to go deeper into King's ideas. Here's Goldstein huffing and puffing about King's relative relevance:

So while yes, the piece remains poignant — and while it in many ways serves as a constant reminder of what we, as a society need to guard against — acknowledgingpoignancy and social relevance is far different than pretending that Dr King’s decades-old letter is a revealed text to be taken as scripture by the Church ofthe Always Well-Meaning Liberal Democrat.

Here, Goldstein is trying to have King both ways. While acknowledging King's continued moral authority ("serves as a constant reminder"), Goldstein also tries to throw off that authority by treating King's work as merely "poignant" as opposed to anything that might claim our attention in dealing with real racial issues. That's why Goldstein sounds so labored and mealy-mouthed in this passage (like John Kerry saying he was for a bill before he was against it). Of course, the reason Goldstein sweats so much in his efforts to throw King off is that King's writing in "Letter from Birmingham Jail" applies to Goldstein in powerful ways that he finds unwelcome.

Much as King condemned the crude bigotry of people like Bull Connor or George Wallace, he emphasized in "Letter from Birmingham Jail" that he thought that Southern moderates were even more of an obstacle to overcoming segregation.

First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action . . . "

As I've pointed out previously in my correspondence with Protein Wisdom, there is a strong analogy between the Southern moderates King condemns here and advocates of color-blindness in contemporary society. Much as Southern moderates said they agreed with the efforts of blacks to overturn racial segregation, advocates of color-blindness say they want a color-blind society which I take to mean a society that is so bereft of racism that there is no racial discrimination, no racial stereotyping, no racial profiling, and no racial violence. However, just as Southern moderates opposed King's civil disobedience and every other method for opposing segregation, the current advocates of color-blindness oppose any method for rectifying either the legacy of segregation or the evils of contemporary racial discrimination.
The advocates of color-blindness have a clever way to justify their refusal to do anything about contemporary racial oppression. They say that policies like affirmative action, school busing, etc. are morally wrong because they are "race-conscious." However, the advocates of color-blindness are just as committed to the status quo of contemporary white supremacy as the Southern moderates of King's day were committed to segregation. And that commitment is revealed when they also oppose the efforts of black activists and white liberals to rectify job discrimination against blacks, consumer discrimination against blacks, racial profiling of blacks, and police harassment of blacks. In the final analysis, color-blind rhetoric is just a way to re-package racial hostility toward blacks for a post-segregation era.

For King, moderates were worse than crude racists because they were a greater obstacle to overcoming the racial oppression of the segregation system. The same is the case with Goldstein and other advocates of color-blindness. They are more morally culpable than the crude racists because their campaigns against almost all efforts to rectify contemporary racial oppression are more of a barrier to racial justice than the less sophisticated bigotry of the crude racists.
Goldstein knows just as well as I do that the Martin Luther King of "Letter from Birmingham Jail" would authoritatively condemn the rhetoric of color-blindness as it's used by contemporary conservatives. That's a major reason why Goldstein's effort above to diminish King's moral authority while still acknowledging that authority is so weak.

Goldstein just keeps flopping around the race-rhetoric boat in an attempt to escape King's categorization of whites as oppressors. It's hard to say which of Goldstein's flops is the weakest, his claim that "some" whites were segregationists or his attempt to define segregation exclusively in terms of race consciousness. They're both pretty bad. Anyway, when King writes that "[w]e know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed," he refers to whites as "the oppressor" group and blacks as "the oppressed." Goldstein embarrasses himself by saying that "segregation was a moral sickness of some white people (my emphasis)." As King emphasizes, the vast majority of white Southerners whole-heartedly supported segregation. True, King named most of the Southern whites who wrote in favor of the civil rights movement and referred to those whites who marched with him, but those rare exceptions to the white supremacist beliefs of the vast white Southern majority did not detract in King's mind from the fact that whites were an oppressive group. In fact, he viewed civil disobedience as a technique for lifting whites out of the moral and social sickness of racial oppression.

"[W]e see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood."

Another way Goldstein flops around on the issue of racial oppression is his claim that segregation was primarily a matter of "race consciousness." According to Goldstein, segregation was a matter of "state-sanctioned race consciounsess" in the sense that segregation would have been a matter of dividing people by skin-color. In Goldstein's words, ". . . both these whites, and the Blacks who followed Dr King, were appalled at the kind of state-sanctioned race consciousness that . . . gave “cover” or lent legitimacy to segregation." This formulation gets two things badly wrong. First, "the race consciousness" of southern whites was not a matter of "dividing people by race" as Goldstein suggests when he characterizes civil rights activists as finding it "morally or legally problematic that a government would presume to separate people on the basis of skin color." Instead, the race consciousness of segregationists was a matter of white supremacy in which whites defined themseles as fully human (rational, moral, self-controlled, healthy) and blacks were defined as inferior to the point of not being seen as human in any strict sense of the term. Segreration did not "separate the races," it created a racial hierarchy.

