I'm at the Northrup family reunion of four of my brothers and sisters in Asheville, NC. All of us were born in upstate NY, but so many of us have moved South that we've held our reunions in Atlanta and Asheville. My home in Kentucky is now too far north for a family reunion.
Notes.
1. Who's in shape. It's Mrs. RSI! She's been working out twice a day as part of her diet and it really showed when we went hiking. She did all the hikes on Mount Pisgah the younger people did while I had to pass on the last steep one. My turn to get in shape next.
2. Turning my stomach. I had to leave the conversation when it turned to the neighbor's botched gastric by-pass. It turns out that lots of people have botched gastric by-passes. Personally, I don't have the stomach for it.
3. Bucking the Tide. Septuagenarians Aunt Shirley and Grama Marlene were singing the praises of being a stay at home mom. I thought that being a stay-at-home mom was a terrible idea when I was ten and haven't changed my opinion since. So it was good to hear that my oldest daughter told them that the world has changed since feminism. Because it has.
4. The Popularity of Dogfighting. My Aunt Shirley and her husband Lou talked about the popularity of dog fighting and dog and pig fighting in South Carolina. It's sickening but it goes way beyond Michael Vick.
5. The Power of Plants. Three of my friends in Morehead have bad cases of cancer and a woman I knew died a horrible death after being pinned under a lawn tractor for five hours. Whenever I hear about death and dying among those I know, I imagine myself fathering 5,000 more children just as a way to stick it to death. But it's not necessary. I can always see the force of living things when I see plants growing along highways. Even the sheerest rock faces have plants growing out of them. So does the asphalt on road shoulders. The tenacity of the plants is unbelievable. So is the beauty of some of the flowers that grow alongside highways. The periwinkle blue corn flowers and black-eyed Susans were especially beautiful as we drove down to Ashville from Kentucky.
It was a beauty I needed to see.
Saturday, August 04, 2007
Friday, August 03, 2007
Ollie North Casts Shadow On Surge Progress
In a Townhall.com article today, Oliver North let the cat out of the bag while trying to extoll the surge. It turns out that the Sunni tribes in Anbar started switching allegiance from al-Qaeda to our side last December even before the first surge troops started to arrive.
And, as I mentioned before, there's good reason to wonder why the surge has accomplished so little despite the Anbar Awakening and the relative standing down of the Shiite militias.
Last December -- even before the additional troops arrived in Iraq -- I reported how the "Awakening" in violent Anbar province had created conditions where, for the first time, Sunni police, Shia soldiers and American troops were working together against Al Qaeda.Given that the "Anbar Awakening" began before the surge, there's no reason to give credit for the Sunni change of heart to General Petraeus or the surge.
And, as I mentioned before, there's good reason to wonder why the surge has accomplished so little despite the Anbar Awakening and the relative standing down of the Shiite militias.
Surge and Backwash
ANOTHER NAIL IN NEO-LIBERAL COFFIN. One of the real pleasures of the collapse of the Bush administration has been watching neo-liberalism go down with it. The tactic among neo-liberal Democrats like Joe Lieberman was to be almost as conservative as the Republicans while treating liberals as their chief opponents. But the neo-liberal "liberal hawks" who were almost as eager to invade Iraq as the Bush administration now look almost as stupid and delusional as Dick Cheney.
One liberal hawk who probably won't get a job in a Hillary administration is Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution. On Monday, O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack were promoting the surge in a New York Times op-ed entitled "A War That We Just Might Win." Five years ago, promoting a Bush administration line like that would have been the hip, counter-intuitive thing to do for a neo-liberal Democrat who wanted to get ahead. But Democratic leaders have stopped waffling between support for the war and tepid opposition any more. Now, they're waffling between cutting off funding for the war and contempt of Congress prosecutions for the Bush White House.
In that context, the O'Hanlon/ Pollack article was a stab in the back for Democratic presidential candidates and Congressional leaders. Somebody with some clout must have told that to O'Hanlon because he recanted on Tuesday for what he wrote on Monday.
A WEAK SURGE. But the case for the surge is extremely weak.
We have 38,000 additional troops in Iraq. What have they accomplished since the first additional troops allied in February, 2007.
The major objective of the surge was stability in Baghdad? Has that been accomplished? No! Even a guy as pro-war as Michael Totten emphasizes that nowhere in Baghdad is safe, including the Green Zone.
One liberal hawk who probably won't get a job in a Hillary administration is Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution. On Monday, O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack were promoting the surge in a New York Times op-ed entitled "A War That We Just Might Win." Five years ago, promoting a Bush administration line like that would have been the hip, counter-intuitive thing to do for a neo-liberal Democrat who wanted to get ahead. But Democratic leaders have stopped waffling between support for the war and tepid opposition any more. Now, they're waffling between cutting off funding for the war and contempt of Congress prosecutions for the Bush White House.
