The Legacy of Shame

The first slave ship arrived on what would become US soil before the pilgrims made it to Plymouth, MA. By the time the country fought a civil war over the systematic imprisionment, torture, and rape of human beings, it had been established as an honored tradition for nearly 250 years. The country spent the next 100 years practicing our own version of apartheid, inflicting a legal form of violence and oppression on the millions of descendants of the slaves we had once imprisioned, tortured, and raped.

The events in Charlottesville are the fruit of this long history and, critically, our failure to deal with our national shame over our past. Let's acknowledge that is shame, too. We all know this history, and white Americans feel a powerful sense of implication. Whether our families were Mississippi plantation owners in 1785 or arrived here from Belgium in 1985, the color of our skin indicts us as surely as the color of skin once indicted black Americans who lived under slavery or Jim Crow. It is our legacy, and one that will never wash off.

This doesn't make us unique or special. Dark legacies are a part of being a human. No country is without its history of horrors, but some own up to them more healthily. In the US, white Americans are unable to even discuss it honestly without deflecting. Some things are just too painful to acknowledge. Imprisonment, torture, and rape are just too much for most of us. Instead, some of us prefer not to think about it (if we still have that luxury), or we shift blame, refusing to accept the national responsibility we all bear.

The most damaged transmute that shame into pride. It is such an overwhelming darkness, so woven into identity, culture, and history, that to accept its substance is to risk annihilation. It's why, for centuries, those who were closest to these unspeakable acts were the quickest to invoke personal destruction, to cite their own grievances, to play victim. They--we--are victims of this horror. Accepting responsibility means accepting an identity shot through with monstrousness.

Shame is so powerful it can turn the mind inside out, and leave the worst perpetrators feeling like the greatest victims. Shame turns to a hard, mean instinct to shut out anything that invokes the original crimes. People hunker in defensive crouches, coagulate with others willing to work as hard as they to shut out this history that is too painful to look at.  And in that small, cramped hole of victimhood and fear, people lose sight of the humanity of those around them. Anyone unwilling to repeat the soothing myths becomes a foe--and those once oppressed become an intolerable symbol of that awful shame. How else could a man work up the hate to drive into a crowd of people of gun down a church full of parishioners?

We can't easily extract a better history from the actual one and hope to start over. Our "greatest" founding fathers were slave owners, and we wrote this atrocity into our Constitution. It shaped the way we designed our republic, and in failing to confront slavery in 1776, we ensured we'd inherit its legacy in vivid moments like 1861, 1881, 1954, and yesterday.

There's nothing controversial in our history as a matter of fact; everything about it is well and extensively documented. But its meaning--the stain that can't be washed from our national soul--is the battleground that defines us a country. It is often cast as a problem of "race," but that misses the mark. It's a problem of shame and how to address it. All Americans own this history, it's part of us all. But for those of us who can't accept or acknowledge its true meaning--that we did in fact commit these horrors, that that *is* who we are--the pathologies of our shame will continue to play out like this over and over and over again. 

Things will not improve soon, but if anything in this disgraceful episode holds the shafts of hope, it's this: the reason Charlottesville was ground zero for a white supremacist rally was because the city had finally decided to confront our awful past. We are a long way from full, real acceptance of our history, but we are slowly taking baby steps to at least consider it. I hope. 

PHOTO: CNN

Trump and the Decline of White America

So many white people...

I've spent the best part of the past year trying to figure out the Trump phenomenon. How does a man this manifestly incompetent, ignorant, and offensive command so much support in the United States in 2016? There is clearly a racial component, but what Trump speaks for is not 1950s racism. It's race-adjacent, but not strictly racist. The distinction is subtle but important.

Instead, what's happening is the death rattle of normative white culture--that is, the assumption that everything in society will be filtered through the cultural lens of the typical 55-year-old white male. It's not just that he will look out and mainly see white faces, it's that he will have his cultural values and preferences reflected back to him. In this way it's a kind of narcissism. Racism is directed outward--it's an attack on very real people. What Trumpies are experiencing is cultural dissonance, and it's personal and inward-looking. They're nostalgic, they express a longing for a time when they were "free" to think and behave without filter.

