Ta-Nehisi Coates's Blog, page 18

Talk To Me Like I Am Stupid: Communist Deviations

For those following along, I'm about two thirds of the way into Anne Applebaum's The Iron Curtain. I'd like to submit myself before the the tender mercies of the Horde and ask for some help. Specifically--how do we define a "right deviationist" and a "left deviationist" in communism? As I recall this has something to do with the decision to pursue "communism at home" or push for a world revolution, but I'm not sure which. More I'm not sure how each can be married to either end of an ideology.  Perhaps more confusing, much like the term "kulak," (or even "Jew") at some point these labels lose their meaning and just become slurs to hurl at enemies. Still, I'd like to be able to at least follow the logic. 

Help me mighty Horde. You're my only hope.

As with all of these threads, one could easily google this. But the knowledge that comes from an active back and forth will always be superior. In that vein, please don't do a quick google or wikipedia so that you can yell "First!" If you don't know, just wait. Someone who does will post soon enough.

 

       

Other People's Pathologies

Over the past week or so, Jonathan Chait and I have enjoyed an ongoing debate over the rhetoric the president employs when addressing African-Americans. Here is my initial installment, Chait's initial rebuttal, my subsequent reply and Chait's latest riposte. Initially Chait argued that President Obama's habit of speaking about culture before black audiences was laudable because it would "urge positive habits and behavior" that are presumably found especially wanting in the black community.

Chait argued that this lack of sufficient "positive habits and behaviors" stemmed from cultural echoes of past harms, which now exist "independent" of white supremacy. Chait now concedes that this assertion  is unsupportable, and attempts to recast his original argument:

I attributed the enduring culture of poverty to the residue of slavery, terrorism, segregation, and continuing discrimination.

Not quite:

The argument is that structural conditions shape culture, and culture, in turn, can take on a life of its own independent of the forces that created it. It would be bizarre to imagine that centuries of slavery, followed by systematic terrorism, segregation, discrimination, a legacy wealth gap, and so on did not leave a cultural residue that itself became an impediment to success.

The phrase "culture of poverty" doesn't actually appear in Chait's original argument. Nor should it--the history he cites was experienced by all variety of African-Americans, poor or not. Moreover the majority of poor people in America have neither the experience of segregation nor slavery in their background. Chait is conflating two different things: black culture--which was shaped by, and requires, all the forces he named, and "a culture of poverty," which requires none of them. 

That conflation undergirds his latest column. Chait paraphrases my argument that "there is no such thing as a culture of poverty." His evidence of this is quoting me attacking the "the notion that black culture is part of the problem." This evidence only works if you believe "black culture" and "a culture of poverty" are somehow interchangeable. 

Making no effort to distinguish the two, Chait examines a piece I wrote in 2010 entitled "A Culture Of Poverty" in which I sought to explain the difficulty of navigating culture in two different worlds--one in which "Thou Shalt Not Be Punked" was a commandment, and another where violence was best left to the authorities: 

I think one can safely call that an element of a kind of street culture. It's also an element which--once one leaves the streets--is a great impediment. "I ain't no punk" may shield you from neighborhood violence. But it can not shield you from algebra, when your teacher tries to correct you. It can not shield you from losing hours, when your supervisor corrects your work. And it would not have shielded me from unemployment, after I cold-cocked a guy over a blog post.

Chait calls this one of the most "memorable essays" he's ever read. This is too kind--both to my writing and to his memory. Chait reads the piece as evidence of having "grown up around cultural norms that inhibited economic success." In fact, my behavior was the result of having grown up around cultural norms that enabled my survival. I said as much in the original piece:

The problem is that rarely do such critiques ask why anyone would embrace such values. Moreover, they tend to assume that there's something uniquely "black" about those values, and their the embrace. If you are a young person living in an environment where violence is frequent and random, the willingness to meet any hint of violence with yet more violence is a shield. 

I repeated the same thing two years later:

Using the wrong tool for the job is a problem that extends beyond the dining room. The set of practices required for a young man to secure his safety on the streets of his troubled neighborhood are not the same as those required to place him on an honor roll, and these are not the same as the set of practices required to write the great American novel. The way to guide him through this transition is not to insult his native language. 

And then again last May:

For black men like us, the feeling of having something to lose, beyond honor and face, is foreign. We grew up in communities — New York, Baltimore, Chicago — where the Code of the Streets was the first code we learned. Respect and reputation are everything there. These values are often denigrated by people who have never been punched in the face. But when you live around violence there is no opting out. A reputation for meeting violence with violence is a shield. That protection increases when you are part of a crew with that same mind-set. This is obviously not a public health solution, but within its context, the Code is logical. Outside of its context, the Code is ridiculous.

The point has obviously eluded Chait. Instead of considering that I may well have been responding to my actual lived circumstances, Chait chooses to assume that I was responding to some inscrutable call of the wild: 

When the imprint of this culture was nearly strong enough to derail the career of a writer as brilliant as Coates, we are talking about a powerful force, indeed. 

What's missed here is that the very culture Chait derides might well be the reason why I am sitting here debating him in the first place. That culture contained a variety of values and practices. "I Ain't No Punk" was one of them. "Know your history" was another. "Words are beautiful" was another still. The key is cultural dexterity--understanding when to emphasize which values, and when to employ which practices.

Chait endorses a blunter approach:

The circa-2008 Ta-Nehisi Coates was neither irresponsible nor immoral. Rather, he had grown up around cultural norms that inhibited economic success. People are the products of their environment. Environments are amenable to public policy. Some of the most successful anti-poverty initiatives, like the Harlem Children’s Zone or the KIPP schools, are designed around the premise that children raised in concentrated poverty need to be taught middle class norms.

No, they need to be taught that all norms are not transferable into all worlds. In my case, physical assertiveness might save you on the street, but not beyond it. At the same time, other values are transferrable and highly useful. The "cultural norms" of my community also asserted that much of what my country believes about itself is a lie. In the spirit of Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and Malcolm X, it was my responsibility to live, prosper and attack the lie. Those values saved me on the street, and they sustain me in this present moment.

People who take a strict binary view of culture ("culture of privilege=awesome; culture of poverty=fail") are afflicted by the provincialism of privilege and thus vastly underestimate the dynamism of the greater world. They extoll "middle class values" to the ignorance and exclusion of all others. To understand, you must imagine what it means to confront algebra in the morning and "Shorty, can I see your bike?" in the afternoon. It's very nice to talk about "middle class values" when that describes your small, limited world. But when your grandmother lives in one hood and your coworkers live another, you generally need something more than "middle class values." You need to be bilingual. 

In 2008, I was living in central Harlem, an area of New York whose demographics closely mirrored the demographics of my youth. The practices I brought to bear in that tent were not artifacts. I was not under a spell of pathology. I was employing the tools I used to navigate the everyday world I lived. It just so happened that the world in which I worked was different.  As I said in that original piece "there is nothing particularly black about this." I strongly suspect that white people who've grown up around entrenched poverty and violence will find that there are certain practices that safeguard them at home, but not so much as they journey out. This point is erased if you believe that "black culture" is simply another way of saying "culture of poverty."

This elision is not particular to Chait. In the 1960s, when 20 percent of black children were found to be born out of wedlock, progressives went to war over   the "tangle of pathologies" choking black America. Today, 30 percent of white children are being born out of wedlock. The reaction to this shift has been considerably more muted. This makes sense if you believe that pathology is something reserved for black people. When The New Republic wanted to dramatize the evils of AFDC, there was really no doubt about whose portrait they'd pick. 

