Tim Wise's Blog, page 22

Asking for It: Male Violence, Misogyny and the Prospects for Justice

Sometimes, it’s good to just vent.

With that in mind, and before proceeding with a deeper and hopefully more constructive commentary about male violence and misogyny, perhaps it would do me well to release my first, instinctual thoughts about the guilty verdicts recently secured against two members of the Steubenville (OH) High School football team, who raped a young woman last year after a night of heavy drinking. Not because these are thoughts about which I am proud, or even the least bit satisfied — as we’ll see below — but because they are necessary perhaps, or at least pure, and human, and suggestive that beyond political and philosophical posturing, even we who make our living with rational argument are yet capable of feeling, and anger, when called for.

And so here they are.

First, good.

Go directly to jail.

Do not pass go.

Do not pick up your trophies or your letterman jackets. You will neither need nor be allowed them where you’re going.

No more pep rallies.

No more adulation from the cheerleaders or the jock-besotted fans of your community, so many of whose members still apparently believe that high school football is actually important.

Your loss to the juvenile justice system, in which you will now be firmly ensconced for so long as it takes to reach your 21st birthdays will be no loss whatsoever to the rest of us. Honestly, and despite all the crocodile tears shed on CNN, amid lamentations that your futures looked so bright, I have to wonder, did they really? I mean really? Somehow, I rather doubt it. In all likelihood, neither of you were headed for anything much greater than a barstool, right there in Steubenville, where you would eventually have managed to attain middle age, all the while (and every Saturday) regaling your fellow losers with stories about that time you threw the winning touchdown, or caught the same in the face of two defenders, thereby securing the state championship for your little band of brothers. For people like yourselves, high school more often than not proves to be the pinnacle of your lives, from which lofty perch everything else is almost ineluctably downhill.

But now, you won’t even get to play in that last game, or be hoisted upon the shoulders of your teammates and carried off the field to the screams of the Friday Night crowd-gasms upon which you had staked your entire pathetic existence.

And once again, good. Double good in fact. You digitally violated (or as you and your boys likely prefer to exclaim amid appropriately bro-worthy high fives, finger-banged) a young woman who you knew full well, given her inebriation, was incapable of consenting to any form of sex act. That is rape, first by law, and then, according to any decently calibrated notion of morality, the latter of which concept I realize remains horribly perplexing to you. And if you didn’t know that such behavior constituted a crime before that night, well that’s too bad. You sure as shit do now. And if, as I suspect, your parents weren’t competent enough or informed enough or concerned enough to share such minor details with you before your hormones and general disregard for women kicked in, lubricated as they were by all that alcohol, well too bad for them too. You wouldn’t be the first kids with crappy parents, and I am quite certain you won’t be the last.

But in addition to your ethical depravity, your stupidity in texting about your crime, and having people take pictures, and more or less bragging about getting hand jobs from a drunk girl, all suggest that you really are the kind of people who deserve more than most to be locked up. And if there were cells nearby sufficient to hold those among your fetid classmates, who thought those pictures and your texts were funny — like former Steubenville student, Michael Nodianos whose video joking about the rape went viral, or like the ones who have been publicly threatening the victim on Twitter (because they have no real employment or college futures, the likes of which they would need to worry about jeopardizing with public displays of dumbshittery) — then I’d gladly secure them away with you. The world, and surely the mostly good people of Steubenville, would fare better without any of you around.

Those are my first thoughts, and understandably so, not only as the father of daughters, but as a person who thinks of rape and sexual assault as the most thoroughly evil of violations, and will offer no forbearance to the rationalizations — whether by media mouthpieces, politicians, priests, or frat boys who have too much to drink at their kegger — that continually and in every generation seem to surface whenever an event such as this happens, yet again.

But that — and now that I’ve gotten it off my chest, I can acknowledge it — is the easy part. It’s way too easy in fact, and wholly unsatisfying, for just as with any rage directed at a criminal perpetrator, it falls short of actually doing anything to change the culture in which criminal violence so often transpires. In the instant case, our anger — whether mine or yours — will do nothing to move by even a millimeter, the society in which those young men and the woman they violated were raised. Which is to say, that anger cannot and will not make my own daughters one bit safer. And if something like this were ever to happen to either of them, God forbid, they wouldn’t likely take much solace in the fact that their dad was on record, officially, as standing foursquare against rapists, so utterly un-brave is such a stance. So let us dig deeper now.