This is why Trump and his followers are so fixated on "political correctness." At the gross level, for the first time in American history, it's not mainstream to be racist, homophobic, and misogynist. All of these positions are reflective of a time when white, Christian culture was the national default. A long time ago it became uncool to voice these things publicly, but the were still minority views, marginalized positions. Racist, homophobic whites could still joke about fags and niggers in private and not offend people. In the last decade, these things became the majority view. Most Americans find these terms offensive, and anyone using them risks public scorn.


But it's more subtle than just bigotry. The world is confusing when norms change--when people say Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas. Respect for Latino and black culture, for non-Christians, and for non-straights has become the majority view. Drop an n-bomb now, and you court censure in all but the most insular settings. Trumpies want the freedom to use whatever language is comfortable without being social pariahs. This is one of the lost "freedoms."

Of course, this is not a change politicians can affect. They're bigger social changes. It is employees in department stores that say Happy Holidays, not the guy at the DMV. Whites of a certain generation expect to be paid deference, but the world seems to be spiting them. In the America of 2016, it's fine to be gay or transsexual, Muslims and Jews are accorded respect, women are often the boss, and signs are in English and Spanish.

Trump constantly talks about weakness. "We're so weak, nobody respects us." This is a big theme for Trump. It has seemed an odd critique. Actually, we're stronger now than we have been twenty years--crime is down, unemployment is down, the economy is fine, we all have smart phones, and soon we'll all be watching TV on Oculus Rift. The weakness Trump has identified, though, has to do with this loss status. Who cares if you have an iPhone if everyone's calling you a racist all the time?

Trump's entire message is one of white restoration--there's basically nothing else there. He doesn't have policies per se, just vague promises that things will be great again. (Believe me.) Nonwhite America says, "what do you mean 'again,' white man?" For anyone who wasn't white and probably male, that normative culture was a terrible thing. (It's even possible for whites to see it as a terrible thing even though they benefited.) Good riddance.

A final irony about this election is that even the election itself is a last gasp example of normative whiteness. We have elevated and enlarged Trump's status because we always see things through the lens of whiteness. And he is indeed huge with whites. But he's never passed about 40-42% in the polls (the tightening has to do with Hillary's fall). I suspect most Americans think that he's dominating among poor voters. After all, big part of his message is predicated on jabbing the "elites," and this is how the media dutifully frames it. But of course he's not winning among the poor. He's winning among the poor whites. Overall, Hillary is doing way better among people earning less than $50,000. That white cultural view still has valence--there's still evidence of it all around--but it's receding.

This is why the Trump phenomenon contains a bright light at its core. The very existence of Trump demonstrates is that this view is dying. You only run on the platform of white restoration when something needs restoring. And not only is it not getting restored, it's going away. Trumpism isn't the spark of a new movement, it's the ember of a dying one. Thirty percent of the electorate is nonwhite, and that number grows each year. Nonwhites are being born at a faster rates than whites, and whites are dying at a faster rate than nonwhites. We will be a majority nonwhite country by 2044.

But even that fails to get at the truth of things. Culturally, we quit being a white country a while ago. Donald Trump is not going to change that.

Trump and the Brexit

When the vote for the UK's referendum on exiting the EU--the Brexit--was finally called, it was around 8:30 pm on a Thursday, West Coast time. That gave the media just long enough to think about the implications to have solidified one common point by the morning: the Brexit and the Donald Trump phenomenon in the US seemed highly analogous in some relevant (but never defined) way. It didn't help that Trump was in Scotland, busily making that same connection himself.

But what are the connections? The Trump vote is anchored by a visible cohort of working-class whites who are principally driven by racial animus. Upon their complaints are draped (by themselves and, compliantly, the media) the more decorous claims of economic hardship, but this is an evident dodge. Hillary far outperforms Trump among those earning less than $50,000 (53% - 36%). She outperforms him in nearly every region of the country: North East (+22%), Midwest (+11%), and West (+12%). She trails only in the South (-12%), where those white voters have a certain distinctive cultural and historical context. In that that specific historical and cultural context--slavery, civil war, Jim Crow, and the post-civil-rights era GOP realignment--we see the grievances of a large chunk of the Trump bloc. 

