cheese it, the cops!

malcolm and martin: the eternal yin yang

a bit more selma. as you may know, i have been reading about and writing about malcolm x for many years, for example, long chapters of act like you know and extreme virtue. reading the autobiography in 7th grade was a real revelation to me, as i went to a mostly-black school in chocolate city; it transformed my understanding of the racial situation in the world and in my life, and it set me on a road to political radicalism. in my own view, it taught me something important about trying to speak the truth as i experienced it, as he did: the truth about the world, about oppression and liberation, about my own life. now, in selma, it's pointed out that malcolm called martin an 'uncle tom' (his favorite, though, was 'house negro'). i would say even in selma, king is doing stuff that might make someone construe him sort of like that (i am not asserting that these were ultimately fair characterizations at all). but the relationship with johnson is what works in this sort of direction. many people, including maureen dowd today are for giving johnson much more credit for the whole thing, and joe califano has asserted that selma was johnson's idea. (i can only say that that appears ridiculous to me.) 

but at any rate, johnson is pictured as using king to try to prevent people like malcolm x or later militants from leading the civil rights movement. king is in and out of johnson's office, maybe also conjuring the spectre of malcolm x (the, um, 'field negro' on his own account, who wants to see massa's big white house burn). now this, even in the movie a bit (king does more or less stand there and take johnson's patronizing attitude), but surely, surely in the accounts of califano, dowd, etc, really would tend to substantiate malcolm's basic reading, and it would tend - in my opinion, at any rate - to discredit king. if califano's account is right, then i'm actually pretty comfortable with malcolm's characterizations of king, though for a white person like me to call any black person, much less king, an uncle tom, would be excruciating or insane. but if you are intent on hagiography - and everyone is, where king is concerned - i would suggest not playing this up too much. at least the movie portrays king as using johnson in a way, bringing ever-greater and finally irresistible pressure. i think this makes king much more admirable than the alternative (that johnson was using king, or telling him what to do), and i also think it is a more plausible account overall, though i have not listened to all the relevant johnson tapes or something, and though of course if we are doing history we ought to say whatever's true. 

j. edgar hoover was surveilling king in order to destroy him. bobby kennedy authorized that, but it would surprise me if johnson opposed this approach, and it would surprise me if he didn't try to make use of it to run king. but i don't think that he was running king, and i think that's obvious from what king was doing, including in selma. i think he decided to go on despite the blackmail, which is how the film portrays it. but surely this whole thing makes the portrait of johnson as king's champion or whatever implausible. i guess the claim is that hoover was running johnson; i don't necessarily buy that, and any sort of decent pres would have shut that shit down with extreme prejudice, especially if, as these folks are claiming, he was on king's side. in my view johnson was attacking king's life and family, and trying to put him under his thumb. and in my opinion that did not succeed. johnson was capable of almost any strategem to get what he wanted, and i think blackmail was central to his amazing effectiveness as a senate leader.

and though johnson, whatever his reasons, did do a lot for civil rights, it is worth recalling his monstrousness in other dimensions: he was killing hundreds of thousands of vietnamese people for reasons that were simply incomprehensible, in a war that was unwinnable, and he invented the incident that led to the congressional authorization for extreme 'escalation'. he lied about vietnam all day every day, and he got everyone else in the american state lying about it too. i remember lyndon baines johnson, baby, and i felt the emanation of murderous evil and soul- and democracy-destroying lies, lies, lies.

i did think that the most human, and maybe the most (and even only) surprising moment in selma was the moment martin accused coretta of being 'enamored' with malcolm. but perhaps my response reflects my fascination - a little difficult for me fully to explain, maybe - with the profound contrast and connection between malcolm and martin. in my head, they embody two ways to resist vicious power, and even two ways of being in the world. for whatever reason, it seemed and seems like an existential choice to me, and i still just feel malcolm in the way a lot of people feel king: i was a little white boy who wanted to be malcolm x, and now i'm a 55-year-old white man who, left to me own immediate emotional responses, still feels that way. i think if one took the approach of attacking my right to make any judgments on this, or even to feel these connections in any authentic way, one would have a point. on the other hand it runs deep, and i can't really stop, and i guess i think that even if i am horribly wrong to be this way, i am not doing a great deal of harm to anyone. 