Accepting the premise that "black culture" and "a culture of poverty" are interchangeable also has the benefit of making the president's rhetoric much more understandable. One begins to get why the president would address a group of graduates from an elite black college on the tendency of young men in the black community to make "bad choices." Or why the president goes before black audiences and laments the fact that the proportion of single parent households have doubled, and carry no such message to white audiences--despite the fact that single parenthood is growing fastest among whites.  And you can understand how an initiative that began with the killing of a black boy who was not poor, and who had a loving father, becomes fuel for the assertion that "nothing keeps a young man out of trouble like a father." In his best work Chait mercilessly dissects this kind of intellectual slipperiness. Now we find him applauding it and reifying it. 

"Culture is hard, though not impossible, to quantify," writes Chait. "Which does not mean it doesn’t exist." Indeed. I have done my best to identify specific cultural practices and outline how they work in different worlds. Much of that evidence is built on memoir, and thus necessarily subject to an uncomfortable vagueness.

But quantifying the breadth and effect of white supremacy suffers no such drawbacks. Some of our most celebrated scholarship--Battle Cry of Freedom, Reconstruction,  The Making of The Second Ghetto, The Warmth Of Other Suns, At The Hands of Persons Unknown, Family Properties, Confederate Reckoning, Black Wealth\White Wealth, American Apartheid, Crabgrass Frontier, The Origins of The Urban Crisis, When And Where I Enter, When Affirmative Action Was White--is directed toward, with great specificity, outlining the reach and effects of white supremacy.

It is not wholly surprising that Barack Obama tends not to focus on this literature, whatever its merits. I do not expect the president of the United States to make a habit of speaking unvarnished and uncomfortable truths. (Though he is often brilliant when he does.) Of course removing white supremacy from the equation puts Barack Obama in the odd position of focusing on that which is hardest to evidence, while slighting that which is clearly known.

Jonathan Chait is not a politician. He needs neither to assemble a 60-vote majority nor worry about his words affecting the midterms. I'm happy that Chait decided to engage me here on a subject that he, himself, confesses is hard to quantify. I wish I'd had his input over the past few months when I was pouring over redlining maps and grappling with the racism implicit in the New Deal. I wish I'd had his input when I was attempting to understand what it meant that in 1860 this country's most valuable asset was enslaved human beings. I think had we engaged each other then, he might well not have written something like this:

It is hard to explain how the United States has progressed from chattel slavery to emancipation to the end of lynching to the end of legal segregation to electing an African-American president if America has “rarely” been the ally of African-Americans and “often” its nemesis. It is one thing to notice the persistence of racism, quite another to interpret the history of black America as mainly one of continuity rather than mainly one of progress.

This certainly is a specimen of progress--much like the ill-tempered man might "progress" from shooting at his neighbors, to clubbing them and then finally settling on simply robbing them. His victims, bloodied, beaten and pilfered, might view his "progress" differently. Effectively Chait's rendition of history amounts to "How can you say I have a history of violence given that I've repeatedly stopped pummeling you?" 

Chait's jaunty and uplifting narrative flattens out the chaos of history under the cheerful rubric of American progress. The actual events are more complicated. It's true, for instance, that slavery was legal in the United States in 1860 and five years later it was not. That is because a clique of slave-holders greatly overestimated their own power and decided to go to war with their country. Had the Union soundly and quickly defeated the Confederacy, it's very likely that slavery would have remained. Instead the war dragged on, and the Union was forced to employ blacks in its ranks. The end result--total emancipation--was more a matter of  military necessity than moral progress. 

Our greatest president, assessing the contribution of black soldiers in 1864, understood this:

We can not spare the hundred and forty or fifty thousand now serving us as soldiers, seamen, and laborers. This is not a question of sentiment or taste, but one of physical force which may be measured and estimated as horse-power and steam-power are measured and estimated. Keep it and you can save the Union. Throw it away, and the Union goes with it.

The United States of America did not save black people, black people saved the United States of America. With that task complete, our "ally" proceeded to repay its debt to its black citizens by pretending they did not exist. In 1875, Mississippi's provisional governor, Aldebert Ames, watched as the majority black state's nascent democracy "progressed" from terrorism, to anarchy and then apartheid. Taking in regular reports of blacks being murdered, whipped and intimidated by the Ku Klux Klan, Ames wrote the administration of President Ulysses Grant begging for aid. The Grant administration declined:

The whole public are tired of these autumnal outbreaks in the South, and the great majority are ready now to condemn any interference on the part of the government.

A horrified and exasperated Ames told his wife that blacks in Mississippi...

...are to be returned to a condition of serfdom—an era of second slavery...The nation should have acted but it was “tired of the annual autumnal outbreaks in the South” . . . The political death of the negro will forever release the nation from the weariness from such “political outbreaks.” You may think I exaggerate. Time will show you how accurate my statements are.

Ames was totally accurate. For the next century, the United States legitimized the overthrow of legal governments, the reduction of black people to forced laborers, and the complete alienation--at gunpoint--of black people in the South from the sphere of politics.  

Chait's citation of the end of lynching as evidence of American serving as an "ally" is especially bizarre.  The United States never passed anti-lynching legislation a disgrace so great that it compelled the Senate to apologize--in 2005.

"There may be no other injustice in American history," said Louisiana senator Mary Landrieu. "For which the Senate so uniquely bears responsibility." Even then, a half century after Emmett Till's murder, the sitting senators from Mississippi--the state with the most lynchings--declined to endorse the apology. 

"You don't stick a knife in a man's back nine inches," said Malcolm X. "And then pull it out six inches and say you're making progress."

The notion that black America's long bloody journey was accomplished through frequent alliance with the United States is an assailant's-eye view of history.  It takes no note of the fact that in 1860, most of this country exports were derived from the forced labor of the people it was "allying" with. It takes no note of this country electing Senators who, on the Senate floor, openly advocated  domestic terrorism. It takes no note of what it means for a country to tolerate the majority of people living in a state like Mississippi being denied the right to vote. It takes no note of what it means to exclude black people from the housing programs, from the GI Bills, which built the American class. Effectively it takes no serious note of African-American history, and thus no serious note of American history.

You see this in Chait's belief that he lives in a country "whose soaring ideals sat uncomfortably aside an often cruel reality." No. Those soaring ideals don't "sit aside" the uncomfortable reality, but on top of it. The "cruel reality" made the "soaring ideals" possible.

From Daniel Walker Howe's Pulitizer Prize winning, What God Hath Wrought:

By giving the United States its leading export staple, the workers in the cotton fields enabled the country not only to buy manufactured goods from Europe but also to pay interest on its foreign debt and continue to import more capital to invest in transportation and industry. Much of Atlantic civilization in the nineteenth century was built on the back of the enslaved field hand. 

From Edmund Morgan's foundational American Slavery, American Freedom:

In the republican way of thinking as Americans inherited it from England, slavery occupied a critical, if ambiguous, position: it was the primary evil that men sought to avoid for society as a whole by curbing monarchs and establishing republics. But it was also the solution to one of society’s most serious problems, the problem of the poor. Virginians could outdo English republicans as well as New England ones, partly because they had solved the problem: they had achieved a society in which most of the poor were enslaved.

White supremacy does not contradict American democracy--it birthed it, nurtured it  and financed it. That is our heritage. It was reinforced during 250 years of bondage. It was further reinforced during another century of Jim Crow. It was reinforced again when progressives erected an entire welfare state on the basis of black exclusion. It was reinforced again when the intellectual progeny of the same people who excluded black women from welfare, turned around and inveigh against it through caricaturization of black women.

Jonathan Chait is arguably the sharpest political writer of his generation. If even he subscribes to a sophomoric feel-good rendering of his country's past, what does that say about the broader American imagination?

And none of this is even new:

The record is there for all to read. It resounds all over the world. It might as well be written in the sky. One wishes that –Americans--white Americans--would read, for their own sakes, this record and stop defending themselves against it. Only then will they be enabled to change their lives.  The fact that they have not yet been able to do this--to face their history to change their lives--hideously menaces this country. Indeed, it menaces the entire world.    

