eye of the storm

once more into the breach on obama, teapartiers, carter, and race. now let me start off by saying that the left has a million ways to not listen to what their opponents are saying. they regard the opposition to health care legislation, for instance, as only the ignorant, manipulated by demagogues. this is a way to say: no rational person can possibly disagree with what i'm saying. it's actually a kind of 'argument' for their position, based on the a priori or ad hominem dismissal of its opponents. as usual the basic strategy is self-praise. alternatively or as a supplement, we hold that the opposition to some very elaborate government program can only be based on something like race: or in other words, if you disagree with me, you are ignorant, manipulated, and just to throw this in, evil. so the arguments are strategic in terms of the inner life of those who make them. looked at from the other side, what they really say is: i am so reasonable and good, so educated and benevolent, that the positions i hold - despite the fact that i accept them on raw authority - cannot be rationally opposed. and if people do, they are evil, because i am so perfectly good.

but let me go the other way too, briefly. my view - which obama appears to agree with - is that these folks want to have an argument about the size and scope of power of the federal government. it's always a good time to have that argument, and this is an acutely, a severely good time for it. this view - suspicion of government, localism, small-scale democracy, fierce autonomy, etc etc - is at the precise heart of our tradition. just say 'jefferson' or fly 'don't tread on me.' however, this american tradition - which i believe is our contribution to mankind - is bound up throughout our history with racism, as the name 'jefferson' signals. but nullification, states' rights, goldwater-style libertarianism - all of them have been intertwined with racism throughout. (goldwater opposed the civil rights bill on libertarian grounds, e.g.).

here's one reason for that: the fierce individualism characteristic of america is an outgrowth of our settlement by radical protestants, whether quakers, puritans, or baptists. these people came from northern europe, and they're white. and throughout our history, most of the people touting individualism and small gov have been white men. and the defense of economic and political liberty entailed for them a continuing right to enslave, degrade, and exploit other sorts of people without state interference.

there is no conceptual connection between [love of liberty, individualism, and suspicion of state power] and racism. in fact they are in tension. but the historical connections are extremely elaborate. so when someone at a town hall says: "i'm losing my country" or "is this america?" i think that they are basically talking about pervasion of state power - the american tradition of loving liberty. but they are also, probably, talking about race; the two things are not fully distinguishable on the ground. we are losing our white protestant nation, and people like obama and sotomayor are perfectly visible signs of that. well, this is losing our ethnic character. but it is also losing our basic values.

it may be that individualism and personal autonomy are characteristic values of northern-european protestants. it is often said that asian and african cultures are more "collective" or less focused on individual differences and autonomy, and more on social cohesion. i would make such claims very carefully. but, that we are losing both an ethnic heritage and a set of values is, it seems, to me undeniable. the loss is real and important. that this heritage is problematic is undeniable. that it is inspiring is undeniable. do white people have a message for the world?

so anyway, my question would be: could we still care about liberty and stop caring about race? can we detach the needed part from the unneeded, the liberatory from the repressive?

one believes that the whole kanye/beyonce/taylor brouhaha is the first real salvo in the oncoming race war: the fort sumter, as it were. one hopes that collateral damage can be limited to celebrities, but is otherwise indiscriminate.

so again, the aproach is: if you object to a healthcare bill, you're a racist. paul krugman:

But they’re probably reacting less to what Mr. Obama is doing, or even to what they’ve heard about what he’s doing, than to who he is.That is, the driving force behind the town hall mobs is probably the same cultural and racial anxiety that’s behind the “birther” movement, which denies Mr. Obama’s citizenship. Senator Dick Durbin has suggested that the birthers and the health care protesters are one and the same; we don’t know how many of the protesters are birthers, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it’s a substantial fraction.