 

animatronic lessons

i just saw selma, and i'm going to express a negative assessment. but first, the production design is excellent; it really gives that feel of the deep south in the '60s. and it is a great and inspiring story, though a bit compromised in its inspiration by the slow or non-pace of racial justice in the decades since.

but there is perhaps too much reverence for king to make a realistic movie about him. it is hard to escape the impression that the actors were cast as look-alikes, and that in itself might make you a little suspicious; they were perhaps not chosen for the excellence of their acting. but it's hard to tell, really, because the script and direction and even make-up makes them like wax figures of king, andrew young, john lewis (that actor was a cut above, though, even if he was partly cast on the basis of the size of his nostrils), coretta scott king, hosea williams, and so on.

there are a few half-hearted attempts at humanization, but they are...insincere, i think. perfunctory. everyone talks in extremely written complete sentences: they simply emit inspiring speeches at one another all day, which does not actually constitute dialogue. they don't talk like human beings. when a tear flows down the face of a character, it's like a miraculous but hieratic crying icon of mary or something. this turns the whole movie into quite the didactic little history lesson rather than a real human drama. honestly, it's also a lesson that is taught incessantly to everyone already in every school in america, a million television shows, etc etc, a lesson you cannot have avoided on a thousand previous occasions. and i don't think that david oyelowo as king quite brings off the electrifying preaching, admittedly an extraordinarily difficult task. but truly, there is no reason to pay money to see david oyelowo deliver king's speeches, because there are recordings of the real ones.

on the other hand, i also don't think, as some have asserted, that johnson is portrayed too negatively. i'm glad they included a little malcolm x, but lord i wish they'd shown a bit of his speech in selma: they just showed other people talking about it. anyway, i wouldn't have nominated it for any academy awards except in set design, art direction, and such. 

oprah produced the thing and cast herself as annie lee cooper. she is repeatedly beaten. now, watching civil rights protesters getting beaten fills me with rage. but watching stupefyingly banal self-esteem entrepreneurs/billionaires get beaten, which was quite how i experienced those scenes: well, i don't actually straight condone it, but i wouldn't say i take absolutely no pleasure in it either. go back to inspiring us by your yoyo diets or whatever, sweetie.

here's another little problem. basically, a film about king is above criticism, expecially if you're a white person. that is a formula for making and selling bad movies. but the thing is a mega-million cash franchise produced by oprah winfrey, for god's sake. nothing anything like that can be above criticism. you can't be required to give academy awards on the grounds that someone played king or whatever it may be. just because your gigantic movie is about king doesn't mean, for example, that it couldn't have been better in many filmic or human dimensions. i sort of think a lot of people are pretending to think selma is a good movie to avoid being racists.

police power

i think that abuse is inherent in a situation of police power, and that you're not going to get away with thinking the problem is 'a few bad apples' while of course the vast majority of police officers are doing a bang-up job, as it were. i actually don't think 're-training' and so on is going to address the basic issue at all.

so you are arming one part of the population against the rest, or authorizing some to use violence and coercion that, for the others, would be criminal. the first thing to ask is what sort of person, overall, is likely to want to perform this role, and why. i am sure there are various motivations. one is surely an attraction not to the law or to the public but to the power, which is of the most concrete variety: real control of real specific people. and then you should contemplate the effect of routinely having this sort of power over a decade or whatever it may be. a certain air of arbitrary superiority is likely to develop, due to the real superiority.

the legal status of a police officer can be accurately reprersented as a series of legal impunities, as being authorized to do what would be crimes for others: binding or kidnapping people, for example, strutting around with guns and clubs on their hips, and so on. and it relies also on an informal exemption that is much more wide-ranging than that, as seen in the cases before us. these things are not addressable, i think, within the basic conceptuality that presupposes that such power is necessary and legitimate.

i do not think it is particularly plausible that constituting this sort of power is likely to reduce violence in the society as a whole. or, i wonder what evidence could actually be produced that it does? this is always asserted at the outset; it is 'common sense'. but the idea of arming one group against the others and immunizing them from the law does not, let's say, obviously entail a reduction in violence or crime however construed. and notice that in various complex ways this police power will of course mirror the power hierarchies of the society: racial, for example, and then it reinforces or reproduces or enforces those hierarchies. if you really thought about the role of policing in racial oppression through our whole history, you'd see that it is central: a necessary condition of the whole horrendously violent history, and ever more so in a situation in which mass incarceration replaced jim crow as a mode of segregation.