In that context, the O'Hanlon/ Pollack article was a stab in the back for Democratic presidential candidates and Congressional leaders. Somebody with some clout must have told that to O'Hanlon because he recanted on Tuesday for what he wrote on Monday.
A WEAK SURGE. But the case for the surge is extremely weak.
We have 38,000 additional troops in Iraq. What have they accomplished since the first additional troops allied in February, 2007.
The major objective of the surge was stability in Baghdad? Has that been accomplished? No! Even a guy as pro-war as Michael Totten emphasizes that nowhere in Baghdad is safe, including the Green Zone.
As mentioned in previous posts, what makes the failure to secure Baghdad particularly telling is that U. S. forces have had nearly ideal conditions. Sunni tribes began turning against al-Qaeda last September and the Shiite militias decided not to confront American troops.
But Baghdad isn't secure, there's only one hour of electricity a day (according to Michael Totten), and terrorists have been able to attack "high value targets" like open-air markets, funeral processions, and soccer celebrations. If anything, the counter-surge of Sunni insurgents and al-Qaeda looks like it's having more success in Baghdad than the American surge.
EVEN WORSE, it looks like the American military and American embassy have decided to throw their weight behind a hoped for and inevitably unwieldy alliance of Sunnis, Kurds, and secularists. The U. S. also is pushing against the Shiite militias, forcing the Iraqi government to fire sectarian Shiite military officers, and arming Sunni militias.
It's a recipe for disaster. What the U. S. is doing is driving large sectors of the majority Shiite population toward insurrection. Shiite violence has already flared twice with al-Sadr's campaign againt the U. S. military in 2004 and the death squads of 2006. U. S. policy is pushing the Shiites toward another big blow-up that will reverse months of patient progress.
Thursday, August 02, 2007
Very Bad News
I just learned that one of my friends has stomach cancer. From what I've heard, it doesn't look good for him either but I'm going to visit him at the hospital in Lexington and see his family. So I'll probably get a little more information then.
Given my friends illness and my upcoming trip to Asheville, NC for my family reunion, I might now be doing much blogging over the next 72 hours and probably won't be able to renew my wonderful exchange with the PWC (Protein Wisdom Collective) until then.
We'll see.
Given my friends illness and my upcoming trip to Asheville, NC for my family reunion, I might now be doing much blogging over the next 72 hours and probably won't be able to renew my wonderful exchange with the PWC (Protein Wisdom Collective) until then.
We'll see.
The Secret Ideals of the Right
Over that the right-wing blog that dishonors the name RedState, there's a little tribute to Rush Limbaugh's 19th anniversary with his talk show. Here's Hunter Baker affectionately quoting a story he heard William F. Buckley tell comparing Limbaugh to Generalissimo Franco, the fascist dictator from Spain.
As a veteran conservative, Buckley captured himself very well. When Buckley retreats deep in the forest for privacy and then rows to the middle of a lake to make doubly sure nobody overhears, he doesn't need all the cover stories that the right tells to make themselves palatable in a democracy like the United States. Buckley doesn't talk about freedom being God's gift to humanity, the beauties of a color-blind society, the need to go back to JFK liberalism, the suspending of habeas corpus under Abraham Lincoln, or the Christianity of the "classic feminists."
Instead, he traced his own lineage back to Franco and the fascist regime in Spain and expressed his affection for Limbaugh in terms of an analogy with affection for Franco.
Of course, Franco's not the only reference point for authentic feeling on the right. There's British colonialism, Israeli rule over the Palestinians on the West Bank, Confederate figures like Jefferson Davis, military dictatorship, absolute monarchy, or the segregation South. If the Nazis weren't so awfully taboo, there'd probably be a few nostalgic references for them as well.
These are the things the right-wing longs for when they think the rest of the world isn't listening.
At the end of his presentation, [Buckley] allowed questions. The first supplicant approached the microphone and hopefully inquired, "Mr. Buckley, what do you think about Rush Limbaugh?" This was during the time when Rush was still something of a rising star. His rhetoric was bombastic, hard-edged, and wickedly funny. Members of the audience shifted forward in their seats expectantly as Buckley answered by telling the following story.
There were two Spaniards sitting in a bar. One asked the other, "What do you think about General Franco?" Instead of answering, the man gestured for his friend to follow him outside. Once on the sidewalk, he motioned for the friend to follow him to his car. They got in the car and drove to a forest. Deep in the woods, he parked the car and beckoned the friend to hike with him down to a lake. At the edge of the lake, he pointed to a boat which they boarded. He grabbed the oars and rowed to the
center of the lake. Finally, he sat still, looked his friend in the eyes and paused for a moment. "I like him." Buckley told the story so brilliantly and created so much suspense, the denouement brought the house down amid gales of laughter and happy applause.
As a veteran conservative, Buckley captured himself very well. When Buckley retreats deep in the forest for privacy and then rows to the middle of a lake to make doubly sure nobody overhears, he doesn't need all the cover stories that the right tells to make themselves palatable in a democracy like the United States. Buckley doesn't talk about freedom being God's gift to humanity, the beauties of a color-blind society, the need to go back to JFK liberalism, the suspending of habeas corpus under Abraham Lincoln, or the Christianity of the "classic feminists."