For the real problems, the real issues, are far harder to excavate than simply this. They go well beyond the matter of “no means no,” and standards of consent, and legal boundaries; well beyond images of lecherous men and their victims; well beyond questions of self-defense, and athletic hero-worship, to questions regarding the broader culture we share, well beyond the confines of this one Ohio town.

At the heart of our national dialogue on rape — to the extent we can even be said to have one, in the true sense of what dialogue implies — stands a persistent and rather transparent contempt for women, indeed a hatred so complete as to call into question just how many of us actually accept the idea that women are full human beings at all.

When those who seek, again and again, to minimize the crime of rape, can — and they do — come up with the same rationalizations, the same deflections, the same blame-shifting bullshit, over and over, you know you’re dealing with more than merely an individual pathology; rather, it is at that point that one must confront the possibility, indeed likelihood, that the sickness is cultural; that perhaps one is staring at the rank detritus of a society that inculcates as a matter of course — as part of its normal operating procedures — misogyny. That you are living in a rape culture, plain and simple.*

For how else can we understand, except as a thoroughly entrenched remnant of woman-hating, the persistent cries of so many that those who are sexually violated by men are somehow responsible for those violations? That either their clothes, or how many drinks they had, or their penchant for flirting somehow can make acceptable whatever a man might wish to do to them for the sake of his own gratification? After all, we don’t apply this same solipsistic illogic to other situations in which, one supposes, it might be available to us. So, for instance, we wouldn’t say that the wealthy arts patron who exits the symphony only to be mugged at gunpoint and relieved of her jewelry was somehow asking for it by virtue of having donned such shiny objects, or merely for having partaken in such bourgeois entertainment pleasantries. We wouldn’t, I hope, decide that a carjacker might in some sense be blameless for his crimes, at least so long as he plied his trade only against persons driving really nice, expensive cars, the fanciness of which naturally rendered said carjacker incapable of controlling his urges to punch the drivers in the face, throw them from their vehicles, and speed away.

No, victim blaming is something we reserve, when it comes to acts of violence, for women and pretty much women alone. Or perhaps also LGBT folks, attacked for their sexuality, but then too by men whose masculinity is so insecure — another symptom of and contributor to misogyny — as to be enraged by the sight of two men together, or two women needing only each other, or a trans man or woman whose sexuality the misogynist and straight/cis supremacist finds too confusing to fit within the bigoted confines of their own desiccated brains. Even then, there is a hatred of women — or in the case of gay men a hatred of men perceived as less than men, which is to say, as women — operating here.

In short, the problem with rape and sexual violence is not women or the behaviors of women. The problem is men, and the broken notions of masculinity that define our culture, and have been (for too long) allowed to predominate throughout the modern world.

This is not to say, and please make a note of it, that women should simply and without thinking not concern themselves with their personal behaviors when around men. No doubt it would be best if all women were extraordinarily cautious as to the ways in which they interact with men, especially when alcohol is present. I am quite confident that my wife and I will have these conversations with our girls, and that they will be very well versed as to that part of sexuality over which they have some control; namely, their own presentation. But what they will also surely understand is this: regardless of what outfit they wear for the night, regardless of whether they make eyes at some boy, giggle a bit too long at a joke that really wasn’t funny, or even agree to make out, that none of those are invitations to sex.

And if the parents of boys out there are not making that clear to their children, well that is on them. It is not going to be my daughter’s — or anyone’s daughter’s — fault, when the boys they failed, the boys they raised to be stunted men, turn their damage upon a woman just because they think they can.

But now here’s the irony: To not understand this — and it is painfully obvious that millions don’t understand it in the least — is to not only denigrate the agency of women, it is to actually operate from the implicit assumption that men have no human agency at all. Which is to say, it is an attitude that is not only misogynistic but oddly enough, evidence of misandry as well. In short, to suggest, as rape culture and its enablers do, that men just can’t help ourselves in the presence of a woman showing cleavage (or any woman, no matter how she’s dressed or how old she is, since rape has little to do with merely trying to get laid and everything to do with domination and subordination), is to render men little more than involuntarily manipulable vertebrates, utterly devoid of the ability to make moral decisions. That such a verdict, were it true of such a powerful and dangerous group as this, would justify quarantining the lot of us until individually we managed to demonstrate that we had broken with our lower-order brothers, should be apparent. That rape culture not only violates women by definition, but by holding men to such a low standard of expectation, violates us as well, may be less obvious, but is no less true.