arms race

i think that the militarization of the police indicates that we had better strap and armor up. i heard one of these defend-the-popo kind of guys saying that the message of the garner case was 'comply with the police'. i'd elaborate on that: comply. comply unto death. but if, contrary to my advice, you are not going to comply, you may find yourself needing to resist with extreme prejudice. you don't have to be a cop to choke someone out, baby.

i don't know what to say about the failure to indict in the nyc garner case except that it is incomprehensible. i do want to remark from the anarchist perspective that exemption from the law is of the very essence of police power.

unconscious

let me try to diagnose 'unconscious racism', which has reached an amazing hallucinatory pitch of intensity at which the whole society is structured on racist lines (residential, educational, political, income, incarceration rates, unemployment, etc), but no actual person is a racist. here's how that happened. one aspect of the civil rights movement - which continues to be central - is speech control. the word 'nigger' for example, is an emblem of racism, but then people made the faulty inference that if you eliminated the word, you would have ameliorated the injustice. more widely, people have been very confused about the relation of words to reality, and have really seemed to think that if you forced people to use the right words, you would have substantially addressed the problem. words are powerful, after all, though sometimes that seems hard to believe when everyone is yapping slop to no effect for decades on end.

now, combine this with the fact that the culture more or less came to a consensus that racism is evil. at this point white folk p faces a syllogism: 'racists are evil; i am a racist; therefore i am evil'.  there are various ways for p to deal with this personal crisis. one would be to spend long years reflecting on and dismantling a wide-ranging structure of racial attitudes. the other would be to leave all the attitudes intact and just deny that he is a racist. or run the thing backwards: 'racists are bad people; i am a good person; therefore i am not a racist'. you spend all day muttering to yourself 'i am a good person' 'i am a good person' 'i am not a bad person'. that is what the worst people have where other people have a conscience; they have a voice that says 'i am a good person'; and they need that voice; it gets them through whatever bad things they want to do or believe.

maybe you don't know this, but when white people talk to other white people they very often do this: 'i am not a racist, but...' 'i don't have a racist bone in my body, but...' i take such locutions as demonstrating the combined self-delusion and racism of the people who utter them. at any rate, the obsession with words in the various liberation movements hints that to be a racist is to have certain epithets or stereotypical characterizations run through your head. so, to not be a racist, all you have to do is censor your internal monologue. once you have, your internal monologue features paraphrases of the censored material rather that material itself, and so you spend the rest of your life congratulating yourself on your substantial accomplishment and for being such a very good person. also you get to unconsciously clean up on your own advantages, and to focus on your great deservingness.

it's unconscious alright, and it's unconscious because of each person's extremely concerted failure to introspect, each person's program of self-esteem enhancement. this is a safari into the dark heart of whiteness, or the white heart of darkness, if you prefer.

if ever there was a demonstration that there is more to the world than words, this would be it. (if you need such a demonstration, however, that's just sad.) anyway, it's all euphemisms, self-delusion, and an intractable situation on the ground. then people, every time out, wish desperately for a 'free-wheeling' or 'frank' 'dialogue'. this is after decades of imposing overwhelming social sanctions on the frank expression of racial attitudes. it's because of those sanctions that people are desperate for the dialogue, and it's because of those sanctions that the dialogue is impossible. and it's partly because of those sanctions that white liberals live in a stupor of self-congratulation, and partly because of them that you can have an obviously racist society in which no one believes of themselves that they are racist. also, at that point, there is very little hope for change, because it is impossible even to describe the situation honestly.

 

what race is

the way i think about race is that it's a series of generalizations based on a bad taxonomy. that is, there is no basis in reality for distinguishing people into races. but then once you have it's not precisely that the generalizations you make are necessarily false: for example you detect real voting patterns among the races, real income levels, educational levels, incarceration rates. not only that, but a lot of actual stereotyopes are true. that is what race really is: race is a series of technologies designed to make the antecedent taxonomy real.

this happens again and again: so the stereotype is ignorant, godless savage. then you actually pass laws making it illegal to teach black people to read. right? black women are oversexed or whatever, not like your wife; then they are free game for rape. see? racism tries to manufacture a world that matches its conceptuality, with mixed success. the stereotype is violent, criminal, so then you start filling up prisons with millions of black men. you are just enforcing the law; no, you are enforcing the law in reflection of a problematic taxonomy that the result of that enforcement confirms. now we see that there are astonishing rates of crime among young black men, precisely because it is enforced on them, and it is enforced precisely because of the antecedent set of categories. one makes the structure of categories or the typology true and then finds it to be true in experience. one helps create what one then detects, as though quite intentionally.

