Ta-Nehisi Coates's Blog, page 17

John Roberts And The Color Of Money

My friend and MIT colleague Tom Levenson watched, with some interests, the debate between myself and Jonathan Chait. On a whim, Tom pulled together some more thoughts on campaign finance reform that, I think, help spin this conversation forward. His insights are below.

There has been plenty of talk about  the Ta-Nehisi Coates-Jonathan Chait argument over the term "black culture" in the context of the ills of poverty and the question of progress as seen through the lens of the actual history of America.

A drastically shortened version of Coates’ analysis is that white supremacy -- and the imposition of white power on African American bodies and property -- have been utterly interwoven through the history of American democracy, wealth and power from the beginnings of European settlement in North America. The role of the exploitation of African American lives in the construction of American society and polity did not end in 1865. Rather, through the levers of law, lawless violence, and violence under the color of law, black American aspirations to wealth, access to capital, access to political power, a share in the advances of the social safety net and more have all been denied with greater or less efficiency.  There has been change -- as Coates noted in a conversation he and I had a couple of years ago, in 1860 white Americans could sell children away from their parents, and in 1865 they could not -- and that is a real shift.  But such beginnings did not mean that justice was being done nor equity experienced.

Once you start seeing American history through the corrective lens created by the generations of scholars and researchers on whose work Coates reports, then it becomes possible – necessary, really  -- to read current events in a new light.  Take, for example, the McCutcheon decision that continued the Roberts Court program of gutting campaign finance laws.

The conventional -- and correct, as far as it goes -- view of the outcome, enabling wealthy donors to contribute to as many candidates as they choose, is that this further tilts the political playing field towards the richest among us at the expense of every American voter.  See noted analyst Jon Stewart for a succinct presentation of this view.

But that first-order take on this latest from the Supreme Court's right wing misses a crucial dimension.  It isn't just rich folks who benefit from the Roberts Court's view that money = speech.  Those who gain possess other key identifiers. For one thing, they form a truly a tiny elite.  As oral arguments in McCutcheon v. FEC were being prepared last fall, the Public Campaign delivered a report on all those who approached the money limits the court struck down.  They amount to just 1,219 people in the US -- that's 4 in every 1,000,000 of our population.  

Unsurprisingly, most of the report simply reinforces the main theme of the reaction to the Supreme Court's decision:  this is one more step towards securing governance of, for and by rich people and their well-compensated servants.  One of the most troubling aspects of the story is that the top donors in this country simply don't encounter ordinary folks, the middle class no more than the poor:

Nearly half of the elite donors (47.6 percent) live in the richest one percent of neighborhoods, as measured by per capita income, and more than four out of every five (80.5 percent) are from the richest 10 percent.

Equally unsurprisingly, the world of top donors is overwhelmingly male:

Of donors for whom gender data were available, only 25.7 percent of the elite donors in 2012 were women, even lower than the paltry one-third of donors giving at least $200 to a federal campaign that election cycle. Also, 304 superlimit donors have a spouse or other family member as another member of list, which could indicate either a very politically interested family or a way for one donor to circumvent the existing limits through contributions in his or her spouse’s name. Of the donors without another family member on the list, only 17.7 percent are women.

And against the argument that regardless of the source of the money, cash is gender blind, I give you both data and Nancy Pelosi:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) identifies big money as a key factor holding this number down: “If you reduce the role of money in politics and increase the level of civility, you’ll have more women elected to public office, and sooner, and that nothing is more wholesome to the governmental and political process than increased participation of women.”

In contrast, further increasing the role of money in politics by removing the aggregate contribution limit means the Supreme Court may end up pushing down women’s role in campaigns even further. CRP’s “Sex, Money and Politics,” report also found that “Women tend to make up a larger percentage of the donor pool when contribution amounts are limited by law.” It continues to note that the three cycles in which loopholes for sending unlimited contributions to political parties or outside groups like super PACs were largely closed, women played a larger role: “In the 2004, 2006 and 2008 cycles, which were the only three since 1990 with strict donation limits restricting the amount of money a single individual could give, the percentage of women as a portion of the donor pool increased.”