James Baldwin was not being cute here. If you can not bring yourself to grapple with that which literally built your Capitol, then you are not truly grappling with your country. And if you are not truly grappling with your country, then your beliefs in its role in the greater world (exporter of democracy, for instance) are built on sand. Confronting the black experience means confronting the limits of America, and perhaps, humanity itself. That is the confrontation that graduates us out of the ranks of cheerleading and into the school of hard students.

Chait thinks this view is "fatalistic." I think God is fatalistic. In the end, we all die. As do most societies. As do most states. As do most planets. If America is fatally flawed, if white supremacy does truly dog us until we are no more, all that means is we were unexceptional, that we were not favored by God, that we were flawed--as are all things conceived by mortal man. 

I find great peace in that. And I find great meaning in this struggle that was gifted to me by my people, that was gifted to me by culture.

 

       

The Meaning of 'Totalitarian'

Lest you think The Blue Period has abated, know that I am taking it slowly with Anne Applebaum's Iron Curtain: The Crushing Of Eastern Europe. Ostensibly a history of Eastern Europe under Soviet rule, I regard Iron Curtain as something more granular and grand—an epic essay on the actual meaning of totalitarianism. Writers are always bemoaning the degradation of names—racist, Nazi, misogynist, homophobe etc. The common complaint is that such labels are so often employed that they have lost meaning, and thus should be restricted in their use.

I am skeptical of this claim because it is so often employed by people who do not live on the business-end of ideology and tend to overstate the progressive passage of man. (You can read more on this here and here.) It's worth remembering Andrew Breitbart claiming that accusing someone of racism was "the worst thing you can do in this country" and then falsely laying that same accusation at the doorstep of Shirley Sherrod.

Words exist within the realm of politics. In politics, words are sometimes perverted by the speaker. It's worth considering which words come under attack for perversion ("racist," "homophobe," "bigot") and which do not ("democratic," "bipartisan," "anti-American"). I am always skeptical of people who seek to curtail their use, instead of interrogating their specific usage. Some people really are racists, and other people really are misogynists, and others still actually are homophobes. Instead of prohibiting words, I'd rather better understand their meaning.

Applebaum does this through repeated, grinding example. In the first chapter, she goes through the various debates around the word "totalitarian" and its many, many misapplications. I didn't follow it all entirely—I'm still not clear why a democratically elected politician can't be described as having "totalitarian instincts," for instance. But I found the classic definition helpful:

Although it has been most often used to describe Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union, the word “totalitarian”—totalitarismo—was first used in the context of Italian fascism. Invented by one of his critics, the term was adopted with enthusiasm by Benito Mussolini, and in one of his speeches he offered what is still the best definition of the term: “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

Strictly defined, a totalitarian regime is one that bans all institutions apart from those it has officially approved. A totalitarian regime thus has one political party, one educational system, one artistic creed, one centrally planned economy, one unified media, and one moral code. In a totalitarian state there are no independent schools, no private businesses, no grassroots organizations, and no critical thought. Mussolini and his favorite philosopher, Giovanni Gentile, once wrote of a “conception of the State” that is “all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value.

What follows this is a long, painful recitation of how the post-war Soviet Union basically attempted to dominate every aspect of life in its imperial holdings. Nothing escapes its purview. Boy scouts are disbanded and reconstituted. Tobacco-grower associations are outlawed. Radio is turned for the use of propaganda. Democracy is embraced—until it fails to produce an "enlightened" class of workers. Then democracy is subverted. Applebaum outlines the tools of subversion in great detail. (Pretending to be a member of some other left-wing group was a particularly ingenious tactic.)

All of the machinations are undergirded by a kind of determinism which Timothy Snyder outlined in Bloodlands:

Workers represented the forward flow of history; the disciplined communist party represented the workers; the central committee represented the party; the politburo, a group of a few men, represented the central committee. Society was subordinate to the state which was controlled by party which in practice was ruled by a few people. Disputes among members of this small group were taken to represent not politics but rather history, and their outcomes were presented as its verdict.

I actually don't understand that last sentence, and I include it hoping that someone in the Horde can assist. (By history, does Snyder mean destiny? Prophecy? Magic?) But the central idea—that the communist party, and thus the central committee, and thus the politburo was the sole representative of workers—has a chilling moral closure. Who could be against the workers? And if the party is the true representative of the workers, why do we need other parties? 

The best part of absorbing all this is the clarity you get over terms. In America, for instance, we think of slavery as forcing other people to work. In the meanest sense, this is correct. But we don't think of it as the perpetual destruction of family, the legitimization of rape, the legalization of torture. And we don't think of this period of enslavement as being longer than our period of freedom, and longer than the existence of the country itself. You need to slow it down to really get this. You need to have the history address you as though you are stupid.

       

Anne Applebaum Talks To Us Like We're Stupid

"Il Duce" Benito Mussolini. Wikicommons

Less you think The Blue Period has abated, know that I am taking it slowly with Anne Applebaum's Iron Curtain: The Crushing Of Eastern Europe. Ostensibly a history of Eastern Europe under Soviet rule, I regard Iron Curtain as something more granular and grand--an epic essay on the actual meaning of totalitarianism. Writers are always bemoaning the degradation of names--racist, Nazi, misogynist, homophobe etc. The common complaint is that such labels are so often employed that they have lost meaning, and thus should be restricted in their use.

I am skeptical of this claim because it is so often employed by people who do not live on the business-end of ideology and tend to overstate the progressive passage of man.  (You can read more on this here and here.) It's worth remembering Andrew Breitbart claiming that accusing someone of racism was "the worst thing you can do in this country" and then falsely laying that same accusation at the doorstep of Shirley Sherrod.

Words exist within the realm of politics. In politics, words are sometimes perverted by the speaker. It's worth considering which words come under attack for perversion ("racist," "homophobe," "bigot") and which do not ("democratic," "bipartisan," "anti-American.") I am always skeptical of people who seek to curtail their use, instead of interrogating their specific usage. Some people really are racists, and other people really are misogynists, and others still actually are homophobes. Instead of prohibiting words, I'd rather better understand their meaning.

Applebaum does this through repeated, grinding example.  In the first chapter she goes through the various debates around the word and its many, many mis-application. I didn't follow it all entirely--I'm still not clear why a democratically-elected politician can't be described as having "totalitarian instincts," for instance. But I found the classic definition helpful:

Although it has been most often used to describe Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union, the word “totalitarian”—totalitarismo—was first used in the context of Italian fascism. Invented by one of his critics, the term was adopted with enthusiasm by Benito Mussolini, and in one of his speeches he offered what is still the best definition of the term: “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

Strictly defined, a totalitarian regime is one that bans all institutions apart from those it has officially approved. A totalitarian regime thus has one political party, one educational system, one artistic creed, one centrally planned economy, one unified media, and one moral code. In a totalitarian state there are no independent schools, no private businesses, no grassroots organizations, and no critical thought. Mussolini and his favorite philosopher, Giovanni Gentile, once wrote of a “conception of the State” that is “all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value.

What follows this is long, painful recitation of how the post-war Soviet Union basically attempted to dominate every aspect of life in its imperial holdings. Nothing escapes its purview. Boy scouts are disbanded and reconstituted. Tobacco grower associations are outlawed. Radio is turned for the use of propaganda. Democracy is embraced--until it fails to produce an "enlightened" class of workers. Then democracy is subverted. Applebaum outlines the tools of subversion in great detail. (Pretending to be a member of some other left-wing group was a particularly ingenious tactic.)

All of the machinations are undergirded by a kind of determinism which Timothy Snyder outlined in Bloodlands:

Workers represented the forward flow of history; the disciplined communist party represented the workers; the central committee represented the party; the politburo, a group of a few men, represented the central committee. Society was subordinate to the state which was controlled by party which in practice was ruled by a few people. Disputes among members of this small group were taken to represent not politics but rather history, and their outcomes were presented as its verdict.

