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 (needs page numbers). 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 argue that 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 (needs links).
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. But the justification of that bigotry is left to the advocates of color-blindness. They're the ones who generate the "intellectualized" ideas of black inferiority, use those ideas to defend what could be called the "primary" bigots, and work 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 instead.
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 on Iraq. That's because what the practitioners of color-blind rhetoric are doing with 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 seems to mean that clever guys like Jeff G. can have it all. On the one hand, they can dissociate themselves from low-class, ignorant racial bigots as well as inflammatory writers like Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin. On the other hand, they can get the edge 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 political disaster that's starting to engulf 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. Indeed, there may come a time when right-wingers consider "weenie boy" to be more of a compliment than anything else.
Saturday, July 28, 2007
Oppression and Color-Blindness, Second Reply to Goldstein
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 economic 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.
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 economic 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.
Oppression and Color-Blindness, Revised and Linked Reply to Goldstein, Part I
Note--I revised and linked the Part I post of what's now a gigantic three part post. I loaded all the replies from the earlier version of this post into one reply to this version.
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.
*Note to PW readers. These are some of the facts of segregation. Needless to say, a full account of segregation would be much more appalling than I, or even King,. could convey.
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.
*Note to PW readers. These are some of the facts of segregation. Needless to say, a full account of segregation would be much more appalling than I, or even King,. could convey.
Friday, July 27, 2007
Life is Sweet When the Goodness Can't Be Beat
"It's the best of both worlds . . . " Dads of pre-teen girls everywhere will recognize that as the theme song from Hannah Montana. Having taken care of my ear-infected daughter this week, I got to know Miley Cyrus, Billy Ray Cyrus***, and the rest of the Hannah gang better than I'd ever dreamed possible.
Given my noble week of self-sacrifice, I was planning on some serious blogging tonight. But when Mrs. RSI and I got together to go over plans, it turned out that she had committed to spend time with a friend of ours who we might say is "troubled" in her life right now. Years ago, I might have protested, but Mrs. RSI's goodness makes life so sweet I didn't mind.
In fact, if I didn't know better, I would think that some of her goodness had rubbed off on me.
***Eastern Kentucky alert: Billy Ray Cyrus is originally from Ashland. His dad is a former head of the Kentucky AFL-CIO.
Given my noble week of self-sacrifice, I was planning on some serious blogging tonight. But when Mrs. RSI and I got together to go over plans, it turned out that she had committed to spend time with a friend of ours who we might say is "troubled" in her life right now. Years ago, I might have protested, but Mrs. RSI's goodness makes life so sweet I didn't mind.
In fact, if I didn't know better, I would think that some of her goodness had rubbed off on me.
***Eastern Kentucky alert: Billy Ray Cyrus is originally from Ashland. His dad is a former head of the Kentucky AFL-CIO.
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Republican Suicide Watch, No. 3--Obstructing Justice and Running Out the Clock
Another way that the Bush administration is leading the Republican Party to suicide is by failing to cooperate with Congressional investigations. The Bush administration thinks that they can run out the clock on the deluge of Congressional investigations and leave office in January 2009 without having given Congressional Democrats any solid information. They think that Alberto Gonzales can continue to lie, that Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten can continue to snub the House Judiciary Committee, and that they can protect Karl Rove from Henry Waxman's investigation into political campaigning with civil service personnel.
Once again, the Bush administration is playing chicken--the only game they ever want to play. The basic idea is to refuse to cooperate with the Democrats and dare them to try to impeach Gonzales or hold Miers and Bolton in contempt of Congress. And if Congressional Republicans want Gonzales to either resign or cooperate, the White House will tell them where to stick it as well.
They might as well call it a Republican Suicide strategy. That's because the Democrats are going to have an easy time making Gonzales, Miers, and Bolton (especially Gonzales) into a campaign issue. I can just see the Democratic attack ad claiming that the Bush administration is the most incompetent administrtion in American history, showing a clip of Gonzales speaking, and then going on to say that the Democrats will dramatically improve the quality of government personnel.
But it's worse than that for the Republicans. Stonewalling now means that Democratic investigations into the Bush administration will continue after the election of 2008 and that stories of the Bush administration's corruption, malfeasance, and incompetence will be dominating the media right up to the 2010 Congressional elections. There will barely be enough time for stories about President Hillary's salon visits.
One could say that the Bush administration is giving the Democrats a club, but it's more accurate to say that the Bush administration is forcing the Republican Party into a suicide march.
Once again, the Bush administration is playing chicken--the only game they ever want to play. The basic idea is to refuse to cooperate with the Democrats and dare them to try to impeach Gonzales or hold Miers and Bolton in contempt of Congress. And if Congressional Republicans want Gonzales to either resign or cooperate, the White House will tell them where to stick it as well.
They might as well call it a Republican Suicide strategy. That's because the Democrats are going to have an easy time making Gonzales, Miers, and Bolton (especially Gonzales) into a campaign issue. I can just see the Democratic attack ad claiming that the Bush administration is the most incompetent administrtion in American history, showing a clip of Gonzales speaking, and then going on to say that the Democrats will dramatically improve the quality of government personnel.
But it's worse than that for the Republicans. Stonewalling now means that Democratic investigations into the Bush administration will continue after the election of 2008 and that stories of the Bush administration's corruption, malfeasance, and incompetence will be dominating the media right up to the 2010 Congressional elections. There will barely be enough time for stories about President Hillary's salon visits.
One could say that the Bush administration is giving the Democrats a club, but it's more accurate to say that the Bush administration is forcing the Republican Party into a suicide march.
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.
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.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
If You Ran Out of Sleeping Pills, Here's Goldstein's Reply
One of the things I seem to be cursed with this summer is long-winded blog discussion partners. There were times when I thought Dan Gerstein, bless him, wanted to drown me in words. Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom is even worse than that. I deleted his marginal comments on my own post and focused on the main body of Goldstein's comments.
Here we go.
". . . what caught my eye is not so much the redundancy of Caric’s reliance on the circular notion that the political policy beliefs of “right wingers” are bigoted because, well, rightwingers are by nature bigots, but rather the unoriginality and datedness of his attempts to put such a premise into the respectable garb of academic rigor.
