Radical Negative

"A More Perfect Union" and the Sober Debate on Race

2008-03-24T14:37:00.008-04:00

When Obama delivered “A More Perfect Union” in Philadelphia last Tuesday, he offered a challenge to the American Public. Stinging from his association with Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama seized the moment to highlight the problem of race in America:

“race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America — to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.”

Obama explained how Wright’s anger and paranoia are representative of feelings within the black community; that there is a reason for these feelings; and America ignores the cause of the Jeremiad at its own peril:

“The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we've never really worked through — a part of our union that we have not yet made perfect.”

He went to describe the history of segregation and Jim Crow, as well as its legacy today, from residential and school segregation to racially disparate wealth and incarceration. His message was that race is a political issue that manifests itself across policy issues from education, to criminal justice, to development; and that we must acknowledge racial disparities and attend to racial problems, not merely for the sake of the black community, but for the country’s general welfare.

The speech resonated with Americans across political lines. On the left responses were largely glowing, and Democratic primary voters seemed satisfied that Obama had addressed the problem of his association with the outspoken Reverend. The right’s response was more surprising. Opponents could not settle on a coherent critique of the speech, except perhaps that Obama was uncharitable to his grandmother. But several notable figures dissented and endorsed the speech as a remarkable and important contribution to contemporary political discourse. Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, concluded a lengthy debate with his colleagues at The Corner with this appraisal of Obama: “the other day he talked about race in ways that no other major politician has tried to do, with a level of honesty that no other major politician has dared, and with more insight than any other major politician possesses. Not bad." Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal “thought Barack Obama's speech was strong, thoughtful and important. Rather beautifully, it was a speech to think to, not clap to” (WSJ). Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow John McWhorter found that “For a light-skinned half-white Ivy League-educated black man to repudiate, in clear language and repeatedly, the take on race of people like Julian Bond and Nikki Giovanni is not only honest but truly bold” (TNR).

The impact of the speech has resonated within conservatism as Doug Kmiec, Professor of Constitutional Law and vocal pro-life advocate endorsed Obama for President, and Fox News anchor Chris Wallace confronted his colleagues on the airwaves for misconstruing Obama’s remarks on the “typical white person" (the video is well worth a watch).

The speech appeals to conservatives as much because of its mood as its content. As Andrew Sullivan has previously noted, Obama has a conservative “temperament” which makes his liberal politics appealing to the Burkean ear. In “A More Perfect Union,” this temperament is evidenced in Obama’s account of history. Obama sees the past as a reservoir of good and bad meanings that we cannot separate ourselves from. He employs William Faulkner’s famous observation that “the past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” He recalls the wounds caused by progress, as perceived preferences for black advancement inspired anger and resentment among poor and middle class whites. And he explains his refusal to entirely disavow Wright as a matter of loyalty, commitment, and culture: “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community… These people are a part of me. And they are part of America, this country that I love. ”

Obama’s unwillingness to reject the historical and cultural moorings of his own personality mirrors the tragedy of the south, where many people are unable to reject the legacy of the Confederacy, even while acknowledging the evils of slavery and Jim Crow, because they find essential cultural capital invested there. In this way, Obama makes the conservative case for the discussion of racism, as an element of our past that is lived in the present, that cannot neatly be separated by the many glories of American history. While conservatives may get off the boat when Obama describes the social policies and expenditures he proposes to address these problems, this disagreement over remedy need not undermine the underlying consensus that race is real and its manifestations are problematic.

In opening a conversation on race with rhetoric that appeals to conservatives as well as liberals, Obama has highlighted an existing cleavage in America’s political sensibility. He has carved out a distinction between two conflicting perspectives that cut across party and politics, conventionally understood. There are those who think we ought to think about race when discussing and forming policy, and those who don’t. Among those who don’t, count Bill Kristol:

“The last thing we need now is a heated national conversation about race.

“What we need instead are sober, results-oriented debates about economics, social mobility, education, family policy and the like — focused especially on how to help those who are struggling. Such policy debates can lead to real change — even “change we can believe in.” “National conversations” tend to be pointless and result-less.”
- Bill Kristol, “Let’s Not, And Say We Did,” NYT

It’s tempting to reject Kristol tout court for his hypocrisy. A man whose career has been built upon justifying the War in Iraq on the grounds of neoconservative ideology, and in spite of all the available evidence, should hardly be taken seriously in asking for “results oriented debates” on any subject. But, like every other canned Kristol column, this one sums up the conventional wisdom in conservative circles on the topic at hand. In this case, Kristol takes up the color blind cause. We shouldn’t talk about race, he argues, because things are getting better for black people, and talking about race either won’t make a difference or might even make thing worse. So instead we should have serious policy debates, which will result in better times for everyone.

But how, Mr. Kristol, shall we have a sober debate about social mobility without talking about severe disparity in median net worth between white families and black or Hispanic families? How shall we have a sober debate about education without talking about the fact that schools are now more racially segregated than they were a decade ago; that there are fewer black males in college than in prison? How shall we have a sober debate about family policy without talking about how incarceration (or, in the opinion of conservatives, welfare) has broken black families? How shall we have a sober debate about financial regulation without acknowledging that the numbers of subprime loans and foreclosures are disproportionately high in minority communities? A policy debate in any of these arenas would have to be black out drunk not to address the racial dimensions of our predicament.

Discussions of race are dangerous distractions for men like Kristol. They “shudder” at the thought of a national conversation on race. They cannot entertain these sober debates because they would be pressed into a dilemma. If Kristol were confronted with racial disparities in income, wealth, education, and incarceration, he could either assert that these disparities were caused by an innate or cultural racial inferiority, or he could assert that they were caused by the obstacles and disadvantages minorities confront. He would have to choose between defending the racism of social Darwinism and acknowledging that white privilege and systemic racism are real. If we have a conversation on race, we must stake out our positions on this question. For men of Kristol's politics, this choice is disastrous. Either they must accept the gospel of racism, or they must accept that society has a share of blame in racial disparity.

With this choice, between endorsing racism and accepting social culpability, Americans can honestly stake out their position on the nature of race. For those Americans who are not racists, who believe American society is responsible for racial disparity, the policy debate comes next.

Liberals may ask for comprehensive community revitalization projects for low income minority communities. Conservatives may acknowledge the existence systemic racism but protest that past “solutions,” such as urban renewal policies, cause more harm than good. Liberals may respond by suggesting a more flexible schedule of public investment that places government funds in the hands of private foundations that have spent decades refining best practices.
A mature and sober conversation on race and policy is therefore possible, and it is necessary.

Obama has afforded the American public the opportunity to pivot on race in this way, and apply the energies of the radical negative to a transformative policy agenda. But those liberals concerned with race should not fool themselves that liberal policies will necessarily address racial disparities. If we do not always ask ourselves what racial issues are implicated in policy questions and what policy innovations could address those issues, racism will go untreated, and Martin Luther King’s dream will be deferred. It is an open question what happens to a dream deferred. But none of the possibilities are welcome.

"God Damn America": Reverend Jeremiah Wright and the Radical Negative

2008-03-17T17:17:00.006-04:00

The media have pounced on Obama for his pastor’s inflammatory rhetoric. Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s words in 2003 sermon have received particular attention:

“The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes three-strike laws and then wants us to sing God Bless America. No! No No! God damn America—that’s in the bible--for killing innocent people. God damn America for threatening citizens as less than humans. God damn America as long as she tries to act like she is God and supreme.”

To this, National Review Online and Fox News have responded with a flurry of condemnations and prognostications that Obama’s association with Wright will be a mortal blow for his campaign. John Derbyshire of NRO predicted, “the man is toast,” while his colleague Lisa Schiffren predicted that the Wright affair had made the election “McCain’s to lose.” Sean Hannity of Fox News called for Obama’s resignation from the Senate. On the liberal end, concerns about the impact on Obama’s campaign have likewise been dire. Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo posted commenters who described Wright as “cancer,” and Obama’s connection to him as a “death blow” for his campaign. One TPM blogger, Flyonthewall, summarized the resulting political imperative: “Obama himself will need to forcefully and clearly reject the logic of Wright's claims, the tone of his remarks, and the words that he used. Then he has to take the most painful step - he needs to distance himself from Wright.” Obama took this message to heart, as he rejected Wrights remarks, and Wright stepped down from an official role in the campaign.

The narrative at work is that Obama succeeded by not being branded “black,” with all of the associated stereotypes of anger and victimization; and now that the public has seen video of his long time pastor displaying those very stereotypes, Obama is doomed. His campaign can’t be a transcendent embrace of Americans across color, because he is now associated with cries for racial justice; he can’t preach the “audacity of hope” when his minister, who coined the phrase, preaches the gospel of racial despair.

Reverend Wright’s sermon, and the public’s encounter with it, is therefore exemplary of my claim that “race is the radical negative in America.” By radical negative, I mean to draw a contrast to GWF Hegel’s dialectical negative. The dialectical negative is at the service of the positive, as when immoral acts serve as the foil for moral standards; or when bloody revolutionary war destroys despotic government and brings about liberal democracy; or when Jesus dies to save the souls of humanity. The dialectical negative is the destructive engine of progress that brings change and renews possibility. The radical negative, by contrast, is not absorbed back into a positive narrative of progress and redemption. Rather, the radical negative is a threat to the continuity of such narratives.

I call race the radical negative in America because it continually underscores the bankruptcy of liberal principles in their application. In the American Dream, race is a phantom whose maniacal grin we interpret as benign, in hopes of staving off the lurking nightmare. But sometimes, as when there’s a race riot in L.A., or when the New Orleans levies break, or when the public hears the anger of a black reverend at a country ruled by “rich white people,” the force of the radical negative is stronger by its cognitive or bodily proximity. Wright’s speech takes up the voice of this radical negative. To the common call “God Bless America,” Wright answers “God Damn America,” turning the ultimate will from positive to negative; from blessedness to damnation.

Race is the radical negative because it explodes the notions of liberty and equality upon which we pride ourselves. While there are many metrics of severe racial disparity—from health, to income, to wealth—the starkest is incarceration. As a recently published Pew study shows, America is far and away the world’s leading incarcerator (NYT - "U.S. Inprisons One in 100 Adults, Report Finds"). The country which is supposedly the world’s shining beacon of democratic liberalism puts a larger portion of its population behind bars than any other. And who does the state put there? Whereas blacks constitute only 12 per cent of the U.S. population, they account for 45 per cent of its prison population (Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Prisoners in 2002). This grave disparity is a consequence of black poverty, the war on drugs, segregated schools, and general urban neglect, all of which have maintained the roots of racial hierarchy even after its legal appendages had been hewn.

It is in this context that Reverend James Wright’s remarks are comprehensible. NRO contributor Stanley Kurtz would have us believe that “from the standpoint of deconstruction and postcolonial theory (and only from that standpoint), Wright’s remarks are undisturbing, and in fact most welcome.” Kurtz can only imagine pomo leftists being sympathetic to Wright, since the only standpoints he considers are the theoretical positions of elite academics. But, plainly, Wright’s words are welcome to the congregation that applauds his words. And plainly they are welcome to the African American community, whose support for Obama has only risen since news of Wright’s incendiary sermon broke (h/t KLo).

Wright’s words are emphatically not welcome to whites and other Americans who are comfortable with an historical narrative of progress and a discourse of individual responsibility, merit and opportunity. In a country where life, even as a white man, remains indisputably difficult for many, suggestions of white privilege and racial oppression grate on sensitive nerves. Faith in the integrity of America’s basic justice defends popular sentiment against deeper satisfaction with social and economic inequality. This faith acknowledges racism as the negative in an always upward moving dialectic, in which slavery is followed by emancipation, and Jim Crow by desegregation. But when race intrudes as a radical negative, untempered by reconstruction and reform, it threatens the American faith with the reality of a society where a man’s race is often more predictive of his success than his personal merit.

Obama’s approach has been to champion an understanding of race as a dialectical rather than a radical negative. He highlights the stories of abolitionists and freedom riders—all positive, shining examples of human action that have been called forth by the abnegating evils of racism. But this recent outburst from the media over Wright shows how the radical negative intrudes: so long as there is deep racial inequality, its white beneficiaries will recoil when confronted with the anger of the underprivileged. If the public’s reaction to Obama’s association damages his prospects, it will be the work of the radical negative. Or if, in the event he is elected, the racial backlash forces him to deny issues of racial inequality altogether, then the feeling of pride we feel for our multiculturalism will be accompanied by that same smiling phantom.

But there is a third way. Obama can perform the transcendental feat of uniting American identity in his person, while pivoting on the radical negative of race as the defining project of his candidacy. Pivoting on the radical negative would not mean adopting Wright’s voice, preaching the social gospel, or taking slave owning Founders off of the currency. It would mean that the questions of racial disparity and racism would always be asked in any policy matter from health care to the war in Iraq, and that every viable opportunity to address racial disparity would be taken. It would mean, in short, an end to color blindness. It would mean an unerring engagement with problems of race until those problems cease, or have become so different in kind that they must be grasped by other conceptual handles. To neutralize the radical negative, we must recognize the political imperative it foists upon us.

Feminism's Race Problem

2008-03-13T15:46:00.019-04:00

“If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color), he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”

- Geraldine Ferraro, first female vice presidential nominee, prominent Clinton supporter, and (now) ex-Clinton-campaign-finance-committee member.

Ferraro’s nonsensical assertion reads like the whine of every bitter white male high school student who didn’t get into an Ivy League school and blames it on his black classmate who did. In short, this is an anti-affirmative action meme: black people get all these advantages, and, as such, successful black people only got where they are because of their race.

Given Ferraro's background as the first female vice presidential nominee and her ties to the Hillary Clinton, the first viable female presidential nominee, her remarks reflect poorly on the feminist establishment's grasp of issues of race and racism. But Ferraro's rhetoric is not an isolated case. On the contrary, she is a prime example of feminism’s recent complicity in anti-affirmative action discourse. Other instances are not so direct, damning, or egregious; they imply and connote rather than emphatically state. Today, for example, Feministing noted Catherine Orenstein’s laudable Op-ed Project, which aims to increase the representation of women among op-ed writers. As Orenstein describes it, the Op-Ed Project is

“an initiative to target and train women experts across the nation to project their voices on the op-ed pages of major newspapers and other key forums of public discourse, which are currently overwhelmingly dominated by male voices, and to connect them with the editors who need them. This is a media democracy project, designed to promote diversity on the op-ed pages and beyond. The premise of this project is not “women’s affirmative action” — in fact, it is not a “women” project at all: It’s an everyone project. The lack of diversity on the op-ed pages deprives the public of robust, democratic debate, especially important in this space, which is intended to showcase divergent opinions.”

Orenstein is careful—eager, even—to dissociate her project from affirmative action programs. By stating that the program is not “women’s affirmative action” she seems to imply that "regular" affirmative action does not benefit women; that its scope is limited to race. But, on the contrary, as African American Policy Forum executive director Kimberle Crenshaw frequently points out, the greatest beneficiaries of affirmative action are white women. Orenstein nevertheless insists that the Op-ed Project is not some women’s version of (black) affirmative action; that it is something far nobler and less fraught with identity politics.

If we interpret her meaning somewhat more charitably, Orenstein could be simply acknowledging that there are affirmative action programs for women, but that the Op-ed Project is not one of those. In either case, she seeks to divorce the project from affirmative action.

But the Op-ed Project is an affirmative action project—a very worthwhile one at that. The impetus for the project, as she describes it, is exactly the same as that of affirmative action: “the lack of diversity on the op-ed pages deprives the public of robust, democratic debate.” In the same way, academic affirmative action seeks to create a “critical mass” of minority students on campuses in order to foster intellectually stimulating cultural diversity, and prepare students for life in a multicultural democratic society. And, like the Op-ed Project, affirmative action is an instrument to address white male power structures which have systematically excluded minorities and women.

So why is Orenstein running as fast as she can from the label “affirmative action” in defining the goals of her project? She’s running because she wants the project unsullied by race.

Conservative think tanks have successfully crafted a public image of affirmative action as a remedial program for black folk. And in policies where black folk are concerned, the public is always quick to suspect that they have been given preferential treatment. Since the Civil War, Americans have had an underlying sense that we’ve sacrificed enough already for the Africans we brought here as slaves; that we apologize too much; that they’ve taken a mile for every inch we’ve given. Orenstein is conscious enough of this stigma to reject, in her one paragraph summary of the Op-Ed project, any commonality with affirmative action. She knows that the label "affirmative action" has a stink to it. And that stink emanates from the public perception that affirmative action gives blacks preferential treatment. These are the humors of racism, and though I doubt it was her intent, Orenstein has become complicit in confirming public perceptions of affirmative action as unjust, and black people as unfairly advantaged. By obliquely signaling her sympathy to the critique of affirmative action as an unjustified preference for racial minorities, Orenstein seeks to defend the Op-ed project at the expense of affirmative action, and transitively, at the expense of racial minorities.