But even these pathologies are vastly less severe than those to be found through the lens of race.  People of color are almost entirely absent from the top donor profile, and none more so than members of the community that white Americans enslaved for two centuries:

While more than one-in-six Americans live in a neighborhood that is majority African-American or Hispanic, less than one-in-50 superlimit donors do. More than 90 percent of these elite donors live in neighborhoods with a greater concentration of non- Hispanic white residents than average. African-Americans are especially underrepresented. The median elite donor lives in a neighborhood where the African-American population counts for only 1.4 percent, nine times less than the national rate.

IOW:  political money and hence influence at the top levels is disproportionately white, male, and with almost no social context that includes significant numbers of African Americans and other people of color.

This is why money isn't speech. Freedom of speech as a functional element in democratic life assumes that such freedom can be meaningfully deployed.   But the unleashing of yet more money into politics allows a very limited class of people to drown out the money "speech" of everyone else -- but especially those with a deep, overwhelmingly well documented history of being denied voice and presence in American political life.

Now take the work of the Roberts Court in ensuring that rule of cash, the engine of political power for an overwhelmingly white upper-upper crust, with combine those decisions with the conclusions of the court on voting rights, and you get a clear view of what the five-justice right-wing majority has done.  Controlling access to the ballot has been a classic tool of white supremacy since the end of Reconstruction.  It is so once again, as states seizing on the Roberts Court Voting Rights Act decision take aim at exactly those tools with which African Americans increased turnout and the proportion of minority voters within the electorate.  There's not even much of an attempt to disguise what's going on.

Hell, add all this to the Roberts decision to free states from the tyranny of being forced to accept federal funds to provide health care to the poor.  When John Roberts declared that Obamacare's Medicaid expansion would be optional, the decision sounded colorblind -- states could deny succor to their poor of any race -- in practice, that is to say in the real world, this decision hits individual African Americans and their communities the hardest …. as Coates wrote way back when.

So:  money, which disproportionately defends existing power structures, is unfettered; ease of voting, which at least in theory permits challenges to such structures, is constrained; and a series of decisions seeming devoid of racial connection presses thumbs the scale ever harder against the chance that in the real world African Americans will have get to play on a level field.

'The Joy Women Express Over 100-Calorie Snack Packs Is Not to Be Believed'

I think Roxane Gay's piece on The Biggest Loser is pretty phenomenal. Gay, wh watched the show for several seasons, pegs her essay to contestant Rachel Fredrickson's alarming weight loss--155 pounds over the course of the season, nearly 60 percent of her body-weight. But the heart of the piece is all Roxane Gay:

My body is wildly undisciplined and I deny myself nearly everything I desire. I deny myself the right to space when I am public, trying to fold in on myself, to make my body invisible even though it is, in fact, grandly visible. I deny myself the right to a shared armrest because how dare I impose? I deny myself entry into certain spaces I have deemed inappropriate for a body like mine—most spaces inhabited by other people. 
 
I deny myself bright colors in my clothing choices, sticking to a uniform of denim and dark shirts even though I have a far more diverse wardrobe. I deny myself certain trappings of femininity as if I do not have the right to such expression when my body does not follow society’s dictates for what a woman’s body should look like. I deny myself gentler kinds of affection—to touch or be kindly touched—as if that is a pleasure a body like mine does not deserve. 
 
Punishment is, in fact, one of the few things I allow myself. I deny myself my attractions. I have them, oh I do, but dare not express them, because how dare I want. How dare I confess my want? How dare I try to act on that want? I deny myself so much and still there is so much desire throbbing beneath my surfaces. 
 
Denial merely puts what we want just beyond reach but we still know it’s there. 

Wow.

It's so hard to get naked on the page. It's one of the hardest things to convey in my essay classes. You must be naked. You must understand that clothes are the illusion, and  your readers are naked too. Humans are at war with themselves. Once you can accept this, your own wars become less shameful. I don't mean exhibitionism. I mean honesty. The clothes are the illusion.

I'll be teaching this in workshop, tomorrow.