To wit, Caric’s reply on race isn’t very original. In fact, it is merely a simplified rehashing of the arguments Stanley Fish made in “Reverse Racism, or How the Pot Learned to Call the Kettle Black.” Note that the piece was published in 1993 — nearly 15 years ago.
Further, Caric’s entire worldview seems to rely, for the force of its arguments, on essays like Fish’s “How the Right Hijacked the Magic Words” — which uses the very kind of sleight of hand Fish himself ostensibly rails against, and proceeds from the dual fallacies that 1) “conservatism” and “liberalism” (or those who espouse what he would characterize as rightwing versions of what are more properly “liberal” beliefs) remain static descriptors, which has the effect of tarring those currently labeled “conservatives” with the detritus of conservatism past, just as today’s “progressives” get to fancy themselves the same, philosophically, as those liberals who once fought for equal rights and equality of opportunity; and 2) that a disagreement over the strategy for reaching a desired end (which is never really laid out) proves that one doesn’t wish to reach that end (instead of proving only that one disagrees with a particular strategy for reaching that end, or another end that s/he finds more desirable. From there, it is a short trip from recalcitrance to obstructionism and pure evil). Which is why I’ve tried, unsuccessfully, thus far, to get Caric to describe his end game with respect to racial politics. Does he favor a quilt or a melting pot? And why one over the other?
For Fish, the cumulative “blows” of racial inequality are pushed aside by those who live to serve the status quo of white dominance. In short, those who now profess “color-blindness” really want us to forget about the years of racial discrimination in this country so that they can comfort in its long-term effects.
But what Fish (and Caric, who merely parrots the 12-year-old article) don’t take into account is that the cumulative affects of racial discrimination have long been fought with social engineering policies specifically designed (or, at least, so they claimed) to level the playing field — with a goal toward establishing Dr King’s vision of a society wherein people are judged on the content of their character and not the color of their skin. And part of the “history” of racial politics that Fish and Caric rely on must account for the last 40+ years of Great Society programs (which have alternately given us forced integration (busing) and “good” segregation (identity politics)), which, too, are part of the “cumulative” effect of this country’s attitudes and policies with respect to race.
The question now is, have the attempts by government (and the judiciary) to correct the wrongs of the past proven successful? In what ways? What parts of that program should be continued, if any? Why? And — importantly — is it possible that those policies themselves have outlived their usefulness, or are they necessary in perpetuity? Can they withstand Constitutional scrutiny without the aid of an interpretive approach that avails itself of social advocacy?
In short, was the strategy we chose to “fix” the racial divide the best one available to those of us who believe in individual rights (Fish plays on this notion, as well: when used by those on the right, “individual rights” is simply “code” for maintaining the status quo; when used by the 60s civil rights movement, it was a galvanizing cry for social change).
Ironically, when Fish wrote that piece in 1995, he was reacting to a kind of Republicanism that was still supporting foreign policy realism (today’s home of the new Dems) — and many of those who are now labeled “conservatives” would back then have self-described as liberals (myself included).
Caric believes that a culture, having learned the lessons of racial discrimination, either can’t change — or else they refuse to (Caric leans toward the whole “White Oppressor” trope — a way to show that he’s one of the “good ones” by admitting to his own self-loathing. White guilt as a kind of secular absolution).
Me, I’m not much into such reductionist psychologizing. Instead, I’m more interested in getting us to the place where we, as a society, claim we wish to be. And in doing so, I am interested in finding the best strategies for doing so.
It is my argument that the Great Society programs, while initially well-intentioned, have given rise to an entire new set of problems that keep us as a society from achieving our goal of individual equality. If, indeed, that remains our goal.
And it seems to me that those who most resist this argument are people like Caric, who have built a career around teaching things like “Comparative Racial Thought”. These are people who have a vested interest in keeping “racism” and “sexism” and “homophobia” alive, which is why they are so desirous to find it wherever and whenever they can, even if they have to strain — or even redefine the terms — to do so.
But if the idea is to truly level the playing field, it is my contention that doing away with “racial” thought — or “black” aesthetics, or “feminine” logic, etc — is the best way forward. Affirmative action that relies on something both scientifically dubious and historically charged as “race” is not a winning strategy; affirmative action based on opportunity is far more desirable, and far less racially divisive.
Fish and Caric would turn “merit” into a code word; but to do so cheapens the accomplishments of a host of immigrant cultures who throughout the history of this country have assimilated and prospered as “Americans.”
In short, Caric (and, at least in 1995, Fish) have staked out an enemy and consigned him with bad faith. They may as well as “the right” if we’ve all stopped beating our wives.
Similarly, his reply on homosexual marriage manages to suggest that those who don’t view marriage as a fundamental right (rather than a social contract decided upon by a given culture, with a long tradition shared over time by multiple cultures) are, by fiat, homophobic — despite the fact that they would readily grant all the benefits of state-sanctioned partnerships to same-sex couples.
Caric explains this only by saying that those who wish to deny such a “fundamental right” must necessarily hate gays, because by denying they devalue.
Pure sleight of hand. Because the question of whether marriage is a fundamental right is just that — a question, not some universal principle or inalienable right. Societies place restrictions on marriage all the time (from age to number of partners, etc). And, were same-sex marriage legislation to pass by popular vote, I’d have no trouble abiding it. As it stands, though, my argument against same sex marriage remains semantic — and redounds to worry over both the stated motives of some activists, and the precedent such a redefinition of marriage would set with respect to future petitioners vying for their “fundamental rights”.
Caric believes that these positions are simply masks for a hatred of Queers and Darkies. Because by doing so, he doesn’t have to get into the nitty gritty of putting his own policy preferences to the test.
My positions and arguments — linked above and there for all to see — are clearly stated; my reasons for supporting those arguments are, likewise, spelled out. For Caric’s part, he has yet to address them at all, except by way of generalizing about the motives of conservatives, and by relying on a pair of dated essays by Stanley Fish, who would proudly call himself a modern day sophist.
And before Caric takes the easy way out and labels me another knee-jerk attacker of po-mo, he should know that I have, on several occasions, defended Fish here — against attacks from conservatives.