and we are so so stuck in the taxonomy, cannot even conceive ourselves without it: just listen to the ways every pundit starts by breaking us down into racial groups in order to understand us politically, and simultaneously how racial groups polarize toward certain parties or positions. race becomes ever truer as it mutates. but it does matter that it's actually false.

or, race is and is not false: it's the sort of social construction that is massively enforced and hence becomes a massive fact; it's not merely imaginary, sadly. start by thinking about the way it articulates the way bodies are distributed in space. it is always being enforced and naturalized. but then precisely because it is actually false it is always falling apart and always being enforced anew. the fact that it is enforced - in large razor-wire enclosures or on the streets - shows that it's not true; if it were not enforced it would cease to exist; it has to be held in reality by force. in some sense if we stopped thinking about each other this way it would disappear, but that's not under anyone's power because of the centuries-long history of the concept's enforcement on people's bodies; it's impossible to the extent that it is a reality external to each of us. race shows the power of our social constructions and also the lurid flimsiness of our self-serving fictions.

scream, blacula, scream

apropos of demonic faces and white policemen, i draw your attention to this baudrillardian pre-enactment and pivotal moment in the history of cinema, starring my distant relation william marshall.

 

[he is my mother's step-mother's, er, nephew? ps there are a lot of far-lefties where i come from, and later a rich history in the blaxploitation industry. so i'll always have those to fall back on.]

one of the aspects of white privilege is that we often don't have to be aware that we are under occupation by the government. there are many places where that is easy to know, though. however, we too are under occupation, and as per usual, privilege is difficult to distinguish from fantasy. i guess what i wonder, though, is how there is not much more black anti-statism.

american political racialism of the left and right

watching all the election analysis, last night and this morning, i am struck above all by the racialism of american politics. every polling expert, consultant, and even politician, on both sides, basically conceives the american population in racial terms. so, people always win or lose because of the black vote, or the latino vote, or the white vote. every demographic analysis starts with that, and every campaign everywhere works a racial strategy. indeed, the dem party's long-term hope is entirely cast in racial terms, as we become 'majority-minority' etc. congressional districts are basically articulated in racial terms, which ends up being the content of gerrymandering. when push comes to shove and it's get-out-the-vote time, people are scouring the streets for racial types; it's all profiling; we've got to get out the black vote, or we've got to get out the older whiteguy vote. then, those are the constituencies you represent; that's your base. it is a racial base, and it begins to look like the inkatha freedom party vs the national party in apartheid south africa.

there are many ways that the population might be split or conceived, and in my opinion any demographic segment of similar size could be represented as decisive in any election no matter how they vote. if our whole political system conceives the racial categories to be the most important categories, racial differences the most important differences, that shows who we still are, what we still obsess about. and operating politically under the assumption that racial differences are the most important differences has its role in freezing all the categories and segregations in place. i really do think dems and reps do this equally.

simplified scenario: take a situation in which the black vote is 13%, which goes 90% dem, and the republican loses by 5%. a pundit will draw the obvious conclusion: the black vote was decisive. had the rep gotten half the black vote, he would have won, for example. but let's say white men ages 55-74 also form 13% and vote 90% rep. had half of them voted dem, the dem would have been elected. they are decisive in just the same sense and to the same degree. now say left-handed people form 13% and split their vote. had they voted 90% republican, the republican would have won. that is, the left-handers were decisive in just the same sense as the black vote. no one group is ever decisive, or all always are, but the question is: who can we break off and appeal to as an integral audience, with their own media, etc. then your whole strategy both mirrors and redoubles a basically segregated social and political terrain.

you might want to pause for a moment in your project of getting elected and ponder the devastating question of who you are. 

here is a good and typical example: the diane rehm's show election debrief this morning, with nia-malika henderson, doyle mcmanus, and ron elving. you would really think that the election was primarily about race. it's both the way people conduct the campaigns and the way pundits or experts analyze them. in neither case is this a forced move, or even plausible as a primary explanation. but the conduct of the campaigns and the analyses are mutually reinforcing.