This unfortunate ploy is all too common in feminist discourse. The movement has a troubled historical legacy in dealing with the competing interest of racial equality. Elizabeth Cady Stanton allied herself with racist southern Democrats in exalting women’s rights above the rights of black men. Because black men won their right to vote before white women, feminists pitted their interests against those of racial justice, as suffragettes disparaged blacks for women’s gain. As Stanton herself put it, "This republican cry of manhood suffrage created an antagonism between black men and all women.”

This antagonism, I argue, is at the heart of Orenstein’s disavowal of the affirmative action label. Because the public perceives affirmative action as a remedial program for African Americans, Orenstein feels she must dissociate her project from it. In reality, there is no difference between her program and the affirmative action agenda as a whole, except that the Op-ed Project is limited to women, whereas affirmative action benefits both women and minorities. Orenstein must nevertheless take pains to state that her program is not affirmative action, because that program benefits blacks, and programs that benefit blacks do not sit well in the public mind. It’s not that Orenstein has it out for black people. Rather, she realizes on some level that racial prejudices would cast her project in an unsavory light, unless she specifically rejects any connection to programs which people believe give black people preference. As a consequence, Orenstein plays into a gender-race antagonism in which affirmative action is maligned and misunderstood as the unearned privilege of blacks.

This same antagonism has reared its head in the Democratic Primary, as Barack Obama faces off against Hillary Clinton. And the conflict has been filtered through the same terms that conservatives have set for the debate on affirmative action. First, Gloria Steinem, in her New York Times Op Ed Column, “Women are Never Front Runners,” argued that Obama had been beating Clinton because racism is less of a problem than sexism. Faced with Clinton’s diminishing popularity, she charged that “gender is probably the most restricting force in American life.” Here, again, a Feminist leader defined oppression of women against the oppression of African Americans. She sees Obama’s success as part of an “historical pattern of making change” in which black men always get theirs before white women; in which the preference always goes to them, from emancipation to affirmative action. “Black men,” she notes, “were given the vote a half-century before women of any race were allowed to mark a ballot.” She fails to note that black men and women were prevented from exercising that right with poll taxes, literacy tests, and lynchings up until at least 1965 when the Voting Rights Act was passed. But in Steinem’s mind, the verdict of history is clear: American women have been short-changed because of the competing equity claims of African Americans; and Obama, and African Americans in general, do not deserve the preference they have been shown.

The gender-race antagonism of the campaign then reached new heights with Ferraro's "affirmative action candidate" screed against Obama. It bears repeating: “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color), he would not be in this position.” Like Stanton, she allies herself with racist whites in her disdain for perceived racial preference. The Clinton campaign has in this way reinforced existing prejudices about black people and about affirmative action, all to win the votes of racist Democrats in Pennsylvania.

These attacks underscore that racism and condescension to blacks is not a partisan disease. Many liberals are eager to nominally address African American interests so long as African American power and African American leaders don’t undermine the existing liberal establishment and its agenda. The parental and possessive attitude of the Clintons towards blacks is symptomatic of a racial hierarchy that operates across party lines; and their backhanded pandering to racist whites is a bleached shade of the Democratic Party’s historical colors as the champion of slavery and Jim Crow.

It is time for the Democratic Party to shirk this legacy once and for all by rejecting Clinton’s race baiting politics and denying her the nominiation. And it is time for feminism to shirk the race-gender antagonism of Stanton, Steinem, and Farraro, and take up the intersectional approach to gender championed by Kimberle Crenshaw and Eve Ensler and Jessica Valenti.

Obama, Race, and Identity (American and Personal)

2008-01-07T16:11:00.000-05:00

In the wake of Barack Obama’s win in Iowa, the condition race and identity in the American Republic have been thrown into relief. Yesterday, Thomas Edsall at Huffington Post noted the Clinton campaign's frustration with the appeal of Obama's message and symbolism:

“In private, some of Clinton's supporters are deeply disdainful of Obama. 'He is the candidate of the "identity left"', said one, dismissively.”

Today Matt Yglesias noted the obvious implication: “and by ‘identity’ we mean ‘black people.’”

On the sentimental surface, the Clinton campaign is expressing its contempt for a young, black politician who is not waiting his turn; who is challenging the interest of the party establishment; who is not so grateful to the Clintons for all they have done for African Americans as to carry Hillary’s luggage into the White House; and, finally, who blasphemously proposes that racial equity might this time trump feminism in the priorities of liberal progress.

But there is a deeper late modern undercurrent to the derisive claim that Obama’s candidacy has to do with identity politics. The dismissive Clinton supporter Edsall quotes is right that the Obama campaign is about identity. Specifically, it is about the effort to preserve and exalt personal identity through national identity in the face of the racial meanings, dynamics, and structures that fracture both personal and national identity. The self-identity of the individual, upon which citizenship, responsibility, and rights depend, is put into question by the radically non-identical character of race. The Obama candidacy is therefore centrally a contest about race and the deeper disorders of the American political self that race reveals.

Today in the Republic, personal identity is bright and in sharp focus. Because it appears so clearly, its intrinsic blurs and faults are more visible. As the presidential election develops, the public confronts the ultimate elevation and interrogation of the concept of personal identity. In an election where a black candidate is a serious competitor, personal identity becomes yet more crucial in the national discourse, and yet more fragile.

Every candidate is assessed for at once their character, their symbolism, and their representation. They are seen as either possessing or lacking the requisite personal qualities to hold the office, and as symbolizing certain ideas and aspirations, and as also representing certain interests and populations. So the contest between individuals for the presidency imbues the identities of candidates with popular and unpopular traits, symbols, and associations. This process calls into question identity as real or achievable. Where the character, symbolism, and representation of each candidate are not conceptually or thematically aligned, it belies the notion that we are electing a unified personality to the office. Rather, we are electing a set of potentially incongruent identities, predicated of a single body, and, in particular, a single face.

To the extent that presidential politics betrays the lack of identity in candidates, it reveals a more profound unraveling of what it means to be an American self. “One ever feels one’s two-ness” (or three- or four-ness), as Dubois put it, because the meaning of personality in America has multiple and conflicting valences. We are each something in terms of our characteristics, something else in terms of what others take us to symbolize, and something else in terms of what groups and histories we represent. Only in outliers are these three valences of self-definition congruent. For most, identity is fractured and refracted between the way we act, the way our action relates to collective imageries and imaginations, and the way our acts are taken to represent a certain species of American life.

This fracturing of identity has many causes. Empirical science has placed personal identity under close experimental scrutiny, gradually vindicating—experiment by experiment—Hume’s contention that personal identity is a mental fiction created from the continuity of different impressions. At the same time, capitalist law, which creates legal persons in corporations, undermines the notion that identity is a personal quantity, or that legal recognition of personality is coterminous with the rights and obligations pertaining to human bodies. Finally, with race, the fractures of identity are deepest. As personal identity is defined and contested by multiple understandings of racial meaning, the unity of the self is threatened by universal categorizations that supplant the supremacy of identity with an understanding of individuals as instantiations of general racial designations.

Because Barack Obama is a black man, the contest to attach characteristic, symbolic, and associative predicates to his identity is therefore fiercer and more revealing of the racial dynamics at play in the Republic. Obama’s own personal history makes him representative of multiple racial and cultural meanings: his mother was a white Christian from Kansas and his father a non-practising black Muslim from Kenya; he was born in Hawaii; he attended a public school in Indonesia with a majority Muslim student body; he converted to Christianity. Andrew Sullivan, who himself has a troubled grasp of racial identity, describes the complexities of Obama’s racial identity aptly:

“In Dreams From My Father, Obama tells the story of a man with an almost eerily nonracial childhood, who has to learn what racism is, what his own racial identity is, and even what being black in America is. And so Obama’s relationship to the black American experience is as much learned as intuitive. He broke up with a serious early girlfriend in part because she was white. He decided to abandon a post-racial career among the upper-middle classes of the East Coast in order to reengage with the black experience of Chicago’s South Side. It was an act of integration—personal as well as communal—that called him to the work of community organizing.

“This restlessness with where he was, this attempt at personal integration, represents both an affirmation of identity politics and a commitment to carving a unique personal identity out of the race, geography, and class he inherited. It yields an identity born of displacement, not rootedness. And there are times, I confess, when Obama’s account of understanding his own racial experience seemed more like that of a gay teen discovering that he lives in two worlds simultaneously than that of a young African American confronting racism for the first time” (Andrew Sullivan, "Goodbye to All That," Atlantic Monthly).

For Sullivan, Obama’s fragmentary construction of a racial identity mirrors his own difficulties in assembling a unified self from the sexual structures that confront him. Obama’s racial identity is therefore not merely significant for determining the meaning of race in America. It is also significant for determining the meaning of identity in America. For race is akin to all other identities, except its fractures are deeper and its impact is more remarkable and more harmful. So when we confront the meaning of racial identity, we confront the problems of identity writ large.

Everyone’s racial identity is fractured because racial designations are imprecise and insensitive to nuance. But because of his biography, Obama particularly highlights at once the incoherence and the power of race as political and personal fact. With everyone from the right to the left agreeing that Obama’s significance as a candidate has to do with race, commentary and criticism often takes on the dismal shades of racism. But it is a racism which reveals the unstable meaning of racial identity. Bob Kerrey, a Clinton supporter, for example threw the race card at Obama with an underhanded though obvious appeal to racial anxieties:

““The fact that he’s African-American is a big deal. I do expect and hope that Hillary is the nominee of the party. But I hope he’s used in some way. If he happens to be the nominee of the party and ends up being president, I think his capacity to influence in a positive way . . . the behavior of a lot of underperforming black youth today is very important, and he’s the only one who can reach them.”

Kerrey continued: “It’s probably not something that appeals to him, but I like the fact that his name is Barack Hussein Obama, and that his father was a Muslim and that his paternal grandmother is a Muslim. There’s a billion people on the planet that are Muslims, and I think that experience is a big deal.”

It’s a “big deal” to Kerrey that Obama is African American and related to Muslims: a big deal that he’s African American because African American youth are out of control, and won’t listen to any white people; a big deal that his mother was Muslim because there are a billion Muslims on earth and lots of Muslims are terrorists. So Obama, the black Muslim relative is important because blacks and Muslims are out of control. Kerrey thus intended to associate Obama with perceptions of racial threats from blacks and Muslims. In the tradition of Norman Podhoretz and Frank Salvato, Kerrey sought to link perceived threats from blacks at home to perceived threats of Muslims abroad through Obama’s personal identity. But it is only because Obama has an ambiguous racial identity that this equation is possible: black violence is associated with Muslim violence through a person associated with both blacks and Muslims (thought not violence).

Obama’s lack of definable racial identity in this way becomes a playground for racial attribution that at once raises the profile of the debate about race and increasingly blurs racial distinctions and racial meanings. Whereas Andrew Sullivan argues that Obama represents the end of a the racial culture war that has gone on since the sixties, Jonah Goldberg of the National Review suggest that black people will riot if Obama loses, and white liberals will vote for Obama out of fear of social unrest. Bill Bennett applauds Obama for not playing the race card, thereby himself affirming the legitimacy of race as a political “card.” (Glenn Greenwald “Jonah Goldberg and Glenn Reynolds Worn of Social Unraveling if Obama Loses," 1.5.08). Steve Sailer of the Washington Times contests this assertion by claiming that Obama has a “lifelong fixation with proving himself ‘black enough.’” Obama is the end and the beginning of race riots; he is absolved of race and a race peddler. In short, the ‘Obama’ that pundits have constructed embodies the condition of race in America: denied and avowed; shunned and embraced; feared and loved.

The message of the Obama campaign is that the fractures of identity that race reveals can be healed through the identification of a national we, represented and instantiated in Obama’s person. Since his historic speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, entitled “Out of Many, One,” Obama has sought to dissolve difference in unity:

“For alongside our famous individualism, there’s another ingredient in the American saga. A belief that we’re all connected as one people. …

“E pluribus unum. Out of many, one.

“Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters, the negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes.

“Well, I say to them tonight, there is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America — there’s the United States of America."

The hope of Obama is that we can be united in the shared disunity of our persons, and in our effort to somehow reconstruct the pieces; that we can supercede interpersonal and intrapersonal difference with national unity. This effort might occur in any case. But such attempts at unity would necessarily wring hollow without Obama--a candidate with a black face and an identity entangled with racial ambiguity. Race is too deeply embedded in the cavities of personal and national identity to be bracketed again, as it was in the Constitutional convention, in the interest of the union. Without Obama, the racial fissures in American identity would be ignored, and therefore would persist. With Obama, the reality of race must be confronted, in all its complexity, contradiction, and multiplicity.

LA Times Homicide Report: Race and the Situated Specificity of Death

2007-12-14T12:23:00.000-05:00

The Los Angeles Times blog Homicide Report, by Jill Leovy, documents homicides in Los Angeles with brief accounts of the victim, the murder, and, where applicable, the investigation. A couple of the entries struck me:

“Adam Blount, 28, a black man, was shot and killed Thursday night, Dec. 6, at about 11 p.m. in the 1600 block of W. 36th Street. west of Normandie Avenue in South L.A. He had just left the recreation center at Denker park and was walking to his home, which is near the murder scene. His assailants caught up with him as he walked on the sidewalk. There was gunfire, and Blount was taken to California Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. He was single, and had no children. When detectives arrived at the murder scene, no one was around, and it had begun to rain.”

“Jeffrey Sinclair, 17, a black youth, was shot multiple times at 825 W. 54th Street in LAPD's 77th Street Division at about 9:15 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 20. He was taken to California Hospital, where he died at 9:45 p.m. His mother was incarcerated; he lived with his grandparents. He had been on his bicycle just before he was attacked. The bicycle fell near him at the homicide scene.”

These reports are unusual and poignant because of the specificity they give to the circumstances of the murder, and the victim. When the police arrived to find the body of a black man, who they would learn was named Adam Blount, it began to rain. Jeffrey Sinclair, the black son of an incarcerated mother, was found dead beside his bicycle. The reports begin with general facts that situate the murder, and then descend into particularities, ending with a detail that grounds the account in the unique then-and-there of the crime scene.

This situated account of death is an admirable and compelling way to appreciate the weight and significance of isolated human events in a large nation where powerful and pervasive forces are at play. Martin Heidegger would counsel us that death is special for the way it separates us from commitments to other thing and people. The situated account, on the contrary, posits that death is unique in that it places us, forever, in a circumstance that is entirely our own, while at the same time connecting that circumstance to the structures, identities, and histories that brought it about.

Race is at the forefront of this context. As you read down the entries of the blog, almost all victims are black or latino. Each of these deaths is therefore unique and tragic, but at the same time representative of the social reality of race. If Leovy merely described a boy dead beside his bicycle, or officers arriving as the rain fell, the death would appear tragic and senseless, but it would appear innocent of political or social causes. On the other hand, if we merely list the statistics of racial disparity in homicide rates, we are confronted with only a mass of color coded data unrelated to particular violations of human worth, which entail moral and political responsibilities. In combining facts about race and racial disparity with the radically specific and human circumstances of death, Leovy’s Homicide report makes an important contribution to a discourse about criminal justice that refuses to be colorblind. Leovy herself aptly described the need for a racially sensitive account in her post: "Why does the Report talk about race?"

“The Homicide Report recognizes the peril of dehumanizing victims by reducing their lives and deaths to a few scant facts--particularly racial designations which provide only the roughest markers of ancestry and history. But given the magnitude of difference in homicide risk along racial and ethnic lines--and the extremity of suffering which homicide inflicts on subsets of the population--we opt here to present information which lays bare racial and ethnic contours of the problem so conspicuous in the coroner's data. The goal is to promote understanding, and honor a basic journalistic principle: Tell the truth about who suffers.”