I have also broken down some of Fish’s rhetorical subterfuge. So you see, I’m more difficult to pigeonhole than Dr Caric would imagine me to be.
****long-oppressed sister of update: I loved this comment from ushie so much that I decided to append it here, lest it be overlooked:
Meh. The sumbitch has the nerve, repeatedly, to characterize a blog he disagrees with as “cute” and “Fluffy.” Believe me, as a feminist and a female, I know EXACTLY what he’s doing by employing such denigrating terms that are usually an accompaniment to “Oh, don’t worry your pretty little head, darling.”
Caric, you should not be teaching women’s studies. You’re a fraud.
(Hey, anyone want to lay a bet as to whether he ignores this sally, thereby further marginalizing a female voice?)
Sadly, ushie, you miss Dr Caric’s point: the fact that you read this site (read it, you understand — not just skim it in order to jump to ridiculous conclusions) means that you cannot lay claim to being a feminist. Because “real” feminists cannot possibly align themselves with the hatred and bigotry toward women, gays, and all the other Others so routinely hated here.
In fact, “real” feminists can only believe in what “real” feminists believe in. Which is what makes them “real” feminists to begin with.
It’s simple, really: to prove your feminist bona fides, you must ride along with the herd.
Not sure that captures the spirit of what the first wave feminists were after, but hey — they’re just a bunch of old dead white women anyway, right? Good riddance, I say.
Here we go.
". . . what caught my eye is not so much the redundancy of Caric’s reliance on the circular notion that the political policy beliefs of “right wingers” are bigoted because, well, rightwingers are by nature bigots, but rather the unoriginality and datedness of his attempts to put such a premise into the respectable garb of academic rigor.
To wit, Caric’s reply on race isn’t very original. In fact, it is merely a simplified rehashing of the arguments Stanley Fish made in “Reverse Racism, or How the Pot Learned to Call the Kettle Black.” Note that the piece was published in 1993 — nearly 15 years ago.
Further, Caric’s entire worldview seems to rely, for the force of its arguments, on essays like Fish’s “How the Right Hijacked the Magic Words” — which uses the very kind of sleight of hand Fish himself ostensibly rails against, and proceeds from the dual fallacies that 1) “conservatism” and “liberalism” (or those who espouse what he would characterize as rightwing versions of what are more properly “liberal” beliefs) remain static descriptors, which has the effect of tarring those currently labeled “conservatives” with the detritus of conservatism past, just as today’s “progressives” get to fancy themselves the same, philosophically, as those liberals who once fought for equal rights and equality of opportunity; and 2) that a disagreement over the strategy for reaching a desired end (which is never really laid out) proves that one doesn’t wish to reach that end (instead of proving only that one disagrees with a particular strategy for reaching that end, or another end that s/he finds more desirable. From there, it is a short trip from recalcitrance to obstructionism and pure evil). Which is why I’ve tried, unsuccessfully, thus far, to get Caric to describe his end game with respect to racial politics. Does he favor a quilt or a melting pot? And why one over the other?
For Fish, the cumulative “blows” of racial inequality are pushed aside by those who live to serve the status quo of white dominance. In short, those who now profess “color-blindness” really want us to forget about the years of racial discrimination in this country so that they can comfort in its long-term effects.
But what Fish (and Caric, who merely parrots the 12-year-old article) don’t take into account is that the cumulative affects of racial discrimination have long been fought with social engineering policies specifically designed (or, at least, so they claimed) to level the playing field — with a goal toward establishing Dr King’s vision of a society wherein people are judged on the content of their character and not the color of their skin. And part of the “history” of racial politics that Fish and Caric rely on must account for the last 40+ years of Great Society programs (which have alternately given us forced integration (busing) and “good” segregation (identity politics)), which, too, are part of the “cumulative” effect of this country’s attitudes and policies with respect to race.
The question now is, have the attempts by government (and the judiciary) to correct the wrongs of the past proven successful? In what ways? What parts of that program should be continued, if any? Why? And — importantly — is it possible that those policies themselves have outlived their usefulness, or are they necessary in perpetuity? Can they withstand Constitutional scrutiny without the aid of an interpretive approach that avails itself of social advocacy?
In short, was the strategy we chose to “fix” the racial divide the best one available to those of us who believe in individual rights (Fish plays on this notion, as well: when used by those on the right, “individual rights” is simply “code” for maintaining the status quo; when used by the 60s civil rights movement, it was a galvanizing cry for social change).
Ironically, when Fish wrote that piece in 1995, he was reacting to a kind of Republicanism that was still supporting foreign policy realism (today’s home of the new Dems) — and many of those who are now labeled “conservatives” would back then have self-described as liberals (myself included).
Caric believes that a culture, having learned the lessons of racial discrimination, either can’t change — or else they refuse to (Caric leans toward the whole “White Oppressor” trope — a way to show that he’s one of the “good ones” by admitting to his own self-loathing. White guilt as a kind of secular absolution).
Me, I’m not much into such reductionist psychologizing. Instead, I’m more interested in getting us to the place where we, as a society, claim we wish to be. And in doing so, I am interested in finding the best strategies for doing so.
It is my argument that the Great Society programs, while initially well-intentioned, have given rise to an entire new set of problems that keep us as a society from achieving our goal of individual equality. If, indeed, that remains our goal.
And it seems to me that those who most resist this argument are people like Caric, who have built a career around teaching things like “Comparative Racial Thought”. These are people who have a vested interest in keeping “racism” and “sexism” and “homophobia” alive, which is why they are so desirous to find it wherever and whenever they can, even if they have to strain — or even redefine the terms — to do so.
But if the idea is to truly level the playing field, it is my contention that doing away with “racial” thought — or “black” aesthetics, or “feminine” logic, etc — is the best way forward. Affirmative action that relies on something both scientifically dubious and historically charged as “race” is not a winning strategy; affirmative action based on opportunity is far more desirable, and far less racially divisive.
Fish and Caric would turn “merit” into a code word; but to do so cheapens the accomplishments of a host of immigrant cultures who throughout the history of this country have assimilated and prospered as “Americans.”