How to connect that to an apple grower in Herefordshire? It is part of the American experience to see the grievances of American whites through the lens of race--so much so that we can't see that the immigrant that angers the Herefordshire orchardist is a white guy from Poland. Poles are the stand-in in the British narrative for the invading "other."  It's so hard for Americans not to see this in racial terms, because for Americans everything is racial, but this is where the phenomena of Trump and the Brexit most obviously diverge. 

The British don't share the history of the Alabaman. As recently as a century ago, they controlled the most powerful empire since the Romans. They ruled it from off the shore of Europe, a separation that figures hugely in their self-conception. Those on the other side of the English Channel were the others, the ones who came from time to time in boats (and later, planes) as would-be conquerors. Their otherness, of course, was not predicated on race, but nationality, place, culture, religion (sometimes), and blood. 

Old rural English people scared of immigrants voted to leave the EU and old rural American people scared of immigrants vote for Trump. They're the same. They're not. Nor are the immigrants. The flavors of xenophobia are varied, and never interchangeable. 

The fixation on connecting Trump and the Brexit would be harmless enough if it were constrained to election predictions. But if Trump does win in November and we have delved no deeper into the causes of that victory than to say they were the same as those who voted to leave the EU, we will have failed to understand the actual forces at work. The UK and US have very different pasts, different histories, different wounds, and different cultures. We are motivated not by amorphous, global grievances, but the very specific ones that create the world we see around us.

McNasty, Obama, and Race

The recent descent into the gutter by the McCain camp has led to wide speculation about what they're trying to say. The guy who's out in front of it with the best and most cutting analysis is Josh Marshall, who is determined not to let McNasty have it both ways--playing the race card and keeping his hands clean.

Effective messages hit multiple themes, different messages in different people's minds and even read differently on the first or the third reading. So is the Britney ad about emasculating Obama, as Robert George says? Yes. Is it also about simply pairing Obama up with Britney and Paris? Absolutely. It's both. And a lot more. In many cases, this game is simply a matter of taking charged images out into the public consciousness. They don't necessarily 'mean' one thing or another. You just push them out and they take on a life of their own.

In this case, if the point is to say that Obama's a celebrity, how exactly do you get from there to Britney Spears? Paris Hilton? Mull on that for a second. Are those the most logical analogues to Obama? Play it any way you want but somehow at the end of the day we end up with a campaign message based on promoting Obama as a song and dance man and paired with Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. How'd we get here? It's the GOP race and sex equivalent of all roads lead to Rome.

Newsday is more succinct:

So, they didn't pick other big celebrities, who were either men, or black, or married.

What they picked was two sexually available white women.

But it must have been a coincidence, because we know John McCain wants to run an elevated campaign focusing on the serious issues that America faces.

The race was always going to be about race, at least in part. I am actually pleased that McCain is going so negative so early. Cards on the table. Now we'll see where we are as a country.

On Race and Power in America

Digby writes the most astute post I've seen in the aftermath of Obama's race speech. She gives voice to many of the themes I've seen crop up in conversations I've had since the speech--ones I frankly haven't had the courage to voice.

Perhaps I have a different sense about this than others, but I personally didn't find what he said to be all that shocking. Many of his comments on racial issues were as true as they were discomfiting and his views on American error weren't illogical or unprecedented. Like virtually everyone else, I understood immediately upon hearing them that they were going to be a political problem but on the substance (except for the HIV stuff, which is rank conspiracy theorizing) they weren't indefensible. Indeed, they speak to the essence of what separates us from the lockstep, chauvinistic , American exceptionalism of the right. No, we aren't "blame America first" fifth columnists. But neither are we "blame America never" which means that we have a much clearer eye about our government's sometimes irrational and immoral actions than conservatives do.