I actually don't understand that last sentence, and I include it hoping that someone in the Horde can assist. (By history, does Snyder mean destiny?Prophecy? Magic?) But the central idea--that the communist party, and thus the central committee, and thus the politburo was the sole representative of workers--has a chilling moral closure. Who could be against the workers? And if the party is the true representative of the workers, why do we need other parties? 

The best part of absorbing all this is the clarity you get over terms. In America, for instance, we think of slavery as forcing other people to work. In the meanest sense, this is correct. But we don't think of it as the perpetual destruction of family, the legitimization of rape, the legalization of torture. And we don't think of this period of enslavement as being longer than our period of freedom, and longer than the existence of the country itself. You need to slow it down to really get this. You need to have the history address you as though you are stupid.

       

Black Pathology and the Closing of the Progressive Mind

Among opinion writers, Jonathan Chait is outranked in my esteem only by Hendrik Hertzberg. This lovely takedown of Robert Johnson is a classic of the genre, one I studied incessantly when I was sharpening my own sword. The sharpening never ends. With that in mind, it is a pleasure to engage Chait in the discussion over President Obama, racism, culture, and personal responsibility. It's good to debate a writer of such clarity—even when that clarity has failed him.

On y va.

Chait argues that I've conflated Paul Ryan's view of black poverty with Barack Obama's. He is correct. I should have spent more time disentangling these two notions, and illuminating their common roots—the notion that black culture is part of the problem. I have tried to do this disentangling in the past. I am sorry I did not do it in this instance and will attempt to do so now.

​Arguing that poor black people are not "holding up their end of the bargain," or that they are in need of moral instruction is an old and dubious tradition in America. There is a conservative and a liberal rendition of this tradition. The conservative version eliminates white supremacy as a factor and leaves the question of the culture's origin ominously unanswered. This version can never be regarded seriously. Life is short. Black life is shorter.

On y va.

The liberal version of the cultural argument points to "a tangle of pathologies" haunting black America born of oppression. This argument—which Barack Obama embraces—is more sincere, honest, and seductive. Chait helpfully summarizes:

The argument is that structural conditions shape culture, and culture, in turn, can take on a life of its own independent of the forces that created it. It would be bizarre to imagine that centuries of slavery, followed by systematic terrorism, segregation, discrimination, a legacy wealth gap, and so on did not leave a cultural residue that itself became an impediment to success.

The "structural conditions" Chait outlines above can be summed up under the phrase "white supremacy." I have spent the past two days searching for an era when black culture could be said to be "independent" of white supremacy. I have not found one. Certainly the antebellum period, when one third of all enslaved black people found themselves on the auction block, is not such an era. And surely we would not consider postbellum America, when freedpeople were regularly subjected to terrorism, to be such an era. 

We certainly do not find such a period during the Roosevelt-Truman era, when this country erected a racist social safety, leaving the NAACP to quip that the New Deal was "like a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through." Nor do we find it during the 1940s, '50s and '60s, when African-Americans—as a matter of federal policy—were largely excluded from the legitimate housing market. Nor during the 1980s when we began the erection of a prison-industrial complex so vast that black males now comprise 8 percent of the world's entire incarcerated population.

And we do not find an era free of white supremacy in our times either, when the rising number of arrests for marijuana are mostly borne by African-Americans; when segregation drives a foreclosure crisis that helped expand the wealth gap; when big banks busy themselves baiting black people with "wealth-building seminars" and instead offering "ghetto loans" for "mud people"; when studies find that black low-wage applicants with no criminal record "fared no better than a white applicant just released from prison"; when, even after controlling for neighborhoods and crime rates, my son finds himself more likely to be stopped and frisked. Chait's theory of independent black cultural pathologies sounds reasonable. But it can't actually be demonstrated in the American record, and thus has no applicability.

What about the idea that white supremacy necessarily "bred a cultural residue that itself became an impediment to success"? Chait believes that it's "bizarre" to think otherwise. I think it's bizarre that he doesn't bother to see if his argument is actually true. Oppression might well produce a culture of failure. It might also produce a warrior spirit and a deep commitment to attaining the very things which had been so often withheld from you. There is no need for theorizing. The answers are knowable.

There certainly is no era more oppressive for black people than their 250 years of enslavement in this country. Slavery encompassed not just forced labor, but a ban on black literacy, the vending of black children, the regular rape of black women, and the lack of legal standing for black marriage. Like Chait, 19th-century Northern white reformers coming South after the Civil War expected to find "a cultural residue that itself became an impediment to success."

In his masterful history, Reconstruction, the historian Eric Foner recounts the experience of the progressives who came to the South as teachers in black schools. The reformers "had little previous contact with blacks" and their views were largely cribbed from Uncle Tom's Cabin. They thus believed blacks to be culturally degraded and lacking in family instincts, prone to lie and steal, and generally opposed to self-reliance: 

Few Northerners involved in black education could rise above the conviction that slavery had produced a "degraded" people, in dire need of instruction in frugality, temperance, honesty, and the dignity of labor ... In classrooms, alphabet drills and multiplication tables alternated with exhortations to piety, cleanliness, and punctuality.

In short, white progressives coming South expected to find a black community suffering the effects of not just oppression but its "cultural residue." 

Here is what they actually found:

During the Civil War, John Eaton, who, like many whites, believed that slavery had destroyed the sense of family obligation, was astonished by the eagerness with which former slaves in contraband camps legalized their marriage bonds. The same pattern was repeated when the Freedmen's Bureau and state governments made it possible to register and solemnize slave unions. Many families, in addition, adopted the children of deceased relatives and friends, rather than see them apprenticed to white masters or placed in Freedmen's Bureau orphanages. 

By 1870, a large majority of blacks lived in two-parent family households, a fact that can be gleaned from the manuscript census returns but also "quite incidentally" from the Congressional Ku Klux Klan hearings, which recorded countless instances of victims assaulted in their homes, "the husband and wife in bed, and … their little children beside them."

The point here is rich and repeated in American history—it was not "cultural residue" that threatened black marriages. It was white terrorism, white rapacity, and white violence. And the commitment among freedpeople to marriage mirrored a larger commitment to the reconstitution of family, itself necessary because of systemic white violence.

"In their eyes," wrote an official from the Freedmen's Bureau, in 1865. "The work of emancipation was incomplete until the families which had been dispersed by slavery were reunited."

White people at the time noted a sudden need in black people to travel far and wide. "The Negroes," reports one observer, "are literally crazy about traveling." Why were the Negroes "literally crazy about traveling?" Part of it was the sheer joy of mobility granted by emancipation. But there was something more: "Of all the motivations for black mobility," writes Foner, "none was more poignant than the effort to reunite families separated during slavery."

This effort continued as late the onset of the 20th century, when you could still find newspapers running ads like this:

During the year 1849, Thomas Sample carried away from this city, as his slaves, our daughter, Polly, and son …. We will give $100 each for them to any person who will assist them … to get to Nashville, or get word to us of their whereabouts.

Nor had the centuries-long effort to destroy black curiosity and thirst for education yielded much effect:

Perhaps the most striking illustration of the freedmen's quest for self-improvement was their seemingly unquenchable thirst for education .... The desire for learning led parents to migrate to towns and cities in search of education for their children, and plantation workers to make the establishment of a school-house "an absolute condition" of signing labor contracts ...

Contemporaries could not but note the contrast between white families seemingly indifferent to education and blacks who "toil and strive, labour and endure in order that their children 'may have a schooling'." As one Northern educator remarked: "Is it not significant that after the lapse of one hundred and forty-four years since the settlement [of Beaufort, North Carolina], the Freedmen are building the first public school-house ever erected here."