Voter Suppression and Diminished Political Reality

2007-12-11T15:27:00.000-05:00

The Bush Administration's assault on minority voting rights pushed on today as the Justice Department, in an unusual move, submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in defense of Indiana's voter ID law. As I noted in "The Return of the Racial Aristocracy in the New American Century," Indiana's voter ID law has been shown to disenfranchise disproportionately poor, elderly, and minority voters (Barreto et al.). While the law is supposedly intended to reduce voter fraud, there is scant evidence that voter fraud is actually a problem. Rather, the false alarm of voter fraud has provided a plausible justification for voter registration requirements which disenfranchise groups who tend to vote for Democrats. The true victim of this maneuver, however, is not the Democratic party, but minorities and poor people who have lost their constitutional rights by virtue of their political association.

The Indiana voter ID law is not an isolated case. With the advice and leadership of of the Justice Department Civil Rights Division, and officials like Hans von Spakovsky, Florida has passed a law which requires voter registration information be checked against (error ridden) drivers license and social security databases. The result has been the rejection of 43,000 voter applications, with black applicants over six times and hispanic applicants seven times as likely as white applicants to be rejected.

Such laws thus employ the faults, discrepancies, and delays endemic to bureaucratic processes to disenfranchise poor and minority voters, who are more likely to be the victims of database errors, and most vulnerable to registration complications. Similarly, voter ID laws rely upon the imposition of unwarranted bureaucratic burdens to accomplish voter suppression.

These programs represent a broader effort to call into question the political reality of poor and minority citizens. When poor and minority communities are prevented from expressing their interests at the polls, their reality in the calculus of political campaigning and the making of policy diminishes. Beyond this, the deeper implication of voter ID laws is to equate minority and low income suffrage with fraud, and by extension, to suggest that the reality of minorities and poor people as citizens is suspect. These laws capitalize on the histories of descrimination and the circumstances of low income life, which make it less likely that individuals within minority groups will be recognized and accurately accounted for by the bureaucratic and institutional instruments that locate and define the status of citizens.

Such instruments are instances of political thought: they are ways of attaining knowledge of the reality of the selves who constitute the Republic. But when this thought is brought to bear on the law, it ceases to reflect an existing political reality. Instead it shapes the political reality to reflect its accurate or inaccurate assesments. Whereas it may have been an error, in the first instance, to fail to document the residences of poor and minority citizens, when this erroreous data informs voter registration rejections, such citizens truly become diminished citizens with diminished rights. Techniques of of bureaucratic obfuscation are thus not merely instruments towards the end of Democratic voter suppression; more, the techniques underscore and employ ambiguous data about minorities and the poor so as to engender and confirm the suspicion that, politically at least, these people are somewhat less than real.

State laws which disenfrancise convicted felons, who are disproprotionately hispanic and black, likewise aim to associate minorities, via criminality, with severely diminished political reality ("Uneven Justice," The Sentencing Project: 2007). As these instruments of disenfranchisement succeed, and poor and minority influence diminishes at the polls, this association of criminality, minorities, and suspect citizenship will be confirmed in reality by minorities' absence from the national discourse and natural conscience. The Bush Administration's techniques of voter suppression thus cunningly exploit the state's powers of definition, authentication, obfuscation, and incarceration to bolster the racial and economic aristocracy in a republic turned empire.

h/t: Talking Points Memo.

Black Folk Behind the Veil: The Racial Blindness of Political Liberalism

2007-12-06T17:22:00.000-05:00

“Then it dawned on me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.”

--W.E.B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk.

In 1903, when The Souls of Black Folk was published, the veil took many concrete forms, such as poll taxes, which blinded the electoral chambers to Black interests, or, legal segregation, which kept Blacks out of the sight and out of mind for the white public. But even with the removal of these institutional barriers in the 1960s, the racial veil remains as a limit on the scope of our political reason. John Rawls’ employs the imagery of a veil explicitly in A Theory of Justice. There, in arguably the most adequate defense of contemporary liberalism, Rawls uses the notion of a “veil of ignorance” to describe the conditions for determining principles of justice. When we consider these conditions in light of our racially disparate reality, we find that the veil serves not as the instrument of justice, but as an instrument for the preservation of injustice. Rawls’ use of the veil therefore betrays political liberalism's morally fatal ignorance of racial injustice. Political reasoning behind the veil necessarily yields color blind norms because it requires citizens deliberating over justice to ignore the question of race. As a consequence, Rawls' mode of political reason is wholly unequipped to recognize the contemporary reality of racism, and conceive of justifiable norms for political redress.

Rawls aim in A Theory of Justice is to articulate universal and public principles that would establish fair terms of social cooperation, serving as the “final court of appeal for ordering the conflicting claims of moral persons” (Rawls 1999: 117). To accomplish this, he suggests that we reason from an “original position,” in which the facts we have access to in reasoning will be restricted in order to minimize partiality. Here Rawls employs the notion of the “veil of ignorance” to describe the justifiable conditions of political reasoning:

“Now in order to do this I assume that the parties are situated behind a veil of ignorance. They do not know how the various alternatives will affect their own particular case and they are obliged to evaluate principles solely on the basis of general considerations.

“It is assumed then, that the parties do not know certain kinds of particular facts. First of all, no one know his place in society, his class position or social status; nor does he know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets or abilities, his intelligence or strength, and the like. Nor, again, does anyone know his conception of the good, the particulars of his rational plan of life… More than this, I assume that the parties do not know the particular circumstances of their own society. That is, they do not know its economic or political situation, or the level of civilization and culture it has been able to achieve" (118).

Rawls’ veil is fairly opaque, excluding the parties’ knowledge of their cognitive, social, economic, of cultural circumstances. It leaves so much off the table because it intends to produce consensus between self-interested individuals over principles of social cooperation by denying them knowledge of their particular circumstance. When reasoning over the structure of a just society, parties must imagine that they could be any citizens within this society, such that the rules are, hypothetically, fair from the perspective of any citizen.

Rawls never mentions “race” as a circumstance that should be excluded from deliberations over questions of justice. The closest he comes to addressing race is his exclusion of “social circumstance.” The idea of considering race in questions of justice is too remote for a liberal like Rawls even to consider. But presumably, if individuals must be ignorant with respect to their social circumstance when deliberating over principles of justice, they must be ignorant of their race as well.

What, then, do the parties to this convention of justice know? “It is taken for granted…that they know the general facts about human society. They understand political affairs and economic theory; they know the basis of social organization and the laws of human psychology.” Leaving aside the question of what “general facts” we have on these particular topics, it seems that no “general facts” about race could be introduced, because there is no public or scholarly consensus on race: whether it is or isn’t, and if it is, what it is. Because race is an ambiguous, complex, empirically ungrounded, and historically produced concept, it cannot be among the general facts that inform the priniciples of justice.

Because of the way Rawls understands "general facts," and their relation to reasoning, race simply cannot factor in to deliberations about justice. In Rawls' understanding, general facts serve as boundary condition that informs what kinds of social structures and principles would be plausible in the context of social psychology and human nature. So if Rawls were to allow parties to consider a "general fact" about race, that fact would therefore structure resulting principles of social organization to confirm that fact. For example, let's say parties to the convention of justice admit as a general fact that societies tend to assign unequal values and unequal opportunities to different people depending on their physical characteristics and ethnicity. This fact then plays the same role as facts like egoism, or moral sympathy, or scarcity of resources: it is an assumption built into deliberations about society which the principles that derive from deliberation will not only take for granted, but also actively confirm. If you create social structures that assume egoism, then those structures will (re)produce egoism. Likewise, if you assumes that people hiearchically order individuals according to race, then the society you create will tend to hierichally order individuals according to race, in order not to resist supposed facts about human tendencies. There is no possibility, in Rawls, that certain general facts, as opposed to particular facts, could be fundamentally unjust facts, deserving not merely consideration, but active negation. So race must be excluded as a general fact at the outset, because its inclusion would undermine the objectivity of facts that underlies Rawls' scheme of political justification.

Because the inclusion of race as a fact, unlike the inclusion self-interest or material scarcity as facts, raises explicit moral questions, and does not square with liberal universalist intuitions, race does not appear in Rawls' understanding of liberal reasoning. The inclusion of race would challenge the relation between facts and norms in liberal thinking, and the whole liberal scheme whereby reality is filtered and normalized through the universal categories of thought. To include race as a consideration in matters of justice would be to pollute the universality of liberal principles with a fact that derives its very force from the segregation and differential valuation of universality. And so, in the same way that the Founding Fathers felt they needed to ignore the question of slavery in order to preserve the fledgling union, Rawls' species of liberal political reason ignores race in order to preserve the justification conferred by the universal dictates of reason.

Rawls’ principles of justice, and the whole order of value they designate, are thus colorblind. They treat race as a historical fiction and curiosity, divorcef from the general, social scientific facts that are relevant to political considerations. The universal principles of justice are advertised, nonetheless, to entail just arrangements for all members of society, irrespective of race. For Rawls, reasoning behind the veil of ignorance yields too basic principles:

“First: each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others. Second: social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all” (53).

When these color blind principles of justice confront the reality of American society, they are woefully unprepared to redress racial inequality. Race, after all, was excluded as a fact for consideration in the genesis of the principles of justice, so the glaring facts of racial disparity in income, wealth, health, education, or incarceration do not seem like facts at all. They are figments of our partial imagination, which we gratefully forgot while in the original position. Through a willful exclusion of the question of race, the principles of justice emerge as the universal arbiters of fairness and equity.

Newly armed with these unimpeachable principles, Rawls suggests that we can wipe away the vestiges of racism, and embrace a legal system that treats everyone equally regardless of their race. Rawls’ principles would thus champion anti-discrimination law and forbid de jure segregation, since these would trammel on individuals “most extensive scheme of basic liberties,” and prevent positions and offices from being open to all. But because “each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties,” policies that aimed to ameliorate disparity by placing new burdens and restrictions on individuals would be forbidden tout court. We could not have mandatory busing programs that aim to achieve racial balance in public schools; we could not allocate public resources to programs designed to ameliorate racial disparity; we could not have affirmative action programs, in public universities at least; and we could not in any case put demands for racial parity on institutional or corporate bodies. Any of these would place a demand for racial equity above the right of individuals to set their own course. And given the universal right to the most extensive scheme of liberties, even if we acknowledged a compelling public interest in racial disparity, the fundamental principle of equal and maximal liberty would trump that interest.

The only avenue for racial redress in the Rawlsian scheme would be to treat racial disparity as its own kind of social inequality, and then argue that racial disparity is not to everyone’s advantage. But here the racial justice Rawlsian will meet with blank stares from his liberal compatriots. They would say that unlike income inequality, social organization, or political affairs, race is not among the “general facts about human society” around which the principles of justice is defined, since race is not a fact but fiction. From the perspective of justice behind the veil, racial disparity is not a recognizable form of social inequality. Inequalities may appear to have a racial correlation, but the only real inequalities, the only inequalities relevant to political justice, are the unequal circumstances between individuals, which are defined not by skin-color, but by legal and social, and economic metrics. In the liberal view, to consider race in political reason is to employ an illegitimate category, and so to reason incorrectly. Race, so understood, is an ideological relic of social structures that violated principles of justice, so the consideration of race can only serve to perpetuate those structures. As Avery Gordon and Christopher Newfield put it, liberalism “treats the categories through which racism operates, is felt, and is addressed as conceptual errors” (Gordon and Newfield, Critical Theory: 1994). In the liberal’s reasoning, the best and only available political remedy for racial disparity is to eschew race consciousness and laws that explicitly employ the faulty concept of race. With the abolition of the irrational category, racial disparity may or may not dissipate, but in either case it will not matter, because we will not think of fairness in terms of race.

The veil of ignorance thus blinds the principles of justice to questions of racism beyond explicit discrimination or de jure segregation. The color blind policy which Rawls’ political reason mandates does not serve to eliminate racism, but only serves to inoculate the conscience of justice from the fact or racial disparity. It creates a circumstance where one of the most glaring aspects of our political in social reality becomes completely irrelevant to considerations of fairness. And so the question of race is bracketed permanently, and Black folk remain behind the veil as the theoreticians consider the merits of our society.

The Arab Race

2007-12-03T14:09:00.000-05:00

Last week, in "The Vicious Cycle of Racism and the War on Terror," I wrote about the racialization of Muslims and Arabs in American discourse. Today, National Review editor Kathryn Jean Lopez responded to charges that NRO blogger Thomas Smith had fabricated stories about Hezbollah in Lebanon by blaming the inaccuracies on an Arab "tendency to lie":

"As one of our sources put it: 'The Arab tendency to lie and exaggerate about enemies is alive and well among pro-American Lebanese Christians as much as it is with the likes of Hamas.' While Smith vouches for his sources, we cannot independently verify what they told him. That’s why we’re revisiting the posts in question and warning readers to take them with a grain of salt."

Take Smith's reporting with a grain of salt, in other words, because Arabs are a lying people. American commentators are unaccountable, in Lopez's view, because they are forced to rely the reports of people who lie all time, by virtue of their ethnicity. Notice, also, that the source Lopez approvingly quotes attributes a unifying characteristic to Arabs irrespective of their political or religious association. Pro-American Lebanese Christians are liars just like Hamas, because they're Arab. This idea that we shouldn't trust Arabs, not because of their politics or their religion, but because of their ethnicity, is part and parcel of the Right's project of categorizing Muslims and Arabs under a monolithic racial category, and ascribing virtues and vices to individuals according to that category.

h/t: Matt Yglesias

The Financial Reality of Race

2007-11-27T12:04:00.000-05:00

Source:
Kochhar, Rakesh. “The Wealth of Hispanic Households 1996-2002.” Pew Research Center: 2004.

Research from the National Community Redevelopment Coalition also shows that in metropolitan areas, blacks and hispanics are twice or more likely as whites to receive the high interest loans that are causing the mortgage crisis. Worse, these loans appear to be striking upper and middle income blacks and hispanics hardest. As more and more of these borrowers foreclose on their homes, the small amount of wealth that black and hispanics households have accumulated will dwindle further. So while white households will also increasingly suffer from Wall Street's financial irresponsibility, the burden will, most likely, disproportionately fall on the minority groups whose wealth is smallest. We would be delusional to expect, therefore, that as we march into the "colorblind" future, racial disparities will dissipate. While our laws remain color blind, reality will remain color coded. White privilege will imbricate itself beyond the conditions of the possibility of our wildly ignorant experience.

The Vicious Circle of Racism and the War on Terror

2007-11-26T18:06:00.000-05:00

In “Neoconservative Racism,” I argued that neoconservative thought embodies a psychological and theoretical connection between anti-black racism and the war on terror. Black social unrest, the counterculture, and racial integration in academics were the initial inspiration for the reactionary ideology of Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, and the neocon school. Racial fears therefore motivated their political program from the outset. While their most influential doctrines—those regarding middle eastern foreign policy—may appear innocent of these racial origins, they in fact remain motivated by and directed against a perceived racial menace. The combination of the September 11th attack on America’s liberal economic institutions, and fear and hatred of Israel’s Palestinian underclass, caused the neoconservatives to view the Muslim world through the same conceptual lens as they had viewed African Americans: a racial horde, indistinguishable by national origin or political allegiance, who threatened to undermine western liberal culture. The difference was that, as a foreign menace, the Muslims could be assaulted with much more direct and violent implements than the methods of economic, political, residential, and educational subjugation employed at home against blacks.

Though Muslims/Arabs/Palestinians/Persians do not constitute a race in any classical sense, they have been reified as one in the political discourse. The war on terror has succeeded in assigning attributes and threats to individuals by virtue not simply of their religion, but also by a vague constellation of identities including culture, ethnicity, and geography. This vague and irrational categorization is the mark of racist thought.

That the neoconservatives and the Bush administration treated the Muslims as a racial enemy, and relied on racial psychology in their politics, is clear from the war in Iraq. It did not matter that Iraq had nothing to do with the September 11th attacks. The Iraqis were Muslim/Arab, so, in the logic of racial attribution, they were obviously sponsors of terrorism. In addition, the administration's shocking blindness to the most important social-political fact of the occupation—the Sunni and Shiite division in Iraq—is more comprehensible in light of Bush and the neocon’s racially informed belief that there were no meaningful distinctions between Muslims, Arabs, Palestinians, and Persians, except for whether they were “with us or against us.” As a consequence, we find ourselves in a middle eastern imbroglio, committed now to an imperial government over a terrority in which Muslims and Arabs will indeed be united by at least one characteristic--a justifiable disdain for American belligerence and arrogance. Racism has in this made the war on terror not only misguided, but wildly unsuccesful and counterproductive.