It is no different than the way male sexist behavior always denigrates the practitioner, even as its target remains located elsewhere. When men exchange chauvinistic pleasantries with their buddies (or for that matter perfect strangers with whom they feel oddly and almost uniformly comfortable engaging in such banter), they are, in effect, presuming that all men are assholes of a similar size and shape as themselves. They are suggesting with their words, or jokes, or catcalls or whatever, that when it comes to guys, “we’re all pigs here, right fellas?” That so many men — and probably all of us at least occasionally — have ratified this intrinsically offensive and even self-hating notion at some point (or many points) in our lives is tragic, but no less true for the designation. Much as white folks so often remain silent in the face of racist humor, even when it troubles us to the core of our beings, so too have men decided in far too many cases to go along to get along, and in the process we demean not only our mothers, our wives, our girlfriends, our sisters and our daughters. We diminish ourselves as well.

And it needs to stop.

But it won’t stop, and we won’t abolish once and for all the mentality of human disposability that animates misogyny (and all hatreds) by way of our criminal justice system, at least not alone. Though one can perhaps envision such a system capable of restoring violent offenders to a better and more contributory place, let us acknowledge that this is not the system we have at present. Ours, rather, is one predicated on punishment as an end in itself, on retribution, on the infliction of pain. Not because pain or retribution have any positive correlation with reducing future violence — if anything they enhance the likelihood of repeat offending, since most of those to whom we direct our retributive instincts will one day walk free, angrier and even less whole than they were on their first day of incarceration — but because it makes us feel better. Because it allows us to preen about as moral superiors, to remind ourselves of how good we are, precisely because we can point to others and affix to them the permanent mark of “bad.”

Yet, if we remain satisfied with this, remain sanguine about a system that gives little thought to what comes next, no one is safe. Not me, not you, not any woman from the predations of a rapist. No one. And in the case of Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond, the fact is (and this is true no matter how one may feel about it), these two young men will be released in just a few years, tops, into a world that will not have changed much since the time of their trial. It will be the same culture, with the same proximate views of women, all of which they will once again be free to imbibe unless the rest of us demand something more from them. Something that is predicated not on punishment and pain, but on restoration, redemption and accountability. For just as certain as I was above about the likelihood that these two men were headed nowhere fast prior to their crimes, I am equally confident that if we demand it, and make room for it, they might now — and precisely because of their crime and the punishment they will be expected to serve — come out the other end capable of taking the kinds of actions, in line with restorative justice, that will not only allow them to change, but will go further than any other possible punishment in terms of healing the community from which they came, and importantly, the victim and her family.

Restorative justice is the only hope we have as a society. It need not foreclose the possibility of incapacitation and incarceration, but it has to be considered superior to those options, or else we are to be forever trapped in a cycle of action and reaction, crime and punishment, and crime again. To simply dispose of them, as many would like to do — and as I too initially countenanced without much compunction — would only ratify the mentality of human disposability that animated, at least in part, their crimes to begin with.

And so we need to expect more from them than to simply go away, to be disappeared into a justice system, juvenile or otherwise, from behind which edifice we may merely put them out of sight, out of mind. We must demand of them that they, beginning now, step up and become peacemakers by challenging other men like themselves, be they jocks or not, about rape and their own fractured understanding of the humanity of women and men alike. They should be expected to spend time not only being counseled on these matters, but then counseling others, to serve as living examples of both the terror of sexual violence, but also the possibility of human redemption. They should be expected, right now, to tell their peers in Steubenville to cease with their blaming of the victim in this case. To apologize in court is not enough. Now they must take the lead in demanding a change of thinking in the culture that nurtured them, or rather, perhaps, failed to. None of this will erase the damage they have done. None of it is intended to make it okay. But unless we expect this, and more, from them, nothing will change.

Additionally, there is more we should expect, and in keeping with the notion of restoration, should demand. As diarist/blogger UnaSpenser noted on dailyKos, among other things:

The parents of the boys could meet with the parents of the girl and ask them how they can support them. They could meet in private and discuss ways in which the families could support each other, but particularly what can be done to help the girl heal, gain emotional strength and a sense of safety in the world.

The coaches of Steubenville — all of them — could be required to get training about how to guide students regarding a culture of consent. Since what appears to be so important to everyone in Steubenville was that these boys were football players, it seems that the sports teams are accorded a higher status in Steubenville than other citizens…So, the first place to instill a culture of consent is at the top…The coaches need to be trained and need to adopt a culture of consent. It needs to be a part of their required coaching curriculum to instill this culture in their athletes.

The town could inject a “culture of consent” curriculum into their entire school system. From teaching toddlers not to hit people, to teaching elementary children not to mock each other or take lunch money, to teaching middle- and high-schoolers that sex without consent is assault.