In short, Caric (and, at least in 1995, Fish) have staked out an enemy and consigned him with bad faith. They may as well as “the right” if we’ve all stopped beating our wives.
Similarly, his reply on homosexual marriage manages to suggest that those who don’t view marriage as a fundamental right (rather than a social contract decided upon by a given culture, with a long tradition shared over time by multiple cultures) are, by fiat, homophobic — despite the fact that they would readily grant all the benefits of state-sanctioned partnerships to same-sex couples.
Caric explains this only by saying that those who wish to deny such a “fundamental right” must necessarily hate gays, because by denying they devalue.
Pure sleight of hand. Because the question of whether marriage is a fundamental right is just that — a question, not some universal principle or inalienable right. Societies place restrictions on marriage all the time (from age to number of partners, etc). And, were same-sex marriage legislation to pass by popular vote, I’d have no trouble abiding it. As it stands, though, my argument against same sex marriage remains semantic — and redounds to worry over both the stated motives of some activists, and the precedent such a redefinition of marriage would set with respect to future petitioners vying for their “fundamental rights”.
Caric believes that these positions are simply masks for a hatred of Queers and Darkies. Because by doing so, he doesn’t have to get into the nitty gritty of putting his own policy preferences to the test.
My positions and arguments — linked above and there for all to see — are clearly stated; my reasons for supporting those arguments are, likewise, spelled out. For Caric’s part, he has yet to address them at all, except by way of generalizing about the motives of conservatives, and by relying on a pair of dated essays by Stanley Fish, who would proudly call himself a modern day sophist.
And before Caric takes the easy way out and labels me another knee-jerk attacker of po-mo, he should know that I have, on several occasions, defended Fish here — against attacks from conservatives.
I have also broken down some of Fish’s rhetorical subterfuge. So you see, I’m more difficult to pigeonhole than Dr Caric would imagine me to be.
****long-oppressed sister of update: I loved this comment from ushie so much that I decided to append it here, lest it be overlooked:
Meh. The sumbitch has the nerve, repeatedly, to characterize a blog he disagrees with as “cute” and “Fluffy.” Believe me, as a feminist and a female, I know EXACTLY what he’s doing by employing such denigrating terms that are usually an accompaniment to “Oh, don’t worry your pretty little head, darling.”
Caric, you should not be teaching women’s studies. You’re a fraud.
(Hey, anyone want to lay a bet as to whether he ignores this sally, thereby further marginalizing a female voice?)
Sadly, ushie, you miss Dr Caric’s point: the fact that you read this site (read it, you understand — not just skim it in order to jump to ridiculous conclusions) means that you cannot lay claim to being a feminist. Because “real” feminists cannot possibly align themselves with the hatred and bigotry toward women, gays, and all the other Others so routinely hated here.
In fact, “real” feminists can only believe in what “real” feminists believe in. Which is what makes them “real” feminists to begin with.
It’s simple, really: to prove your feminist bona fides, you must ride along with the herd.
Not sure that captures the spirit of what the first wave feminists were after, but hey — they’re just a bunch of old dead white women anyway, right? Good riddance, I say.
Republican Suicide Watch, No. 2--A Test of Character
It almost goes without saying that President Bush and Dick Cheney are killing the Republican Party for 2008. Given that President Bush's role as leader of the Republican Party and Dick Cheney's role as a Republican spokesman, fixer, and policy powerhouse, their part in the upcoming Republican disaster makes it a form of suicide.
Both President Bush and Cheney have decided that it's a principle of political manhood to ignore the impact of the Iraq War on Republican chances in 2008. I can't find the link, but recently President Bush claimed that he wasn't following politics all that closely and that he was acting on "principle" instead. For Bush, ignoring Congress and public opinion on the war is a test of his character. Bush is determined to do what he wants whatever Congress thinks and he's daring the Democratic leadership to either cut off funding for the war or impeach him. One component of that test is whether he is willing to ignore public opinion to the extent that it hurts the Republicans. Bush appears to believed that changing his policies to avoid a Republican Party meltdown would be a sign of weakness, softness, or femininity. Given that he is determined to avoid all of these things, Bush is quite willing for the Republican Party to take a big fall in 2008.
The same is the case with Dick Cheney. In a May interview with Fox, Cheney announced that:
Here, Cheney's telling Congressional Republicans that he doesn't care any more about what they think than he cares about the Democrats or anybody else thinks. For Cheney, anybody who disagrees with the Bush administration's vision of the war has failed a "fundamental test of character" and he expects Republicans to fall on their political swords rather than challenge Bush.
That's another test of character.
Both President Bush and Cheney have decided that it's a principle of political manhood to ignore the impact of the Iraq War on Republican chances in 2008. I can't find the link, but recently President Bush claimed that he wasn't following politics all that closely and that he was acting on "principle" instead. For Bush, ignoring Congress and public opinion on the war is a test of his character. Bush is determined to do what he wants whatever Congress thinks and he's daring the Democratic leadership to either cut off funding for the war or impeach him. One component of that test is whether he is willing to ignore public opinion to the extent that it hurts the Republicans. Bush appears to believed that changing his policies to avoid a Republican Party meltdown would be a sign of weakness, softness, or femininity. Given that he is determined to avoid all of these things, Bush is quite willing for the Republican Party to take a big fall in 2008.
The same is the case with Dick Cheney. In a May interview with Fox, Cheney announced that:
"We didn't get elected to be popular. We didn't get elected to worry just about the fate of the Republican Party. Our mission is to do everything we can to prevail on what is now, we believe, a global conflict, a fundamental test of the character of the American people, whether or not we're going to be able to prevail against one of the most evil opponents we've ever faced."
Here, Cheney's telling Congressional Republicans that he doesn't care any more about what they think than he cares about the Democrats or anybody else thinks. For Cheney, anybody who disagrees with the Bush administration's vision of the war has failed a "fundamental test of character" and he expects Republicans to fall on their political swords rather than challenge Bush.
That's another test of character.
RSI's Response to the Challenge of the Protein Wisdom Collective
The Protein Wisdom gang is such a lockstep group that I thought of referring to them as the Protein Wisdom "'Soviet," but I was able to resist temptation.