Because the war on terror has a racial tenor of this kind, the threat of terrorism has served to promote domestic racist agendas against groups and programs that otherwise have nothing to do with terrorism, Arabs, or Muslims. The clearest instance of this crossover has been in the conservative attack on bans on racial profiling and employment discrimination, framed ostensibly as a critique of “political correctness” and “multiculturalism.” The conservative war against multiculturalism has been on since the 1960s, when white people were forced, for the first time, to breathe the same air as blacks in buses, restaurants, and schools. For the Right, multiculturalism—the idea that western Judeochristian civilization does not have a monopoly on cultural value—is anti-American. Norman Podhoretz himself described multiculturalism as an “insidious” and “disguised” “assault on the traditions and values of this society” (Commentary, March 1996). Now, the Right is advancing the argument that multiculturalism has allowed terrorists to infest the government. As Frank Salvato, of Family Security Matters, argued today, in "Multiculturalism Exposes the U.S. to Terrorism," “It would seem that in our nation’s quest to prove to the world that we are inclusive and tolerant we have, literally, allowed those who want to kill us into some of the most sensitive areas of our government, areas where they put our national security at risk.” Salvato sites as his evidence alleged connections of two Arab FBI and CIA employees to Muslim terrorist organizations. To him, the problem is clear:

"It is, of course, easy to understand how such a thing might happen, especially in the cases of Prouty and Tehseen. The unconstitutionally mandated shadow laws of political correctness, which function in parallel to our legitimate constitutionally sanctioned legal system, puts in place Gorelick-like barriers that make it impossible to employ common sense and logic when it comes to identifying potential enemy operatives."

Common sense and logic, in their common use, would tell us that we need Muslims and Arabs in the FBI and CIA in order to effectively combat Islamic terrorism, and that, if these charges are real and accurate, they suggest, not that we should discriminate against Muslims in law enforcement employment, but rather that every individual working for the government should be more thoroughly screened. However, the common sense and logic Salvato refers to is of a different breed. It is the common sense and logic of racism: the idea that the actions, characteristics, and culpability of any member of a racially defined group can and should be attributed to every other member of the group, and indirectly, to other suspect races. Salvato thus goes on to advocate racial profiling as “one of the most effective tools in law enforcement and maintaining national security.” For Salvato, the threat of terrorism justifies racial profiling and racial discrimination as legitimate and indeed essential techniques, not only against suspected terrorists, but for all law enforcement purposes.

The causal relationship between racism and the war on terror thus runs both ways: racism has made the war on terror into a racial struggle with a racial enemy; and now the war on terror serves to vindicate illegal techniques of racism, not just against Muslims and Arabs, but against blacks and other enemies of the white establishment who have no connection with terrorism. The Right’s assault on equal protection, which could not succeed with fear mongering over the threat of black crime alone, now aims to triumph indirectly through the threat of terrorism. For racist thought and racial injustice, ‘success in circuit lies.’

h/t: Think Progress

Racial Equity and the Moral Implications of Sunk Cost

2007-11-20T16:05:00.001-05:00

The principles and reality of capitalist exchange are infectious. They naturally extend their influence beyond the bounds of economics proper, and into the realms of politics, society, and morality. When principles of economic rationality are applied beyond their intended ambit, they lose their justification and merit, but not their power. In particular, the principle and accompanying sensibility of “sunk cost” serves to absolve American social and political institutions of any responsibility to redress past racial injustice with active measures.

“Sunk costs are unrecoverable past expenditures. These should not normally be taken into account when determining whether to continue a project or abandon it, because they cannot be recovered either way. It is a common instinct to count them, however."

Or, to put it plainly, “don’t cry over spilled milk.”

Here’s a classic example: let’s say you buy tickets to a Ghostface Killah concert that cannot be refunded. But then your friend invites you to a Jay-Z concert taking place on the same night, and asks if you want to buy tickets for that concert. Many people would be inclined to consider the fact that they had already spent money on tickets to see Ghostface, in determining whether or not to buy tickets for the Jay-Z concert. It would be a waste, they reason, not to use the tickets they had already bought. The principle of sunk cost says this is irrational: you should only consider which concert you would rather go to, and, if you’d rather go to the Jay-Z concert, whether it is worth the price of the Jay-Z tickets to attend.

So sunk cost has both a factual and a normative dimension. Factually, it refers to costs that cannot be recovered. Normatively, the principle requires that unrecoverable costs not factor into decision making.

The normative principle of sunk cost is exemplary of economic rationality. It requires the actor to think about his choices incrementally, and to make decisions at the margin, rather than to view each decision as continuous with previous commitments or representations of value. It is forward looking, rather than backward looking, taking present circumstances as givens, detached from their causal ancestry.

With the exception of financial institutions, the principle is more often used for moral, political, and social purposes than for economic decisionmaking. While people often mistakenly ignore the principle of sunk cost in discrete economic decisions, they often use it to jettison the heavy burdens of the past in ethical or legal contexts. “You can’t change the past,” so we say, so it is a waste to feel guilt for the events of the past, or try to make up for them with present or future actions.

Sunk cost is overapplied because of its intimate association with the myths of progress, individual agency, and self-interest, which have thoroughly infiltrated our global perspective on events, and the moral implications of those events. Capitalism tells us that everybody wins in economic exchange: inefficiencies are eliminated and wealth is created. So as long as we allow people to make self-interested choices and barter, truck, and trade with one another, the "life of the world will move forward into broad, sunlit uplands." And as long as our legal and political arrangements do not prevent individuals from exercising their agency, by consigning them to social or racial casts with special rights and privileges, the past no longer matters. It no longer matters who a man’s father was, nor does it matter where he is born, or what his given resources are. If he exercises his will and his talent, he will advance, and advance with, the rising tide of history. Capitalism therefore councils us not to look back, but to press on with reasoned choice after reasoned choice.

Our faith in progress, agency, and self-interest is more than an economic faith because it arose in a moral and religious context. Adam Smith described the social benefit of self-interest as a matter of providence: a divine alignment of public and private goods. Economic self-sufficiency and success is therefore construed as a moral, social and religious good. The capitalist sensibility has thus been infused throughout with moral and religious appraisal. Having coursed through economic rationality, morality retains the values of such rationality, and carries them beyond financial and budgetary decisions, and into the domains of ethics and politics. As a consequence, we now tend to approach political and ethical questions through the lens of sunk cost, particularly when it would be more advantageous to forget the injustices and wrongs of the past.

As an economic and moral imperative, sunk cost defends and justifies modern economic's other key principles. Sunk cost justifies the notion of autonomous individual agency by divorcing each decision from past decisions, such that the homo economicus can reinvent himself at every instant, unbounded by previous decisions and obligations, and constrained only by rationality and self-interest. Sunk cost likewise justifies the modern economic notion of progress by foreclosing the consideration of previous events and circumstances that were regressive. We can always maintain the purity of our conception of universal progress, even in the face histories of slavery and colonialism, because sunk cost declares such blemishes irrelevant to the freedom and rationality of decisions at present.

The moral function of sunk cost operates in these ways in the case of color blind policy. The logic of color blind policy is that the only valid way to avoid repeating past racial injustices is to ignore the historical circumstances in which racial identities and inequalities were forged, and instead treat each individual as autonomous and formally equal in the present. To consider the racial formation of individuals and groups in setting policy, would mean to tie moral and political evaluation to the unrecoverable, racially inflected judgment, determinations, and limitations that have produced their current circumstances. Thus, from the standpoint of sunk cost, we must forget this history, and treat each individual as a blank slate, whose opportunities are not significantly constrained by their past.

The history of school desegregation is a clear example of this color blind application of sunk cost. Capitalist morality demanded that legal segregation end. Segregation created a legal barrier to individual agency and self-interest, and so crippled American progress. But the principle of sunk cost also suggested that ending legal segregation is all that morality demands. It would be irrational and improper, from the standpoint of sunk cost, to take into account the historical circumstances that created educational segregation and inequality when shaping current policy. The decisions that created de facto segregation--de jure segregation, red lining, etc.--are all in the past, and cannot be changed. So in a moral application of sunk cost, we can ensure that such racist decisions are not repeated by enforcing color blind policy, but we ought not to conclude that those decisions morally obligate us to redress their consequences. To do so would be to taint the rationality of progress and self-interest with the burdens of the past. This, in part, is why many liberals and most conservatives have opposed measures to actively redress de facto segretation; for such measures act on the supposition that the sunk costs of the past are morally relevant.

As a moral principle, sunk cost forbids active steps toward integration, because such a legal mandate would acknowledge that decisions we have made in the past are morally relevant to the decisions we ought to make in the present and future. This is why affirmative action and school busing programs infuriate conservative and liberal free marketeers. Such programs suggest that individuals be treated as something other than fully autonomous agents; that we choose the less efficient path that produces greater equity over the more efficient path that reproduces inequity; that progress be judged not by the march of the lucky and the privileged into the future, but rather by the extent to which we acknowledge and redress the inequities of the past that persist into the present.

The morality of sunk cost is thus blind to the way in which past decisions resound into the present, and delimit the possibilities for rational action. School segregation has persisted, despite the abolition of legal segregation, because there are high frictional costs associated with integration. Institutions that are designed for particular circumstances and particular populations have an interest in perpetuating those circumstances and populations so as to avoid the costs of change. So unless we enforce a moral mandate for integration with legal measures, economic rationality will perpetuate segregation, even in the absence of any intentional racial discrimination.

The operation of sunk cost as a moral principle must be diagnosed and combated. Where employed, it soothes our consciences and preserves the myth of liberal progress, by affecting societal amnesia over the real history of modern economic and social development. Instead of shrugging at mistakes we cannot retract, we must see the facts of the past as impinging upon our present, saddling us with obligations that would be reprehensible if not evil to shirk.

J. Rushton, Arthur Jensen, and William Saletan: the Next Generation of Scientific Racists

2007-11-19T13:09:00.001-05:00

In a Slate series on “Human Nature,” William Saletan makes extraordinary and disturbing claims about genetics and race. He equates the notion that racial differences in IQ are wholly environmentally caused with creationism, and with the belief that the “surge” in Iraq is working. His implication is that it is an article of empirically unsupported faith to deny that blacks are genetically inferior to whites. Saletan’s argument, based on a 2005 research summary in Psychology, Public Policy and Law, is that racial differences in average IQ can be partially attributed to differences in brain size between black, white, and asian people, and that such variation is attributable to the work of natural selection in these different populations (Rushton and Jensen, Public Policy and Law: 2005). His aim is not to show that racial differences in IQ are wholly determined by differences in genetics, but rather that genetics play an important role.

Richard E. Nisbett does a very thorough job of refuting the literature review Saletan cites. His article argues that

“J.P. Rushton and A.R. Jensen (2005) ignore or misinterpret most the evidence of greatest relevance to the question of heritability of the Black—White IQ gap. A dispassionate reading of the evidence on the association on the association of IQ with degree of European ancestry for members of Black populations, convergence of Black and White IQ in recent years, alterability of Black IQ by intervention programs, and adoptions studies lend no support to a hereditarian interpretation of the Black—White IQ gap. On the contrary, the evidence most relevant to the question indicates that the genetic contribution to the Black—White gap is nil” (Nisbett, Psychology Public Policy and Law: 2005).

Even if Nisbett’s critique is wrong, and the research is inconclusive, this does not mean we should assume, as Saletan does, that there probably is some genetic basis for racial difference in IQ. It means we don’t know, and pundits who don’t know anything about science should keep quiet until we do.

But as long as Saletan continues to blather on about head size, genetics, race, and IQ, his arguments must be engaged. Robert Farley has led the charge on this front. He points out that: (1) IQ is not necessarily an accurate measure of intelligence; (2) the legal and social scientific category of “race” is totally different from “populations,” which is genetic science’s only valid unit of social analysis; (3) since Africans, Asians, and Europeans lived in very similar economic and agricultural conditions up to about 200 years ago, it is unlikely that their respective environments would have selected for different levels of intelligence in that short period of time; and (4) if indeed inherited intelligence can change that quickly, it suggests that genetic differences in race are extraordinarily historically transient, and therefore the notion that there are stable, fixed, or inherent racial traits is nonsensical.

Saletan is not merely wrong; he is, wittingly or unwittingly aiding and abetting the cause of racist politics. Because the research he cites was published in a public policy and law journal, the authors give us an unusually candid appraisal of what kinds of policy prescriptions these alleged biological facts would entail. Rushton and Jensen assert that because racial differences in IQ appear to have a genetic basis,

“a demonstration of differential racial performance (good or bad) could not, by itself, be offered as proof of racial discrimination because, as the evidence review in this article demonstrates, genetic factors play a role in producing these differences. Rather, the burden would be on the plaintiffs to prove that the defendants had discriminated on the basis of race and not educational or vocational performance associated with race” (282).

Rushton and Jensen wrongly imply that a demonstration of differential racial performance can, by itself, be offered as legal proof of racial discrimination. The law currently requires proof of intent. So Rushton and Jensen’s proposal would make discrimination cases based on racial disparity virtually impossible to prove, since the plaintiff would have to prove, first, that the disparity cannot be accounted for by genetic racial inferiority, and, second, that the disparity was the result of intentional discrimination. If Rushton and Jensen have their way, there would be no recourse to discrimination law for even severe racial disparity in health, education, or income level, or wealth. Further, through their research, Rushton and Jensen explicitly aim to discredit affirmative action, and criticism of racial bias in standardized testing (282-3).

Rushton and Jensen also aim to show that racial disparity is not an indicator of racial injustice. They worry that “the view that one segment of the population is largely to blame for the problems of another segment of the population can be...harmful to racial harmony” (282). In other words, we cannot suggest that racism has made blacks disadvantaged, because such a suggestion might make people angry. Racists have been sounding the racial disharmony alarm since debates over abolition before the Civil War. We shouldn’t talk about white privilege, so the argument goes, because it will destroy the wonderful and delicate harmony of races we have created. With the genetics argument, Rushton and Jensen offer a way to avoid attributions of blame for racial inequality, by positing that such inequality is caused by nature, rather than structural, institutional, and individual racism.

Rushton and Jensen thus suggest that we should educate people about the immutability of racial disparity, in order to innoculate society from the suggestion that it is anything but equitable and just: “ultimately, the public must accept the pragmatic reality that some groups will be overrepresented and other groups underrepresented in various socially valued outcomes.” In other words, they suggest that we accept that black people will always be poorer, less healthy, and less education than whites, since their genes have made them that way.

From Rushton and Jensen’s review of the implications of their assessment, it is clear what the intent of such research is: to ground racial inequity in the facts of nature so as to foreclose charges of socially-wrought inequity, and policies that aim to redress them. In championing this research, Saletan thus joins in a long and infamous heritage of non-scientists eager to enlist politically-motivated science in defense of racism.

Reagan at Neshoba: the Columnal Saga Continues

2007-11-18T17:31:00.000-05:00

The Reagan and Race debate, which raged last week, drags on this weekend with Lou Cannon's NYT column, "Reagan's Southern Stumble." The core of Cannon's claim is that: "The mythology of Neshoba is wrong in two distinct ways. First, Ronald Reagan was not a racist. Second, his Neshoba speech was not an effective symbolic appeal to white voters. Instead, it was a political misstep that cost him support."

Whether or not Reagan was a racist is totally irrelevant to whether or not Reagan was guilty of appealing to racists. Politicians often make political calculations that do not match with their personal views or sensibility. This does not mean they can avoid responsibility for those calculations. If, indeed, Reagan was not a racist, his appeal to racism at Neshoba was still unconscionable, as it nailed a racist plank into the Republican platform.

Whether the race-baiting at Neshoba was a political misstep is also irrelevant to whether the speech was, indeed, intended to win the Jim Crow vote. Cannon never denies that Reagan aimed to appeal to this contingent. All he seeks to show is that the "symbolic appeal to white voters" was not "effective," since it pissed off some moderate whites. But it seems much less important that it may have been a poor decision for Reagan to align himself with the racist south, than that he sought this alignment in the first place. His presidency was certainly loyal to these voters, as he vetoed the renewal of the Voting Rights Act, calling it "humiliating to the south." If Cannon is right, and Reagan's appeal to states rights was an ineffective electoral strategy, it is even more damning to Reagan's legacy that he nonetheless faithfully represented the interests of racist southern whites while in office.

And the fact that Reagan had a couple of black friends on his football team doesn't make it any better, Lou.