The town could offer parenting courses on how to model a culture of consent and home and teach the principles of consent to their children. Parents of Steubenville could start a foundation to support rape victims and restorative justice. Victims could receive counseling, college scholarships, or whatever they find that they need. Those who have committed rapes could receive counseling, be given community service to perform and be guided through a process of apologizing and offering restitution to their victims.

The bottom line is this: women will never be safe, so long as we continue to treat them as the inevitable victims of men who not only cannot control their sexual urges and desires for domination, but who also cannot change or be changed, and so must simply be locked away and perhaps brutalized themselves. That isn’t to say that no one should ever be put away in such a fashion. I am certain there are some for whom separation from society, and for very long periods of time, may be the only way to protect the rest of us from their predatory behaviors. But I am just as sure that such a system — for it is the one we live with now, as incarceration continues to spiral out of control and as we continue to lock up more people than any nation on Earth — is not, on the whole, working. And so we have to think bigger.

Revenge, though it is an absolutely normal human instinct — and though the desire for it has its place I suppose — is unsustainable as a motivator for human thought and action. It is a recipe for constant violence and endangerment. So while the victims of violent crime have every right and reason to desire it — I get it, I really do — the state, and we the people as represented by it, must at long last demand something more. Because when we allow the state to operate on the basis of the same enraged human emotions as victims at their darkest and most pained moments, we set in place the instrumentality of torture, of cruelty, of war without ceasing, of mass death and destruction.

Revenge has no place as a motivator for public policy. And this is especially true when it comes to correcting and altering the actions of misogynists, racists and other haters of all stripes. After all, many a misogynist himself operates from a place where he believes he is somehow avenging a slight at the hands of a woman, perhaps his mother, perhaps a lover who spurned him, or whomever. That his anger, his understanding of his real injury, and his vengeance are all psychotically misplaced is, of course, self-evident. But that anger and vengeance almost always are misplaced, even if not psychotic, remains less so to most of us.

Let us learn it, and fast, before it swallows us whole.

________

*Note, when I call this culture a rape culture, I do not intend to suggest that it is uniquely so, or even more so than others, in other nations around the world. Sadly, misogyny and rape are global problems, and rape culture is all too ubiquitous. But the fact that there are other rape cultures as well, neither should allow us to accept such a thing as normal and natural — and thus incapable of change — nor encourage us to duck our responsibility for challenging ours, here in the U.S. The fact that others are guilty of the same horrors as we, should provide no solace here.

Announcing My Forthcoming Book: Culture of Cruelty (Due Fall, 2013)

Announcing my forthcoming book from City Lights.

Working on it now, and should have it out sometime in Fall…

BOOK DESCRIPTION:

Tim Wise is one of the country’s most prolific public intellectuals. His critically acclaimed books, high-profile media interviews and year-round speaking schedule have established him as a leading voice for racial equity. In Culture of Cruelty, Wise aims his incisive commentary at a new Goliath: class disparity and a growing culture of cruelty that demonizes those in need.

As Wise demonstrates, there was a time when the hardship of fellow Americans stirred feelings of sympathy and prompted support for public policies to alleviate private pain. But today, mainstream discourse increasingly blames low-income folks for their own situation, and the notion of an intractable “culture of poverty” has pushed our country in an especially ugly direction. Wise shows how the economic elite have commandeered the discussion about class, moving the nation from compassion to scorn for the marginalized. With clarity and precision, Wise not only documents growing contempt for the nation’s have-nots, but also explores the reasons for it. In doing so, he convincingly demonstrates how classism, racism and sexism are inextricably linked, and how popular culture has also inadvertently contributed to a deepening indifference towards the plight of the poor. Finally, Wise shows that far from a culture of poverty, it is the culture of affluence and power that deserves the blame for America’s economic and social crises.

Flashback: Affirmative Action Debate, 2007: Destroying Conservative Nonsense

Oh damn…somebody just sent me this and reminded of how much fun I had thoroughly eviscerating right-wing nonsense in a debate back in 2007 on affirmative action for the now venerable IQ-squared debate series. I was teamed up with my friend Kimberle Crenshaw (of Columbia and UCLA Law Schools), and Khin Mai Aung of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. We were opposing Terence Pell of the Center for Individual Rights, John McWhorter, conservative fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and Joseph Phillips, a black conservative actor whose claim to fame is that he was on the Cosby Show or something…enjoy. Even though I got cut off at the end, by Robert Siegel (who didn’t seem to like me at all, which makes me happy, actually), I’m still pretty happy with this.