Instead, he traced his own lineage back to Franco and the fascist regime in Spain and expressed his affection for Limbaugh in terms of an analogy with affection for Franco.
Of course, Franco's not the only reference point for authentic feeling on the right. There's British colonialism, Israeli rule over the Palestinians on the West Bank, Confederate figures like Jefferson Davis, military dictatorship, absolute monarchy, or the segregation South. If the Nazis weren't so awfully taboo, there'd probably be a few nostalgic references for them as well.
These are the things the right-wing longs for when they think the rest of the world isn't listening.
Book Proposal Done!
My book proposal for Displays of Degradation: Cultural Transformations in Philadelphia, 1785-1850 is on its way to the University of Pennsylvania Press. Submitting a book proposal was a big mental block for me. So putting it into the mail felt good.
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
Romney Breaks Ten--Feel the Momentum
Ten days ago, a senior strategist for Mitt Romney named Alex Gage was claiming that Romney had replaced Giuliani as the front-runner for the Republican nomination.
In that light, Gage must have been happy to see Romney break 10% in the most recent Hart/Newhouse poll. True, The RealClearPolitics Average still has Romney at 9.3% and Mitt is in fourth place behind Rudy Giuliani, undeclared candidate Fred Thompson, and tanking candidate John McCain.
But so what if Mitt's still running fourth among the pigmies. He has established a clear distance between himself and the other undeclared candidate Newt Gingrich. That means that Mitt is no longer the smallest pigmy in the room.
Feel the momentum!
In that light, Gage must have been happy to see Romney break 10% in the most recent Hart/Newhouse poll. True, The RealClearPolitics Average still has Romney at 9.3% and Mitt is in fourth place behind Rudy Giuliani, undeclared candidate Fred Thompson, and tanking candidate John McCain.
But so what if Mitt's still running fourth among the pigmies. He has established a clear distance between himself and the other undeclared candidate Newt Gingrich. That means that Mitt is no longer the smallest pigmy in the room.
Feel the momentum!
A Note on Beauty in Kentucky
Today's the thirteenth birthday of my older daughter. It's a big deal and we started the day by singing happy birthday to her at 7:00am. It would be a bigger deal at home if she hadn't spent nine hours playing percussion at band camp. But they sang happy birthday there as well.
After she was born, one of the many lights that went off in my head was the ability to see the full beauty of our neighborhood for the first time. We live just off North Wilson Avenue in Morehead, KY. Our section of the street runs at a narrow point in the "holler" and the houses have such a lush combination of trees, bushes, and grass that the rich green colors seem to be pulsating. It's a literal effect created by the way the various shades of green play off each other in the eye as one drives north on the stree. It's a beauty that I sometimes find overwhelming as I drive up the street, but I never would have seen it if my children hadn't been born.
The effect of the green would be even more overwhelming than it already seems if it weren't for the flowers. Currently blooming are the Rose of Sharon bushes which can be found up and down the street. While providing relief from the power of green color, the pinkish and white colors of the Rose of Sharon flowers look especially delicate themselves.
And I would never would have noticed these beauties if my younger daughter had not started picking Rose of Sharon flowers for her fourth-grade teachers last year while we were waiting for her school bus.
If I remember correctly, the Rose of Sharon blooms continuously for at least two or three months and my daughter was picking flowers into October.
I'll have to check to see if I was right there.
After she was born, one of the many lights that went off in my head was the ability to see the full beauty of our neighborhood for the first time. We live just off North Wilson Avenue in Morehead, KY. Our section of the street runs at a narrow point in the "holler" and the houses have such a lush combination of trees, bushes, and grass that the rich green colors seem to be pulsating. It's a literal effect created by the way the various shades of green play off each other in the eye as one drives north on the stree. It's a beauty that I sometimes find overwhelming as I drive up the street, but I never would have seen it if my children hadn't been born.
The effect of the green would be even more overwhelming than it already seems if it weren't for the flowers. Currently blooming are the Rose of Sharon bushes which can be found up and down the street. While providing relief from the power of green color, the pinkish and white colors of the Rose of Sharon flowers look especially delicate themselves.
And I would never would have noticed these beauties if my younger daughter had not started picking Rose of Sharon flowers for her fourth-grade teachers last year while we were waiting for her school bus.
If I remember correctly, the Rose of Sharon blooms continuously for at least two or three months and my daughter was picking flowers into October.
I'll have to check to see if I was right there.
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
John Dickerson of Slate: Yesterday's Cliches Today
As part of his series on the "achilles heel" of the presidential candidates, John Dickerson of Slate argues that Rudy Giuliani's strategy of attacking the Democrats "risks damaging his chances in the general election by alienating moderates and independents."
Something tells me that they're not really worried about this at Giuliani headquarters.