Update: Krugman responds eloquently to Cannon, Brooks, et al. in his column today ("Republicans and Race" 11/19/2007). In sum:

"Now, maybe I’m wrong about all of this. But we should be able to discuss the role of race in American politics honestly. We shouldn’t avert our gaze because we’re unwilling to tarnish Ronald Reagan’s image. "

I anxiously await Brooks' diss track in response. Somehow, I don't think it will match Nas' "Ether," in either style or accuracy.

Neoconservative Racism: The Case and Threat of Norman Podhoretz

2007-11-15T17:41:00.001-05:00

Neoconservatism has become the most powerful political sensibility in 21st Century American thought and reality. Combining free market fundamentalism, elitism, militarism, and expansive understandings of executive power, neoconservatism advertises itself as the antidote to the social liberalism and political radicalism of the late 1960s. Through the Bush Presidency, it has deeply embedded itself in government institutions, the public mind, and the geopolitical configuration we now confront. And now that the patriarch of movement, Norman Podhoretz, has the ear of the Republican frontrunner, Rudy Giuliani, there is a genuine possibility that neoconservatism will become a lasting reality in American politics. The perils of the ideology are numerous. But scant attention has yet been paid to its racial genealogy, which inflects our political circumstance today, and may dominate it tomorrow.

The racial subtext of neoconservatism was first noted by Ian Buruma in his review of Podhoretz latest work, World War IV, in the New York Review of Books. Buruma locates Podhoretz “obsession with power and violence” in his childhood experience with blacks in Brooklyn, which Podhoretz documented in his 1963 essay “My Negro Problem—And Ours.” As Buruma notes, the essay is a candid account of race relations in the 1960s, concluding with a call for miscegenation as the only solution to racial strife. But it also reveals that Podhoretz’s first encounters with power and powerlessness occurred in a racial context; namely, in the fist of black bullies assaulting a nerdy Jew. In Buruma’s analysis, “the key to Podhoretz’s politics seems to lie right there: the longing for power, for toughness, for the shtarker who doesn’t give damn about anyone or anything, and hatred of the contemptible, cowardly liberals with their pandering ways and double standards.” On the streets of Brooklyn, Podhoretz learned to hate and envy blacks for the power they held over him.

Buruma’s interpretation therefore acknowledges the racial aspect of neoconservatism’s origins. He sees racial conflict as the cause of Podhoretz's general lust for power and toughness. But in light of the development of Podhoretz's thought in the 60s and 70s, it becomes clear, on the contrary, that its endemic violence has a specifically racial tenor and dynamic. In Podhoretz's case, at least, Irving Kristol's description of a neoconservative as "a liberal who has been mugged by reality" is strikingly apt. The reality that mugged Podhoretz was the reality of race. And so, it was as the target of racial violence that Podhoretz inaugurated neoconservatism, and its prolonged war against the counterculutre. In defining the neoconservative sensibility, Podhoretz notes that

“opposition to the counterculture of the 1960’s was their ruling passion at home. Indeed I suspect that revulsion against the counterculture accounts for more converts to neoconservatism than any other single factor. This revulsion was not only directed against the counterculture itself; it was also inspired by the abject failure of the great institutions of the liberal community to resist the counterculture. First, the universities capitulated, then the national media, and finally even the Democratic part. In part the problem was simple moral cowardice, but in part it was the sheer inability of these institutions to defend themselves intellectually when they came under attack” (Commentary, Mar. 1996).

For Podhoretz, the struggle with the counterculture was a war, with institutions being besieged by and “capitulating” to a terrifying cadre of leftists. His oppostion to the counterculture was not merely philosophical or political, but rooted "revulsion." Elsewhere, he trembles over the “left insurgents, who had been on the offensive since 1967.” Part of this military rhetoric has to do with Podhoretz’s anti-communist lens, through which the anti-liberal critiques of the American left seemed radically treasonous.

The other essential aspect of Podhoretz’s violent and visceral reaction against the culture war is race. The language of “insurgency, “assault,” and “capitulation” reflects the siege mentality associated with American racism: the fear that blacks will rise up, first from the plantation, and later from the ghettos, to overthrow the white elite. And during the race riots of the late 60s, a black insurgency might have seemed like a real possibility to those possessed of a hysterical fear of black invasion.

Podhoretz himself relates the collapse of liberal consensus to these riots: “thanks to the riots in the ghettos, the radical assault on the traditional liberal strategy for dealing with the problem of race and poverty undermined the faith of many liberal themselves in its viability” (Commentary, Jan. 1981). In describing the impact of riots on “the faith of many liberals,” Podhoretz was not merely referring to those liberals who turned to radicalism in the face of increased social, economic, and racial conflict. More tellingly, he was describing the impact of the riots on his own liberal faith, which was shattered by the prospect of a black invasion of the academy and society at large. Whereas the liberals who became radicals took the riots as a cue that liberal strategies were inadequate to redress racial and economic injustice, Podhoretz and the neoconservatives took them to mean that the liberal social order was unprepared to defend itself against the black monsters swarming in from the ghettos. Podhoretz’s great fear was Brooklyn writ large. Perhaps when he saw the Newark riots on television in 1967, he was gripped with a fear that once again he, and his cherished academic institutions, would be at the mercy of the black bullies of his childhood. So when Podhoretz says that the universities were the first to “capitulate,” he is referring to what he understood to be a black revolt, which infiltrated the academy with the admittance of black students, and proceeded to undermine traditional liberal education with the demand that non-western cultures and thinkers be included in the curriculum.

In light of Podhoretz's deepest racial fears, his fierce opposition to affirmative action is not suprising. The idea that minorities ought to be given a preference in university admissions must have seemed the ultimate capitulation and insult. So Podhoretz and his neocon cohort used their earlier experience as members of the liberal left to equip the Right with the ideological weapons to undermine the credibility of such prorgams:

“…some on the Right who had opposed the civil-rights movement even before it was radicalized in the late 60’s, who had never had any use for Martin Luther King, Jr. when he was alive later learned under the tutelage of the neoconservatism that one of the most effective weapons they could wield in the fight against affirmative action was King’s dream of a world in which all would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. In this way many conservatives came to embrace the ideals which had animated the civil rights movement” (Commentary, Mar. 1996).

When Podhoretz refers to his tutelage of those “who opposed the civil rights movement, even before it was radicalized in the late sixties” he means his tutelage of racists. What else but racists ought we to call those who opposed Brown v. Board, the Voting Rights Act, and the Civil Rights Act? And when he says that he and the other neocons tutored these racists to “embrace the ideals that had animated the civil rights movement,” he means that he showed them how to pervert those ideals to defend white privilege.

In recounting his tutelage of the defenders of legal segregation, Podhoretz aims to show that neconservatives have had a positive influence on conservatism proper, insofar as they convinced paleoconservatives of the high ideals of the civil rights movement. This argument is deeply disingenuous. In its early stages, at least, the campaign against affirmative action was nothing less than an effort to ensure that Brown v. Board made no practical difference in ending educational segregation and inequity. The Racist Right divorced color-blind principles from their original intent, which was to eliminate de jure segregation, and reoriented them against policies that actively sought to redress racial discrimination and inequality.

King himself explicitly supported the rationale behind affirmative action. As he put it in Why We Can't Wait, “if a man enters the starting line of a race three hundred years after another man, the first would have to perform some incredible feat in order to catch up.” Thus, in using King’s hopes for a color-blind society to undermine affirmative action, the right did not “embrace” the principles of the civil rights movement, but rather performed a dizzying feat of racist irony, which turned those principles against the people they were meant to protect. As Podhoretz's commentary reveals, it was neoconservative thinkers who contrived this rhetorical appropriation, which has since becomes one of the most powerful impediments to racial equity. The political legacy of Podhoretz and the neocons is thus intimately bound up with the Right's struggle not just against the counterculture generally, but against racial integration and justice in particular.

Though today, Podhoretz is most well known not for his contributions to domestic policy, but rather for his militant foreign policy views. He has been an unflagging supporter of the Iraq war, and recently advised the President and Karl Rove in a private meeting to stop negotiating with Iran, and open up a Persian front in the “war on terror.” This agressive foreign policy viewis not a separate issue from his domestic commitments and passions; rather, his foreign policy should be seen in light of his racial politics. September 11th fulfilled his fantasy of an assault on western liberal institutions, as two towering symbols of American capitalism were struck down. Podhoretz understood those attacks through the same lens that he understood the 60s' countercultural assault on liberalism. He saw radical islamic terror as an organic product of the same anti-western sentiment that had motivated the 60s counterculture, as well as his turn to neoconservatism. This time, however, it was Palestinians/Muslims/Arabs, rather than the blacks, who led the assault. Thus, when Podhoretz remarked in a column in Wall Street Journal on September 20, 2001, that "we are in the same boat as Israel," he drew implicit association between Israel's struggle with its Palestinian underclass and the struggles against the American black underclass. Both represent, in Podhoretz's mind, the war of the poor, the dark, and the barbarian against the rich, the white, and the civilized.

The Right's elision of Palestinians, Muslims, Arabs, and Persians into one horrible spectre of anti-American Islamic extremism indicates that the racial tenor of the culture wars has carried over into the war on terror. In this way, the September 11th attacks has enabled Podhoretz to transform the racially-motivated culture wars of the 60s into a race war proper. At the side of Rudolph Giuliani, a well-credentialed racist, Podhoretz therefore has an opportunity to extend this war and embroil America in a violent "clash of civilizations." If Giuliani should be elected president, the war on terror will more explicitly be construed as a racial struggle, and the racial hue of domestic wars already in progress—against crime, against drugs, and against the counter culture—will deepen with the threat of Islamic terror, and the infusion of the sophisticated technology of neoconservative racism.

The Return of Racial Aristocracy in the New American Century

2007-11-14T17:30:00.001-05:00

A new study from the Washington Institute for the Study of Ethnicity and Race finds that black voters are significantly and disproportionately disenfranchised by stringent voter ID laws in Indiana (Barreto et al.: 2008, h/t TPM: “Finally, the Numbers”). The data indicate that the voter ID laws championed by the Bush Administration are the legal descendents of poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and other relics of Jim Crow segregation. Along with other recent assaults on voting rights, these laws represent the return of racist, anti-democratic techniques as normal politics.

Since the 15th Amendment was passed in 1870, state governments have made a persistent effort to disenfranchise African Americans with myriad instruments of racial discrimination. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 seemed to ensure that these instruments would be struck down and replaced with fair and inclusive electoral processses. But in the new American century minority voting rights are being stripped yet again, under the legal judgment of an increasingly conservative Supreme Court. In particular, the courts have narrowly interpreted section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which mandates that proposals for voting schemes demonstrate that they do “not have the purpose and will not have the effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race or color.” In 2003, Georgia v. Ashcroft eviscerated section 5, finding that redistricting plans that reduce minority representation do not necessarily violate the Voting Rights Act.

On the heels of these legal concessions, the Bush Administration has used the Justice Department Civil Rights Division and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights to defend voter ID laws which effectively disenfranchise minority voters without. The supposed rationale for these laws is that they prevent voter fraud. But as the NYU Brennan Center for Justice notes, there is no actual evidence that voter fraud is a problem, and voting irregularities can be accounted for by system failures and imperfections rather than fraud. The problem is a myth invented to rig elections for Republicans. In truth, voter ID laws serve the purpose of disenfranchising certain groups within Democratic Party’s constituency, namely blacks and the poor.

Given the social, political, and racial aims that these laws satisfy, the Bush Administration has been eager to endorse them. When Justice Department lawyers found that a voter ID law in Georgia had the effect of disenfranchising minorities, the Voting Rights Section Chief, John Tanner, overruled them, with his famous “Black People Die First, therefore…” argument. The constitutionality of these laws is likely to wind its way into the chambers of our highest court soon enough. And given its ideological composition, there is little reason to be hopeful about the outcome.

These new techniques of disenfranchisement are of a piece with the poll taxes and literacy tests as intruments of white privilege and institutional racism. In order to circumvent the 15th Amendment, all these techniques employ a non-racial standard for voter qualification which can predictably disenfranchise black voters. Combined with the gutting of the Voting Rights Act and Brown v. Board at the hands of the Supreme Court, these laws represent a radically reactionary effort to overturn the Civil Rights Movement. We are on the verge of reauthorizing a racial aristocracy in which our sovereign, "the people," signifies not all citizens, but rather the white economic elite.

Night Thoughts on the Reagan Presidency: Brooks, Krugman, Taranto, and Herbert Visit the Neshoba County Fair

2007-11-11T21:05:00.000-05:00

In a previous post, "Blame Reagan for Making Me into A Monster," I countered Bruce Bartlet's assertion that there was nothing racist about Ronald Reagan opening his presidential campaign in a southern town infamous for violent racism, with a speech laced with racial code. David Brooks and Paul Krugman carried on the debate this weekend, and Bob Herbert and James Taranto entered the fray on Monday. The profile and vigor of the debate indicates how important the interpretation of the Reagan presidency remains to political discourses. At the same time, it indicates how troubling and powerful the question of racism is when splashed over conventional, white-washed commentary.

In "History and Calumny," David Brooks argues that, while it was "callous, at least" for Reagan to use the code of "states rights" in Mississippi, any suggestion that the speech reveals the racism of his politics and electoral strategy is a "slur." The implication of Brooks' piece is that Reagan is not the one guilty of slurs. Quite the opposite, the "leftists," like Paul Krugman, who locate the racial element of his campaign strategy, are slurring Reagan. Brooks' strategy, like Bartlet's, is to create the illusion of more responsible, race neutral interpretation of Reagan's speech by selectively highlighting elements of its historical context, such as Reagan's effort to win over black voters. Somehow, for Brooks, the fact that Reagan wanted to court the black vote is supposed to mitigate the racism of other elements of his campaign. But campaigns are not syllogisms, so the principle of non-contradiction does not apply. Overtures to African Americans are not mutually exclusive of a racist campaign.

For conservatives such as Brooks, who were won over to conservatism with the inspirational presidency of Ronald Reagan, the suggestion that his candidacy and presidency were deeply racist is impossible to accept. Unable to acknowledge their political savior as a peddler of racial slurs, Republican converts must claim he is the victim of interpretive dishonesty and liberal propaganda. Brooks' righteous indignation is striking for its similarity to the tone of left identity politics, which places the discussion certain sacred, aspects of cultural, racial, or gender identity off the table for discussion. Impugning the dignity and essential goodness of Reagan is an affront for contemporary conservatives, because he constitutes their identity. Political correctness of this kind has become a bulwark of conservatism, shielding the Republican party from accusations of racist pandering.

In "Innocent Mistakes" Krugman rebuts Brooks' transparent defense of Reagan by pointing out all the elements of the speech's context that Brooks ignores: Reagan's description of the Voting Rights Act as "humiliating"; his opposition to making Martin Luther King day a national holiday; his defense of Bob-Jones University in the face of a racial discrimination suit; and his use of racial stereotypes like the cadillac driving "welfare queen," and the food stamp abusing "strapping young buck."

James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal joins the debate, painting Krugman's response as a dodge: "Krugman's blog post, which doesn't mention Brooks by name, is not a rebuttal but an effort to change the subject. It says nothing about the Philadelphia speech, instead listing other Reagan statements and actions that Krugman finds objectionable..." Whereas Taranto applauds Brooks for shedding light on the context of Reagan's remarks, and the speech as whole, he seems to believe that the consideration of any wider context is an effort to change the subject. Why, I wonder, should it be relevant to the significance of the Neshoba speech that Reagan campaigned at the Urban League shortly thereafter, but not relevant that he ran against the civil rights movement, using racial code and criticizing the Voting Rights Act? Once Taranto and Brooks accept the relevance of context to the meaning Reagan speech at Neshoba, the totality of circumstances weighs against them.

Reagan's candidacy and presidency encompass a large constellation of statements and policies that tapped racial antipathies and aimed to undermine the legacy of the civil rights movement. If Reagan had begun his presidential campaign in Neshoba, but then gone on to aggressively enforce the Voting Rights Act and condemn racial descrimination, we might interpret the event as having no broader signification. But Reagan's presidential record, which Krugman's piece describes, places the speech at the beginning of a long pattern of behavior that betrays a racist agenda. The context of the speech therefore does not in any way vindicate Reagan; it condemns him.