let me start this by saying that we are seeing an actual racist backlash to obama; that's part of the birther thing, for instance. it's like the last dying paroxysm of race, perhaps. but the strategy of connecting every objection to obama's policies to racism and hence discrediting all opposition, first of all, increases rather than solves the racial confrontation. and it's disingenuous; it didn't take a black president to raise objections in 1994. last night olbermann ran through a series of clips of people at town meetings, which he roughly characterized as depictions of racist hate-mongering. there was a woman, for example, saying tearfully "is this america?" well, first of all: no. it isn't. and second, it's a question that might actually be about the provision of healthcare and not about race. but at any rate, if you're going to characterize the opposition to - you know - revisions of the tax code or carbon emissions policies as racist, this is going to be a long, long counter-productive presidency. we used to call this "playing the race card," so when you're marion barry and you just got caught huffing crack in a hotel room with a hooker, you made it all a racist conspiracy.

presume, instead, that there are real objections and answer them. otherwise, people are going to get more and more pissed off that you're not only taking away their country and trying to silence them, you're insulting them.

watchin the "beer summit," which seems kind of clumsily handled. they should have decided whether this was a public or a private meeting. if it was private, then they should have done it without reporters and millions of photographers forty feet away: i can't even imagine what'd be like to be a cambridge cop in that situation in the rose garden. not exactly a good situation for anyone to express themselves without pile-driving self-consciousness. on the other hand, if you were going to do it publicly, then mic up and put a camera at the table. this just seems like useless grandstanding.

i wish i had something clear to say on the skip gates matter.

i can certainly speak to the excellence of his scholarship, which i availed myself of in act like you know. the person who comes through in his writings - scholarly, personal, etc. - is certainly affable and admirable. he is as good as any academic in the fields he essays: with a coherent point of view and a fine prose style. he is a first-rate scholar and thinker. his understanding of race is serious, nuanced, and right, basically: treating race both as a fact and as a social construction of extreme interesting complexity. his writing is non-reductive, but congenial in a way to liberation movements, but itself manifesting considerable scholarly detachment from the whole configuration of race. that is, he's a post-modern scholar of race, foucauldian in his way, and perhaps the very best and most thoughtful.

he grew up in rural west virginia, and has written beautifully about that. it's funny that he went all "yo mama"; he himself wrote beautifully about the dozens.

this run-in might be "reverse-profiling" in which gates was what appeared to be insanely sensitive to the police presence. in that situation, you greet the officer in a friendly way and explain the sit. you greet him like a white homeowner greets a cop, with the happy presumption that we're all on the same side. i'll give you lessons; this is literally something i've tried to teach my kids; the catechism in status and playing things cool (which is how i might put it to gates: wwmd: what would miles do?) the "do you know who i am?" approach is never the right one, because it's an insult to everyone who is not-you, e.g. the cop himself: sheer hubris doesn't help anything, and if your bellowing could be mistaken for drunkenness etc, that doesn't make for a successful interchange. the only response to "do you know who i am?" is: i don't give a fuck who you are.

on the other hand, that's also the stance one might take up as an officer, as in "excuse me, sir." you'd think that the very last thing a cambridge cop is going to want is an altercation with an eminent harvard prof, and how these cops manufactured this incident is worth asking. and i obviously am not going to dismiss the "black man in america" argument: that's the origin of gates's response even if there was no racism on the other side. and here's a problem: how,  if you are a white officer, do you know whether racial attitudes played a role in how you responded, even if you mean well? "would i have responded the same to a white guy?" is a hard question, unless you are explicitly in your own self-image a racist. the locked-out-of-your-own-house scenario is surely one that cops see every day. on most days, it's happy laughs all around when it's done. we'll get more info - obviously, more than we will ever want - on what actually happened.

obama should have been a bit more reticent. he's backpedaling on live tv right now. it's interesting that the right instantly denied that it was a case of racial "profiling," while the left (including obama) asserted it. neither had to wait and actually find out. it shows the status of facts in our political culture.

guess i had some stuff to say after all.

one thing that happened to academic identity politics is that it just kept fragmenting, in reflection to some extent of the movements it was associated with. so you were a friedan-type feminist, but then black feminism arose to some extent as a critique of that. like are you worried about the problems of the bourgeois housewife when you're working as a maid for that very woman? ok so then also you are alienated from the radical civil rights movement, because malcolm x or stokely carmichael are raving sexists. you need your own movement. well, say you are a black lesbian woman. then you're in tension with hetero black feminists and also the gay rights movement, dominated by men. but then say your mom's white and your dad's black, or your mom's brazilian and your dad's japanese? it's an infinitely divisible space.