Anyway, I thought I would respond to Jeff Goldstein's challenge through my response to somebody in the group. Unlike Goldstein (who often gets tied up in his own cleverness), "Zelda" provided something that I could respond to.
To Quote from Zelda:
What makes Goldstein and Protein Wisdom a particular evil is that he’s making the justification of oppression into something “cute,” “fun,” and “hip” while providing a haze of pop culture references to cover their practical alliance with the hard core bigots.
The same is the case with gay marriage. Zelda writes that she doesn’t approve of “preventing anyone from getting married.” In case she hasn’t noticed though, preventing gay people from getting married has been one of the top political priorities of the American right for several years. Why is this the case? As Karl Rove would say, campaigning against gay marriage was a way to ensure that people who hate and fear gays, homophobic people in other words, voted Republican.
In fact, marriage is one of the fundamental acts, sacraments, or relations of our society. For someone to advocate the exclusion of any group of people from marriage is to tell people in that group that they are not full citizens, really not full human beings. When Goldstein opposes gay marriage (I haven't seen him say why yet), he is telling gay people that they are not worthy of the fundamental and good things of our society. That’s pretty much exactly the same thing that the more overtly bigoted right-wingers are saying.
At the same time, Goldstein is providing a slick cultural cover for the hard-core homophobes. Once again, that makes him worse than the bigots.
Anyway, I thought I would respond to Jeff Goldstein's challenge through my response to somebody in the group. Unlike Goldstein (who often gets tied up in his own cleverness), "Zelda" provided something that I could respond to.
To Quote from Zelda:
“I don’t approve of killing people for their skin color, preventing anyone from getting married, shunning children for their parents’ race, segregation, Jim Crow laws, job discrimination, and using naughty words to insult someone’s ethnicity.”You’ve nicely summed up the substance of American conservatism in your disavowals here. Let me get to the heart of the matter in relation to race. Conservatives went from “Killing people for their skin color” in order to enforce segregation to using the rhetoric of “color-blindness” to justify generalized racial hostility, “job discrimination,” consumer discriminations of all kinds, police targeting of young black men, racial profiling, and other kinds of discriminatory behaviors. In “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King characterized whites as an “oppressor group” be ause of white support for segregation. Given the wide range of discriminatory and oppressive behaviors toward blacks in contemporary America, whites are still an oppressor group and the rhetoric of color-blindness is used both to justify the oppression and to cut off any kind of remedies for the oppression (like affirmative action).
What makes Goldstein and Protein Wisdom a particular evil is that he’s making the justification of oppression into something “cute,” “fun,” and “hip” while providing a haze of pop culture references to cover their practical alliance with the hard core bigots.
The same is the case with gay marriage. Zelda writes that she doesn’t approve of “preventing anyone from getting married.” In case she hasn’t noticed though, preventing gay people from getting married has been one of the top political priorities of the American right for several years. Why is this the case? As Karl Rove would say, campaigning against gay marriage was a way to ensure that people who hate and fear gays, homophobic people in other words, voted Republican.
In fact, marriage is one of the fundamental acts, sacraments, or relations of our society. For someone to advocate the exclusion of any group of people from marriage is to tell people in that group that they are not full citizens, really not full human beings. When Goldstein opposes gay marriage (I haven't seen him say why yet), he is telling gay people that they are not worthy of the fundamental and good things of our society. That’s pretty much exactly the same thing that the more overtly bigoted right-wingers are saying.
At the same time, Goldstein is providing a slick cultural cover for the hard-core homophobes. Once again, that makes him worse than the bigots.
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Today's "Ric Caric Celebration" at Protein Wisdom
Today was "Ric Caric Day" at the right-wing blog Protein Wisdom. As much attention as they lavished on me, Jeff Goldstein and Dan Collins might as well have held a parade. I guess they didn't like one of my comments on their posts. They had three top posts (here, here, and here) challenging me to debate feminism, race relations, gay marriage, Islamophobia and enough other topics to fill out a five book research project. One of the posts by Collins was funny in the fluff kind of way that Protein Wisdom does well. But as usually is the case with Jeff Goldstein, he did a lot of bragging about his super-powered intellect without saying anything substantive. My reply boiling down my initial argument that the "intellectual conservatism" of Protein Wisdom is more evil than unsophisticated bigotry is here.
Republican Suicide Watch--No. 1
Slim Republican Chances in 2008. According to a Bob Novak column, Republicans in Congress see themselves as having one chance to win in 2008--the fact that the Democrats are likely to nominate eithe Hillary Clinton (a woman) or Barack Obama (an African-American). As has been the case for a long time, bigots are the best friends of the Republican party.
Actually, I doubt that they even have that chance.
Mostly because they seem bent on committing political suicide.
The Petraeus Plan. That certainly seems to be the case with the evolving plan for occupying Iraq. According to MSN, General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker are drawing up a military plan* that envisions the surge as continuing through June 2008. The idea is that American forces won't be able to establish "localized control" in Baghdad and other areas for at least another eleven months. Another year after that, in June 2009, the plan envisions American troops as handing the baton off to Iraqi forces.
What's the strategy? That's hard to say at present. According to MSN:
That doesn't seem like a likely plan. What Petraeus means by "locally-based security initiatives" is setting up outposts in neighborhoods, gaining the trust of the locals, providing a higher level of security, and paving the way for economic reconstruction. However, that had nothing to do with American progress in Anbar which occurred because Sunni tribes switched allegiance from the global jihadis to the U. S.
It's not likely that Shiite leaders will do the U. S. the same favor in areas like Sadr City in Baghdad. Unlike the foreign fighters, the Shiite militias are genuinely popular in Shiite neighborhoods. The militias are led by the two most popular Shiite political parties (SCIRI and Sadr's Party) , have leaders who are genuinely popular among the Shiite population, and are made up of young men from Shiite neighborhoods. It will be extremely difficult if not impossible for the American military to induce the Shiite population to switch their allegiance from their own leaders and militias to the Americans attacking their militias.