Tim Wise at the University of San Francisco – February 26, 2013

My talk at USF, 2.26.13

 

Tim Wise at Providence College, “Diversity, Racism and the Trouble With Colorblindness,” February 20, 2013

My entire speech at Providence College, 2/20/2013. By all means, watch the entire speech, rather than the snippets posted by various websites, which they are using so as to suggest that I “attacked the Catholic Church,” or demeaned Catholicism — both of which are absurd arguments made by liars…which is to say, by right-wingers. Same thing. Always. No exceptions.

Hearing No Evil: The Amazing Obtuseness of Campus Conservatives

Seems like every young conservative with a phone cam thinks they’re James O’Keefe.

Sadly for them, since there’s no Andrew Breitbart left to selectively edit and post their handiwork, thereby making it seem a lot more damning than it really is, they’re reduced to making even the most obvious, historically inarguable comments by those of us on the left seem controversial.

Just such a thing happened to me this past Wednesday, during my talk at Providence College in Rhode Island. I’ll get to the supposedly “shocking” video shortly, but first let it be noted that most of the 500 or so in attendance were enthusiastically supportive of the message I delivered regarding the obligation of educational institutions to promote racial equity and representation, by way of deliberate efforts at recruiting and retaining students of color. There had been some controversy at the school recently, thanks to an article in the student paper critiquing the college’s diversity plan, and so I weighed in. My argument was really quite un-radical, in truth. I merely explained, drawing on the available evidence, that unless deliberate efforts were made to make Providence a more inclusive place, it would not simply happen on its own, and that highly capable persons of color would continue to be overlooked. And this would happen, not because they were unqualified, but because of the inertia of a K-12 education system that too often provides unequal opportunity to students, such that would allow all students to thrive and even consider Providence, let alone apply and be admitted.

Seriously, in terms of radicalness, it was like a 6.5 on my normal scale.

But in any event, during the Q&A period things got more interesting. Two conservative students asked me questions — good, tough questions (and indeed the kind I like getting at these sorts of events) — and my answers, and our interactions proved grist for the right-wing “undercover video” mill, despite how incredibly mild and obviously true my remarks were, to which they took such offense.

One of these was a young woman of color who wanted to know — given my “dislike for conservatives and Republicans” — what I would say to people of color who were also conservative, such as herself. I explained that I wouldn’t say anything different to her than any other conservative. Rather, I asked her, as I would anyone on the right, how she would explain the persistent racial disparities between whites and people of color, if she rejects (as the right does, and as she admitted she did), the notion that racism and discrimination, either past, present, or a combination of the two, were largely to blame.

At no point did she even try and answer my question, because like most conservatives, she cannot; at least not without sounding incredibly racist in the process. Because the only possible answer, if one rejects the discrimination thesis as an explanation for ongoing and glaring disparities in income, wealth, education, and elsewhere between whites and black folks, is inherently racist: namely, that those persons of color must in some way be inferior, either biologically or culturally, relative to whites. I waited with baited breath for her — a woman of color — to actually admit that was what she thought. But instead of grappling with the question honestly, she said nothing, beyond her amazing admission that she refuses to accept the simple statement that people of color had ever been disadvantaged in the U.S., or that whites had ever been advantaged, due to racism. In other words, it wasn’t just that she insisted America was an equal opportunity society now (say, because of the civil rights revolution), which is at least an understandable and honorable argument, however wrongheaded I might view it to be. Rather, she refused to so much as acknowledge that the history of racism and white supremacy had ever mattered at all. She was the moral equivalent of a Holocaust denier, so fundamentally irrational and uninformed about basic social reality as to call into question how and why a school as good as Providence would have admitted her as a member of its student body. And to think that she was chagrined by affirmative action ostensibly lowering the academic standards of the school on behalf of the other black kids there? Ah, methinks the lady doth protest too much.

But her friend and conservative colleague’s question — actually it was a statement — was even more interesting. She claimed that I was “anthropologically reductionist” (one of those word casseroles that we learn in college and that some sadly deploy just to show how smart they are), for even noticing something like race. She, on the other hand, in the throes of a deeper (and Scriptural) enlightenment merely saw “people” when she looked around, not colors, and especially “people made in the image of God.” Cue the harps and Vienna Boy’s Choir.