As an aside, Roxane Gay writes the greatest zombi stories in the world.

Barack Obama's Challenge to American Morality

If you haven't yet, it's work checking out Barack Obama's address before the National Action Network, last week. I think it's one of the most significant and morally grounded speeches of his presidency. I think we will eventually regard this current effort to suppress the vote through voter-ID laws, ending early voting, restricting voting hours, etc., in the same way we regard literacy tests and poll taxes. (It's worth recalling this piece for the magazine by Mariah Blake which helps historicize voter suppression.)

I believe in judging Barack Obama's rhetoric and policies not as though he were the president of black America, but of the United States of America. On that count his speech soared. There aren't many topics more important than the security of our democracy. The president did not attack that topic gingerly, but forcefully, directly and without hedge.

It's an important speech.

As an aside, I'll add that I still can't get over seeing a black dude, who is the president, standing in front of Garvey's red, black, and green. Strange days, I tell you. Strange days, indeed. No one knows where this is going.

The Devastating Effects of Concentrated Poverty

Last week I was lucky enough to sit on a panel with social scientists Patrick Sharkey, Paul Jargowsky, and Sherrilyn Ifill who heads the NAACP-LDF. We focused our conversation on concentrated poverty with  a strong emphasis on its effects on black people. I've talked about Sharkey's work quite a bit. His presentation is as impressive as his research. At one point, Sharkey displayed a chart which showed that the average black family making $100,000 a year lives in the same kind of neighborhood as the average white family making $30,000 a year. It's worth your time.

Here's a link to the Pew study on the wealth gap I reference. In turns out I underestimated the wealth gap.  Here's a link to Paul Jargowsky's disturbing study on the concentration of poverty across America.

'He Hated Error More Than He Loved Truth'

A few notes for some folks who are interested in the winding path to the Blue Period:

1.) A friend sent along the following quotes from Michael Oakeshott on the limits of awesome sonnage. Oakeshott is critiquing Hobbs who raised sonnage to historic levels:

...The blood of contention ran in his veins. He acquired the lucid genius of a great expositor of ideas; but by disposition he was a fighter, and he knew no tactics save attack. He was a brilliant controversialist, deft, pertinacious and imaginative, and he disposed of the errors of scholastics, Puritans and Papists with a subtle mixture of argument and ridicule.

But he made the mistake of supposing that this style was universally effective, in mathematics no less than in politics. For brilliance in controversy is a corrupting accomplishment. Always to play to win is to take one’s standards from one’s opponent, and local victory comes to displace every other consideration. Most readers will find Hobbes’s disputatiousness excessive; but it is the defect of an exceptionally active mind.

And it never quite destroyed in him the distinction between beating an opponent and establishing a proposition, and never quite silenced the conversation with himself which is the heart of philosophical thinking. But, like many controversialists, he hated error more than he loved truth, and came to depend overmuch on the stimulus of opposition. There is sagacity in Hobbes, and often a profound deliberateness; but there is no repose.

I didn't finish Leviathan. I hope to get back to it. I'm sure some folks in the Horde will disagree with this characterization. But I think the deeper point about "brilliance in controversy" is one for the ages. It's tough to remember that you must never do it for them. It's tough to remember why you came. Why you came was not to be lauded for "destroying," "owning," or otherwise sonning anyone. You must always define the debate and not allow the debate--and all its volume and spectacle--to define you. 

2.) As noted before, I first began seriously considering the immortality of white supremacy after listening to Nell Irvin Painter. I say "seriously considering" to distinguish it from the kind of general cynicism toward white America that a lot of black people feel. I felt that and then lost most of it with the election of Barack Obama. What followed wasn't cynicism--which I think is really just another specimen of naiveté-- but something more haunting and real. Here are a couple interviews on that point--one with Phoebe Judge at WUNC in the Research Triangle in North Carolina, the other with Jonathan Judaken before a lecture at Rhodes College in Memphis.