 

shut up with the shutting up, already

every newsworthy event these days seems to be a reason to hang people for saying the wrong thing.

"How does she marry him after that? How does she go in front of (NFL Commissioner Roger) Goodell? That's pathetic to me," Robinson said during the radio segment, according to CBS Sports.

he was suspended. or how about the atlanta hawks owner talking about the economic implications of the racial makeup of the crowds at hawks games, in a way almost anyone might in that position? he had to sell out the day it was reported. just make up your mind to this: speech is not assault. and for god's sake, stop becoming outraged at people for saying even things that you are yourself, or that very many people, are thinking. there's no percentage in that. people do not want there to be any public actual discussion of anything, in particular race and gender. they want everyone chanting the same pc cliches in unison.

the baseline is that anyone gets to say whatever they like, and what you are doing is forcing dishonesty on everyone, even yourself. after that, you're going to wonder why no one appears to be a racist or sexist in a society that is structurally racist and sexist. my basic explanation of this always-apparently-mysterious fact is that it's one of the effects of of the overwhelming social sanctions against using certain words or expressing certain thoughts in public space. i think people really are or were confused between racism and the vocabulary of racism, sexism and the vocabulary of sexism: people seriously held the view that it would be a substantive improvement in the condition of women if no one ever used 'chick' or even 'girl', ever again. 

pretty soon, not only is everyone policing every word out of their own mouths, they are editing their own thoughts, or trying to, because they themselves believe that the basic thing that makes you a racist is that the word 'nigger' crosses your mind. that is, the general theory that drives the policing of speech - the idea that reality is the result of our simultaneous incantations - itself becomes widely accepted and applied. then if you do kind of edit that stuff out of your own internal monologue, you believe of yourself that you cannot be a racist. that would actually be true if the 'words-have-power' magick theory of reality were true. the ever-more thorough and effective censorship regimes around racism and sexism combined with the mysterious persistence of the hierarchies themselves actually show that words are shit. or proverbially: talk is cheap. surely anyone who has lived among humans has learned this lesson, and no one can have better data on that than members of oppressed groups.

racialism never goes out of style

the little league world series makes it clear that the united states and indeed the world is still pretty racially organized. it was an all-black team from chicago against an all-white team from nevada for the us championship; japan v south korea for the international. now they're playing black against asian for all the marbles. i say whoever wins gets to be master-race until next year.

i've been out of pocket but obsessively following ferguson, too. the authorities certainly are behaving as though they are in an armed insurrection. i am not impressed so far with the 'outside agitators' theme, which sounds familiar from arkansas circa '63. also, i am not as convinced as the msm about who may be shooting whom.

as i understood the chief of police in ferguson in his press conference an hour ago, he was asserting that protestors fired on the police last night, that they were taking 'gunfire'. i have not heard anyone else say that or seen any evidence for it at all. but even as he was calling for peace, he was describing war, and justifying more crackdown. obviously, if people are firing on the police...

ferguson

been trying to think of what to say about ferguson. maybe i've got nothing fresh, but (prodded by adam) i'll at least utter some sentences. i am on michael brown's side and the side of the folks who are resisting. one thing that the resistance has exposed clearly: what race and class mean there, and here, now: they've been militarized. there's an occupying army in missouri, trying among other things to keep people from reporting on what they're doing. good luck with that. obviously, this case is emblematic of things that are happening on the streets of america all the time. we've got to identify with the people being victimized and the people fighting back: this is happening to us, do you understand? to our children. whatever distance we might feel or even want to feel, from that neighborhood, that family, etc, we should work to collapse that distance. this cannot be tolerated in our society.

i was more mystified than most and more ambiguous than many on the trayvon martin situation. that wasn't exactly a cop, or even exactly a white man. this, i think, is already a far clearer case, though of course there's plenty to find out. the police response has done nothing but confirm everyone's awful misgivings or awful knowledge.

holy war

i'm hoping that the forces conducting the war on women and the forces conducting the war on whites can transcend their partisan bickering, find their common ground, and join together in a war on white women. jihad jihad jihad!

more interracial marriage

all forms of american popular music are syncretic, and often consititute aesthetic miscegenation, the best response to taboos on interracial marriage. that pretentious sentence is an intro to this: country music is full of hip hop these days. this is not that surprising because (a) hip hop is in every form of popular music in the world now, and (b) country music is an interracial form.  jimmie rodgers and hank williams were blues artists, and you really can't get to country without black gospel either. but however, jimmie and hank were very great blues artists, and i would say that even though many country songs now feature rapped verses, vocal effects, etc., country needs much better mc's. it was rational for florida-georgia line to use nelly, because even though they often rap themselves, they really don't rap very well. the only country-specialist rapper i know is cowboy troy, who hasn't necessarily solved the problem. i really think you need rick rubin or someone sitting down and figuring out how the synthesis should be realized.