Taranto argues that Reagan's use of the term "states rights" was benign because he didn't endorse segregated education, lynchings, and literacy tests in the next breath. But the whole point of a racial code is to suggest sympathy for racism without explicitly endorsing, so as to maintain plausible deniability. Reagan's "benign" formulation of "states rights" is therefore indicates not the racial innocence of his purposes, but, on the contrary, the skill with which he filtered the American racist rhetoric through the color blind sieve. As Bob Herbert noted in his New York Times column yesterday:

"To see Reagan’s appearance at the Neshoba County Fair in its proper context, it has to be placed between the murders of the civil rights workers that preceded it and the acknowledgment by the Republican strategist Lee Atwater that the use of code words like “states’ rights” in place of blatantly bigoted rhetoric was crucial to the success of the G.O.P.’s Southern strategy. That acknowledgment came in the very first year of the Reagan presidency.It enabled him to support racist ideology covertly without losing his appeal to conscious, color-blind sensibilities of the mainstream."

His campaign and presidency was waged by conjuring the spectre of race in the collective imagination, and then denouncing any assertions of racism as imaginary. And his strategy enabled him to court racist voters in the election while allowing men like Taranto and Brooks to argue decades later that he wasn't being racist.

Thanks to the contributions of Krugman and Herbert, these arguments have been exposed as the guilty apologetics of men who masquerade obfuscation and denial as nuance and complexity in ordder to dissociate their political faith from its racist heritage. Today, our temporal distance from Reagan's program enables a more comprehensive perspective, in which the particular inflictions of racial injury come into focus and coalesce to reveal the reactionary racist assault on the body politic. The significance of these events is most clear and striking with the benefit of time and consideration, when the object of interpretation has had time to settle into its historical context. Indeed, in what Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic have diagnosed as the "time warp aspect of racism," we are never able to fully grasp the dynamics of racism as they occur, but only in retrospect ("Images of the Outsider," in Critical Race Theory, 1995: 217-227). Or, as the man himself put it, "the owl of Minerva flies when the shades of night are gathering." Unable to ever fully reconcile our thought to the reality we confront, we must leverage history against the present, to infer where we are from where we were, and from where are, find someplace better to go. The charge of Reagan's racism is therefore neither inappropriate nor superfluous. It is a crucial element of understanding, criticizing, and combating the manifestations of racism in the political sphere.

Civil Rights as Irony: The Racist Techniques of the Bush Administration

2007-11-06T11:46:00.000-05:00

The Boston Globe reports today that the Bush Administration has stacked the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights with conservatives, in order to convert the commission from a defender of minority rights into an active spokesman for de facto segregation and color-blind policy. Though the law states that the Commission cannot be composed of a majority of either party, Bush's Republican appointees changed their registration to "independent," so as to avoid the restriction. The result has been that the Commission has ceased defending minority civil rights, and has become a bulwark against racial equity initiatives:

“Before the changes, the agency had planned to evaluate a White House budget request for civil rights enforcement, the adequacy of college financial aid for minorities, and whether the U.S. Census Bureau undercounts minorities, keeping nonwhite areas from their fair share of political apportionment and spending. After the appointments, the commission canceled the projects.

“Instead, the commission has put out a series of reports concluding that there is little educational benefit to integrating elementary and secondary schools, calling for closer scrutiny of programs that help minorities gain admission to top law schools, and urging the government to look for ways to replace policies that help minority-owned businesses win contracts with race-neutral alternatives" (Boston Globe, "Bush Maneuver Alters Civil Rights Panel's Direction," 11/6/07).

Bush’s Commission aims to turn to the clock back (as far as possible) to Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 decision in which the Supreme Court found that a color-blind constitution had no remedy for legally enforced segregation. In light of Brown v. Board, Bush cannot defend de jure segregation. Instead, the strategy has been to protect de facto segregation: first, by appointing conservative Supreme Court judges, who ruled against voluntary school integration policies in St. Louis and Seattle (Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education); and second, by appointing a Civil Rights Commission that would actively seek to preserve segregation. The color-blind ideology the Commission promotes should be seen in light of this pro-segregation program. They are of a piece. Both seek to blind government from racial inequity and therefore bind its powers to address such inequity.

The current composition of the Commission also ensures that abuses of civil rights within the administration will go largely unchecked. Bush has thus directed the powers of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division away from the enforcement of minority civil rights, and towards racist programs such as its inquiry into spurious “voter fraud” allegations, which aims to disenfranchise minority voters. As Joseph D. Rich, the former chief of the Voting Rights Section of the Civil Rights Division as justice notes,

"From 2001 to 2006, no voting discrimination cases were brought on behalf of African American or Native American voters. U.S. attorneys were told instead to give priority to voter fraud cases, which, when coupled with the strong support for voter ID laws, indicated an intent to depress voter turnout in minority and poor communities" (LA Times, 3/29/2007).

The Bush Administration’s voter suppression program in the Justice Department, and its defense of segregation and color-blind policy on the Commission on Civil Rights both embody irony as a technique of racism. The Administration could not very well eliminate the Commission or the Justice Department Civil Rights Division without explicitly betraying its racist agenda. Instead, it directs those groups to undermine their own purpose by framing racist policy as anti-racist or race neutral. For example, the Commission Recently Issued a Report “Examining the Benefits of Diversity in Elementary and Secondary Education,” which, of course, concluded that there is “scant proof of the benefits for racial and ethnic groups attributed to diversity in elementary and secondary school.” The amicus brief submitted by 553 social scientists to the Supreme Court for the above cited cases directly contradicts that assertion, pointing to school integration’s documented benefits in cross-racial understanding, critical thinking, and workplace preparation. The Commission has also put much effort into investigating unfounded allegations of “voter fraud and intimidation,” with the goal of suppressing minority voters. In this way, the Commission exemplifies the technique of irony: it says it wants to determine what is best for minority students, but it means that segregation is best for them; it says it wants to end voter fraud, but means that it wants to prevent minorities from voting.

The racist techniques of the Bush Administration are refined and sophisticated. The next administration must therefore make it a priority to reverse the impact of these techniques, reject color-blind ideology, further racial integration in education, protect minority voting rights, and create stronger legal protections for institutions that defend civil rights and promote racial equity.

No Banks for Blacks and Hispanics: Finance and the Making of Subprime Citizens

2007-11-05T12:10:00.000-05:00

The racial aspect subprime lending issue, explored in “Mapping the Reality of Race,” has been gaining traction in the mainstream media. Sunday's New York Times notes that while there has been extensive coverage of the relation between subprime lending and poor credit, “there has been less attention paid to the concentration of these loans in neighborhoods that are largely black, Hispanic, or both.” Bijaj and Fessenden attribute racial disproportionality in lending to the absence of bank branches in minority communities:

“It may be that these borrowers do not have access to traditional banks, because there are no branches near them. The Community Reinvestment Act, enacted 30 years ago, was intended to address redlining by forcing banks to make loans in lower-income areas. But the law’s provisions do not apply to banks in neighborhoods where they have no branches."

"Banks typically locate branches where they believe they will get the most deposits. A lower savings rate and a distrust of banks stemming from a legacy of redlining may help explain why there are fewer branches in minority neighborhoods, Mr. DelliBovi said."

The Neighborhood Economic Development and Advocacy Project provides a map (pdf) that illustrate this extreme paucity of bank branches in minority communties. Revealing the financial geography of New York City, these images convey the operation of racial oppression. But the implications of racial disproportionality in subprime lending are greater than increased racial disparity in wealth. In our capitalist society, credit has served since the outset as an indicator of civic responsibility and moral worth. In Alexander Hamilton's Report on the Public Credit, he expressed a contention widely held amongst the Federalist, that the credit rating of individuals and of the nation reflected on their personal merit and behavior: "States, like individuals, who observe their engagements, are respected and trusted; while the reverse is true of those who pursue an opposite conduct.”

As an indicator of national and personal responsibility and continuity, credit rating therefore informs moral reputation in the American mind. As an indicator of faith and spiritual accountablity, moral reputation likewise impacts credit rating. Max Weber observed “Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism" that the moral standing provided by membership in American religious sects entailed a accompanying good financial standing and credit: "The expectation of the creditors that his sect, for the sake of their prestige, would not allow creditors to suffer losses on behalf of a sect member was not, however, decisive for his opportunities. What was decisive was the fact that a fairly reputable sect would only accept for membership one whose 'conduct' made him appear to be morally qualified beyond doubt." In a capitalist republic infused with the protestant ethic, good credit and moral standing aremutually determinative: according to protestant understandings electedness, If one is moral, one can acquire debt; and according to the liberal equation of proprietary contract and moral and political obligation, only if one repaid debts could one have good moral standing.

The absence of bank branches from minority communities therefore at once reflects a moral judgment and organizes future events so as to confirm that judgment. The financial community's judgment that such communities are unworthy of credit, as evidenced by the absence of bank branches in their neighborhoods, entails a judgment that they are unworthy more broadly. This judgment results in an inferior savings and credit access that accords with society's moral appraisal. Debtors in turn are unable to repay the high interest loans they qualify for, and which mortgage securitization enables. Now in default, debtors suffer a further diminution in moral standing. Blacks and Hispanics' structurally enforced difficulty in acquiring high-quality loans therefore cannot be construed as anything other than a technique of racial oppression. The institutional drive to pawn off subprime loans onto minorities serves to reify and securitize their status in the national imagination as subprime souls and subprime citizens.

The public discourse immunizes itself in advance from culpability for the increased racial disparity in wealth that the subprime crisis will surely cause. Because bad credit is associated with poor moral character in the American mind, liberal ideologues can attribute subprime minority debtors' reduced economic status to some moral deficiency. And amidst all the cries for personal responsibility and free market totalitarianism, the public will forget the original context of the crisis, in which minorities were already designated as morally bankrupt, and were geographically sorted to make financial choices that would confirm that designation.

Andrew Sullivan: Stalwart Defender of Scientific Racism

2007-11-02T17:02:00.000-04:00

Andrew Sullivan has recently made a concerted effort to revive the reputation of scientific racism. Today, he highlighted research that claims to show that Ashkenazi Jews have a higher average IQ than the rest of the population. He concludes, approvingly: “I like the fact that asking these kinds of questions is also part of the Jewish inheritance.” Apparently Andrew believes that asking certain “kinds of questions” is a genetic trait, strongly expressed in Jews.

Sullivan’s defense of scientific racism is wide ranging: from “The Bell Curve,” to ear wax, to foot size. Every time he can find a glimmer of subtle correlation between a racial group and a physical trait, he is eager to trump it up and defend it as evidence “that race does in some way exist as an essential fact of human nature... The social and political ramifications of this deserve a different and deeper treatment....” How differences in foot size and ear wax could possibly have “social and political ramifications,” I’m not entirely sure. Sullivan’s main concern is to reclaim race as a scientifically-based concept, on whatever grounds he can find.

Sullivan’s eagerness to highlight supposed biological racial differences stems from his self-proclaimed conservatism. Conservatism hinges in part on the notion of a natural order of things and people. This natural order justifies the economic and social inequality that conservatives romanticize as the “richness and variety of human experience.” Conservatives console themselves that they need not redress inequality because that is the way God meant it to be, or else, simply the way things are. But because social and economic inequality in America is correlated with race, conservatives must maintain that racial inequalities have a genetic basis. They would otherwise have to confront the fact that no feature of a natural order can explain why African Americans are disproportionately represented in incarceration and child welfare, and have a lower life expectancy, even after controlling for income level. However, no evidence supports the contention that these inequities can be explained by any racially-determined genetic or biological trait whatsoever. The best Sullivan can do is display as many scientific confirmations of racial difference as possible in hopes that his readers will make an inference to the worst explanation.

Sullivan never explicitly states or defends his belief in a natural racial order. His strategy is obliquely to introduce and legitimize racist hypotheses, in order to introduce skepticism that racial social and economic inequality is purely human handiwork. For example, in a post on “Race and IQ,” Sullivan begins with a link to recent quotes from James Watson, the Nobel Prize winning discoverer of DNA structure, who is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa," since he believes that “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really” (Daily Telegraph 10/20/07). Previously, Dr. Watson has claimed that dark skinned women have a higher sex drive than light skinned women. Sullivan does not explicitly support any of Watson’s views. He is, however, in line with Watson in believing that natural racial difference has "social and political ramifications." And he seems to acknowledge Watson's assertions as a valid contribution to reasoned public debate on genetics, under the auspices of Williams Saletan’s principle: “Never be afraid to consider testable claims about your sex or ethnicity.”

To assert that one should never be afraid to consider testable claims about one’s ethnicity is not, however, to say that one should not be insulted and offended by the suggestion that certain testable claims are worth testing, or are worth any serious consideration before they have been tested. It is no coincidence that Watson’s “testable claims” are the claims of racist stereotypes: that blacks are less intelligent than whites and have a higher sex drive. If a scientist wanted to test whether Jews had a natural propensity towards greed, that would likewise strike me as off color, to say the least. There are myriad hypotheses we can test, and there are finite resources for experimentation. So, the hypotheses we choose to test say a great deal about what questions we think are most important, and what answers we are most interested in hearing. We should therefore be suspicious of scientific programs and pseudo-scientific pontification that seek to empirically verify racist stereotypes, the perpetuation of which serves to justify and reproduce racial inequality.

Du Bois, Hegel, and the Structural Context of Black Double Consciousness: Part I

2007-11-02T14:42:00.002-04:00

American political discourse has had difficulty grasping the reality and gravity of racism. Our political theory, economic system, intellectual history, and cultural norms all circulate around notions individual autonomy and responsibility. Analyses and remedies to racism have thus focused upon individual agency and culpability. Racism, so the story goes, is the attribute and fault of the bigot. Racist actions are only those actions that intend to harm other individuals by virtue of their membership in a certain ethnically and/or physically defined group. The enemy to racial equity in this narrative is thinking in terms of groups, and assessing the value of others by their group membership. The panacea, then, is to judge people solely by their individual virtues and vices. According to this liberal principle, the end of racism requires the repression of racial categories from public discourse. The law and attendant public values aim to be color-blind. They intend to wipe race off the political and social map, in hopes of engendering a cognitive tabula rasa with respect to interpersonal interaction, exchange, and moral assessment.

The color-blind filter forecloses conceivable political analyses and solutions that might consider collective outcomes as significant, or might think of agency, discrimination, and culpability as residing in anything other than the solitary embodied mind. The atomized, color-blind lens places us behind a veil of ignorance—one more insidious, but perhaps not altogether genealogically distinct from John Rawls’ instrument of normative political reasoning. Thus America law generally avoids questions of race, and, for the most part, is only cognizant of racism when individuals or institutions demonstrate an explicit intent to discriminate. Liberal political theorists, likewise, conclude that the only instances of racism that should concern us are individual acts of prejudice. And they find our institutions more or less adequate to address these blemishes on liberal perfection.

American political thought is deeply complicit in this color-blind discourse. Our failure to recognize and engage the magnitude of the problem of race arises in part from a deeply engrained philosophical sensibility, enshrined in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and rooted in British empiricism and social contract theory, which takes the individual as sole unit of analysis, responsibility, and political justice. Within this theoretical frame, we cannot adequately articulate why racial disparities that cannot be traced to the intentions of individual actors demand new thought and new politics.

The racial equity field has therefore begun to shift the debate away from this atomistic liberal focus. Theorists in the racial equity field have developed the notion of “structural racism,” recognizing that traditional liberal theorizing has not come to terms with perpetual and plastic conditions of racial inequity. In building this theory, racial equity practitioners have brought the reality of systemic racism in America to bear on our theoretical discourse. Theoretical discourse must now respond with an adequate conceptual housing entertain and critique the workings of racial injustice. Roughly, this will require an account of racism that focuses on the implicit logic of institutions, processes, and practices that produce racial disparity, rather than the expressed intent of those processes.

As a first step towards elucidating this mode of analysis, I propose to turn to an alternative philosophical tradition, upon which American academic discourse has touched, but whose critical and normative energies remain largely untapped. I argue that G.W.F. Hegel’s social phenomenology and political metaphysics provides fertile ground for a more robust analysis of the problem of race than liberal theory can provide.

Hegel’s thought can be brought to bear directly upon questions of race through its impact on W.E.B Du Bois’ mode of racial critique, which has left an indelible mark on American race theory. Shamoon Zamir has already outlined the ways in which the logic of the first chapter of The Souls of Black Folk mirrors the dialectic of self-consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Zamir: 1995, 115-168). In “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” Du Bois employs Hegel’s logic to explicate elite African American Consciousness at the turn of the century. Susan Buck-Morss gives further credence to the profitability of an Hegelian conversation on race with her hypothesis that Hegel’s master-slave dialectic in the Phenomenology suggests a radical politics informed by the Haitian Revolution (Buck Morss: 2000). If Hegel’s dialect of self-consciousness is inflected with historical fact of slavery, it should not be a surprising that Du Bois found its dynamics relevant to the condition of African American consciousness during reconstruction. In inspiration and in application, then, Hegel’s Phenomenology is implicated in questions of race, as it relates to slavery.