"All in all," Foner concludes, "the months following the end of the Civil War were a period of remarkable accomplishment for Southern blacks." This is not especially remarkable, if you consider the time. Education, for instance, was not merely a status marker. Literacy was protection against having your land stolen or being otherwise cheated. Perhaps more importantly, it gave access to the Bible. The cultural fruits of oppression are rarely predictable merely through theorycraft. Who would predicted that oppression would make black people hungrier for education than their white peers? Who could predict the blues? 

And culture is not exclusive. African-American are Americans, and have been Americans longer than virtually any other group of white Americans. There is no reason to suppose that enslavement cut African-Americans off from a broader cultural values. More likely African-Americans contributed to the creation and maintenance of those values.

The African-Americans who endured enslavement were subject to two and half centuries of degradation and humiliation. Slavery lasted twice as long as Jim Crow and was more repressive. If you were going to see evidence of a "cultural residue" which impeded success you would see it there. Instead you find black people desperate to reconstitute their families, desperate to marry, and desperate to be educated. Progressives who advocate the 19th-century line must specifically name the "cultural residue" that afflicts black people, and then offer evidence of it. Favoring abstract thought experiments over research will not cut it.

Nor will pretending that old debates are somehow new. For some reason there is an entrenched belief among many liberals and conservatives that discussions of American racism should begin somewhere between the Moynihan Report and the Detroit riots. Thus Chait dates our dispute to the fights in the '70s between liberals. In fact, we are carrying on an argument that is at least a century older.

The passage of time is important because it allows us to assess how those arguments have faired. I contend that my arguments have been borne out, and the arguments of progressives like Chait and the president of the United States have not. Either Booker T. Washington was correct when he urged black people to forgo politics in favor eliminating "the criminal and loafing element of our people" or he wasn't. Either W.E.B. Du Bois was correct when he claimed that correcting "the immorality, crime and laziness among the Negroes" should be the "first and primary" goal or he was not. The track record of progressive moral reform in the black community is knowable.

And it's not just knowable from Eric Foner. It can be gleaned from reading the entire Moynihan Report—not just the "tangle of pathologies" section—and then comparing it with Herb Gutman's The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom. It can be gleaned from Isabel Wilkerson's history of the Great Migration, The Warmth of Other Suns. One of the most important threads in this book is Wilkerson dismantling of the liberal theory of cultural degradation.

I want to conclude by examining one important element of Chait's argument—the role of the president of the United States who also happens to be a black man:

If I'm watching a basketball game in which the officials are systematically favoring one team over another (let's call them Team A and Team Duke) as an analyst, the officiating bias may be my central concern. But if I'm coaching Team A, I'd tell my players to ignore the biased officiating. Indeed, I'd be concerned the bias would either discourage them or make them lash out, and would urge them to overcome it. That's not the same as denying bias. It's a sensible practice of encouraging people to concentrate on the things they can control.

Obama's habit of speaking about this issue primarily to black audiences is Obama seizing upon his role as the most famous and admired African-American in the world to urge positive habits and behavior.

Chait's metaphor is incorrect. Barack Obama isn't the coach of "Team Negro," he is the commissioner of the league. Team Negro is very proud that someone who served on our staff has risen (for the first time in history!) to be commissioner. And Team Negro, which since the dawn of the league has endured biased officiating and whose every game is away, hopes that the commissioner's tenure among them has given him insight into the league's problems. But Team Negro is not—and should not be—confused about the commissioner's primary role.

"I'm not the president of black America," Barack Obama has said. "I'm the president of the United States of America."

Precisely.

And the president of the United States is not just an enactor of policy for today, he is the titular representative of his country's heritage and legacy. In regards to black people, America's heritage is kleptocracy—the stealing and selling of other people's children, the robbery of the fruits of black labor, the pillaging of black property, the taxing of black citizens for schools they can not attend, for pools in which they can not swim, for libraries that bar them, for universities that exclude them, for police who do not protect them, for the marking of whole communities as beyond the protection of the state and thus subject to the purview of outlaws and predators. 

The bearer of this unfortunate heritage feebly urging "positive habits and behavior" while his country imprisons some ungodly number of black men may well be greeted with applause in some quarters. It must never be so among those of us whose love of James Baldwin is true, whose love of Ida B. Wells is true, whose love of Harriet Tubman and our ancestors who fought for the right of family is true. In that fight America has rarely been our ally. Very often it has been our nemesis. 

Obama-era progressives view white supremacy as something awful that happened in the past and the historical vestiges of which still afflict black people today. They believe we need policies—though not race-specific policies—that address the affliction. I view white supremacy as one of the central organizing forces in American life, whose vestiges and practices afflicted black people in the past, continue to afflict black people today, and will likely afflict black people until this country passes into the dust. 

There is no evidence that black people are less responsible, less moral, or less upstanding in their dealings with America nor with themselves. But there is overwhelming evidence that America is irresponsible, immoral, and unconscionable in its dealings with black people and with itself. Urging African-Americans to become superhuman is great advice if you are concerned with creating extraordinary individuals. It is terrible advice if you are concerned with creating an equitable society. The black freedom struggle is not about raising a race of hyper-moral super-humans. It is about all people garnering the right to live like the normal humans they are. 

       

Black Pathology And The Closing Of The Progressive Mind

Among opinion writers, Jonathan Chait is outranked in my esteem only by Hendrik Hertzberg. This lovely take-down of Robert Johnson is a classic of the genre, one I studied incessantly when I was sharpening my own sword. The sharpening never ends. With that in mind, it is a pleasure to engage Chait in the discussion over President Obama, racism, culture and personal responsibility. It's good to debate a writer of such clarity--even when that clarity has failed him.

On y va.

Essentially, Chait argues that I've conflated Paul Ryan's view of black poverty with Barack Obama's. He is correct. I should have spent more time disentangling these two notions, and illuminating their common roots--the notion that black culture is part of the problem. I have tried to do this disentangling in the past. I am sorry I did not then and will attempt to do so now.

​Arguing that poor black people are not "holding up their end of the bargain," or that they are in need of moral instruction is an old and dubious tradition in America. There is a conservative and a liberal rendition of this tradition. The conservative version of the cultural argument eliminates white supremacy as a factor, and leaves the question of the culture's origin ominously unanswered. This version can never be regarded seriously. Life is short. Black life is shorter.

On y va.

The liberal version of the cultural argument points to "a tangle of pathologies" haunting black America born of oppression. This argument--which Barack Obama embraces--is more sincere, honest and seductive. Chait helpfully summarizes:

The argument is that structural conditions shape culture, and culture, in turn, can take on a life of its own independent of the forces that created it. It would be bizarre to imagine that centuries of slavery, followed by systematic terrorism, segregation, discrimination, a legacy wealth gap, and so on did not leave a cultural residue that itself became an impediment to success.

The "structural conditions" Chait outlines above can be summed up under the phrase "white supremacy."  I have spent the past two days searching for an era when black culture could be said to be "independent" of white supremacy. I have not yet found one. Certainly the antebellum period when one third of all enslaved black people found themselves on the auction block, is not such an era. And surely we would not consider postbellum America, when freedpeople were regularly subjected to terrorism, to be such an era. 

We certainly do not find such an era during the Roosevelt-Truman era when this country erected a racist social safety, leaving the NAACP to quip that the New Deal was "like a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through." Nor do we find it during the 1940s, 50s and 60s, when African-Americans--as a matter of federal policy--were largely excluded from the legitimate housing market. Nor during the 1980s when we began the erection of a prison industrial complex so vast that black males now comprise 8 percent of the world's entire incarcerated population.