then, when identity politics segued into social constructionism or postmodernism, each of the categories was analyzed as a social production, not nothing, but contingent, malleable, something that could even...disappear, like judith butler on gender. that happened with race and gender and sexual orientation: continua not dichotomies. people started speaking for the border-crosser or the creole; trying to organize various groups across lines because they all lived near lines.

i feel like this kind of discourse started dying by the mid-nineties, and has had difficulty in recent years really getting any traction or any resistance. there is a younger generation of scholars with somewhat different categories. my own contribution was act like you know, but it was hard to know that it was already obsolete in say 1995 when the book was written. or else on the other hand, identity politics was merely ramified and realized more fully.

identity politics really is necessary, but it is also self-consuming. it tries to reproduce that amazing feeling that you get when you hear someone speak your experience, as in the consciousness-raising of second-wave feminism. the best analogy i can draw in my own experience is listening to alchies and addicts at 12-step meetings, where you go: you are me. it is mobilizing, absolutely essential to stake any sort of claim against the dominant class or motivate resistance. but this experience can be over-rated, and an ecstasy of identification can be delusory: there are more differences and division than one initially recognizes. also, though, it's real: you do inherit chunks of your white or black or regional membership-class.

i do think it really fetches you up in individualism, where each person is an incomparable, incongruous congeries. but it remains imposrtant as a way for people to describe at least some of the ingredients in their personal soup. it made contributions to understanding the content of those elements, while people also keep re-asserting the dichotomies; we're still not at the point where we don't try to figure out whether you're black or white, straight or gay, etc., and adjust our responses accordingly.

but that's obama's approach to identity politics: he's interested in it but not invested in it. he tried to "explore his black identity," but almost as a matter of choice or a game. sotomayor, on the other hand is a wise latina woman. as i say, the division is generational, and arises right at the gap between them, as well as from the details of their biographies.

eric holder's nation of cowards thing was interesting. i think we learned not to talk frankly about race because of all the explosive possibilities, how easy it is to put a foot wrong, the massive informal and formal enforcement of pc speech codes etc. but here, eric, is a sample of what what you're asking for. there is still a hierarchy, conceived within the black community and the white community, of "black" people by skin-tone. still sense in the term high yellow, for instance, as you can tell when you get a gander at black aristocracy, such as, er, eric holder's family.

 

washpost today:

The election of Barack Obama, who will become the first African American president when he is inaugurated Jan. 20, prompted a short-term burst of hateful incidents including racist graffiti, cross burnings and violence from New York to California, according to news reports and criminal indictments. On Wednesday, the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn indicted three Staten Island men on hate crimes charges, alleging that they assaulted black residents "in retaliation for President-elect Barack Obama's election victory."

i think we are seeing a little burst of the concept of race in the face of its apparent decline or erasure. one thing that's worth saying: when there's no such thing as blackness anymore, something important will be lost, though something important will be gained, and the end of race would mark the end of a movement and a culture as well as of a burden and a nightmare. that's why jesse jackson, for example, is ambivalent about obama, not in the sense of being indifferent, but of being hyper-intense on both sides. but watch bobby rush at the blagojevich/burris news conference. or look what's happening in oakland etc, on both sides. perhaps race is twitching after its death. or perhaps it will now re-assert itself in scary and inspiring ways.

i'm a barack skeptic. but this is a great goddamn speech; the first time i've heard race actually faced in mainstream politics.