Zamir and Buck-Morss’ work connecting Hegel’s Phenomenology with slavery and racial consciousness is most valuable for the critical purchase it gives the question of race on Hegel’s political thought, and, conversely, for the purchase it gives Hegel’s political thought on the problem of race. I therefore take up Zamir’s understanding of Dubois’ Hegelian notion of black double-consciousness in order to determine the conditions of the possibility of that consciousness.

Du Bois’ concept of double consciousness draws on Hegel’s insight that unequal power relations between subjects create failures of recognition that split, torture, and deny freedom to self-consciousness. In the dialectic of Lord and Bondsman, self-consciousness seeks to achieve recognition through another self-consciousness. Elsewhere, Hegel will describe such relations of recognition as essential to freedom. Therefore, we can read self-consciousness' epistemological efforts in the Phenomenology as an element of a broader effort to achieve freedom. At this particular stage in the dialectic, recognition fails because the relationship between the two self-consciousness is not equal; one is enslaved to the other. Successful and complete recognition would require that each self-consciousness see the other as equal to itself, and therefore adequate to the task of recognizing and reflecting itself. The unequal relation of slavery creates a circumstance in which the master sets the terms of recognition, and therefore undermines the reciprocity that is essential to it. The master comes to define the identity and the consciousness of the slave, such that the slave is not recognized as independent by the master. He is defined by his inferior position.

Du Bois' analysis of black double consciousness during Jim Crow takes up this notion of unequal recognition to describe how racial power relations in America do violence upon the black psyche:

“…the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,--a world which yield him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,--an American, A Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keep it from being torn asunder” (Souls, 8).

While Hegel’s dialectic describes this unequal relationship as slavery, Du Bois’ concept of double consciousness refers to the condition of black consciousness after emancipation. Du Bois therefore suggests that the social and political conditions in America after slavery nonetheless reproduced power relations that mirror slavery in their dynamics and consequence. To understand these racial structures we must look beyond the fact of an unequal power relation between self-conscious subjects. We must locate and define the structures that create such a power relation. This requires that we turn from a subjective account of race to a structural account. In Hegel’s system, we must move from the phenomenology of consciousness to the explication of the moral, economic, political and social structures that enable human freedom. Where race has influenced and corrupted these freedom-conducive structures, we can identify specific sites of structural inequity that must be addressed. In this way, Du Bois’ application of the master and slave dialectic indicates that an analysis of subjective self-consciousness alone cannot grasp the wider and more powerful operations of racism.

I intend to analyze these conditions through Hegel's account of human freedom in Elements of the Philosophy of Right. There, Hegel describes requirements for a just society that align with the liberal norms and political and economic structures that exist in modern American society. To the extent that racial exclusion colors and informs the concrete embodiment of Hegel’s norms and structures in the circumstances of American history, such exclusion calls into question the integrity of the liberal state, particularly its principle of color-blindness. Reading the racial history of America through the lens of Hegel’s account of ethical life, civil society, and the state, I argue that racist intentions can be attributed not only to individuals, but also to our political, social, and economic institutions. To explain how racial hierarchy continues to flourish in American life even in the absence of slavery, I analyze how Hegel’s political structures abstract and represent the individual intentions of members. My aim is not to offer an exhaustive racial critique of the Philosophy of Right, but rather to point out analyses and vocabulary within the text that could flesh out existing theories of structural racism, and the political thought those theories demand.

C.E.O. of the R.O.C.

2007-11-01T14:01:00.000-04:00

Today’s New York Times front page asks: “Is There Room at the Top for Black Executives?” Ron Stodghill reports that

“Mr. O’Neal’s ouster [from Merrill Lynch] has shed much-needed light on the dearth of African-Americans in so-called C-level positions in corporations, while underscoring the extent to which executive suites and boardrooms remain white male bastions….

“The chief executive of StarCom, Renatta McCann, said, “The victories of leaders like Stanley O’Neal and Richard Parsons are both symbolic and transformational.”

“That said, she added. ‘we have yet to reach a tipping point where the pipeline organically regenerates. We have to achieve momentum and velocity, and it has to achieve scale to make it sustainable’” (NYT, 11/1/07).

At a point in time when there is not a “critical mass” of black execs to ensure a broad and persistent presence of African American leadership in business, the life story of each black business leader is crucial in shaping, coloring, and delimiting possible trajectories and life-scripts for their successors. These men and women are making preliminary sketches for African American’s map to the top of the business establishment.

As they draw the boundaries and pathways of economic advancement, their personal development encounters, embodies, and comes to represent the dynamics of America’s racial logic. In the case of black financial leaders, their stories often represent the color-blind discourse:

“The subject of race has proven to be delicate for African American executives, many of whom prefer to view themselves as — at least publicly — an ‘an executive who happens to be black.’ They have earned the right through hard work, they say, to be judged on their merits.”

Evidently, many of these talented and fortunate African Americans have succeeded in part by stepping behind the color-blind veil. They are color-blind policy’s shining examples who de-emphasize their racial identity so that society can de-emphasize the importance of race as an indicator of economic opportunity. These men and women’s admirable success thereby turns our gaze away from the processes that reproduce profound racial inequality in the population at large.

But there is also another black business leader whose life embodies and represents the reality that color-blind discourse denies. Shawn Carter, also known as Jay-Z, was born in the Marcy Projects in Brooklyn New York, sold crack cocaine during the 80s epidemic, skyrocketed to stardom through his hip hop career, and today is CEO of Def Jam Records, with a net worth pushing $400 million. Jay-Z’s story is not the color-blind narrative. On the contrary, Jay-Z’s life and works offer an immanent critique of color-blind capitalism from the standpoint of the radical racial negative that ideology entails and excludes. As he put it in “Can I Live” from his first album, Reasonable Doubt:

"We hustle out of sense of hopelessness,
Sort of a desperation,
And through desperation, we become addicted,
Sort of like the fiends we’re accustomed to serving,
But we feel we have nothing to lose,
So we offer you—well, we offer our lives.
What do you bring to the table?"

In Reasonable Doubt, Jay-Z offers the story of his youth as an example, an interpretation, and a criticism. Asking “what do you bring to the table?” Jay-Z calls on the listener to engage the work on this level, and carry its insights further. Here is what I bring to the table:

Yesterday’s post drew the map from Reagan’s campaign speech at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi to Jay-Z standing on a Brooklyn street corner with “crack in his palm, watching the long arm of the law” (“Izzo,” Blueprint). Jay-Z’s early experience as a drug dealer is embedded in a wider political economic issue: the inherently corrosive, exploitative, and racist tendencies of late capitalism. Throughout the Reagan Administration, cocaine policy was not merely an element of a racist government agenda, but rather had much broader signification. Cocaine was the material embodiment of American capitalism par excellence. We can see the concept of late capital in cocaine along three dimensions: finance, international politics, and race relations.

The road to crack addiction perfectly paralleled the acquisitiveness and insatiability of capital accumulation. Poor, often unemployed urban residents were attracted to it by the lure of sudden pleasure and a sense of power. But as the drug took its hold, the consumption of more crack was no longer a casual pleasure, but became a necessity; an end in and of itself. The upper class foils of these crack heads were Wall Street bankers who, no strangers to cocaine themselves, entered finance for the pleasure and power of wealth, but whose daily work entailed the endless consumption and production of capital for its own sake. Jay-Z's confession—“through desperation, we become addicted, sort of like the fiends we’re accustomed to serving”—speaks, therefore not only to drug dealing, but also to the nature of economic exchange in late capitalism more generally. Buyers and sellers alike become addicted to the empty signification of dollars and their endless proliferation, until their passions are corrupted with the dominance of a single thought: to score another green topped vile of securitized products.

Like capitalism writ large, cocaine functioned as an economic instrument to overthrow governments perceived to be hostile to the United States: Oliver North and the Reagan Administration used drug money to finance the Contras. Cocaine was the ultimate “cash crop” of colonial economic exchange: the astronomical prices of cocaine, fueled by U.S. drug policy, undermined the agricultural base of many Latin and South American Countries, concentrating economic and political power into the hands of drug lords, and providing funding for anti-democratic movements.

As crack cocaine wreaked havoc on America’s black urban communities, so too did free-market, supply-side economics. Both the drug and the market policy were race neutral on their face. The theory of free market capitalism is that anyone can succeed on their own merits, no matter who his father is, no matter what her race is. But the reality was that the creation of a largely unregulated economy entailed the rollback of the social supports poor urban communities relied upon. Worse, poor minority communities lacked any local financial institutions that could enable them to secure wealth. This is still largely true today (pdf). So black Americans were disproportionately hurt by Federal cutbacks, and were unable to benefit from the supposed upside of an unregulated, supply-side economy.

As a substance, cocaine, like dollars, does not distinguish between races. It’s the same drug no matter who uses it. But that reality was changed by Federal cocaine policy, which drew an unjustified distinction in viciousness between crack cocaine, a drug for the urban poor, and powder cocaine, a drug for the wealthy. Cocaine, like economic policy, meant one thing for rich white people and another for poor black people (namely, mass incarceration.). Cocaine's political-economic existence therefore reflected Reaganomics in its false color-blindness. Drug and economic policy conspired together to deal a double blow to black America, which, in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, had had for the first time a chance at social and political equality.

When Jay-Z described the addictive tendencies of selling cocaine, he therefore implicitly addressed late capitalism’s psychological, financial, international, racial dynamics. Like a hip hop beat that returns to the same sample over and over again, America returns to the altar of capital no sooner than it has left. In forcing our attention on the conceptual equivelance of the financial practice of the white establishment and the drug trade in poor black communities, Jay-Z reveals the spirit of the age: one, long cocaine-induced rush which sent the higher spheres of society into untold heights of wealth and power at the expense of the poor black minority, and the future health fo society as a whole. He represents in his person and in his lyrics congruity of capitalism and crime. Jay-Z’s reflective awareness of the significance of his own life keys us into this wider insight:

“I’m an 80s baby, mastered Reaganomics,
School of Hard Knocks
Every day’s college”
--Young Jeezy “Go Crazy (remix)” feat. Jay-Z

He's not talking about the Laffer Curve. And, thankfully, his days as a pusher are a cost that need not remain sunk.

Jay-Z is a survivor of the drug wars for all to see. Sitting at the top of a major music corporation with hundreds of million of dollars to his name, he demonstrates in his own person the connection between drug dealing and capitalism. He also represents a return of the repressed, the child of a people America banished to the ghettos. And he has demonstrated the reflective capacity to communicate the meaning of his experience. He can provide us with a central point around which to critique our modern political and economic circumstance. But we must bring something to the table.

Criminality, Subprime Lending, and Racial Disparity

2007-11-01T12:15:00.000-04:00

N.Y. Attorney AG: Leading Bank Profits at Homeowners' Expense (ABC Blotter, 11/1/2007).

As I noted in a previous post, minorities are disproportionately represented among subprime borrowers.

hat tip: Atrios

Bush Admin.: "Black People Die First, Therefore..."

2007-10-30T14:11:00.000-04:00

Six years ago, when the Bush Administration was pushing for social security privatization, it argued that African Americans were disadvantaged by social security as it currently exists. Now, this year, John Tanner, the Chief of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division Voting Rights Section, argued that African Americans are not disadvantaged by voter ID laws. What do these arguments have in common? They both begin with: "black people die first, therefore..." The latest fashion in conservative discourse appears to be to use racial disparities to support policies that deepen racial disparities.

In 2001, the administration offered the following explanation why social security privatization would be good for African Americans:

"Since longevity is correlated with income, poorer workers will tend to die young and therefore receive fewer payments. Moreover, since lower income workers are almost totally reliant on social security for income in retirement, they have very little inheritable wealth to pass onto their heirs. The combination of these two factors can be particularly harmful to African Americans, who on average have lower incomes and shorter life expectancy than other Americans" (Presidents Commission to Strengthen Social Security: 2001, p. 32).

Here's why that's wrong, from Paul Krugman:

"First, Mr. Bush's remarks on African-Americans perpetuate a crude misunderstanding about what life expectancy means. It's true that the current life expectancy for black males at birth is only 68.8 years - but that doesn't mean that a black man who has worked all his life can expect to die after collecting only a few years' worth of Social Security benefits. Blacks' low life expectancy is largely due to high death rates in childhood and young adulthood. African-American men who make it to age 65 can expect to live, and collect benefits, for an additional 14.6 years - not that far short of the 16.6-year figure for white men.

"Second, the formula determining Social Security benefits is progressive: it provides more benefits, as a percentage of earnings, to low-income workers than to high-income workers. Since African-Americans are paid much less, on average, than whites, this works to their advantage.

"Finally, Social Security isn't just a retirement program; it's also a disability insurance program. And blacks are much more likely than whites to receive disability benefits" (NYT 1/28/05).

The Bush Administration took its cue from conservative think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation, which construct ever more inventive and bogus ways to win minorities over to the GOP—a party which transparently has no interest in their concerns. The Heritage Foundation must feel somewhat chagrined that all their hard work manufacturing false reasons for African Americans to support Republicans has gone for naught, with no GOP Presidential front runners coming anywhere near a minority debate.

But the Administration's "blacks die first, therefore..." argument has been revived for an even more mendacious purpose. This time, it's been used by the Civil Rights Division Voting Rights Section Chief to defend voter ID laws:

"When Justice Department lawyers and analysts found in 2005 that a Georgia law requiring voters to have photo ID would disproportionately discriminate against African-Americans, they were overruled by John Tanner, the chief of the Civil Rights Divisions' voting rights section. The law was subsequently halted by a federal appeals judge, who compared it to a Jim Crow-era poll tax.

"This past weekend, Tanner showcased his own analytical skills, telling an audience that voter ID requirements actually disproportionately affect whites.

"Tanner explained that 'primarily elderly persons' are the ones affected by such laws, but 'minorities don't become elderly the way white people do: They die first.' So anything that 'disproportionately impacts the elderly, has the opposite impact on minorities,' he added. 'Just the math is such as that.'" (TPM, 10/9/07)

Thankfully John Tanner has gotten a stiff rebuke for his utterly unfounded arguments. Rep. Arthur Davis served him up something fierce during today's House Judiciary Committee Hearing on the Justice Department's voting rights oversight. This is satisfying but not enough. I'm with Barack Obama: fire him.

John Tanner is not just a buffoon and a crony, as it may appear. He successfully thwarted a state investigation of voter suppression in Ohio when, in an unprecedent move, he "wrote Columbus, Ohio's election officials to publicly assure them that the Justice Department had found no evidence of intentional African-American voter disenfranchisement in the 2004 election" (TPM, 10/12/2007). This time, Tanner appears to have been less successfull. The "black die first, therefore..." argument didn’t really take hold. Because it was ludicrous.

Tanner’s failed strategy is nonetheless a perfect example of irony as a technique of racism (principle 12). He says one thing--voter ID laws don’t hurt minorities because they “die first,” and elderly people are the ones who are less likely to have valid IDs (???). But the real meaning and intent of voter ID laws, as Tanner's own voting rights division has found, is something else entirely: to disenfranchise poor minorities who are more likely to vote for Democrats.

The deeper irony is that both Tanner and the President’s argument for their consideration of minority interests are founded on the fact that minorities have a lower life expectancy than whites; but it is their policies and the policies of their party that have created that circumstance and willingly perpetuate it. Because of redlining, predatory lending, benign neglect, and the evisceration of the welfare state, minorities are corralled into neighborhoods where food is poor, air quality is bad, and healthcare is lacking. These policies are the direct cause of lower minority life expectancy. And now, the racial disparity in life expectancy that Republicans have authored is supposed to provide arguments for kicking away another leg of the welfare state through social security privatization, and for instituting voter ID laws that intend to disenfranchise poor minorities? The wheel of irony keeps on spinning…

Subprime Lending: Mapping the Reality of Race

2007-10-29T16:29:00.000-04:00

Depending on whom you ask, the subprime lending meltdown is an economic blip that the market will smoothly correct, or the beginning of a prolonged economic downturn. Either way, one thing seems likely: the impact of subprime lending has been felt, and will continue to be felt, disproportionately by minority communities. The Neighborhood Economic Development Initiative has a telling set of maps on finance, race, and class, including one of subprime refinancing loans and foreclosure patterns in Brooklyn, New York. As you can see from the maps, the relationship between subprime lending and minority communities is stark. It is unlikely that this just a big coincidence. In Brooklyn, at least, bank lending policies have clearly resulted in a much larger number of subprime loans to individuals in majority black and Hispanic communities. Nor can such correlations be explained away by income level. Is this another piece of evidence that financial practice in America is intentionally discriminatory? Maybe. But either way, it is clear that the effect of such practice is to take advantage of minority communities, and subsequently to subject them to greater disadvantage than white communities. This is what it means to say that "individual intention is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the existence of racism" (principle 13). The problem with racial disparity is its natural tendency is towards self-perpetuation, irrespective of the intentions of individual actors. As the above cited NCRC report notes,

"Lending discrimination in the form of steering high cost loans to underserved borrowers qualified for market rate loans results in equity stripping and has contributed to inequalities in wealth."