What Dickerson is doing is recycling the age-old cliche about presidential candidates "playing to the base" in the primaries and then changing tack to appeal to "moderates and independents" in the general election.
However, the cliche desperately needs to be updated if it's going to apply to the 2008 election.
Because things have changed.
Most importantly, the partisans in both the Democratic and Republican parties have become much more ideological over the last six years. Given that Dickerson's writing about Rudy Giuliani, let's just consider the Republicans here. Republicans have become much more conservative than they were in 2008 and demand that their candidates toe the conservative line. In other words, conservatives want to hear that the Iraq War is good, torture is appropriate, global warming is a myth, the Bush administration is not conservative enough, and the Democrats are effeminate and ineffective if not treasonous.
The activist Republican base wants to try Giuliani on for size as a result of his performance during 9-11 but also have major doubts as a result of his divorces, pro-choice stance, and basic social liberalism. If Giuliani is going to maintain his 25-27% support among Republicans, he therefore needs to deepen his support among activist conservatives. And that's what Giuliani's baiting the Democrats is about. Every time Giuliani throws some red-meat to the base by bashing the Democrats, he solidifies his support with the right-wingers who already like him and makes himself more credible with other Republicans.
Otherwise, Giuliani has no chance of winning the Republican nomination.
What about appealing to moderates in the general election?
There's several reasons that's not going to happen.
First, there aren't that many people who are genuinely independent. As Matthew Dowd established while he worked in the Bush White House, most moderates and independents vote for one party most of the time and the real number of voters who have to make a decision is something like 7 or 8%.
There could be an argument for the number of independents increasing for 2008. Given the tremendous unpopularity of the Bush administration, a percentage of Republican-leaning independents might have moved over into the "undecided" category. But it's also likely that a number of formerly undecided voters have moved over to the Democratic-leaning camp. So, I'm not sure that argument pans out either.
Second, the media is heavily focused on the "consistency" and "authenticity" of presidential candidates. Of course, partisan bloggers keep a close eye on the consistency of candidates and criticize them heavily for wavering. But the mainstream media also likes consistency stories. Because such stories involve so little reflection, they're an attractive way for hard-working political reporters to punch out articles on deadline.
As a result, it's much harder for candidates to get away with changing their story line for the general election.
Not that this particularly bothers the Republicans. What the Republican Party has often done is mount smear campaigns against Democratic candidates during the general election campaigns. The Swift Boat campaign and the Willie Horton ads were vicious, hyper-partisan, and successful because they convinced enough independent voters that the Democratic candidate could not be a credible president.
It turns out that Republicans like to "appeal to the middle" by being even more viciously partisan than when they're appealing to the base.
That's one reason why Giuliani's focused on his current put-downs of the Democrats. If he wins the Republican nomination, he'll have to rev the partisanship up further.
Something tells me that they're not really worried about this at Giuliani headquarters.
What Dickerson is doing is recycling the age-old cliche about presidential candidates "playing to the base" in the primaries and then changing tack to appeal to "moderates and independents" in the general election.
However, the cliche desperately needs to be updated if it's going to apply to the 2008 election.
Because things have changed.
Most importantly, the partisans in both the Democratic and Republican parties have become much more ideological over the last six years. Given that Dickerson's writing about Rudy Giuliani, let's just consider the Republicans here. Republicans have become much more conservative than they were in 2008 and demand that their candidates toe the conservative line. In other words, conservatives want to hear that the Iraq War is good, torture is appropriate, global warming is a myth, the Bush administration is not conservative enough, and the Democrats are effeminate and ineffective if not treasonous.
The activist Republican base wants to try Giuliani on for size as a result of his performance during 9-11 but also have major doubts as a result of his divorces, pro-choice stance, and basic social liberalism. If Giuliani is going to maintain his 25-27% support among Republicans, he therefore needs to deepen his support among activist conservatives. And that's what Giuliani's baiting the Democrats is about. Every time Giuliani throws some red-meat to the base by bashing the Democrats, he solidifies his support with the right-wingers who already like him and makes himself more credible with other Republicans.
Otherwise, Giuliani has no chance of winning the Republican nomination.
What about appealing to moderates in the general election?
There's several reasons that's not going to happen.
First, there aren't that many people who are genuinely independent. As Matthew Dowd established while he worked in the Bush White House, most moderates and independents vote for one party most of the time and the real number of voters who have to make a decision is something like 7 or 8%.
There could be an argument for the number of independents increasing for 2008. Given the tremendous unpopularity of the Bush administration, a percentage of Republican-leaning independents might have moved over into the "undecided" category. But it's also likely that a number of formerly undecided voters have moved over to the Democratic-leaning camp. So, I'm not sure that argument pans out either.
Second, the media is heavily focused on the "consistency" and "authenticity" of presidential candidates. Of course, partisan bloggers keep a close eye on the consistency of candidates and criticize them heavily for wavering. But the mainstream media also likes consistency stories. Because such stories involve so little reflection, they're an attractive way for hard-working political reporters to punch out articles on deadline.