3.) Horde Legionnaire Absurdbeats has done the tremendous--and laudable--labor of compiling virtually every single book and scholarly article I've ever spoken of on this blog. Some of them remain unfinished--Leviathan, The Origins of Species and Discipline and Punish, being the major ones. The two that really pushed me over were were Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom and Barbara and Karen Fields' Racecraft. Morgan is indispensable. There is no single book I've found myself reviewing more over the past five years. 

4.) Barbara and Karen Fields' Racecraft is curious compilation of essays that I did not quite get when I first read it. Below I've embedded a video of me and Barbara Fields discussing the book. I was still processing its thesis even as I was interviewing to her. (I remember being really afraid of looking stupid.) But the basic argument is that Americans tend to speak of "race" as a biological constant, which it isn't. That notion it, itself, a product of racism. Racecraft is the process by which something moves from the condemnable (racism) to the value-neutral (racism.)

Thus we say that we need a "conversation on race" or "race divides America" or we speak of "different races." Another way to say this is we need to have a "conversation on racism" or "racism divides America," or to speak of "historical victims of racism." This is very key. The was no white and black race until we created one, and this creation was--itself--an act of racism, done to justify other acts of racism. Presuming that there is biological constant called "white" and "black" removes human actors, elides responsibility, and annihilates history.

Around 39:30 you can hear Fields give a good explanation for the process of racecraft.

6.) The New York Times has a great video about "The Superpredator" era of social policy in the 90s. In many ways it brings us full circle. It's protagonist is John Diulio, who with William Bennett, authored the book Body Count which predicted that a wave of "godless" and "fatherless" and "jobless" juvenile criminals would soon descend on America. You will remember that it was in the company Bennett that Paul Ryan offered his unlettered critique of inner city culture. Bennet and Diulio were wrong--horribly so, as the film lays out. America's black communities are still paying the price, and will continue to for some time. That is danger of crafting policy as though we have no history and writing off broad swaths as culturally pathological.

7.) We began with Oakeshott. It seems fitting to end with one of his disciples. I recommend checking out Andrew's attempt to think his way through this. It's admirable and more writers should do it. I very often strenuously disagree with Andrew over the force of white supremacy in American history and the American present. At the same time, Andrew was a big, big influence in my efforts to master the art of thinking publicly. Sometimes our teachers come in unexpected clothing. We are better for taking the lesson, nonetheless. 

Black Pathology Crowdsourced

I think it might help this discussion to offer some sense of how I came to my views on culture and white supremacy. I want to go back to the original piece I wrote, "A Culture of Poverty," and highlight an exchange I had in comments. Then I want to point to a recent note I received which helped clarify things even more.

Many of you know Yoni Appelbaum. He came to us originally under the handle Cynic. I can name several academics who've influenced my thinking over the past five years—Barbara Fields, Nell Irvin Painter, Drew Gilpin Faust, Patrick Sharkey, Arnold Hirsch, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Tony Judt, and a bunch more. As much as any of the people, Yoni has helped me really sharpen my thinking on the centrality of white supremacy in American history. (This is not gush. There's an entire section of this piece that I owe to him.)

In the original column I had a hazy notion about practices fitting environments. Put differently, I believed that culture made sense when understood within the context in which it operated. One might note, for instance, that married black women—as a practice—tend to have fewer children then married white women. I actually don't know why that is. But if I wanted to find out, I would start from the premise that there is something tangible, discernible, and knowable in the world of married black people that animates that practice. Too often "culture" is basically spoken in the way one might say "magic."

I later sharpened that point in other columns. But it was Yoni who first bought this home for me:

Spot on.

But I'd add that it works this way in reverse, too. It's a point seldom made. I was reading a new memoir the other day, by a Harvard graduate who went to work as a prison librarian. Much of the book is an account of his acculturation. He discovered that his robes and spell books, so to speak, were a lot less useful than plate and a broad-sword. That he couldn't afford to be seen as a punk. He was perfectly equipped for a comfortable, upper-middle-class life—and wholly unprepared for his new environment.