 

frigging tim mcgraw is mutating into a drawlin will.i.am. also the extreme spray tan almost edges into blackface. through a variety of cosmetic processes, tim and beyonce have achieved the same skin-tone. they ought to mate and create a new master-race: the golden people.

 

 

 

 

an inspiring leader

relentless tributes by all great americans to lyndon baines johnson. well, i do remember when he was president. voting rights are good. now, there were some little drawbacks: e.g. hundreds of thousands of people killed in vietnam; oh all the regions defoliated with agent orange, the napalmed villages, the utterly indiscriminate bombing, the constant lies lies lies about what was happening, indeed the big lie to get us in in the first place. how many black guys killed or wounded in a war fought for no discernible reason, which ended in complete defeat? maybe he should have fought for the voting rights of corpses. 

 

liberalism: making racism look good

so let me ask you this, antiteapartiers. if i think barack obama is a tyrant, does that make me a racist? i'm reading, for example, the individual mandate in obamacare back through the lens of the nsa: this is a person who runs roughshod over the constitution, has no concept of individual rights, and sees no limits to the legitimate use of state power (well, in these senses he's a culmination of american liberalism; indeed, the basic leftist position is that individual rights are merely capitalist ideology). this is a man that thinks you can be forced more or less at gunpoint to purchase specific items. and he is a person who yaps democracy and commits utterly to a secret program of universal surveillance paid for by its victims. let's just say i'm confident i'd feel the same if it were hillary, though of course then i'd be a sexist. indeed, i think on the pc account, any opposition to tyrranical power is racist and sexist. so, either you're an advocate of oppressing certain groups, or an enthusiast for the oppression of everyone. quite a bleak dilemma, actually, and we have indeed landed in quite a bleak future.

zeale

google reminds us that it's zora neale hurston's birthday (i wrote about her extensively in act like you know). this is indeed something to be celebrated, and in my opinion she is the greatest of american novelists, more or less. now, i would like to see, say, melissa harris-perry, or all those feminist/anti-racist guardian columnists really grapple with how absolutely free she was to express whatever she damn pleased abiout race, how pointedly and continuously boldly anti-pc she was. this is part of how she ended up dying in loneliness, poverty, and obscurity. see, langston hughes and richard wright and paul robeson were, more or less, stalinists, the doinks, and they and others tried to enforce this as well as, say, w.e.b. dubois racial orthodoxy, on every black artist. you better enforce it, because you sure ain't got no argument for it. zora, on the other hand, is actually fucking free: she let herself be free, and she paid the price. but that, as well as the super-excellence of the writing and the folklore etc, is why i love her.

how it feels to be colored me 

how it feels to be colorless me

 

i have a scream

as you listen to obama at the lincoln memorial today - which i would not recommend - you should understand that martin luther king's dream was an america in which a black man could administer a regime of total surveillance. he's like mlk and j. edgar hoover in one deracinated body. our long national nightmare is over!

group memberships are multiple

if it makes you feel better about throwing some richly-deserved criticism/abuse at barack obama, let me point out that he's not only black, but male, heterosexual, a lawyer, and makes like 400k. the minority of people who control vast military and intelligence establishments is rather a privileged minority, though occasionally they do get lynched. however, they also lynch people all day. feel better about the whole thing now? alright, let my tuffy go.