You should go read the whole, long thing. It's worth the nine minutes. She essentially fleshes out the "more perfect union" idea Obama introduced, spicing it with unflinching liberalism he can't touch. She spoke some truths that, for the sake of political viability, no Democratic politician can ever make, like this:

The subjects of race and religion make people uncomfortable and challenge their own view of themselves creating all kinds of emotional dissonance. We saw that with Katrina, when even the most committed liberals didn't want to admit that race played a part in the response to the tragedy or the conditions that led to it. Time and again I was challenged on the subject by those who insisted it wasn't about race, it was about class, and by discussing it racial terms I was perpetuating the myth. I disagree. It is no myth. Progress has been made, but as I wrote at the time, the single most powerful lingering vestige of racism is an irrational fear of an angry black mob --- led by an angry black man. That informs the perpetual fear among whites that Obama mentions in his speech and that's the political minefield Obama and Reverend Wright walked into when those tapes surfaced.

and this:

And sadly, those who do that fighting are often considered to be "unamerican" and "unpatriotic" because by demanding that America change, they are making a case that America is not perfect. For the chauvinist, nationalist, exceptionalist right, (and the mindbogglingly provincial thinkers in the village) that is something you are not allowed to admit.

(Imagine a graceful segue here as I move on to a thought I've been mulling.) In an email discussion I had with a black woman over the Obama speech, we discussed what people say behind closed doors. What has mainly said among the non-blacks I know as a result of this speech is pretty much what Digby wrote in her post. But here's a key point: the people I know are statistical outliers. They're pacificists and Buddhists and vegetarians. They don't understand why Kucinich isn't mainstream.

And this is the point: there are many conversations among whites behind closed doors. Whites are not a demographic--especially in a country where they comprise 80% of the population. Some of them, like this guy who's making waves today, have evolved past eighteenth-century racism to mid-20th century racism. (Call it Dixiecrat racism: it's okay that whites don't own blacks, but for God's sake, don't let them use our toilets.) Others are outright racists. Others are not racist, but know that they can't comprehend what it looks like to live black in America and would rather not try. Others, like Obama pointed out, already feel kicked around and feel that it sucks that their status is not privileged, as they think blacks are. (A mindbender to be sure, but there you have it.)

If the speech did anything, it allowed us to start talking. Digby notes that it's going to be a hard road a'hoe for Obama to get elected in a country that has such a charged relationship to race. It's going to be tough, but whoever thought it wouldn't be? Progress is tough. Well, anyway.

Happy Easter, all--

Race and Intelligence

It seemed unnecessary to pile on to James Watson's racist comments about blacks and intelligence. But here's an interesting post that is worth a mention:

In my work with Fryer, we analyzed a newly available nationally representative survey of children ages two and under, done by the Department of Education. Included in this study are tests of mental ability around a child’s first birthday. While you might think it would be impossible to capture anything meaningful at such a young age, it turns out that these measures of one-year-olds’ intelligence are somewhat highly correlated with IQ scores at later ages, as well as with parental IQ scores.

The striking result we find is that there are no racial differences in mental functioning at age one, although a racial gap begins to emerge over the next few years of life.

So there you go.

Dogs and People

Larry O'Donnell has thrown the Huffington Post into a frenzy with a "what's the big deal?" post about the Vick dog-fighting scandal (currently 457 comments at this writing). Sample observation: "Between bites at McDonald's today there will be a lot of outrage expressed about Michael Vick getting off easy. I won't understand a word of it." Irreverance is what Larry does, and so it's not surprising he was the guy to write the post. He certainly wasn't the first one to make the observation, though.

You don't have to be a vegetarian to appreciate what's wrong with dog fighting. You don't have to be a vegetarian even to see what's wrong with the meat industry. We have these sexy brains that allow us to hold opposing views simultaneously--even while legitimately avoiding hypocrisy. Larry's sort of right then, but his grade on outrageousness exceeds his logic score.

Where the hypocrisy lies isn't with the outrage at Vick, it's that people aren't equally outraged by professional athletes' crimes against other people. I know the NFL has a long rap sheet, but I like the example of Kobe Bryant best--he's a star of a similar status as Vick, he's black, and he took advantage of his power over another being (he was accused of rape, a charge he managed to get settled out of court). And the outrage was ... well, there wasn't any, really. Kobe is now one of the biggest stars in the NBA and no one mentions this piece of history. Why?