We tend to associate culturally-specific practices with the relative successes of the cultures with which they're associated. Things rich people do must be beneficial; habits of the poor, not. The reality is more complex. Culture of Poverty is a label attached to a wide array of behaviors. There are behaviors—physical assertiveness—well-suited to that environment that may tend to inhibit success elsewhere. There are other behaviors—emphasis on familial and communal ties—that will cut both ways, sustaining people in difficult times but sometimes making it harder for them to place their individual needs above the demands of the group. And there are others—initiative and self-reliance—that are largely positive, and in many ways, even more advantageous if carried further up the social scale.

I bristle when I see people discuss the culture of poverty as a pathology. That's too self-congratulatory, and too cramped a view. The reality is that, like all cultures, it has aspects that translate well to other circumstances, those that translate poorly, and those that are just plain different. And that's no different than the Culture of Affluence.

That was crucial. I understood that cultural practices made sense in their context. But Yoni complicated it even further—some practices hurt, some practices help, and some practices don't matter at all. This really was a knock-you-on-your-ass moment for me, because I could think of my own life and see exactly that. At Howard University, I had a culture—a set of practices—that I employed in intellectual debate that are different than most people I encounter online. We tended to argue from history, and there was premium (somewhat obnoxious) on book citations.

That tradition came out of a sense that we had been "robbed" of history and culture and had to reclaim it—as Douglass did, as Malcolm did, as Zora did. Consider the constant (if inaccurate) quip employed in the black community that the easiest place to hide something from a nigger (and that was how it was said) was between the pages of a book. We were responding to that. My style of arguing—a practice coming out of my environment—was formed there. I would not trade it for anything.

I talk to Yoni from time to time. In fact, a lot of us here at The Atlantic do. (Rebecca Rosen calls him the best critical reader of The Atlantic, hands down.) Taking in the early portion of the culture-of-poverty debate, Yoni offered the following:

Your post sends me back to The North American Review, which asked, in 1912, "Are the Jews an Inferior Race?" It answered the question, resoundingly, in the negative, but the more salient point is that the point was then very much in doubt. After the long centuries Jews spent in Europe marked as a minority, tolerated or persecuted, there was no shortage of thinkers willing to advance the claim that Jewish inferiority was innate, or at the very least, an ineradicable element of a broken culture. "Based on anthropology and biased by personal psychology," explained the author, "anti-Semitic literature advances the theory that the Jewish race is divested of the higher forms of genius and is to be regarded as an uncreative, imitative, practical, and utilitarian body. Mental inferiority and spiritual impotency circulate accordingly in the very blood of the Jew." 

The article was, itself, a response to a letter in a previous issue that considered that the Jews, in "all their immiscibility," had survived centuries without sovereignty only at the cost of producing, "a character so unattractive, even repellent, their shortcomings even in righteousness and their insignificance in everything else, without poetry, without science, without art, and without character." 

That's one example. There are innumerable others. My point is that, at the time, it seemed perfectly reasonable to conclude that Jewish culture, whether innate or the product of prolonged persecution, had itself become a significant impediment to success. But that, a century later, it seems impossible to reconcile the idea that Jewish culture was the problem with the record of success that Jews produced over the following hundred years, in those nations in which they were not similarly persecuted. 

Now, we get Jed Rubenfeld explaining how that same culture—formerly blamed for Jewish inferiority—is actually a distinct advantage. And just so, a hundred years from now, there will be bestsellers explaining how black culture, forged in centuries of adversity, accounts for the remarkable success of the African-American community. The point is that the same sets of cultural characteristics operate very differently in different circumstances. And to focus on the culture—rather than the circumstances—seems obtuse.

Yoni is the Yoni of Atlantic Media.

More seriously, I really would like to see more historians in these debates. We have plenty of people with economics background, with political-science backgrounds, and some even with sociology backgrounds. But it feels like there is a massive gulf between how people who study American history see their country, and how not just Americans but American journalists see their country. Forgive me if that is too sweeping.

I keep thinking about this idea of pessimism. A few weeks ago I was at Rhodes College for a conference. I ended up sitting at dinner with the historian Thavolia Glymph, and some other historians of note. Glymph's work is a corrective to the idea that there was some sort of sisterhood between plantation matriarchs and enslaved black women. She was talking about some of the evidence she'd seen and she said that—"When you read a woman's diary and in the middle of dinner she pulls out a knife and slashes her servant, you start to understand." That's not an exact quote. But the point I am making is that I've had the luxury of reading, and now visiting with, a number of scholars (historians, anthropologists, some multi-disciplinary folks) and what you get isn't The Adventures of Flagee and Ribbon.