MSN doesn't report what Petraeus think of the chances of this plan succeeding. However, it's a bad sign that Steven Biddle, a member of an advisory group working on Petraeus' plans last spring, believes that his own preferred "carrot and stick" strategy for dealing with insurgent groups only has a 10% chance of working. Evidently, he believes that Petraeus' own approach has less than a 10% shot of succeeding.
Suicide is Painful. The chances of Petraeus killing GOP chances in 2008 seem to be a lot higher than his chances of securing Baghdad. By June 2008, the nomination process will be over and the Republican nominee would be preparing for the convention in July. This is normally the season when the Republican attack machine does it's best work in smearing Democratic candidates. If the surge is still going on in June 2008, that's not going to happen because the Republicans will be stuck in the position of defending a highly unpopular military policy. The reason Senate Republican like Mitch McConnell only want to give the surge until September 2007 is that they think they'll need 14 months to recover from the unpopularity of the surge if they want to win in 2008.
That's why Petraeus' plan is political suicide for the Republicans. It has little chance of succeeding and it won't give the Republican Party any time to recover from the failure.
George Bush and Dick aren't running for office in 2008. Suicide, however, is going to be painful for the rest of the Republican Party.
*For all those miltiary jargon fetishists out there, the official term for the plan is the "Joint Campaign Plan" (inevitably the JCP).
Actually, I doubt that they even have that chance.
Mostly because they seem bent on committing political suicide.
The Petraeus Plan. That certainly seems to be the case with the evolving plan for occupying Iraq. According to MSN, General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker are drawing up a military plan* that envisions the surge as continuing through June 2008. The idea is that American forces won't be able to establish "localized control" in Baghdad and other areas for at least another eleven months. Another year after that, in June 2009, the plan envisions American troops as handing the baton off to Iraqi forces.
What's the strategy? That's hard to say at present. According to MSN:
The plan envisions using locally based security initiatives, such as those that in western Anbar province have proven successful in reducing insurgent violence this year, as a starting point. Such efforts are now under way elsewhere in Iraq, including some parts of Baghdad.
That doesn't seem like a likely plan. What Petraeus means by "locally-based security initiatives" is setting up outposts in neighborhoods, gaining the trust of the locals, providing a higher level of security, and paving the way for economic reconstruction. However, that had nothing to do with American progress in Anbar which occurred because Sunni tribes switched allegiance from the global jihadis to the U. S.
It's not likely that Shiite leaders will do the U. S. the same favor in areas like Sadr City in Baghdad. Unlike the foreign fighters, the Shiite militias are genuinely popular in Shiite neighborhoods. The militias are led by the two most popular Shiite political parties (SCIRI and Sadr's Party) , have leaders who are genuinely popular among the Shiite population, and are made up of young men from Shiite neighborhoods. It will be extremely difficult if not impossible for the American military to induce the Shiite population to switch their allegiance from their own leaders and militias to the Americans attacking their militias.
MSN doesn't report what Petraeus think of the chances of this plan succeeding. However, it's a bad sign that Steven Biddle, a member of an advisory group working on Petraeus' plans last spring, believes that his own preferred "carrot and stick" strategy for dealing with insurgent groups only has a 10% chance of working. Evidently, he believes that Petraeus' own approach has less than a 10% shot of succeeding.
Suicide is Painful. The chances of Petraeus killing GOP chances in 2008 seem to be a lot higher than his chances of securing Baghdad. By June 2008, the nomination process will be over and the Republican nominee would be preparing for the convention in July. This is normally the season when the Republican attack machine does it's best work in smearing Democratic candidates. If the surge is still going on in June 2008, that's not going to happen because the Republicans will be stuck in the position of defending a highly unpopular military policy. The reason Senate Republican like Mitch McConnell only want to give the surge until September 2007 is that they think they'll need 14 months to recover from the unpopularity of the surge if they want to win in 2008.
That's why Petraeus' plan is political suicide for the Republicans. It has little chance of succeeding and it won't give the Republican Party any time to recover from the failure.
George Bush and Dick aren't running for office in 2008. Suicide, however, is going to be painful for the rest of the Republican Party.
*For all those miltiary jargon fetishists out there, the official term for the plan is the "Joint Campaign Plan" (inevitably the JCP).
Monday, July 23, 2007
The "Alberto Gonzales" of Attorney Generals
"Alberto Gonzales" has become a watchword for incompetence in American society. Given that Alberto Gonzales is also the attorney general, Alberto Gonzales is the "Alberto Gonzales" of attorney generals. Maybe we should just call him "Al."
Tomorrow, the "Alberto Gonzales" of attorney generals is going to return to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. According to Gonzales' prepared remarks:
Gonzales doesn't mention that one of the main problems of the Justice Department is that he himself is such an incompetent. Unfortunately, Gonzales doesn't mention how he's going to fix that.
Tomorrow, the "Alberto Gonzales" of attorney generals is going to return to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. According to Gonzales' prepared remarks:
I believe very strongly that there is no place for political considerations in the hiring of our career employees or in the administration of justice. As such, the allegations of such activity have been troubling to hear . . . I could walk away or I could devote my time, effort and energy to fix the problems. Since I have never been one to quit, I decided that the best course of action was to remain here and fix the problems. That is exactly what I am doing.
Gonzales doesn't mention that one of the main problems of the Justice Department is that he himself is such an incompetent. Unfortunately, Gonzales doesn't mention how he's going to fix that.
The Only Way to Save the Surge
Ouch! The right-wing's "Save the Surge" campaign took a hit today when ARG revealed that President Bush's approval rating had sunk to 25% in their polling. Of course, somebody could just say "that's George Bush, not the war."
But they would be mistaken. A just-published NYTimes/CBS finds that only 19% of the population thinks the surge is making things better.
As Bush Goes, So Goes the War. President Bush's popularity is a good barometer of the popularity of his war policies. Even if polls other than ARG don't find that Bush's popularity is in the mid 20's, the failure of Bush's approval ratings to rise means that the campaign to bolster the surge has not taken hold with the public.