The NAACP jumped in to defend Vick and asserted that the outrage was racially motivated. They were both wrong about Vick (you think people would let Peyton Manning kill dogs?), and wrong to miss a more important point. Why is it that no one cares when a young black man is shot or beaten up at a night club by a star athlete (an all-to-frequent occurance), but sent around the bend by abused animals?

We have a fractured society, one in which NASCAR rednecks can say the most horrific things about gay-lovin' liberals and feel the position is actually moral, and where liberals dismiss NASCAR rednecks as half-witted fascists with the same self-righteousness. We have done a great deal to distinguish ourselves from one another and rob our own compassion. This happens across political, racial, geographic, and religious lines.

But not so much across canine lines. Dogs we can relate to. Other people . . . ?

Hate Speech

Blogospheric navel gazing is low political art, but I don't think I can stomach a post on Iran or the Hillary-Obama scrum for black voters. So it's off to a minor rebellion in the blogosphere, where righties are rallying forces against Ann Coulter.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference [CPAC] in 2006, Coulter referred to Iranians as “ragheads.” She is one of the most prominent women in the conservative movement; for her to employ such reckless language reinforces the stereotype that conservatives are racists.

At CPAC 2007 Coulter decided to turn up the volume by referring to John Edwards, a former U.S. Senator and current Presidential candidate, as a “faggot.” Such offensive language–and the cavalier attitude that lies behind it–is intolerable to us. It may be tolerated on liberal websites but not at the nation’s premier conservative gathering.

It concludes with a request to CPAC to banish Coulter from future events. Righties have begun, reluctantly, to admit that she may not be so hot for the party anymore. (It appears they don't actually disagree with her or disapprove of her words--they were great back when the GOP was attempting a soft coup of the government--but now they appear gauche, and so she's gotta go.) Of course, righties, forever aggrieved, paranoid, and thin-skinned, want to point out that while Coulter is indeed nasty, she's a teddy bear compared to lefties.

This is GOP 101 (aka, the five-year-old's strategy): no matter how great the crime of a Republican, some Dem somewhere has committed a greater atrocity. This is, of course, a further manifestation of the paranoid and thin-skinned personality of a party who has called John Kerry and Max Cleland a traitor, Michael J. Fox a liar, and the Democratic Party traitors and treasonists. But let us examine these charges, just because it's a slow day and it's an amusing diversion. Blogger Patterico prepares a rap sheet, among which are these dandies:

Comedian and (former) talk show host Craig Kilborn [Caption under footage of George W. Bush]:

Snipers Wanted

Comedian Chris Rock:

If President Clinton would pardon me I would whip Starr’s ass right now. I will get a crew from Brooklyn and we will stomp him like, like, we’re Savion Glover. We’ll stomp him like it’s bringing da noise.

You see, Chris Rock and Craig Kilborn--this is the kind of material had had to offer. In fact, scanning through all the horrible things all the Democrats and liberals have ever said, he managed just a single Democratic party A-lister, Howard Dean, whose devastating comment was? "I hate Republicans and everything they stand for." Yeah, that's the equivalent of calling John Edwards a fag (a deeply bigoted comment meant to question Edwards' masculinity and--bonus!--offend gays).

Dems have had their racist comments, as Patterico documents, but when Jesse used the word "Hymie," he was held to account by liberals. But he must cite Louis Farrakhan four times, highlighting the central absence of racism within the liberal orbit.

In fact, Patterico accomplishes something he didn't intend: Dems and liberals, he illustrates, almost never say the kinds of things Coulter does. And, when one does, it is some obscure character like an Alabama Representative or a British pundit (!). Furthermore, by demonstrating that these are isolated cases, he shows that there is no movement approval, as is the case with the very clubby right-wing smear machine (from the Fox pundits to Limbaugh to the attack ads of Rove and coordinated PACs like Swift Boats).