And we do not find an era free of white supremacy in our times, either when the rising number of arrests for marijuana are mostly born by African-Americans; when segregation drive a foreclosure crisis which helped expand the wealth gap; when big banks busy themselves baiting black people with "wealth building seminars" and instead offering "ghetto loans" for "mud people"; when studies find that  black low-wage applicants with no criminal record "fared no better than a white applicant just released from prison"; when, even after controlling for neighborhoods and crime rates, my son finds himself more likely to be stopped and frisked. Chait's theory of independent black cultural pathologies sounds reasonable. But it can't actually be demonstrated in the American record, and thus has no applicability.

What about the idea that white supremacy necessarily "bred a cultural residue that itself became an impediment to success?" Chait believes its "bizarre" to think otherwise. I think it's bizarre that he doesn't bother to see if his argument is actually true. Oppression might well produce a culture of failure. It might also produce a warrior spirit and a deep commitment  to attaining the very things which had been so often withheld from you. There is no need for theorizing. The answers are knowable.

There certainly is no era more oppressive for black people than their 250 years of enslavement in this country. Slavery encompassed, not just forced labor, but a ban on black literacy, the vending of black children, the regular rape of black women and the lack of legal standing for black marriage. Like Chait, 19th century Northern white reformers coming South after the Civil War, expected to find "a cultural residue that itself became an impediment to success."

In his masterful history Reconstruction, the historian Eric Foner recounts the experience of the progressives who came to the South as teachers in black schools.  The reformers "had little previous contact with blacks" and their views were largely cribbed from Uncle Tom's Cabin. They thus believed blacks to be culturally degraded and lacking in family instincts, prone to lie and steal, and generally opposed to self-reliance: 

Few Northerners involved in black education could rise above the conviction that slavery had produced a “degraded” people, in dire need of instruction in frugality, temperance, honesty, and the dignity of labor...In classrooms, alphabet drills and multiplication tables alternated with exhortations to piety, cleanliness, and punctuality.

In short, white progressives coming South expected to find a black community suffering the effects of not just oppression but its "cultural residue." 

Here is what they actually found:

During the Civil War, John Eaton, who, like many whites, believed that slavery had destroyed the sense of family obligation, was astonished by the eagerness with which former slaves in contraband camps legalized their marriage bonds. The same pattern was repeated when the Freedmen’s Bureau and state governments made it possible to register and solemnize slave unions. Many families, in addition, adopted the children of deceased relatives and friends, rather than see them apprenticed to white masters or placed in Freedmen’s Bureau orphanages. 

By 1870, a large majority of blacks lived in two-parent family households, a fact that can be gleaned from the manuscript census returns but also “quite incidentally” from the Congressional Ku Klux Klan hearings, which recorded countless instances of victims assaulted in their homes, “the husband and wife in bed, and … their little children beside them.”

The point here is rich and repeated in American history--it was not "cultural residue" that threatened black marriages. It was white terrorism, white rapacity, and white violence. And the commitment among freedpeople to marriage mirrored a larger commitment to the reconstitution of family, itself necessary because of systemic white violence.

"In their eyes," wrote an official from the Freedman's Bureau, in 1865. "The work of emancipation was incomplete until the families which had been dispersed by slavery were reunited."

White people at the time noted  a sudden need in black people to travel far and wide. “The Negroes," reports one observer. "Are literally crazy about traveling.” Why were the Negroes "literally crazy traveling?" Part of it was the sheer joy of mobility granted by emancipation. But there was something more: "Of all the motivations for black mobility," writes Foner. "None was more poignant than the effort to reunite families separated during slavery."

This effort continued as late the onset of the 20th century, when you could still find newspapers running ads like this:

During the year 1849, Thomas Sample carried away from this city, as his slaves, our daughter, Polly, and son…. We will give $100 each for them to any person who will assist them … to get to Nashville, or get word to us of their whereabouts.

Nor had the centuries-long effort to destroy black curiosity and thirst for education yielded much effect:

Perhaps the most striking illustration of the freedmen’s quest for self-improvement was their seemingly unquenchable thirst for education...The desire for learning led parents to migrate to towns and cities in search of education for their children, and plantation workers to make the establishment of a school-house “an absolute condition” of signing labor contracts...Contemporaries could not but note the contrast between white families seemingly indifferent to education and blacks who “toil and strive, labour and endure in order that their children ‘may have a schooling'.” As one Northern educator remarked: “Is it not significant that after the lapse of one hundred and forty-four years since the settlement [of Beaufort, North Carolina], the Freedmen are building the first public school-house ever erected here.”

"All in all," concludes Foner. "The months following the end of the Civil War were a period of remarkable accomplishment for Southern blacks." This is not especially remarkable, if you consider the time. Education, for instance, was not merely a status marker. Literacy was protection against having your land stolen or otherwise cheated. Perhaps more importantly, it gave access to the Bible. Culture does not just form in one predictable way.

And culture is not exclusive. African-American are Americans, and have been Americans longer than virtually any other group of white Americans. There is no reason to suppose that enslavement, somehow, cut African-Americans off from a broader cultural values. More likely African-Americans contributed to the creation and maintenance of those values.

The African-Americans who endured enslavement were subject to two and half centuries of degradation and humiliation. Slavery lasted twice as long as Jim Crow and was more repressive. If you were going to see evidence of a "cultural reside" which impeded success you would see it there. Instead you find black people desperate to reconstitute their families, desperate to marry, and desperate to be educated. Progressives who advocate the 19th century line must specifically name the "cultural residue" that afflicts black people, and then evidence it. Favoring abstract thought experiments over research will not cut it.

Nor will pretending as though old debates are somehow new. For some reason there is trenchant belief among many liberals and conservatives that discussions of American racism should began somewhere between the Moynihan Report and the Detroit riots. Thus Chait dates our dispute to the fights in the 70s between liberals. In fact we are carrying on an argument that is at least a century older.

The passage of time is important because allows us to assess how those arguments have faired. I contend that my arguments have been born out, and the arguments of progressives like Chait and the president of the United States have not. Either Booker T. Washington was correct when he urged black people to forgo politics in favor eliminating "the criminal and loafing element of our people" or he wasn't. Either W.E.B. Du Bois was correct when he claimed that correcting "the immorality, crime and laziness among the Negroes" should be the "first and primary" goal or he wasn't.  The track record of progressive moral reform in the black community is knowable.

And it's not just knowable from Eric Foner. It can be gleaned from reading the entire Moynihan Report, not just the "tangle of pathologies" section, and then comparing it with Herb Gutman's The Black Family In Slavery In Freedom. It can be gleaned from Isabel Wilkerson's history of the Great Migration, The Warmth Of Other Suns. One of the most important threads in this book is Wilkerson dismantling of the liberal theory of cultural degradation

I want to conclude by examining one important element of Chait's argument--the role of the president of the United States who also happens to be a black man:

If I’m watching a basketball game in which the officials are systematically favoring one team over another (let’s call them Team A and Team Duke) as an analyst, the officiating bias may be my central concern. But if I’m coaching Team A, I’d tell my players to ignore the biased officiating. Indeed, I’d be concerned the bias would either discourage them or make them lash out, and would urge them to overcome it. That’s not the same as denying bias. It’s a sensible practice of encouraging people to concentrate on the things they can control.

Obama’s habit of speaking about this issue primarily to black audiences is Obama seizing upon his role as the most famous and admired African-American in the world to urge positive habits and behavior.

Chait's metaphor is incorrect. Barack Obama isn't the coach of "Team Negro," he is the commissioner of the league. Team Negro is very proud that someone who served on our staff has risen (for the first time in history!) to be commissioner. And Team Negro, which since dawn of the league has endured biased officiating and whose every game is away, hopes that the Commissioner's tenure among them has given him insight into the league's problems. But Team Negro is not--and should not--be confused about the Commissioner's  primary role.

"I’m not the president of black America," Barack Obama has said. "I’m the president of the United States of America."