tuffy and racial immunity

this column by kathleen parker, whom i often admire, goes for a straight endorsement of a completely wack position. so, there's nothing really wrong with clowns ridiculing political leaders, on her account. obviously, it's constitutionally protected and more or less harmless. that's true unless the leader is black, in which case ridiculing him on any grounds or in any way is a horrible enactment of our long national nightmare. in other words we're going to immunize the most powerful person on earth from the effects of free speech because he's a member of an oppressed group. let's just say you're going to need to think this through again. you're going to need to see that the arsenal and the universal surveillance sort of outweigh the ways obama is being oppressed right now. you're going to need to see that this is an unbelievably racially condescending approach; the argument, i propose, is straight-up racist: these helpless victims need our coddling. so thorough is this condescension to every member of the black race that we'll be coddling the most powerful person in the world, helping to keep him safe from the criticism of rodeo clowns half a continent away. tell you what, let's find out about tuffy's life and then try to figure out who has it easier, who makes more money, who has more prestige, to whom the public attributes more credibility, who has more power, who has more privilege, and so on. continuing the argument, tuffy is entirely above criticism, because he doesn't have enough privilege.

knock the little jockeys

i'm sure eugene allen, the white house butler, buttled excellently, and was a dignified person and a sort-of friend to presidents, in that 'help' kind of way the races used to interact. he was also a jockey on the white house lawn. i wouldn't blame him for that, but i wouldn't make a movie about it either. you might imagine to yourself what malcolm x might say about this project.

 

i forgot how great that song is.

 

we need a cashional nonversation

alright, some remarks on trayvon, george, barack, and the post-racial era, if any. the zimmerman case seemed to me somewhere between rodney king and casey anthony: both a discomfiting racial emblem and a 24-hour murder-media circus. i'm not sure, in a way, how seriously to take it. right, a kid is dead. most dead kids don't get months of non-stop coverage and, again, to say that the nsa/snowden thing is a much more important and also morally far clearer case, is to state the obvious, i believe.

obama seemed, as he was making that statement friday, grim and sad. now, one could view the case, or certainly the response to it, as a demonstration that we are very far from a post-racial society, which is true: look at things like income levels, incarceration rates, and so on. but it also shows the reality, which has always been central if less obvious, and which is constantly increasing, of the fluidity of race, its ambiguity, which rests in part on its status as a social construction, more or less shifting as fast as society as a whole. but one thing a post-racial society would be is a society in which everyone's identity is ambiguous, chaotic, or ultimately unspecifiable. that is certainly true of zimmerman and obama, for example.

now, on the one hand, a 'post-racial' society is what almost everyone wants; it would signal the end of 'our long national nightmare' etc. on the other hand: everyone, at least everyone in my generation and its predecessors, has a stake in the racial system they grew up in. these stakes are tremendously complicated, even for white people. so, one such stake is white privilege. another is white fascination with african-american culture and its incalculable contribution to world arts, for example (which is far more significant than the contribution of white americans). a post-racial society could not have given us hip hop, for example, even if hip hop is getting pretty post-racial now.

one problem with white people going around saying that race is over is that it ignores and even seems to double down on unconscious racism; white people would like to believe it's over, thus erasing a burden of guilt, but believing that even helps the structural inequalities to persist or get worse. so, you know, who cares how many black people are in prison or how many black senators there are? there's no such thing as race anyway. but also: any white person who ever sincerely endorsed racial equality was wanting a post-racial society, and probably thought that black folks wanted it too.

no doubt they do, but again only fitfully. african-american culture is an amazingly rich thing; it should be a symbol throughout the world for the transcendence of suffering, or the transformation of oppression into creativity, or the thousands of ways people can survive and resist and transcend subordination. but you can't have that without the subordination, and i think we might with some care point out that a post-racial society could not have this culture in it, really except as a museum. from a certain point of view, 'post-racial' means the end of racialized cultures. you can't have a douglass, a dubois, a booker washington, a king, a malcolm in a post-racial society. a post-racial society in some ways realizes the vision of those people. it also precludes them, makes them into decisively historical figures rather than ones it makes sense to really read and emulate, say.

indeed, you can't have american culture as a whole as we have understood it without race. if race is the great theme/burden of america, as many have asserted, then a post-racial society is a post-american society.

no doubt jesse jackson is right to say that the idea that we live in a post-racial society is wildly premature. on the other hand, think about the stake that jesse has in a racialized society: he has spent his life fighting it, but for that reason among others, his life is inconceivable without it; he has an infinite stake in the system he has fought to overcome. you cannot have the identity of a fighter for racial justice - as jackson or sharpton have regarded themselves through their whole adult lives - in a post-racial society, and frankly i don't think they would acknowledge that we had reached such a point even if we had, and even though that would in some sense be their very own victory. i don't think this is unique: to the extent that race is winding down, we all have something to mourn, for this has been absolutely central to our cultures, our identities, our self-understandings and understandings of others, our social arrangements, our arts, and so on.