so p.j. rodriguez actually mentions my book act like you know in relation to imus, and strangely even my mom wants to know "what i think." and i just watched meet the press do an hour on it etc. so i'm going to have a fairly serious go.
now, first of all, as anyone with any acquaintance with my stuff knows, my default position is to defend anyone caught in the pc maelstrom as follows. if y'all had your way, our public discourse would amount to a speech by hillary clinton or john kerry: an absolutely empty set of cliches that no one could possibly disagree with, or indeed think about at all. one danger lurks in a public discourse of screeching racism or misogyny or something. another lurks in not having a public discourse at all, just a solemn unanimity about a thousand bromides. one feature of this is that public and private discourse detach themselves utterly from one another, so you have no idea what anyone thinks, if indeed anyone does. (my defense is self-defense: if you listened to what i might say in  the course of a given lecture on political philosophy, it would freeze your blood.)
i feel a little differently about this case because it was directed against actual human beings, as opposed to mere public figures. if i threaten death and destruction to alberto gonzales and insult his mother - who obviously failed completely - or something, tough shit. but why would i want to insult matee ajavon (= the amazing rutgers guard)? so anyway, i think that we'd better listen in this case to what the people insulted say about how it made them feel. in this regard, imus has conducted himself pretty well in the apology phase, even if he was trying to save his ass. and i feel like he really should have apologized, because without any real discursive function he was just hurling nasty insults at young persons.
"nappy-headed ho" is certainly parasitic on african-american slang; it's just not something a white person says without that influence. it referred in large part to the darkness of the rutgers black girls, as opposed to the light skin in particular of the tennessee star candace parker. skin tone is the kind of thing that a lot of people - white or black - might notice, but which you're not supposed to say. (i watched the women's tournament, and can't say i thought about skin tone much; however it wouldn't be shocking if we found that a lot of the rutgers players originated in the ghettoes of nyc or, as with ajavon, newark, nj. i think this is one reason i got caught up in the rutgers team and was rooting them on; it's one of the reasons they seemed like underdogs. others: rutgers has never won anything. tennessee wins everything. they started out 2-4 or whatever it was. ajavon overcame a serious injury and is just a transcendently fine player. vivian stringer is a great coach without a national championship etc) there's still a de facto racism internal to blackness by skin tone, both in black and white cultures. [tell you what: the first black president is going to be...pale.] at any rate, the use of black slang, no doubt informed by hip hop, was an element in the comedy, though it's not any sort of excusing condition, as imus himself has said. still, we're in rich, interesting territory, which we might discuss rather than merely sticking our fingers in our ears.
at any rate, let's go on to the hip hop connection. i personally am amazingly tired of "gangstas" and their pimpin. um, if your ideal of gender relations is prostitution, you deserve, at a minimum, eternal damnation. it's at this point just insanely repetitive. on the other hand, you're a dork if you go to music to have your political positions confirmed, and the play with offense and transgression is central to pop music and in particular, black pop. check out ma rainey or blind willie mctell, circa 1920s. you've got to dig on the hyperbole and humor, as well as finding out something disturbing about individuals or cultures. actually, you do learn something about the state of the culture by listening; if they were delivering clintonesque yackety smackety, you'd have no idea what anyone ever thought about anything. i have absolutely no reservation about issuing the lastest ludacris album in its rankest form, even though i personally would rather listen to sage frances or something. and i let my children negotiate all this in any way they see fit.
i just want to say to all you pursed-lip offendeds: you are preparing your own doom. if you enforce a code of cliche, then violating that code becomes funny in itself: you create the humor you hate. and the fact that people will still say what they're not supposed to is, overall, important, good, and unkillable.

matee ajavon and candace parker. candace parker has extremely "good hair."

deep inside, black people are, it turns out, just white people: clean, articulate leaders of men. and black people are just as intelligent as white people, a devastating indictment of both races. at any rate, now that black people have achieved whiteness, our long national nightmare of racism has ended. that is official. par-tay!

i was listening to the world's worst radio show the other day: bbc's world have your say (mike in san antonio: what do you think about iraq?! mistake?! ginny in nairobi: "what do you think about iraq?! etc etc). the question was: is america ready to elect a black president? people said this and that, but i don't think anyone knows, because no one talks openly about race and the level of self-delusion is monumental. a good example of the deep dishonesty, now infecting europe, is the big brother scandal in the uk (check 'related articles' under the story): the world is outraged because the show's producers depicted actual people displaying their actual racial attitudes: a capital crime. a lot of callers said: well, he might have trouble in the south. i don't know: the south is conservative and likely to vote republican barring the (possible) immense democratic landslide, hence not for obama. but i think in the north we have transcended even the idea that we will feel good for voting for a black candidate, having dismissed the idea that we are racists decades ago and learned to simulate this by never saying 'nigger,' and it strikes me that people who are racists and have no idea that they are may just find reasons to vote for someone else in the primaries etc.