The other bad mistake Goldstein makes is to view "race consciousness" as more important than the practices of segregation that white supremacy legitimized. Goldstein writes that people like me are being vaguely deceptive when we are careful "to reframe . . . segregation as based on power-relations." Obviously, I am "framing" when I claim that segregation was a system of power relations in which the white population oppressed the black population. At the same time, the claim that segregation was based on power relations is a completely accurate way to view segregation. Of course, the denial of voting rights, exclusion from jobs, exclusion from state universities, segregation of public services, the various personal humiliations, and lynching all involved a consciousness of white supremacy, but they were also exercises of power by the white population as a whole (as a matter of state constitutions and statutory law), groups of whites, and individual whites. In "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Martin Luther King captures the exercise of power by whites over blacks with unequalled moral and force in his one-sentence account of lynching, police brutality, exclusion from public services, and the disgusting personal humiliations blacks endured from Southern whites.

Given that segregation was a system of power relations instead of being mainly a form of consciousness, Goldstein is particularly foolish when he writes that "for Dr King, skin color was merely shorthand for the peculiar beliefs of the segregationists of his time. To wit, King used “Negroes” and “whites” because it spoke to the stark contrasts between the “races” King wished to see legally obliterated." It's hard to believe how obtuse Goldstein's "color-blind" attachments make him here. For King, "Negroes" or black people were a "people" rather than merely a rhetorical device and specifically they were his people as a result of both sharing the history and suffering and mutual aid of black people under slavery and segregation, and sharing the effort to overthrow these forms of white oppression. Being a "Negro" was neither simply a rhetorical device nor a matter of skin-color (as DuBois pointed out in The Souls of Black Folks, black people have a wide variety of skin colors), it was a matter of common bonds forged in difficult circumstances.

Finally, Goldstein trips himself up many times on the issues of guilt vs empathy. In one of his posts, Goldstein infers that my interest in racial issues was motivated by "white guilt." I've seen the racist idea of "white guilt" being the only possible motivation for whites supporting efforts to promote racial justice before and responded by wondering why Goldstein didn't have any empathy for blacks. This threw Goldstein into a flopping frenzy that began by deceptively portraying me as believing that I had experienced the same things as blacks. Of course, that's nonsense and Goldstein knows it. To ask oneself, "what would I have felt if I had been in that position" is not the same as saying "I was in that position." Goldstein himself has a burst of empathy. As a white person, he was "repulsed by what some whites were doing" during the segregation period and "heartened by what other whites were doing to combat the bigotry of those whites who remained committed to legalized segregation." But then, he isn't really white himself outside "certain strained empirical standards and certain conventional descriptors."
Conclusion. One of the things I've learned from black writers like bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, and Patricia Williams is how important it is to evaluate the current racial situation in relation to the history of segregation. Goldstein flopped this way and that way in response to my first post on "race and oppression" because any semi-informed discussion of segregation punctures a lot of the myths that color-bline rhetoric is built on. Segregation was a system of racial oppression rather than just a manifestation of color consciousness. Martin Luther King did think in terms of race and was proud to do so in relation to African-Americans. Moreover, King condemned the kinds of positions that Goldstein takes as being more of a barrier to racial justice than those of the hard-core racists.

Goldstein is emphatic that he is "not joined to southern white Democratic segregationalists of the 60s — or paleocon Republican white supremacists today — simply because I happen to look outwardly like I could belong to their group, and so could share their beliefs." Of course, Goldstein isn't allied with the segregationists of the sixties and "Republican white supremacists today" because he looks white. He's allied with white supremacy because his politics is so hostile to the efforts of black people to pursue racial justice for themselves in the United States. And Goldstein is pretty clear that he would have opposed those efforts just as much in 1957 as he does in 2007. According to Goldstein:

From there, Caric takes wing on a bizarre flight of fancy, speculating that, had I been a Black man in, say, 1956, I’d be content with my oppression — that, while he would take his condition seriously and die fighting for his freedom, I’d go find a group of likeminded blacks and, with any luck, become their leader. Kind of an Al Sharpton type, say. Because, you see, it is only those who are most ostentatious about their suffering who can truly be said to be suffering. The rest? They probably enjoy it.

A reminder: if you’re being raped, don’t forget to cry the entire time. No need for anyone to get the wrong idea in retrospect, you see.

What's significant here is Goldstein's intense hostility to anyone who complains, protests, or campaigns against oppression whether it's Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, rape victims, or the feminists who have strived for tougher rape laws, organized "take back the night" marches, and work to get the police to take sexual assault more seriously. But, really, wasn't that who Martin Luther King and the civil rights activists of the 1950' and 1960's were, the people " who were most ostentatious about their suffering" and the people who constantly complained about the deprivations of segregation. Looked at from Goldstein's kind of conservative perspective, King was just whining about his 6 year old daughter being excluded from "Funtown."

Evidently, Goldstein would have been just as opposed to "agitators" like Martin Luther King in 1957 as the conservatives of that time. It's just that he's using color-blind rhetoric rather than white supremacy for the purpose of his conservativism.

In terms of this debate, that makes Goldstein a loser.