It seems unlikely, though not impossible, that at the level of large financial institutions, racial groups are targeted for subprime loans. Rather, it is more likely that factors other than race tend to select for people of certain races. It makes sense that banks would steer high cost loans to "underserved borrowers," since lenders might assume that an underserved borrower is underserved for some reason relating to their finances. In other words, lacking perfect information about the risk of lending to an individual or family, institutions could rely on very proximate facts (such as whether or not the borrower has received and repaid loans before) in order to diminish their risk over a large quantity of loans. Another possible explanation is that underserved borrowers simply often lack sound financial education, precisely because they are underserved, and therefore lack the practical experience of having been offered or having received loans. So it's easy for banks to dupe them into thinking a subprime loan is a great idea.

Since blacks, as well as Hispanics and other minorities, are overrepresented among underserved borrowers, bank policies that target underserved borrowers will tend to disproportionately target those racial groups. But the reason minorities are underserved borrowers in the first place is because of racism. In the wake of the Second World War, for example, the G.I. Bill gave cheap loans to returning American soldiers. But loaning practices designed to encourage the growth of suburbia at the expense of cities prevented black veterans from reaping the benefit of this huge windfall of public investment in housing. This wasn't just because black people liked to live in cities, and didn't want to live in the new suburbs. It was because black people couldn't buy houses in the suburbs, because racist whites would not let them. Here, the confluence of suburban growth policy, fueled by the auto-industry, and the genuinely and intentionally racist sentiments of white suburban communities created vast racial disparity in wealth. And this disparity in wealth, combined with continued racism, made blacks into "underserved borrowers," until wall street invented a financial product that could take advantage of underserved borrowers.

Jim Crow law had a "one-drop rule" for racial identification: if you had any black blood in you, you were black. To turn race against itself, and tear the negative asunder, I propose a similar "one-drop rule" for racism itself: if a historical process has any element of racist intent at any point, and if that intent produced racial disparities through its interaction with other, not necessarily racist, policies and practices, the whole process can be described as racist. Racism courses through the veins of "racially-neutral" processes in the same way that racists thought black blood stained the body through which it coursed. Therefore, we can call lending practices that target underserved borrowers racist, since blacks were made underserved borrowers by racist thinking, which became a racial reality through the complicity of other socioeconomic processes.

Introduction and First Principles

2007-10-29T02:07:00.002-04:00

by Blake

Radical Negative is dedicated to furthering the American conversation on race and racism. My goal is to analyze and synthesize the valences of race, as they appear in politics, popular culture, media, and academic research.

Any honest contribution to the marketplace of ideas must be clear from the start about its perspectives, aims, and the assumptions it starts from. So for this first post, I offer several first principles that will motivate and orient the claims I make here. I don’t take these principles to be self-evident. Rather, they are justified beliefs that Radical Negative will seek to defend, by degrees, post by post. Principles 1 and 2 explain the cultural and intellectual traditions from which I will draw. Principles 3-9 sketch my philosophical perspective. Principles 10-13 outline my thoughts on race and racism in America.

FIRST PRINCIPLES

1. ‘Hip is the knowledge, hop is the movement.’—KRS One

Hip hop will be a central focus of Radical Negative. In KRS One’s insightful definition, hip hop represents theory (knowledge) and practice (movement) as related and intertwined. I subscribe to this conception. Thought informs our actions and actions inform our thoughts.

Hip hop provides a crucial model for how theory, interpretation, and critique can proceed in the disorienting space of late-modernism. I believe there is a very real possibility that we have run out of genuinely ‘new’ theoretical material, if there ever was any such thing in the first place. I agree with G.W.F. Hegel’s contention that the post-enlightenment world is the “end of history.” The two centuries of thought following the enlightenment have elucidated all of the major categories of rational thought. This does not mean that there is nothing more to say. On the contrary, it means that to say anything more, we must draw different forms from what has already been said.

Hip hop music opens up the possibility of such forms. Hip hop tracks are often based upon samples taken from compositions in other musical genres. These short segments of sound and voice are cut, spliced, and laid over a beat. Often, they sound wholly different from the original. But the trace of the original music nonetheless remains in the hip hop track as its inspiration and motif. The M.C. then raps over this beat, relating his own message and experience to the rhythmic and tonal structure beneath.

If we are indeed fresh out of new theoretical material, then philosophers and critics must carry on as the hip hop producer does: drawing from, transforming, and combining old material to enable possibility of new thought. Radical Negative will pursue this strategy, combining samples of philosophy with critiques of contemporary events and discourses in order to suggest alternative modes of contemplation, interpretation, and action.

Hip hop has spawned the latest of what Hegel calls “world-historical individuals”: Jay-Z. Future posts will explain this claim and feature his rhymes.

2. Those dead white men had some good ideas.

One of the greatest faults of left political discourse has been to abandon or neglect the thought of the “dead white men” who, until about 50 years ago, wholly dominated the academy. Some of this neglect is a matter of anger and vengeance—an attempt to redress the exclusion of women and minorities from the marketplace of ideas by rejecting the insights of the white men who excluded them. I don’t think this resentment is unjustified. But ressentiment is one of those weapons of the weak that should be kept sheathed.

Most of these famed dead white men were, to varying degrees, sexist or racist or both. However, they were really smart, and their ideas are indispensable for coming to terms with, and acting effectively, in the late-modern world. This is because they helped create the world we live in, and their thought therefore reflects that world. So if we want to get a purchase on our contemporary condition, and bring the powers of immanent critique to bear upon it, we must have recourse to these dead white men.

I would like to admit two of my particular allegiances to dead white men at the outset. First, I believe that James Madison and the Founding Fathers did something truly unique and inspired when they wrote the Constitution of the United States. The principles in that document are essential to our way of life. But they are also highly problematic, both in their conception and in their consequences. The fact that many of the authors of the Constitution owned slaves, and that they collectively enabled slavery and racism to persist in our Republic, is tragic, ironic, and sinful. Tracking the specter of this sin will be a central aim of Radical Negative.

Second, I believe that the 19th Century German Idealist G.W.F. Hegel is the smartest dead white man ever (ever, ever; ever, ever?). You’ll see him around these parts often.

3. Reality is infused with thought.

The relationship between thought and reality can de described as an economy of sorts. Reality and thought are like two currencies, whose values are dependent upon one another. Reality can be exchanged or translated into thought, and thought can be exchanged or translated into reality. The exchange of reality into thought is the impact of our action and experience upon the way we think. The exchange of thought into reality is the impact of our thought on the way we act and the world we experience. Because the currencies of reality and thought are dependent on one another, reality can never wholly comprehend thought, and thought can never wholly comprehend reality. If all reality were exchanged for thought, then thought would cease to have any meaning or value. This is because the value of thought depends upon the value of reality, as something distinct from it. The same is true along the opposite vector of exchange. Thus, reality is never wholly accountable to thought, nor vice versa. But they have purchase and influence on one another.

I subscribe, therefore, neither to a Kantian view of reason nor to Hegel’s absolute idealism. Against Kant, I do not think that there is a realm of reality beyond appearance that our thought cannot grasp. And against Hegel, I do not think that concepts underlie and comprehend all of reality, without remainder. I’ll call my perspective “pragmatic idealism.” This is the notion that thought and reality are engaged with one another, but cannot be wholly subsumed by one another.

The consequence of this view is that one can analyze events through the ideas that operate within them. The implicit concepts behind the world we experience give us access to its deeper movements and characteristics.

4. Facts and norms have an ambiguous relationship; they are insoluble but inseparable.

How we conceive of the relationship between facts and norms has significant impact on our political and moral view. Roughly, the more we believe that facts impact norms, the more conservative we must be; the more we believe norms impact facts, the more leftist we must be; and the more we believe facts and norms are separate and hermetically sealed, the less anything else we believe matters.

Philosophy has a persistent problem of describing the relationship between facts and norms. Hume famously argued in the Treatise of Human Nature that an ‘ought’ can never be derived from an ‘is.’ His point was that the way the world is can never tell us anything about how the world ought to be. Kant followed him in this, saying that our moral sense was a supernatural capacity, deriving its justification wholly apart from the facts we find in the world. Hegel and other modern Aristotelians like Alasdair MacIntyre have argued, on the contrary, that norms can be derived from facts; that the way the world is entails what we ought to do.

I don’t have a definitive answer to the question of facts and norms. I think their relationship is ambiguous. Facts and norms are not altogether distinct. Norms are a certain kind of fact, and facts often take on a normative hue. Like thought and reality, facts and norms cannot be wholly subsumed under one another. Because facts are the articles of reality, and norms are the articles of thought, these paired dichotomies inform one another. One of the aims of Radical Negative will therefore be to elucidate the relationship of facts and norms together with the relationship of reality and thought.

5. Empirical science and philosophy go hand in hand.

Meaningful and useful theorizing must employ both the deductive reasoning of philosophy and the inductive reasoning of empirical science. Empirical science provides us with data to test our hypotheses. But we cannot create useful or innovative hypotheses without enabling the play of deductive thought. Empirical science is often blind to the philosophical assumptions contained in its parameters, and the way in which the “facts” it “discovers” are filtered through different conceptual lenses. On the other hand, philosophical hypotheses need to be scientifically reviewed, and tested against experience. Radical Negative will therefore employ the resources of both social science and philosophy.

6. Reality is a web that we can map.

I think the best way to conceptualize reality is as a web: a dense net of interconnected strands of causation and information that form things and beings at their intersection. The internet is the explicit representation of this view of reality. Since “reality is infused with thought,” thought is capable of mapping this web. The action of thought, then, is to determine the webs paths and contours, and our own place within them.

7. ‘Success in circuit lies.’ -- Emily Dickinson

If reality is a web, then meaningful insights into the nature of that web cannot restrict themselves to one topic or domain, but must trace the threads that run into and out of the object of analysis. We must therefore shun the tendency to come to definitive judgment and rush the conclusion at the expense of exploring the wider orbit of ideas and influences that surround our field of inquiry.

8. The individual is not a self-caused cause.

The idea that people have some autonomy above and beyond the causal sources of their passions, identity, and thinking is pure vanity and fiction. I am a determinist. I believe that what we think and what we do is fully caused by factors beyond our control, such as our genes, our history, our acquired mental traits, our cultivation throughout life. This does not mean, however, that we are not free.

9. Freedom is civilization’s highest aim and humanity’s most perfect state.

I follow Kant and Hegel in believing that the possibility of freedom is what makes us human, and is therefore what we should value most.

But if people are not their own causes, what could freedom possibly mean?

I believe that freedom is the name for states of being in which we are aware of the causes that determine us, and in that awareness, become their steward and embodiment. To be free is to remember and determine oneself as the kind of person one already is. Freedom therefore involves the dual action of knowledge and movement, and the process of mapping our place in the world, such that we can move through it with purpose and conviction.

Freedom, in this sense, is the highest moral and political value. Radical Negative will seek to make this abstract value concrete.

10. Race is real.

Scientific racism has been proven false. It is simply not true that there is a genetic or biological basis for race. Rather, race is a human invention.

But this does not mean that race does not exist. While race is a human contrivance, that contrivance has had a lasting causal impact on the world we live in. Race is therefore a classic case of the economic exchange between thought and reality. Men invented race as a thought. They then put made this thought real with deeds and policies. Race was in this way exchanged from a thought into a reality. The world is now inflected with race because we have made it that way.

Because race is now a reality, we cannot pretend it does not exist. Rather, we have to treat it as a reality—a reality that thought created, and which thought can therefore understand and alter.

Radical Negative will therefore argue that colorblind discourse is complicit in racism. In a world where race is a reality that we have wrought, the claim that we can ignore race merely serves to enable and perpetuate the racial inequities that currently exist. We cannot be blind to color. We must see race for what it is--a deep gash on American culture. We must remember the wounds that wrote race upon our national identity, so that our practical and theoretical faculties heal, rather than fester in racism's bacterial culture. A permanent scar is better than an untreated wound.

11. Racial logic is the radical negative in America*

The title of this blog, Radical Negative, comes from Jacques Derrida’s critique of Hegel’s dialectic of Lord and Bondsman in his essay “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism Without Reserve.” The dialectic of Lord and Bondsman describes the unequal relationship of power and recognition between a master and his slave. For Hegel, this relationship is a stepping stone on the path to freedom and absolute knowledge. In this account, the negative relationship of enslavement has positive consequences further down the line. It is an evil that leads to good. Derrida, however, sees the negative that slavery represents as something more profound and ineradicable:

“The blind spot of Hegelianism, around which can be organized the representation of meaning, is the point at which destruction, suppression, death and sacrifice constitute so irreversible an expenditure, so radical a negativity…that they can no longer be determined as negativity in a process or system… To go ‘to the end’ both of ‘absolute rending’ and of the negative without ‘measure,’ without reserve…is convulsively to tear apart the negative side, that which makes it the reassuring other surface of the positive; and it is to exhibit within the negative, in an instant, that which can no longer be called negative” (1978: 259).

In my view, this account of the radical negative reflects racial logic in America today. Liberal discourse prefers to treat slavery and racism as negatives subsumed under the positive. In this “liberal consensus” position, slavery and racism were evil, and we demonstrated our essential goodness by abolishing and eliminating them. So long as we see racial logic, in this way, as performing the “labor on the negative,” in service of liberal values and pride, racism will persevere. The alternative, as Derrida puts it, is to acknowledge that racial logic a more profound kind of negative. Racial logic’s deep roots in the founding of our republic and its continued perseverance are the insidious underside of our shining liberal values, undermining their relevance and sincerity.

Therefore, to combat racism, we must first acknowledge that racial logic is a radical negative; something that cannot be understood, limited, or controlled by reference to liberal principles. We must then use the radical negative of racial logic against itself, in order to “tear apart the negative side, that which makes it the reassuring other surface of the positive; and it is to exhibit within the negative, in an instant, that which can no longer be called negative.” We must harness the power of race as a negative that cannot be accommodated by the reassurances of colorblind liberalism, and which demands the higher calling of human freedom. This is the project of Radical Negativity.

*Thanks to Professor Robyn Marasco at Williams College for her seminal thoughts on race in America as the negative.

12. The techniques of racism are: categorization, signification, irony, and oppression.

Categorization: The process by which individuals are placed into racially defined groups.

Signification: The process by which racial categories signify the assigned

Irony: A technique wherein one says one thing (“racial differences don’t matter”), and means another (“the fact that racial groups experience significantly different quality of life is a matter of coincidence, and is therefore not a proper subject for political or legal deliberation”).

Oppression: Legal, Political, Economic, and Cultural processes that privilege or disadvantage individuals on the basis of their membership in a racial category.

13. Individual intention is not a necessary condition for the existence and efficacy of racism.

The liberal consensus definition of racism seems to be: cases in which an individual intentionally treats another person in a certain way because of his membership in a racial group. Radical Negativity rejects this narrow definition. Such individual, intentional acts of racism are usually symptoms of more profound and powerful forms of racism. These forms together constitute “structural racism.” As the Aspen Institute Roundtable on Community Change defines it, structural racism

“…refers to a system in which public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations, and other norms work in various, often reinforcing ways to perpetuate racial group inequity. It identifies dimensions of our history and culture that have allowed privileges associated with ‘whiteness’ and disadvantages associated with ‘color’ to endure and adapt over time” (2004).

Structural racism, then, does not require the intentional bigotry of individual actors. Racism succeeds precisely because individuals and institutions can deny culpability on the basis of never having intended to discriminate. I reject this excuse. Radical Negative will attempt to flesh out the notion of Structural Racism with examples from contemporary politics, culture and economics.