In response, I told her first that such a sentiment was lovely, but, I thought naive. Mostly because even if we accept the notion that we are all merely individuals made in the image of God, the fact is, our identities as whites or people or color, men or women, straight folks or LGBT, have mattered, and have resulted in advantages for some and disadvantages for others. In other words, we can’t treat people as abstractions, removed from their social context and consider that justice. If racism has had consequences — which of course her black friend refused to admit, so no doubt one can understand her confusion — then one must deal with that, and attempt to rectify the injustices that have brought us to this point, not merely gloss over them in the name of some colorblind ecumenism, thereby leaving in place all the unearned advantages obtained by some and unearned disadvantages visited upon the rest. She was, in short, guilty of viewing individuals using a dictionary definition of the term, when what we actually experience in this world in the lives we lead, is an encyclopedic version of ourselves, far more complex than either the dictionary, or certainly the Bible might lead us to believe.

But what I also said — and which apparently created such a firestorm — was the part where I noted that however nice it was to prattle on about people being made in the image of God, that even there, we have a problem in this culture, given how we have created the image of that God to match whiteness. In other words, we have made God white, and Jesus white, as could be seen on any number of crucifixes (or is it crucifi?) around this Catholic campus, including one that was hanging right behind my head while I spoke: a lily-white, Europeanized savior, devoid of any relationship to what first century Jews would have looked like. Until my questioner was prepared to deal with that, and why we had done that, and what it meant, she really was in no position to lecture me about my anthropological reductionism or anything else.

One would think that any reasonably educated person would realize that the whitening of Jesus was an act of white supremacy, undertaken down through many centuries for the purpose of inculcating western and European domination. Constantine, after all, said that the cross was the sign under which he would conquer, not liberate, the world. My comments are not remotely contestable by rational people. But in the eyes of Providence College conservatives, they were heresy of the highest order.

And so today I discovered that someone in the crowd apparently provided a video of my talk to well-known white nationalist (as in, openly so), and Providence resident, Tim Dionisopoulos, and that he had written about it and uploaded it to the web. Therein, Dionisopoulos took special umbrage at my discussion of the white Jesus issue, as if my comments were the height of craziness. And he made special note of the part where I joked that the school should make Jesus black for a year, just to show that his color “really doesn’t matter” (which is what white Christians always tell me when I bring up his whitening, as if to suggest I shouldn’t make a big deal of it). Apparently, some folks think I was being serious and that my comment (obviously intended to lampoon their own unblinking devotion to his pasty whiteness on their campus crosses) suggested some kind of anti-Catholic bias.

The videographers also found it shocking, just shocking that I would suggest the Catholic Church (and really, Christendom more broadly), had been deeply implicated in the genocidal mistreatment of indigenous peoples throughout the Americas. This revelation comes as no surprise to anyone who has studied the history of native peoples, or the church for that matter; indeed, even the Church no longer denies it, though they rarely deal honestly with its implications. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, for instance, has itself noted the history, however bloodlessly as such:

Catholicism’s spread to Native people across the United States resembles in many ways the settling of the country itself. From the earliest days French and Spanish missionaries who came to this world newly discovered by Europeans came as extensions of the colonizing powers. The approach was, in many cases, to force the Natives to accept the faith as part of the process of servitude…

The history of the Alta California missions are instructive here. These were settlements established by Spanish colonizers so as to rapidly assimilate native peoples there into both European culture and Catholicism, under the belief of the Church that it had a moral right to evangelize and that the Spanish crown had a legal right to land. The missions operated by forcibly resettling indigenous persons around the mission itself so as “convert them” not only from so-called heathens into Catholics, but from savages to civilized peoples, in European terms. Once Indians were Baptized they were disallowed the right to move about the country; rather, they were forced to work at the missions, under the rigid control of the Friars. Indian women, in particular, were housed in such unsanitary conditions at the missions that diseases spread rapidly, resulting in the deaths of thousands. Contemporaries writing at the time noted without compunction that the labor conditions at the missions resembled slavery, and since the native peoples were unpaid for their work — work that ultimately enriched the Catholic Church and the colonial powers with which the Church was entwined — such an analogy is obviously warranted.

Elsewhere the Church contributed directly to the cultural and even physical evisceration of indigenous Americans, in ways that any truly educated person in this country would know, were our schools dedicated to the teaching of anything remotely comporting with truth. For a comprehensive accounting of the evil done in the name of God to indigenous peoples, one need only read George Tinker’s Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Cultural Genocide, or David Stannard’s meticulously documented, American Holocaust, to see that my comments at Providence, far from indicating a bias against Catholicism, fully dovetail with historical fact, however inconvenient those facts may be for a school that has chosen “Friars” as its sports mascot.