Indeed you often get something much darker then what I'm giving you here. At that same conference I was noting—as I often do—that the Wilmington coup in 1898 is the only coup in American history. The historians in the room looked at me like I was crazy. (Timothy Tyson literally shouted "Noooooo" from the audience.) That's because, as I was told, the truth is much worse. There have been plenty of coups in American history—most of them dating to Reconstruction, and animated by white supremacy. How's that for depressing?

We deserve more of that in our lives. We deserve to see ourselves fully. It's not our history that makes me fatalistic, it's our history of looking away. 

       

Race, Culture, and Poverty: The Path Forward

One thing that happens in the kind of debates we've just seen between myself and Jonathan Chait is that people count up points to see who's sonned who. I shall be honest here: I prefer to son than be sonned. But if the conversation ends merely in sonnage, we've lost something. For black people, this conversation is not an abstract thought experiment nor merely a stimulating debate, after which we may repair to our lounges and exchange quips over martinis (though if you're going to do that, do it with Hendrick's). These are our lives. When you are black, no matter how prosperous, the war is right outside your door—around the corner, a phone call away, at a family reunion. 

The primary goal of this space is to promote clarity and understanding. The sonning of all interlocutors must always play the back. That is because those of us who seek clarity know that even if we son today, we almost certainly will be sonned tomorrow. Sometimes—in fact often times—the greatest clarity comes in being sonned. My greatest lessons have come to me on my ass, with someone—my dad, my mom, my professor, my editor, my friend, a commenter—standing over me. Seeking clarity is not the business of being right. I hope to often be right. But I know inevitably I must, at least sometimes, be sonned. 

In my conversation with Jonathan Chait, I believe that I am right. But more importantly, I hope to know more. Here is another step in that endeavor. The social scientists Kathryn Edin and Timothy J. Nelson have authored a well-regarded study of unmarried inner-city fathers, Doing The Best I Can.

The authors begin by laying out three familiar portraits of fathers.

First from William Bennett:

“It is unmarried fathers who are missing in record numbers, who impregnate women and selfishly flee,” raged conservative former U.S. secretary of education William Bennett in his 2001 book, The Broken Hearth. “And it is these absent men, above all, who deserve our censure and disesteem. Abandoning alike those who they have taken as sexual partners, and whose lives they have created, they strike at the heart of the marital ideal, traduce generations yet to come, and disgrace their very manhood.”

Second from Bill Cosby:

“No longer is a boy considered an embarrassment if he tries to run away from being the father of the unmarried child,” Bill Cosby declared in 2004 at the NAACP’s gala commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Brown versus Board of Education, as he publicly indicted unwed fathers for merely “inserting the sperm cell” while blithely eschewing the responsibilities of fatherhood.

And then from the president:

Then, in 2007, two days before Father’s Day, presidential candidate Barack Obama admonished the congregants of Mount Moriah Baptist Church in Spartanburg, South Carolina, saying, “There are a lot of men out there who need to stop acting like boys, who need to realize that responsibility does not end at conception, who need to know that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child but the courage to raise one."

Edin and Nelson also lay out an infamous portrait of a deadbeat African-American father, Timothy McSeed, (yes, really) that ran on CBS in 1986. The father showed little regard for his children, asserting: "If a girl, you know, she's having a baby, carryin' a baby, that's on her, you know? I'm not going to stop my pleasures."

The portrait sent the media into a fit of rage at absent fathers, and black absent fathers in particular:

William Raspberry’s brother-in-law wrote the noted columnist that the day after viewing the program, he drove past a young black couple and found himself reacting with violent emotion. “I was looking at a problem, a threat, a catastrophe, a disease. Suspicion, disgust and contempt welled up within me.” But it was George Will who reached the heights of outraged rhetoric in his syndicated column, declaring that “the Timothies are more of a menace to black progress than the Bull Connors ever were."