Bush is the Problem. President Bush is not only commander-in-chief, he's also the no. 1 salesman for the war. In fall 2006, a Bush blitzkrieg was helping the Republicans until the Mark Foley scandal broke. This time, it's different though. The fact that Bush has been out more speaking on behalf of the war seems to be actually hurting his public standing. The other problem from the conservative point of view is that the popularity of Bush's war policy is being dragged down because of its association with Bush's many scandals. The fired prosecutor scandal, Jack Abramoff scandal, Scooter Libby commutation, and Hatch Act violations scandal are all dragging down the popularity of the war as well as the popularity of the President.
Impeachment is the Answer. If President Bush is one of the right-wing's main problems in promoting the war, the right-wing is in a bind. Believing that god is on his side in the war, Bush isn't going to resign. At the same time, Bush's unpopularity means that the war could be brought to a grinding halt any time Congress decides to stop funding it.
In this context, the right should support impeachment for Bush and Cheney. I'm serious. Bush and Cheney aren't doing the conservative movement any more good than they're doing the country as a whole. It is true that Nancy Pelosi opposes the war now, but the right could hope that Pelosi might change her mind if she gets to see the same intelligence data as Bush and Cheney and gets regular reports from the generals. Right now, a change of heart on the part of President Pelosi (sounds good doesn't it?) is pretty much the only hope the right has. If Clinton or Obama run on withdrawing combat troops from Iraq, they're going to have to carry through with it or face an extremely angry electorate. It would be better for the right to support impeachment now and deal with President Pelosi than get scorched in the 2008 elections and have to deal with a triumphant anti-war movement.
Of course, there's lots of grounds for impeaching Bush and Cheney. Deceiving the country into going into war, the malfeasance with which Bush and Cheney have managed the war, the constantly evolving torture policy, the politicization of the Justice Department, the violations of the Hatch Act, and obstructing justice in the case of Scooter Libby are all impeachable offenses. Spokespeople for the right-wing should just announce that they've had the same kind of change of heart that Mitt Romney had on abortion, declare themselves to be "shocked, shocked" at the rampant criminality in the Bush administration, and start pushing for impeachment.
It's the only hope for their war.
But they would be mistaken. A just-published NYTimes/CBS finds that only 19% of the population thinks the surge is making things better.
As Bush Goes, So Goes the War. President Bush's popularity is a good barometer of the popularity of his war policies. Even if polls other than ARG don't find that Bush's popularity is in the mid 20's, the failure of Bush's approval ratings to rise means that the campaign to bolster the surge has not taken hold with the public.
Bush is the Problem. President Bush is not only commander-in-chief, he's also the no. 1 salesman for the war. In fall 2006, a Bush blitzkrieg was helping the Republicans until the Mark Foley scandal broke. This time, it's different though. The fact that Bush has been out more speaking on behalf of the war seems to be actually hurting his public standing. The other problem from the conservative point of view is that the popularity of Bush's war policy is being dragged down because of its association with Bush's many scandals. The fired prosecutor scandal, Jack Abramoff scandal, Scooter Libby commutation, and Hatch Act violations scandal are all dragging down the popularity of the war as well as the popularity of the President.
Impeachment is the Answer. If President Bush is one of the right-wing's main problems in promoting the war, the right-wing is in a bind. Believing that god is on his side in the war, Bush isn't going to resign. At the same time, Bush's unpopularity means that the war could be brought to a grinding halt any time Congress decides to stop funding it.
In this context, the right should support impeachment for Bush and Cheney. I'm serious. Bush and Cheney aren't doing the conservative movement any more good than they're doing the country as a whole. It is true that Nancy Pelosi opposes the war now, but the right could hope that Pelosi might change her mind if she gets to see the same intelligence data as Bush and Cheney and gets regular reports from the generals. Right now, a change of heart on the part of President Pelosi (sounds good doesn't it?) is pretty much the only hope the right has. If Clinton or Obama run on withdrawing combat troops from Iraq, they're going to have to carry through with it or face an extremely angry electorate. It would be better for the right to support impeachment now and deal with President Pelosi than get scorched in the 2008 elections and have to deal with a triumphant anti-war movement.
Of course, there's lots of grounds for impeaching Bush and Cheney. Deceiving the country into going into war, the malfeasance with which Bush and Cheney have managed the war, the constantly evolving torture policy, the politicization of the Justice Department, the violations of the Hatch Act, and obstructing justice in the case of Scooter Libby are all impeachable offenses. Spokespeople for the right-wing should just announce that they've had the same kind of change of heart that Mitt Romney had on abortion, declare themselves to be "shocked, shocked" at the rampant criminality in the Bush administration, and start pushing for impeachment.
It's the only hope for their war.
Sunday, July 22, 2007
The Socialist Mentality of the Fluff Right
Protein Wisdom blogger J. Howard posted today on "Welfare and the Road to Serfdom" about the family apparatus. In J. Howard's imagination, family law has become a welfare apparatus but J. Howard doesn't make an argument for this so much as she alludes to words that are important to conservatives.
J. Howard also quotes extensively from the writing of Stephen Baskerville at an Ayn Rand site. Like Howard, Baskerville uses the topic of family law to marshall a lot of conservative words.
Baskerville's Ph.D. must be in name-calling because that's most of what he does as he performs a kind of operant conditioning on conservatives. It's a pretty simple technique. J. Howard and Baskerville write terms like "deeply ruinous welfare state," "tyranny," and "communism" and conservatives that trigger the conservative group loyalties like identifying something they loathe. Then watch their right-wing audience salivate. Trigger the right-wing group loyalties of their readers with other words like "kafkaesque machinery," "bureaucratic tyranny," and "the state," and they'll salivate even more.
Of course, all of this ignores the realities of the millions of people wanting divorces (hence divorce lawyers), the acrimony involved in a lot of those divorces, deadbeat dads like my father and my brother (hence government involvement in collecting support payments), abusive families, hopelessly addicted parents, and the like. But J. Howard and Baskerville don't care any more about that than Dick Cheney cares about democracy in Iraq. The trick is to formulate right-wing jargon in a way that triggers the sense of group loyalty among conservatives. Once that's accomplished, the particularities of the subject matter aren't very important.