That today’s campus conservatives think challenging the phony whiteness of Jesus, or noting the history of the church’s role in racism makes one a radical is instructive. It speaks to what an utterly sheltered, provincial and fundamentally ignorant world view these persons have been given heretofore, by their parents, high schools, priests and preachers, and by a larger society that has no room for any understanding of America and Christianity that isn’t laudatory. Their inability to hear of evil, let alone address it, is rendered all the less likely by such a sheltering, and their ability to engage in even the simplest rational dialogue with others, or even with history, is made almost impossible.

The good news is, the school is pushing forward with its diversity initiative, and nearly everyone in attendance at the talk cringed and groaned openly at the foolishness of their classmates, there on display. So one can only hope that even at a school like Providence, this too shall pass.

Bigots and Their Enablers: Reflections on Racism, Both Individual and Systemic

It’s one of those stories that can leave even the most jaded and cynical critic of racist thinking scratching their head; the kind that manages to shock even those of us for whom acts of bigotry and intolerance seem all-too-typical, and who have, sadly, come to expect them in a culture such as this.

And so it was that in Flint, Michigan recently, a new father — and this is a term he has earned in only the most narrow, biological sense — demanded that when his recently arrived child was sent to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit of the hospital where she had been born, no African American nurses were to attend to her needs, to care for her, to do what neonatal ICU nurses do, which is to say keep sick babies alive. White hands only for this white, fresh as snow child, whose father, sporting a shiny new swastika tattoo (a Christmas present no doubt from his pathetic skinhead bride) prioritized his own hatreds above and beyond the needs of his precious little girl. That the future does not bode well for her seems hardly worth saying. To be delivered from an ICU into the arms of one as unhinged as this can only, by reasonable people, be seen as a turn for the worse. Incubators and breathing machines might be preferable to having parents such as she has, through no fault of her own, inherited.

But what is worse, perhaps, than the bigotry of this one neo-Nazi — which is at least to be expected and so, can, despite its irrationality in a case such as this, remain somewhat within the realm of the banal — is that the hospital in question, Hurley Medical Center, actually capitulated to his psychotically racist demands, posting a sign on the little girl’s chart instructing the unit to disallow any black nurses from as much as touching this baby. Presumably, were Tonya Battle, a black Hurley neonatal nurse since 1988 the only nurse within arms reach of the girl as she entered cardiac arrest or as her kidneys began to shut down — both of which have been known to happen to those in a NIC-U — Battle was to scream loudly for a white nurse to come and save the child’s life. Because God forbid a black woman with 25 years experience do the job. And if she dies, well, at least her precious white skin wouldn’t have been sullied by black hands.

Hurley’s acquiescence to this insanity, in contravention of all ethical responsibility, not to mention legal obligations to treat their employees in a non-discriminatory fashion, is going to cost them no doubt, as they are apt to discover once the lawsuit currently brought against their witless administrators plays out. They are going to pay, and pay big, as they should, for their enabling of overt white supremacy. But that is hardly the most important part of this story. Just as it was not the most important part of the story back in 2000 when a heart specialist at St. Thomas Hospital in Nashville did a similar thing, agreeing to the lunatic ravings of another racist white man, who demanded that his wife, who needed open heart surgery to save her life, not be attended to by any black doctor, because he didn’t want a black man to see his wife naked.

More interesting, I think, is what this story (and the earlier one from Nashville) says about racism in America, and not just of the sort evinced by one bottom-feeder, troglodytic fan of Adolf Hitler. For while we are too quick to presume racism to be merely an individual pathology manifested by individually bad people, much like the father in the story from Flint, the fact is, an incident like this illustrates as well as anything can, the way that racism continues to operate as a systemic force in the United States, civil rights laws and all our vaunted post-raciality notwithstanding.

To understand what I mean by this, consider something I am often asked as I travel the country, speaking about racism, or in reply to one or another column or book that I’ve written: namely, it is queried, why don’t I ever talk about black racism, or, just generally, racism against white people? Why, it is wondered, do I focus on racism only when it’s deployed by whites?

There are many things I could say, and do, when asked something like this. But for now, let it suffice to say that this story, from Michigan, involving a white institution as respected as a hospital bending to the whims of a fucking Nazi, is more than enough of a reason for my selective attention. And this is true for multiple reasons.

First, what the story demonstrates is how much more potent white racism is than any potentially parallel version practiced by peoples of color. Simply put, there is no way that any bigoted black person, or Latino, or Asian American, or indigenous person, could possibly have made a similar demand in the reverse direction — that no white nurses attend to their newborn — and expect to have that insistence met with approval and acquiescence. Anyone who thinks a hospital would have agreed to such a thing — to actually deny opportunity to white nurses or doctors, and to limit the care of such a child to same-race caregivers — is either so overly medicated or mentally damaged as to make further discussion impossible. In other words, even when a white racist who is likely not of substantial economic means makes a racist demand, his desires can get ratified, and in ways that not even the wealthiest person of color could expect to have happen.