As a result, it's much harder for candidates to get away with changing their story line for the general election.
Not that this particularly bothers the Republicans. What the Republican Party has often done is mount smear campaigns against Democratic candidates during the general election campaigns. The Swift Boat campaign and the Willie Horton ads were vicious, hyper-partisan, and successful because they convinced enough independent voters that the Democratic candidate could not be a credible president.
It turns out that Republicans like to "appeal to the middle" by being even more viciously partisan than when they're appealing to the base.
That's one reason why Giuliani's focused on his current put-downs of the Democrats. If he wins the Republican nomination, he'll have to rev the partisanship up further.
Monday, July 30, 2007
Torture: The Weenie Version of Sex
The more people look at the masculinity of the Bush administration and the right, the more sick and twisted it looks. According to A. M. Hamrah in the Los Angeles Times, lots of people in the Bush administration thought of torture as sex and then . . . closed their eyes.
I'll reprint the article in full. Thanks to Zinya for the heads up.
It's not torture, it's sex
Why is it the more the White House refines the rules, the pervier things get?
By By A.S. Hamrah, July 30, 2007
When a group of 50 high school students visiting the White House in June handed President Bush a letter urging him to stop the torture of suspected terrorists, the president took their letter, read it, then told the students that "the United States does not torture."
By the time a president has alienated even high school overachievers, the cat is out of the bag; it is now general knowledge that the United States of America tortures people. We know that torture rarely if ever works. So what are government officials getting out of it?
Right before his recent colonoscopy, Bush announced that he had issued an executive order banning cruel and inhumane treatment in interrogations of suspected terrorists. This clarified interrogation guidelines he had issued last fall banning techniques that "shock the conscience." While the guidelines appear to be a step toward more concrete protection of human rights, the administration's constant rejiggering of the border between interrogation and torture reveals something else: a Sadean interest in the refinement of torture, a desire to define what is and is not "beyond the bounds of human decency," as the order puts it.
The claim that there is an element of sexual perversity in the government's interest in prisoner abuse may seem broad, but consider how officials discuss it. And when it comes to pictures documenting torture, they react in ways that should be as interesting to psychoanalysts as they are to constitutional lawyers, civil libertarians or investigative reporters.
In April, former CIA Director George Tenet appeared on "60 Minutes," telling interviewer Scott Pelley -- between swigs from a tiny bottle of Evian and his insistent, repetitive bark that "we don't torture people" -- that the reason he has never personally seen the evidence of the interrogation techniques he refuses to talk about is because he is "not a voyeur."
Tenet's reference to voyeurism -- which the dictionary defines as "the practice of obtaining sexual gratification by looking at sexual objects or acts, especially secretly" -- would seem to imply that these unmentionable techniques are sexual in nature and therefore inappropriate. But Tenet can never know if that's the case because he, not being a voyeur, claims never to have seen them. So why bring up voyeurism at all?
A quote from an unidentified lieutenant general in Seymour Hersh's article, "The General's Report," in the June 25 issue of the New Yorker exposes a similar unwillingness to confront scenes of torture. "I don't want to get involved by looking" at photographs and videos of torture, the officer told Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba during the torture investigation at Abu Ghraib, "because what do you do with that information, once you know what they show?"
When babies cover their eyes, they assume the world has disappeared because they can't see it; they think they're invisible too and that the world can't see them. Donald Rumsfeld, in Hersh's article, comes off like an innocent child rubbing his eyes and waking in a world he never made. "My God! Did I authorize putting a bra and underwear on this guy's head and telling him all his buddies knew he was a homosexual?" asks the former Defense secretary. Heck, was it all just a dream?
Maybe the reason members of the Bush administration are reluctant to look at evidence of torture is that if they did, they would be forced to admit that, for them, what happened at Abu Ghraib really wasn't torture. For them, evidently, it was sex, and that's why they won't watch.
It's not like government officials have never come right out and said that. In 2004, Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) bridged the gap between the painful and the erotic by dismissing the Abu Ghraib abuses as a mere "sex ring": "I've seen what happened at Abu Ghraib, and Abu Ghraib was not torture. It was outrageous, outrageous involvement of National Guard troops who were involved in a sex ring." When asked to clarify, Shays backtracked and dug himself in deeper at the same time. " It was torture because sexual abuse is torture.
This is more about pornography than torture."
Last winter, when an Australian TV network released photos and videos from Abu Ghraib, a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, speaking for the coalition forces, called the report "unnecessarily provocative." He didn't say the images were wrong or criminal.
Instead of just banning torture outright, as the high school students asked him to do, Bush's new executive order, which purports to be an "interpretation of the Geneva Convention Common Article 3," reduces torture to a series of deviant acts. It dwells on "sexually indecent acts undertaken for the purpose of humiliation, forcing the individual to perform sexual acts or to pose sexually, threatening the individual with sexual mutilation."