Edin and Nelson, taking note of these portrayals, lay out a simple goal:

The conventional wisdom spun by pundits and public intellectuals across the political spectrum blames the significant difficulties that so many children born to unwed parents face—poor performance in school, teen pregnancy and low school-completion rates, criminal behavior, and difficulty securing a steady job—on their fathers’ failure to care. The question that first prompted our multiyear exploration into the lives of inner-city, unmarried fathers is whether this is, in fact, the case.

What I hope to take from this, and from future reading, is something beyond dueling rhetoric. A writer is, mostly, a professional amateur. Part of the job (the least important I'd argue) is fighting with other writers. But most of it is posing questions to people who know more than you. Edin and Nelson offer on the ground research with 110 fathers—black and white—in Camden, New Jersey, and Philadelphia. Certainly what they report back cannot be definitive. But it can be informative. And it can take us away from the land of thought experiments and theorizing, into the world of real people doing real things. I look forward to reporting the results. 

Donc, on y va. Or as we say in the tongue of black pathologia—once again, it's on.

       

For the Horde

Here is your open thread. I will try to do this more often.

       

For The Horde

Here is your open thread. I will try to do this more often.

       

The Blue Period: An Origin Story

 

The secret origins of "the blue period"--if that's what we're calling it--lay in the video embedded above. In it,  historian Nell Irvin Painter discusses her book A History Of White People and calmly, and methodically breaks my heart:

On the other hand, the idea of blackness, that is poor dark-skinned people, I think we will have that with us always, and when we particularly at this moment of economic crisis and this moment in which we have a small number of very rich people and a lot of people who are kind of scraping by and then tremendous differences.  We have a great inequality of wealth and income.  This group of people who are scraping by, there will be a lot of them, but they will probably be largely black and brown and that will tend to reinforce racial ideas.  So on the upper strata, among these few people up here who are doing very well there will be people of various colors and from various backgrounds, but they will probably not be so racialized as the people who are not doing well. 

You can see from my posting at the time I was sort of horrified by Painter's argument. It didn't really mesh with my worldview at the time. At that point I was a progressive in every sense of the word. I believed that you could sketch a narrative of progress in this country from enslavement to civil rights. It seemed logical, to me, that this progress would end--some day--with the complete vanquishing of white supremacy. 

I probably first came across Painter as a young child. My Dad had a ridiculous collection of black books and I'd just swim through them. I certainly knew about her during by my late teenage years at Howard. By then I understood her to be one of the great historians of our era. I also came to understand at Howard the historians are heartbreakers. I have often referred to my history professors destroying all my Afrocentric fantasies, and then telling me that I must, somehow, pick up the pieces and argue for my humanity. The Nubians, for whom I was named, weren't going to cut it. I thought about that for awhile--history and humanity. The history I had been taught had been crafted by humans for political aims. And if these black people truly were human, than it meant that other people likely would also do the same. Even my countrymen. 

Years after Howard I sat with Painter on a panel at the United Nations. Her poise was ridiculous. There was something modest and grand about how she carried herself. I thought it was the aura of a person in full awareness of their big brain and all that it can do. Once I got over my fear of speaking in her presence, I found her to be one of the sharpest people I'd ever engaged. Her assessment of white supremacy  cut to the core of me. I had always considered a vaguely-defined "hope" to be a prerequisite for write. What kind of intellectual confronts a problem and concludes, "Beats the hell out me."

I had, by then at least, gotten past the idea that history was pep rally, that if France had walls, Zimbabwe must have walls too. I also knew that Nell Painter knew a good deal more about America than me. If she thought this would always be with us, then I had better take that notion seriously.

That was four years ago. I knew something about redlining and the New Deal. But not really. I certainly had never heard of contract lending. I knew about the wealth gap, but not really. I was grappling with the Civil War. I had some sense of Reconstruction. I had begun to grasp that slavery was not a side practice in America, but big business.  I still (sort of) believed in "class-based" solutions, for racist problems. I hadn't read Patrick Sharkey's research into neighborhoods. I hadn't grappled with Robert Sampson's work on Chicago and the vast gulf that divides blacks and whites. I hadn't read Walter Johnson's work on the intrastate slave trade. I hadn't thought about Rousseau's sense of slavery as useful killing. I hadn't reas Isabel Wilkerso. 