This focus on words can have disadvantages in dealing with the nitty gritty of public. Witness the Bush administration's incompetence in dealing with Iraq and Katrina. However, the words are much more important to almost any conservative than policy success. This kind of word fetishism is a very effective technique when group loyalty is the highest priority of the people involved. And in the case of conservatives, group loyality is at the top of their list.
Call it the socialist dimension of American conservatism.
Pursuant that reality and now that this particular variant of a deeply ruinous welfare state is coming out of the closet, I’ll freely admit that it’s becoming much harder to find a way to present the argument than it is to define its factors: What do you call such tyranny? Tyranny? Does a program that’s grown beyond a simple socialist bent still warrant the label? Do we trot out and dust off that old standby, Communism? What we’re finding, objectively, has many of the hallmarks of a nice deep shade of collectivist reality, after all (my emphasis).
J. Howard also quotes extensively from the writing of Stephen Baskerville at an Ayn Rand site. Like Howard, Baskerville uses the topic of family law to marshall a lot of conservative words.
it is not called the welfare “state” for nothing. For unnoticed by reformers has been a startling development that is far more serious than even the devastating economic effects. This is the quiet metamorphosis of welfare from a simple system of public assistance into nothing less than a miniature penal apparatus, replete with its own system of courts, prosecutors, police, and jails: juvenile and “family” courts, “matrimonial” lawyers, child protective services, domestic violence units, child support enforcement agents, and more. This kafkaesque machinery operates by its own rules, largely outside the constitutional order, and represents the fulfillment of Friedrich von Hayek’s prophecy that socialism would eventually take us down a “road to serfdom.”
Baskerville's Ph.D. must be in name-calling because that's most of what he does as he performs a kind of operant conditioning on conservatives. It's a pretty simple technique. J. Howard and Baskerville write terms like "deeply ruinous welfare state," "tyranny," and "communism" and conservatives that trigger the conservative group loyalties like identifying something they loathe. Then watch their right-wing audience salivate. Trigger the right-wing group loyalties of their readers with other words like "kafkaesque machinery," "bureaucratic tyranny," and "the state," and they'll salivate even more.
Of course, all of this ignores the realities of the millions of people wanting divorces (hence divorce lawyers), the acrimony involved in a lot of those divorces, deadbeat dads like my father and my brother (hence government involvement in collecting support payments), abusive families, hopelessly addicted parents, and the like. But J. Howard and Baskerville don't care any more about that than Dick Cheney cares about democracy in Iraq. The trick is to formulate right-wing jargon in a way that triggers the sense of group loyalty among conservatives. Once that's accomplished, the particularities of the subject matter aren't very important.
This focus on words can have disadvantages in dealing with the nitty gritty of public. Witness the Bush administration's incompetence in dealing with Iraq and Katrina. However, the words are much more important to almost any conservative than policy success. This kind of word fetishism is a very effective technique when group loyalty is the highest priority of the people involved. And in the case of conservatives, group loyality is at the top of their list.
Call it the socialist dimension of American conservatism.
What if Bush Had Been More Like Dumbledore?
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has run though our family. Katy finished last night, me this morning, and Mrs. RSI is finishing up herself now.
Exhaustion reigns.
Oddly though, my deepest emotion is that I need to finish my own book. J. K. Rowling may have her limitations as a writer (who doesn't?), but I've always admired her greatly for writing The Order of the Phoenix, The Half-Blood Prince, and Deathly Hallows at all. As a wealthy and famous woman, Rowling had the celebrity version of academic tenure. She could have rested on her laurels for the rest of her life, but she kept writing and kept improving.
That's what I want to do as well.
Without giving too much away, it struck me that the U. S. would be much better off as a country if George Bush had followed the path of Albus Dumbledore. A great and good person in his own way, Dumbledore also recognized that he was not the kind of man who should hold great power. In his own words, Dumbledore was "unworthy." (720) That's why Dumbledore turned down several opportunities to become Minister of Magic. He knew that such power would tempt him to act recklessly and foolishly, to bring about his own destruction and that of many others.
What would have happened if George Bush had had a similar moment of self-reflection when Republican recruiters came calling upon him to run for President? What if Bush had realized that he had qualities that made him unworthy to hold enormous power? Bush has many disqualifying personal characteristics, any list of which would include his longstanding failure to exercise responsibility in his own life, lack of curiosity, lack of capacity for self-doubt, lack of attention to detail, and ignorance of many of the issues. George W. had already run two businesses into the ground and made himself an embarrassment in his father's White House. If he had recognized that his previous failures weren't accidents, he could have saved himself, and us, from being such a monumental failure as president.
Of course, it's always difficult to identify the right path, but George Bush should have recognized that the road to the White House was the wrong path for him.
Exhaustion reigns.
Oddly though, my deepest emotion is that I need to finish my own book. J. K. Rowling may have her limitations as a writer (who doesn't?), but I've always admired her greatly for writing The Order of the Phoenix, The Half-Blood Prince, and Deathly Hallows at all. As a wealthy and famous woman, Rowling had the celebrity version of academic tenure. She could have rested on her laurels for the rest of her life, but she kept writing and kept improving.
That's what I want to do as well.
Without giving too much away, it struck me that the U. S. would be much better off as a country if George Bush had followed the path of Albus Dumbledore. A great and good person in his own way, Dumbledore also recognized that he was not the kind of man who should hold great power. In his own words, Dumbledore was "unworthy." (720) That's why Dumbledore turned down several opportunities to become Minister of Magic. He knew that such power would tempt him to act recklessly and foolishly, to bring about his own destruction and that of many others.
What would have happened if George Bush had had a similar moment of self-reflection when Republican recruiters came calling upon him to run for President? What if Bush had realized that he had qualities that made him unworthy to hold enormous power? Bush has many disqualifying personal characteristics, any list of which would include his longstanding failure to exercise responsibility in his own life, lack of curiosity, lack of capacity for self-doubt, lack of attention to detail, and ignorance of many of the issues. George W. had already run two businesses into the ground and made himself an embarrassment in his father's White House. If he had recognized that his previous failures weren't accidents, he could have saved himself, and us, from being such a monumental failure as president.
Of course, it's always difficult to identify the right path, but George Bush should have recognized that the road to the White House was the wrong path for him.
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