It's the exact kind of list you'd expect to find from the kind of people who go on TV and announce to the public that they're not voyeurs. Now that they've defined torture so carefully, it should be much easier for them not to look at it.
A.S. Hamrah is a writer and brand analyst living in Brooklyn, N.Y.
I'll reprint the article in full. Thanks to Zinya for the heads up.
It's not torture, it's sex
Why is it the more the White House refines the rules, the pervier things get?
By By A.S. Hamrah, July 30, 2007
When a group of 50 high school students visiting the White House in June handed President Bush a letter urging him to stop the torture of suspected terrorists, the president took their letter, read it, then told the students that "the United States does not torture."
By the time a president has alienated even high school overachievers, the cat is out of the bag; it is now general knowledge that the United States of America tortures people. We know that torture rarely if ever works. So what are government officials getting out of it?
Right before his recent colonoscopy, Bush announced that he had issued an executive order banning cruel and inhumane treatment in interrogations of suspected terrorists. This clarified interrogation guidelines he had issued last fall banning techniques that "shock the conscience." While the guidelines appear to be a step toward more concrete protection of human rights, the administration's constant rejiggering of the border between interrogation and torture reveals something else: a Sadean interest in the refinement of torture, a desire to define what is and is not "beyond the bounds of human decency," as the order puts it.
The claim that there is an element of sexual perversity in the government's interest in prisoner abuse may seem broad, but consider how officials discuss it. And when it comes to pictures documenting torture, they react in ways that should be as interesting to psychoanalysts as they are to constitutional lawyers, civil libertarians or investigative reporters.
In April, former CIA Director George Tenet appeared on "60 Minutes," telling interviewer Scott Pelley -- between swigs from a tiny bottle of Evian and his insistent, repetitive bark that "we don't torture people" -- that the reason he has never personally seen the evidence of the interrogation techniques he refuses to talk about is because he is "not a voyeur."
Tenet's reference to voyeurism -- which the dictionary defines as "the practice of obtaining sexual gratification by looking at sexual objects or acts, especially secretly" -- would seem to imply that these unmentionable techniques are sexual in nature and therefore inappropriate. But Tenet can never know if that's the case because he, not being a voyeur, claims never to have seen them. So why bring up voyeurism at all?
A quote from an unidentified lieutenant general in Seymour Hersh's article, "The General's Report," in the June 25 issue of the New Yorker exposes a similar unwillingness to confront scenes of torture. "I don't want to get involved by looking" at photographs and videos of torture, the officer told Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba during the torture investigation at Abu Ghraib, "because what do you do with that information, once you know what they show?"
When babies cover their eyes, they assume the world has disappeared because they can't see it; they think they're invisible too and that the world can't see them. Donald Rumsfeld, in Hersh's article, comes off like an innocent child rubbing his eyes and waking in a world he never made. "My God! Did I authorize putting a bra and underwear on this guy's head and telling him all his buddies knew he was a homosexual?" asks the former Defense secretary. Heck, was it all just a dream?
Maybe the reason members of the Bush administration are reluctant to look at evidence of torture is that if they did, they would be forced to admit that, for them, what happened at Abu Ghraib really wasn't torture. For them, evidently, it was sex, and that's why they won't watch.
It's not like government officials have never come right out and said that. In 2004, Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) bridged the gap between the painful and the erotic by dismissing the Abu Ghraib abuses as a mere "sex ring": "I've seen what happened at Abu Ghraib, and Abu Ghraib was not torture. It was outrageous, outrageous involvement of National Guard troops who were involved in a sex ring." When asked to clarify, Shays backtracked and dug himself in deeper at the same time. " It was torture because sexual abuse is torture.
This is more about pornography than torture."
Last winter, when an Australian TV network released photos and videos from Abu Ghraib, a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, speaking for the coalition forces, called the report "unnecessarily provocative." He didn't say the images were wrong or criminal.
Instead of just banning torture outright, as the high school students asked him to do, Bush's new executive order, which purports to be an "interpretation of the Geneva Convention Common Article 3," reduces torture to a series of deviant acts. It dwells on "sexually indecent acts undertaken for the purpose of humiliation, forcing the individual to perform sexual acts or to pose sexually, threatening the individual with sexual mutilation."
It's the exact kind of list you'd expect to find from the kind of people who go on TV and announce to the public that they're not voyeurs. Now that they've defined torture so carefully, it should be much easier for them not to look at it.
A.S. Hamrah is a writer and brand analyst living in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Searching for the Hook: The Hillary Cleavage Flap
A few days ago, Robin Givhan of the Washington Post wrote a breathless little story about Hillary Clinton wearing a top that was cut low enough to allow a brief view of the top of a breast or two. God help us! Cleavage was shown!