a very odd column in today's latimes by erin aubry kaplan says this:

Of course, the O.J. indignation is driven in large part by racial indignation: the idea that a black man may have killed a white woman and gotten away with it. That's a violation of decorum.

then she goes on to say that the difference between the happy reception of kramer's racist rant and the outcry over oj is a racist thing. it seems, let us say, tendentious to equate stabbing people to death with hurling insults, and though a black man killing a white woman is indeed a violation of decorum, one might suggest that it is appropriately subject to more definite forms of disapproval. she also seems genuinely puzzled about whether oj did it or not; i would have thought that oj had put that question to rest once and for all. at any rate, the implied equivalence of a racist rant to a double murder is puzzling, and i'm not sure what more in the way of outcry kaplan could want: a third-tier celebrity has been vilified everywhere for days. if there's one thing we all agree on, it's that saying nigger is not allowed. but i hadn't thought we'd actually confused words with murder weapons.

mlk

today, walk up to someone and thank them simply for being black.

no parking on the dancefloor

it's great that there is now a consensus on people like rosa parks. but as george bush nominates sam alito and then stares at parks's casket he might want to ask himself: what did people of my political orientation think and say about people like her when there was actually something at stake?

i guess the washpost finally got hold of the whole "race traitor" tradition. i've been thinking about it for some reason in terms of reggae lately, and thinking: how could a white reggae artist connect themselves to the themes of slavery/oppression/black in babylon of marley or roots in general. this would have to be made interesting and not mere self-flagelation, but i think it should go like this: make the socratic realization that it is as great a misfortune to do as to suffer injustice: "we" tore people from their homes, forced them to live in servitude: can jah redeem us? we art babylon: how can we escape/destroy/transcend our own power etc?

hey i'm blogging from paris. just wanted to mention that as i rode in from de gaulle on the train, i saw: like, an african man dressed maybe junior executive with scarifications, a woman in full-dresss african-queen regalia, a woman reading a novel in hebrew, a buddhist monk examining a parchment sutra and checking his cell phone. down here in the 14th arondissement - where we're staying with famous ex-pat freak jim haynes - most of the folks seem to be descended from frenchpersons. it's the maturity of a process going on, for example, in my hometown of dc: minorities and immigrants to the suburbs; re-settlement of inner city by the still-dominant groups.

mark anthony neal's op-ed in the latimes today is just kind of silly. i take absolutely seriously white people's sexual phobia about black men (and i've written about it a lot, e.g. in "act like you know"). but both the race and the (alleged) sex are so twisted around in this case that this stuff does not apply. i could sort of see it in the oj case. but if you think that the crazy white fears that large brutal black men are going to rape their wives and daughters extends to a crazy white fear that squeaky-voiced, bleached little michael jackson is going to rape their sons, you're just smoked.

affirmative action in firing

i'm a serious football fan. but i don't pay any particular attention to notre dame. nevertheless it's hard to ignore the furor (i'm having problems linking from the dial-up i'm on, in nyc: exemplary would be wilbon's column in the washpost or the oped in today's nytimes). my sense is that willlingham was a good coach and good man. and i was a bit disturbed when the nd spokesman said: everything but the won-loss record was outstanding: grad rates, probity etc. but the reaction also makes it harder to hire a black coach, because the affirmative action on the other end is extreme: you can't fire him, or else you are a racist. as we all know, football coach at the division 1 or nfl level is an extremely cruel gig. notre dame's move was no more unusual than moving zook out of florida. it's just not a surprising move, any way you look at it. i don't share this mystical attitude about the school. i do deplore the bizarre lack of black coaches in div 1, but actually this whole thing makes it more comprehensible.