And I hadn't thought at all about what any of this meant for humanity. I hadn't read about Japanese soldiers practicing beheading techniques on their fallen prisoners.  I hadn't read any of Tony Judt's books. I hadn't grappled, at all, with communism. I didn't then know who Timothy Snyder was. I had no sense of a world where morality depends, almost exactly, upon the size of your arsenal and your distance from the conflict. I had not grappled with a Poland pillaged by Nazis, pillaged by Russians, the Nazis turning on the Russians, and then the Russians "liberating" the Poles, and then subjugating them. Again. 

I had not, then, read James Baldwin in almost twenty years. I had forgotten some things:

White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this -- which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never -- the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.

People more advantageously placed than we in Harlem were, and are, will no doubt find the psychology and the view of human nature sketched above dismal and shocking in the extreme. But the Negro's experience of the white world cannot possibly create in him any respect for the standards by which the white world claims to live. His own condition is overwhelming proof that white people do not live by these standards....

In spite of the Puritan-Yankee equation of virtue with well-being, Negroes had excellent reasons for doubting that money was made or kept by any very striking adherence to the Christian virtues; it certainly did not work that way for black Christians. In any case, white people, who had robbed black people of their liberty and who profited by this theft every hour that they lived, had no moral ground on which to stand. 

They had the judges, the juries, the shotguns, the law -- in a word, power. But it was a criminal power, to be feared but not respected, and to be outwitted in any way whatever. And those virtues preached but not practiced by the white world were merely another means of holding Negroes in subjection.

And I'm not done. I haven't yet grappled with Israel. My whole project suffers from a kind of bias. I haven't thought about the black diaspora--Cuba, Brazil, Haiti, Venezuela--in years. I haven't even considered India and China--a giant swath of humanity and history. I don't think a human gets to see all of this before dying. But I want to see as much of it as I can. And here is the key thing--it thrills me to see it. I love seeing it. I love knowing. The knowing is its own reward. The ability to frame the question is it's own gift--even if you can't quite name the answer.

I think now, four years after watching that video, and having read A History of White People, that I am a writer. And that is not a hustle. And this is not my "in" to get on Meet The Press, to become an activist, to get my life-coach game on. I don't need anymore platforms. I am here to see things as clearly as I can, and then name them. Sometimes what I see is gorgeous. And then sometimes what I see is ugly. And sometimes my sight fails me. But what I write can never be dictated by anyone's need to feel warm and fuzzy inside:

The TNC of 2010 who wrote that great piece seemed like the kind of guy his father was. Tough. Strict with his kids. And all because he knew the world out there really is wicked and unfair, but that ultimately you can make it if you pay attention to what’s going on around you. Anyone can rise above it and find their way to a decent life. I’m now left wondering if that TNC still exists.  Does he tell his son to just quit or move to some other country because there is no hope for the U.S.?

In short, TNC is angry, and that anger is clouding his vision.

I pray my friend circles back to hope soon.

Golly-gee. 

I think it's hard for people who know you for your work, to grasp that they don't actually know you. And  it's hard for people to get that if they refer to you as an acronym, they probably have never referred to "you" at all. And none of my friends are anonymous. The work gets dark and people think I must be dark. But they don't know and they can't see what's right in front of them--I was born dark. 

I never expected a single thing I wrote to change anything. Writing rarely does. I never expect to make any white person see anything. It's beside the point. And if they do, I hope they go read more. My aims are fairly limited: I expect to hug my kid, and tell him I love him. I expect to hug my wife, and tell her I will always support her. I expect to make my Momma proud ("Be a good race-man," she used to say.) And I expected to honor my Dad. I expect to drink some good rum. And I expect to know more tomorrow than I know today. 

And that really is it. It's all I can ask. It's all I can control. Isn't this an old?