Feminists tend to see this as "focusing on women's bodies" rather than their ideas, character, or experience. But I think what Givhan and her fellow reporters are doing is more insidious. Reporters personally dislike Hillary Clinton just as much as they disliked John Kerry or Al Gore. Or Bill Clinton for that matter. If reporters think of the religious right as too weird to take seriously, they tend to think of Democratic leaders as pretentious stuffed shirts. Or blouses in the case of Hillary Clinton. For the media, the Democrats are not the kind of guys or women you'd want to have a beer or sip a latte with, and they've gone out of their way to pose Republican candidates as fun guys to be with.
John Harward of the Wall Street Journal gets out some of this hostility to the Democrats in his defense of Givhan's story on Meet the Press. Not the comparison with the widely despised Barry Bonds.
In this context, the cleavage story is the media's first real shot at bringing Hillary Clinton to life as the "Madame Defarge" figure referred to by Chris Matthews.
But it doesn't work.
If anything, the little bit of cleavage tends to confound the memes of Hillary as too smart for her own good, overly calculating, unseemly in her ambition, and too masculine in general. When the media wolves started feeding on the minor exposure of her "female parts," Hillary looked like she was sharing a problem with large numbers of other American women. In other words, she looked like a sympathetic figure.
Not that this failure will stop the media from searching for new illustrations of their stereotypes.
But for this time: Hillary-1, Media stereotypers-0
The cleavage registered after only a quick glance. No scrunch-faced scrutiny was necessary. There wasn't an unseemly amount of cleavage showing, but there it was. Undeniable.With Givhan going first on the cleavage story (just mail her Pulitzer to her now), all the other news outlets felt empowered to report on the "controversy" about Givhan's original story. In my opinion, this is an important moment for the mainstream media. The media finally has a gender hook about Hillary that can be interpreted as making her look bad. Actually, the implicit title for the Givhan article is "Hillary Dresses in Bad Taste."
Feminists tend to see this as "focusing on women's bodies" rather than their ideas, character, or experience. But I think what Givhan and her fellow reporters are doing is more insidious. Reporters personally dislike Hillary Clinton just as much as they disliked John Kerry or Al Gore. Or Bill Clinton for that matter. If reporters think of the religious right as too weird to take seriously, they tend to think of Democratic leaders as pretentious stuffed shirts. Or blouses in the case of Hillary Clinton. For the media, the Democrats are not the kind of guys or women you'd want to have a beer or sip a latte with, and they've gone out of their way to pose Republican candidates as fun guys to be with.
John Harward of the Wall Street Journal gets out some of this hostility to the Democrats in his defense of Givhan's story on Meet the Press. Not the comparison with the widely despised Barry Bonds.
When you look ... at the calculation that goes into everything that Hillary Clinton does, for her to argue that she was not aware of what she was communicating by her dress is like Barry Bonds saying he though he was rubbing down with flaxseed oil . . .Getting to the nitty-gritty, what the mainstream media is trying to do is strip Hillary Clinton down to a symbolic nakedness and "expose" her to the world as an unappealing human being--not the kind of person you'd want to look up to as your president. The underlying idea here is to pose the presidential election of 2008 as a contest between a manly, Reaganesque Republican and a "shrew" or "a bitch" if the Democrat is Hillary Clinton. Of course, the media has been murmuring about Hillary as a "polarizing" figure all along, but they haven't found any kind of hook for illustrating the supposedly unattractive characteristics that make her polarizing. Hillary is "just too damn calculating" for them.
In this context, the cleavage story is the media's first real shot at bringing Hillary Clinton to life as the "Madame Defarge" figure referred to by Chris Matthews.
But it doesn't work.
If anything, the little bit of cleavage tends to confound the memes of Hillary as too smart for her own good, overly calculating, unseemly in her ambition, and too masculine in general. When the media wolves started feeding on the minor exposure of her "female parts," Hillary looked like she was sharing a problem with large numbers of other American women. In other words, she looked like a sympathetic figure.
Not that this failure will stop the media from searching for new illustrations of their stereotypes.
But for this time: Hillary-1, Media stereotypers-0
Bill Walsh--Great Coach, Decent Guy
Bill Walsh, the great coach of the NFL's San Francisco Forty-Niners during the 80's, died today from leukemia.
Walsh was the genius behind the "West Coast Offense," won three Super Bowls, and deserves credit for the two Super Bowls the Niners won under George Seifert. Walsh's coaching disciples are littered through the NFL and most teams still run a version of his passing schemes.
But I'll leave it to the sports writers to write about what a great coach he was.
What I want to focus on here is that Walsh also seemed like a decent guy and was a refreshing contrast to ostentatious assholes like Bill Parcells and Tom Coughlin who also came up during the era of Niner domination.
You have to wonder why it happened, but it was Parcells' bullying and screaming became the model for football coaches at the college, high school, and (at least in Rowan County, KY) middle school levels rather than Walsh's matter-of-fact self-confidence. It's too bad. Walsh was a better coach and a better man than Parcells.