actually to lose race as a category really would be lose all kinds of things that have been amazingly great as well as so many horrors. but i do think we'd have to acknowledge the loss if we were actually to get post-racial. 

this is not to say that getting to a post-racial condition is equivalent to the assimilation of african-american to white culture or something; everything is getting more complicated and the future will have elements of everything. i think we suffer in part from our attempts to understand the whole thing or get a grip on it; we're always imposing a new simplistic taxonomy or explanation that's false on the ground. let it flow, baby.

more zim

so, compare zimmerman to rodney king, for example. the acquittal there was ridiculous, and everyone was in a position to reach a reasonable position on that; you could see the damn video. it was directly police against citizen, and you could establish a horrendous racist history in the lapd. now, that is a pretty darn clear and important symbol of central racial realities, even though in every case where you read actual events as sheer symbols, you'll be losing a lot of important particularities etc. but in this case, we don't realy know what happened (if you think you do, that's a bad sign; you'll just kind of make shit up; you don't need facts because you've got the little repertoire of stories all ready to go). zimmerman's race is highly ambiguous, etc. now, 'hoodie' is powerful, but it's sort of one of the few things that's clear: that trayvon was wearing a hoodie. 

i'm just betting that almost every day, somewhere in the usa, there is a clearer example of the way racism expresses itself in our lives now. no one exactly chooses to make a certain event a crazed media sensation or an emblematic thing, but i don't think this was the best such apointment.

doomsday device

reported everywhere:

National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden possesses enough information to cause more damage to the United States government than “anyone else has ever had in the history” of the country, according to the journalist who first reported the former contractor’s leaked documents.

i said from the outset that i hope snowden has a doomsday device. however, i think i would have hesitated to give these sorts of quotes if i were greenwald. it does suggest that the only solution from the us gov's point of view is extreme: extreme search and raid procedures, covert murder ops, and so on. it might get really bad; it might already be getting bad.

once again: the zimmerman trial, which is not even a particularly good racial emblem, is just nowhere near as important as the nsa story. this is true, i believe, even if you are raising a young black man, etc.: this is about a total system of surveillance affecting such people no less than everyone else. this is about a future of totalitarianism over the whole earth. i guess we can have another national conversation about race; i'm already bored; i can rehearse the whole thing in terms of the series of slogans or cliches of our leaders on both sides in my head. let's have a national conversation about the way all of us are being subordinated together, shall we?

i'm happy to talk about race; i do it all the time. i'll talk to you about it. i actually want to reflect on my own racial attitudes; i've tried. but the national conversation just consists of politicians and thought leaders and race leaders saying the same careful crap over and over and over. one problem is the familiar one: none of these people feels obliged to speak as or for themselves; they're representing demographics, bureaucracies, and so on. the sincerity of what they're saying is a question that does not even arise. 

 

 

 

general and particular guilt

sorry, but whether george zimmerman murdered trayvon martin does not depend on the history of race relations in america. it depends on what actually happened specifically there, that night, who jumped on whom, etc., as the correct verdict depends on what can be proven about that. also excuse me but is george zimmerman a white person? i think the whole reading of the case depends on making george zimmerman an honorary white dude or ignoring all racial complexities except a single dualism which has no place for a latino dude with a jewish surname, or whatever it may be. but surely his guilt can't float with the question of what racial group you can assign him to, if any. i heard black philosophy profs holding forth on this one time, and their view was that zimmerman 'identified' with white people, etc. i don't know: sending an actual person to jail for decades on the basis of general racial symbolism or sheer fantasies about their twisted inner life is just not the way to conduct a trial, and is no way to form actual opinions about specific events. for actually determining an individual's guilt or innocence with regard to a particular crime, it's no better than figuring someone must be guilty because he's black. 

trayvon, george, ed, and mohamed

that the zimmerman murder trial is a far bigger story in our news media than the nsa revelations or the situation in egypt is just absurd. i guess it's a racial emblem, but i don't think it works that way until you actually figure out what happened. and if you let your a priori interpretation of racial symbology dictate your view on zimmerman's actual guilt or innocence, you are engaged in an absurd procedure. 

on paula deen: i am against this thing where we crucify people for using the wrong phonemes.