Precisely. And the President of the United States is not just an enactor of policy for today, he is the titular representative of his country's heritage and legacy. In regards to black people, America's heritage is kleptocracy--the stealing and selling of other people's children, the robbery of their fruits of labor, the pillaging of black property, the taxing of black citizens for schools they can not attend, the taxing of black citizens for pools that will not have them, the taxing of black citizens for police who do not protect them, the marking of whole communities as beyond the protection of the state and thus subject to the purview of outlaws and predators. 

The bearer of this unfortunate heritage feebly urging "positive habits and behavior," while his country imprisons some ungodly number of black men, may well be greeted with applause in some quarters. It must never be so among those of us whose love of James Baldwin is true, whose love of Ida B. Wells is true, whose love of Harriet Tubman, and our ancestors who fought for the right of family, is true. In fight to preserve the black family, America has rarely been an ally. Very often it has been an enemy. 

Obama-era progressives view white supremacy as something awful that happened in the past whose historical vestiges still afflict black people today. They believe we need policies--though not race-specific policies--which address the affliction. I view white supremacy as one of the central organizing forces in American life whose vestiges and practices afflicted black people in the past, continue to afflict black people today, and will likely afflict black people until this country passes into the dust. 

There is no evidence that black people are less responsible, less moral, or less upstanding in their dealings with America nor with themselves. But there is overwhelming evidence that America is irresponsible, immoral, and unconscionable in its dealings with black people and with itself. Urging African-Americans to become superhuman is great advice if you are concerned with creating extraordinary individuals. It is terrible advice if you are concerned with creating an equitable society. The black freedom struggle is not about raising a race of hyper-moral super-humans. It is about granting all people garnering the right to live like the normal humans they are. 

       

The Secret Lives of Inner-City Black Males

On Sunday, I took my son to see two movies at a French film festival that was in town. The local train was out. We walked over to Amsterdam to flag down a cab. The cab rolled right past us and picked up two young-ish white women. It's sort of amazing how often that happens. It's sort of amazing how often you think you are going to be permitted to act as Americans do and instead receive the reminder—"Oh that's right, we are just some niggers. I almost forgot." 

Getting angry at the individual cabbie is like getting angry at the wind or raging against the rain. In America, the notion that black people are lacking in virtue is ambient. We see this in our vocabulary of politics and racism, which has no room for the decline in the out-of-wedlock birthrate and invokes Chicago with no regard for Chicago at all, but to deflect all eyes from the body of Trayvon Martin. 

But I was angry, and very much wanted to approach the cabbie, idling there at a red light, in ill disposition. I was also with my son. And more, I am a 6-foot-4 black dude who tries to avoid the police. I think, 15 years ago, with nothing to lose, I would have made a different decision, if only because the culture of my young years made a virtue of meeting disrespect with aggression. This culture was not wrong—the price of ignoring disrespect, in the old town, was more disrespect. The culture was a collection of the best practices for making our socially engineered inner cities habitable. I now live in a different environment. I now have different practices. 

Last week, Paul Ryan went on the radio to address the lack of virtue prevalent among men who grew up like me, my father, my brothers, my best friends, and a large number of my people:

We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.

A number of liberals reacted harshly to Ryan. I'm not sure why. What Ryan said here is not very far from what Bill Cosby, Michael Nutter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama said before him. The idea that poor people living in the inner city, and particularly black men, are "not holding up their end of the deal" as Cosby put it, is not terribly original or even, these days, right-wing. From the president on down there is an accepted belief in America—black and white—that African-American people, and African-American men, in particular, are lacking in the virtues in family, hard work, and citizenship:

If Cousin Pookie would vote, if Uncle Jethro would get off the couch and stop watching SportsCenter and go register some folks and go to the polls, we might have a different kind of politics.

Cousin Pookie and Uncle Jethro voted at higher rates than any other ethnic group in the country. They voted for Barack Obama. Our politics have not changed. Neither has Barack Obama's rhetoric. Facts can only get in the way of a good story. It was sort of stunning to see the president give a speech on the fate of young black boys and not mention the word racism once. It was sort of stunning to see the president salute the father of Trayvon Martin and the father of Jordan Davis and then claim, "Nothing keeps a young man out of trouble like a father who takes an active role in his son’s life."

From what I can tell, the major substantive difference between Ryan and Obama is that Obama's actual policy agenda regarding black America is serious, and Ryan's isn't. But Ryan's point—that the a pathological culture has taken root among an alarming portion of black people—is basically accepted by many progressives today. And it's been accepted for a long time. 

Peddlers of black pathology tend to date the decline of African-American virtue to the 1960s. But pathology arguments are much older. Between 1900 and 1930, blacks were three times as likely as whites to be killed. Their killers tended to be black—black were 80 percent of Mississippi's murderers and 60 percent of its victims. According to historian David Oshinsky, the actual murder rate among African-Americans was likely higher. "We had the usual number of [Negro] killings during the week just closed," the Jackson Clarion-Ledger reported in 1904. "Aside from the dozen or so reported in the press, several homicides occurred which the county correspondents did not deem sufficient for the dispatches."

Oshinsky reports that "many of the murders involved liquor, gambling and personal disputes." Did the ghastly amount of violence afflicting black Mississippians spring from poor blacks "not holding up their end of the bargain?" Or was it the the fact that black Mississippians were living in a kleptocracy that had no regard for their lives? As Khalil Muhammad shows in his book The Condemnation of Blackness, progressives and conservatives alike often argued for the former.

Certainly there are cultural differences as you scale the income ladder. Living in abundance, not fearing for your children's safety, and having decent food around will have its effect. But is the culture of West Baltimore actually less virtuous than the culture of Wall Street? I've seen no such evidence. Yet that is the implicit message accepted by Paul Ryan, and the message is bipartisan. 

That is because it is a message that makes all our uncomfortable truths tolerable. Only if black people are somehow undeserving can a just society tolerate a yawning wealth gap, a two-tiered job market, and persistent housing discrimination. 

I think of that cab driver passing me by on Amsterdam. We are not on the block anymore. We are in America, where our absence of virtue is presumed, and we must eat disrespect in sight of our sons. And who can be mad in America? Racism is just the wind, here. Racism is but the rain.

       

The Secret Lives Of Inner City Black Males

On Sunday, I took my son to see two movies at a French film festival that was in town. The local train was out. We walked over to Amsterdam to flag down a cab. The cab rolled right past us and picked up two young-ish white women. It's sort of amazing how often that happens. It's sort of amazing how often you think you are going to be permitted to act as Americans do and instead receive the reminder--"Oh that's right, we are just some niggers. I almost forgot." 

Getting angry at the individual cabbie is like getting angry at the wind or raging against the rain. In America, the notion that black people are lacking in virtue is ambient. We see this in our vocabulary of politics and racism which have no room for the decline in the out of wedlock birth-rate, and invoke Chicago, with no regard for Chicago at all, but to deflect all eyes from the body of Trayvon Martin. 

But I was angry, and very much wanted to approach the cabbie, idling there at a red light, in ill disposition. I was also with my son. And more, I am a 6'4 black dude who tries to avoid the police. I think, fifteen years ago, with nothing to lose, I would have made a different decision if only because the culture of my young years made a virtue of meeting disrespect with aggression. This culture was not wrong--the price of ignoring disrespect, in the old town, was more disrespect. The culture was a collection of the best practices for making our socially engineered inner cities habitable  I now live in a different environment. I now have different practices. 

Last week, Paul Ryan went on the radio to address the lack of virtue prevalent among men who grew up like me, my father,  my brothers,  my best friends and a large number of my people:

We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.