Finally, Patterico highlights the different nature of the attacks and the different ways in which the parties handle racist/offensive language. First, the nature of the attacks. On the one hand, Coulter (for whom gay is a them): "I don't know if he's gay. But [former Vice President] Al Gore -- total fag. ...Everyone has always known, widely promiscuous heterosexual men have, as I say, a whiff of the bathhouse about them."

Now, let's take one of Patterico's "hate speech" examples, from Nina Totenberg, discussing Jesse Helms: "If there is retributive justice [Sen. Jesse Helms] will get AIDS from a transfusion, or one of his grandchildren will get it."

In the first case, Coulter launches an ad hominem attack on Gore based on who he is (or in this case, isn't). Totenberg, whom I assume was talkign about a Helms effort to block AIDS legislation, makes an admittedly harsh comment about Helms based on his actions. Big difference. Except with the racist commments Patterico details, that's the case with all his comments.

And then there's the way the parties handle things. When a Democrat makes a racist comment, as Jesse did, there's a firestorm and he's forced to apologize. When righties attack, they are given key posts in the Bush administration or fat raises by Fox News. In fact, Patterico unwittingly drives this point home with regard to the current Coulter flap: note that no one's asking her to apologize; they're just hoping she'll go away.

Black and White

"Whites, on the other hand, are engaged in a paroxysm of self-congratulation; [Barack Obama] is the equivalent of Stephen Colbert's "black friend." Swooning over nice, safe Obama means you aren't a racist. I honestly can't look without feeling pity, and indeed mercy, at whites' need for absolution. For all our sakes, it seemed (again) best not to point out the obvious: You're not embracing a black man, a descendant of slaves. You're replacing the black man with an immigrant of recent African descent of whom you can approve without feeling either guilty or frightened. If he were Ronald Washington from Detroit, even with the same résumé, he wouldn't be getting this kind of love. Washington would have to earn it, not just show promise of it, and even then whites would remain wary."

--Debra Dickerson, Salon

Americans have always had a rough relationship with race. Each new wave of immigrants, from Irish to Mexican, has been targeted by the most vile kind of bigotry. But eventually, immigrants become absorbed into the American mainstream; except for fringe racists, America becomes colorblind until the next generation arrives.

The exception are blacks, whose integration has been legal at best. We--Americans--hold blacks in a special category. And it's not just whites who maintain this cultural apartheid--Dickerson's piece, widely reviled in the blogosphere, isn't isolated. We have constructed elaborate projections about not only what race means, but what it means to people on the other side of the aisle. We have boxed up what it means to be black and white and sealed it in a time capsule. Whites can either admit to their racism or displace it while blacks must embrace a preset definition of "blackness" or stand accused of complicity with white racists.

Last week, Stephen Colbert had Dickerson on his show and managed to expose these ridiculous dichotomies. Listen:

DICKERSON: Well, I think that's what's going to happen. I think Barack Obama is a wonderful person, we're proud of him, but--and this is not a critique of him, what this is is a critique of white self-congratulation, of saying we're embracing a black person, when we're not really. It's a way of--if he were sub-saharan African--

COLBERT: Well listen, if you hadn't told me he wasn't black, I would have thought that I was supporting a black person. And then I would have been supporting all black people. But now I won't because he's not.

DICKERSON: (Laughs uncomfortably) Well, then that would make you a racist.

COLBERT: (Ponders) Hmmmm. If I were white.

Later--

COLBERT: So it sounds to me like you are judging blackness not on the color of someone's skin, but on the content of their character. Which I think realizes Dr. King's dream in a very special way.

Barack Obama's candidacy is going to create a lot of discomfort as we work through these issues again. That Obama's black, far more than that his middle name is Hussein or that he's a moderately liberal Democrat or that he's relatively inexperienced, is going to make it nearly impossible to get elected. He's getting strafed by the Dickersons of the left even while Fox News has set up an entire bureau devoted to slandering him. But what comes out of his candidacy may have some positive results. Maybe we can break out of these ancient boxes.

Incidentally, here's the clip of that Colbert-Dickerson interview.