But maybe the trend is moving in the other direction. Tony Dungy, the coach of the Indianapolis Colts, is cut out of the same cloth as Bill Walsh. Football's certainly a violent game but there's no reason why it has to be dominated by assholes and super-assholes.
Walsh was the genius behind the "West Coast Offense," won three Super Bowls, and deserves credit for the two Super Bowls the Niners won under George Seifert. Walsh's coaching disciples are littered through the NFL and most teams still run a version of his passing schemes.
But I'll leave it to the sports writers to write about what a great coach he was.
What I want to focus on here is that Walsh also seemed like a decent guy and was a refreshing contrast to ostentatious assholes like Bill Parcells and Tom Coughlin who also came up during the era of Niner domination.
You have to wonder why it happened, but it was Parcells' bullying and screaming became the model for football coaches at the college, high school, and (at least in Rowan County, KY) middle school levels rather than Walsh's matter-of-fact self-confidence. It's too bad. Walsh was a better coach and a better man than Parcells.
But maybe the trend is moving in the other direction. Tony Dungy, the coach of the Indianapolis Colts, is cut out of the same cloth as Bill Walsh. Football's certainly a violent game but there's no reason why it has to be dominated by assholes and super-assholes.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Announcing A New Form of Gay Sexuality: Gun Ownership
Now I really wish I'd watched the YouTube presidential debate. Via Michelle Malkin, here's a question about gun control from a guy in Michigan.
Jered Thompson's relationship with his Bushmaster AR-15 is fundamentally erotic. Sure, Jered might use his gun for hunting. Sure, he might use it for security. But above and beyond everything else, that Bushmaster AR-15 is Jared's "baby." Ooohh. Baby! Baby! Not only that, Jared also thinks that most American gun owners think that way about their guns: ". . . other
Americans really want to know if our babies are safe."
This reminds me of the time that my brother-in-law Charlie came back from a "Court Days" gun show in Mount Sterling, KY talking about the weird kinds of "love" guys had for their guns and I asked one of my classes how many people knew guys who had more affection for their guns than their wives or girlfriends.
Nearly everybody raised their hands.
Which leads us to think a little about sexual orientation. In popular American culture, sexual orientation is considered dichotomously. The fundemantal divide is between heterosexuality and gay sexuality. Of course, "gay" refers most often to heterosexual males but the terms is also used as a cover concept for lesbians, bi-sexuals, and trans-sexuals as well. I think other forms of sexuality that are not heterosexual in any strict sense should be brought under the concept of gayness as well. I'm especially thinking of the male homoeroticism in which all their affection, trust, love, and intimacy is oriented toward other guys even if they have sexual intercourse with women. That stikes me as a form of "gay" sexuality although it's not homosexual.
The same is the case with the sexual relationships that gun owners have with their guns (and other forms of fetishism I guess). Given that their "babies" are their guns, it's hard to see them as heterosexual in the narrow sense we use that term in American society. So, they would have to be gay.
Hmm. I guess there are a lot more gay people than I used to think.
"Good evening, America. My name is Jered Townsend from Clio, Michigan,” the YouTube citizen questioner began. “To all the candidates, tell me your position on gun control, as myself and other Americans really want to know if our babies are safe.” Townsend then pulled out his Bushmaster AR-15. “This is my ‘baby,’ purchased under the 1994 gun ban. Please tell me your views. Thank you."
Jered Thompson's relationship with his Bushmaster AR-15 is fundamentally erotic. Sure, Jered might use his gun for hunting. Sure, he might use it for security. But above and beyond everything else, that Bushmaster AR-15 is Jared's "baby." Ooohh. Baby! Baby! Not only that, Jared also thinks that most American gun owners think that way about their guns: ". . . other
Americans really want to know if our babies are safe."
This reminds me of the time that my brother-in-law Charlie came back from a "Court Days" gun show in Mount Sterling, KY talking about the weird kinds of "love" guys had for their guns and I asked one of my classes how many people knew guys who had more affection for their guns than their wives or girlfriends.
Nearly everybody raised their hands.
Which leads us to think a little about sexual orientation. In popular American culture, sexual orientation is considered dichotomously. The fundemantal divide is between heterosexuality and gay sexuality. Of course, "gay" refers most often to heterosexual males but the terms is also used as a cover concept for lesbians, bi-sexuals, and trans-sexuals as well. I think other forms of sexuality that are not heterosexual in any strict sense should be brought under the concept of gayness as well. I'm especially thinking of the male homoeroticism in which all their affection, trust, love, and intimacy is oriented toward other guys even if they have sexual intercourse with women. That stikes me as a form of "gay" sexuality although it's not homosexual.
The same is the case with the sexual relationships that gun owners have with their guns (and other forms of fetishism I guess). Given that their "babies" are their guns, it's hard to see them as heterosexual in the narrow sense we use that term in American society. So, they would have to be gay.
Hmm. I guess there are a lot more gay people than I used to think.
Saturday, July 28, 2007
Oppression and Color-Blindness: Third Reply to Goldstein
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.
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.
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.
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