A number of liberals reacted harshly to Ryan. I'm not sure why. What Ryan said here is not very far from what  Bill Cosby, Michael Nutter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama hadn't said before him. The idea that poor people living in the inner city, and particularly black men, are "not holding up their end of the deal" as Bill Cosby put it, is not terribly original or even, these days, right-wing. From the president on down there is an accepted belief in America--black and white--that African-American people, and African-American men, in particular, are lacking in the virtues in family, hard work and citizenship

If Cousin Pookie would vote, if Uncle Jethro would get off the couch and stop watching SportsCenter and go register some folks and go to the polls, we might have a different kind of politics

Cousin Pookie and Uncle Jethro voted at higher rates than any other ethnic group in the country. They voted for Barack Obama. Our politics have not changed. Neither has Barack Obama's rhetoric. Facts can only get in the way of a good story. It was sort of stunning to see the president give a speech on the fate of young black boys, and not mention the word racism once. It was sort of stunning to see the president salute the father of Trayvon Martin and the father of Jordan Davis and then claim, "nothing keeps a young man out of trouble like a father who takes an active role in his son’s life."

From what I can tell, the major substantive difference between Ryan and Obama, is that Obama's actual policy agenda regarding black America is serious, and Ryan's isn't. But Ryan's point--that the a pathological culture has taken root among an alarming sector of black people--is basically accepted by many progressives today. And it's been accepted for a long time. 

Peddlers of black pathology tend to date the decline of African-American virtue to the 1960s. But pathology arguments are much older. Between 1900 and 1930, blacks were three times as likely as whites to be killed. Their killers tended to be black--black were 80 percent of Mississippi's murderers and 60 percent of its victims. According to historian David Oshinsky, the actual murder rate among African-Americans was likely higher. "We had the usual number of [Negro] killings during the week just closed," the Jackson Clarion-Ledger reported in 1904. "Aside from the dozen or so reported in the press, several homicides occurred which the county correspondents did not deem sufficient for the dispatches."

Oshinsky reports that "many of the murders involved liquor, gambling and personal disputes." Did the ghastly amount of violence afflicting black Mississippians spring from poor blacks "not holding up their end of the bargain?" Or was it the the fact that black Mississipians were living under a kleptocracy that has no regard for their lives? As Khalil Muhammad shows in his book The Condemnation of Blackness, progressives and conservatives, made that argument at the time often argued for the former.

Certainly there are cultural differences as you scale the income ladder. Living in abundance, not fearing for your children's safety, and having decent food around will have its effect. But is the culture of West Baltimore is actually less virtuous than the culture of Wall Street? I've seen no such evidence. But that is the implicit message accepted by Paul Ryan and the message is bipartisan. 

That is because it is a message that makes all our uncomfortable truths tolerable. Only if black people are, somehow, underserving can a just society tolerate a yawning wealth gap, a two-tier job market, and persistent housing discrimination. 

I think of that cab-driver passing me by on Amsterdam. We are not on the block anymore. Where are in America, where our absence of virtue is presumed, and we must eat disrespect in sight of ours sons. Who can be mad? Racism is just the wind, here. Racism is nothing but the rain.

       

As Though Iraq Never Happened

I don't really understand how any editorial by Condoleezza Rice on conflict in Ukraine can fail to directly address the failures of the Iraq War. But here is Rice arguing for American godhead:

The notion that the United States could step back, lower its voice about democracy and human rights and let others lead assumed that the space we abandoned would be filled by democratic allies, friendly states and the amorphous “norms of the international community.” Instead, we have seen the vacuum being filled by extremists such as al-Qaeda reborn in Iraq and Syria; by dictators like Bashar al-Assad, who, with the support of Iran and Russia, murders his own people; by nationalist rhetoric and actions by Beijing that have prompted nationalist responses from our ally Japan; and by the likes of Vladimir Putin, who understands that hard power still matters.

These global developments have not happened in response to a muscular U.S. foreign policy: Countries are not trying to “balance” American power. They have come due to signals that we are exhausted and disinterested. The events in Ukraine should be a wake-up call to those on both sides of the aisle who believe that the United States should eschew the responsibilities of leadership. If it is not heeded, dictators and extremists across the globe will be emboldened. And we will pay a price as our interests and our values are trampled in their wake.

Condoleezza Rice was an important member of an administration that launched a war on false pretense and willingly embraced torture. This was done in the name of the American people. It takes a particular historical blindness to claim that such actions should have no effect on all our crowing over "democracy and human rights." 

War-mongering is self-justifying.  If you bungle a war in Iraq, it does not mean you need to sit back and reflect on the bungling. It means you should make more war, less Iraq become a base for your enemies. If Vladimir Putin violates Ukrainian sovereignty, it is evidence for a more muscular approach. If he doesn't, than it is evidence that he fears American power. If there are no terrorist attacks on American soil, than drones must be right and our security state must be effective. If there are attacks, then our security state must increase its surveillance, and more bombs should be dropped. Violence begets violence. Peace begets violence. The circle continues.

Though maybe not. Conor Friedersdorf, in his rebuttal to David Brooks, points out that the appeal of war-mongering is diminishing. In which case the people perceive something that evade some of their leaders--even America is not God. Or perhaps more simply, we have problems of our own. This sense is likely as much a product of virtue as cynicism. This is the last, most unfortunate, legacy of the Iraq War. It was (and is) fuel for such cynicism. For those people actually concerned about democracy, human rights and global peace, the Iraq War was a disaster. To say nothing of the innocent dead.

       

Politics and the African-American Human Language

The NFL and Fritz Pollard Alliance's effort to ban the word the nigger from the NFL is not just, as Richard Sherman smartly points out, borderline racist but actually racist. Any effort to raise a standard for African-American humans that does not exist for non-African-American humans is racist.

As I've explained before, the meaning of human language changes with context. That is why you may call your wife honey, but I probably should not. That is why Toby Keith referring to himself as "White Trash With Money" will never be the same as me accusing Toby as being "white trash with money. That is why Dan Savage proposing a column entitled "Hey Faggot!" will never be the same as me seeing Dan Savage on the street and yelling "Hey Faggot!" This is how humans use language, and it is wholly consistent with how black humans use language. The effort to punish this use, like all respectability politics, is an effort to punish black humanity, is racism. 

It does not matter that black people of a certain persuasion are making this charge. Black people of a certain persuasion also supported the kind of laws that now find one third of all black men under state supervision. This is not an appeal to a crowd, it is an appeal to the basic rules of language, without which we would all be soon reduced to babble.  When people claim that the word "nigger" must necessarily mean the same thing, at all times, spoken by all people, one wonders whether they understand how the very words coming out of their mouth actually work.

The great Harry Carson illustrates the point here:

I find it very disheartening that in our society today we're having a debate about the n-words being used as a term of endearment. If that's a term of endearment, go up to your grandfather, or an elderly black person, and use it on them. See how they react. For those who use it, I say they have no sense of history.

This is deep ignorance masquerading as expertise. As anyone whose spent time with the literature, testimonials, and music of enslaved black people knows, the use of "nigger" by black people to describe themselves is ancient. And as anyone with any familiarity with human beings knows, there are great many things you would not say to your grandfather that you would say to your friends, your wife, or your brother. And as anyone familiar with black people knows, our grandfathers certainly used "nigger" themselves. 

In a particularly sad portion of the Wells Report, Jonathan Martin laments being derided as a nigger to his face by Richie Incognito. Martin's father's response is, "They think nigger is okay because black people use it." I read these words as the testimonial of someone coping with the trauma of rape. I am not sure that this is far off. Black America was birthed in a spectacular act of rape—literal and symbolic and our oppression has often been born as such. They enslave us because we are heathen. They spit on us because our hair is too nappy. They beat us because we are too dark. They enslave us because we are too loud. They oppress us because we are too rude. They kill us because we are too human. 

The religion of nigger-cleansing gives one a sense of power, a belief that a individual respectability can somehow best the big machine. But the actual record of nigger-cleansing is dubious. Booker T. Washington could not stop the Red Summers. Racism neither needs, nor seeks, black people's permission. The wolf does not care if the sheep is respectable.