And this is because — and this is what is especially pertinent to the matter of institutional racism — even if a hospital was willing to go along with the ridiculous and bigoted demands of a hateful person of color, that no whites be allowed to touch their black or brown baby, it would be virtually impossible to fulfill such a request. And why? Simple. Because given the history of unequal opportunity in medical professions, from doctoring to nursing — and also just given the demographic and power dynamics within pretty much any institution you can name — to work around white professionals, even if one wanted to, is almost impossible.

Bottom line: the hospital in this case went along with the demand to exclude blacks from attending to this child because they could. Given the history of discrimination in access to the medical profession, including nursing, and the barriers to professional practice faced by too many people of color, there exists today a more limited number of such professionals from which to draw. As such, excluding them from a particular hospital unit or assignment is hardly a huge burden for the institution in question.

But imagine what would happen if the situation were reversed, and a racist black man had demanded the exclusion of whites from caring for his child. Even if there were a doctor willing to agree to such conditions, it would be virtually impossible for him or her to follow through, because whites — having received the opportunities needed to enter the nursing profession in larger numbers — are hard to work around. “No whites” policies would result in a lot of empty NIC-Us, whereas “No blacks” policies require only a small administrative headache at best, so fewer are such professionals in the first place. And so, given the history of racial inequity, the consequences of which we still experience, white bigotry of the individual type is operationalized and activated if you will, by the institutional injustices that have resulted in the over-represantaion of whites and under-representation of black and brown folks in certain jobs to begin with.

In other words, institutional racism is akin to the gasoline, allowing the otherwise stationary combustion engine of individual racism to function: the former gives the latter life, and the ability to impact others in a meaningful and detrimental way. Without the power to enforce one’s racism, or expect it to be enforced or enforceable by others, that racism is largely sterile. Which is why white racism is simply more worthy of our attention and concern than any other form.

Much the same would be true in other realms of life, beyond medical and hospital settings. Blacks who wish to avoid whites in their neighborhoods will typically find themselves limited to the poorest, most crowded areas of town — places whites long ago abandoned — since finding Caucasian-free zones in more prosperous suburbs can be a tough task. Whites can more or less live wherever we wish. If we are not to be found in a particular census tract you can bet it’s because we’ve chosen to be absent. Such cannot be said for why blacks are often absent from more affluent areas, however. Money or no money, good credit or bad, millions face discriminatory barriers in residential opportunity every year.

Once again, even if people of color despise whites and seek to avoid us, their ability to do so will be directly constrained by the larger opportunity structure that has skewed power and resources in our direction. Whites seeking to avoid blacks and Latinos on the other hand, can do so readily, with the help of mortgage discrimination, redlining, zoning laws and so-called “market forces” pricing many blacks out of the better housing markets (even though we only got into those markets because of government subsidies and preferences, both private and public).

So for those seeking to understand what racism is — and the difference between the merely individual as opposed to institutional forms of it — and why white racism is more potent and problematic than any other potential form, you need look no further than the recent headlines. When institutions can and will collaborate with and directly empower the racism of even the most deranged of bigots, you know that we have yet to arrive at that place of racial ecumenism claimed for us by those who would rather gloss over the ongoing injustices we face, and pretend to have attained, as a people, a perch to which we have no ethical right to lay claim.

Tim Wise on CNN Newsroom: “Racial Typecasting in Hollywood & Advertising,” 2/16/13

This is the second half of a longer discussion on CNN Newsroom with Don Lemon, 2/16/13, in which several guests, myself included, discussed the way in which actors of color are too often typecast in roles, in ways intended to keep white consumers comfortable. Part One of the discussion, which featured commercial actor, Jamison Reeves, film director, Anthony Hemingway, and casting director, Mimi Webb Miller, can be watched here

Tim Wise – Black History Month Speech, “Allyship and the Struggle for Justice,” 2/11/13, Harpeth Hall School, Nashville, TN

My February 11th speech at Harpeth Hall School, a Nashville school for young women, grades 5-12. This was their annual Black History Month Assembly, and the first time I have ever been called upon to speak to an audience ranging in age from 10 to 18 all at once – Yikes! But despite the challenge of that (seriously, try it sometime), thanks to the wonderful students, faculty and administrators, it proved to be a great event!

Assembly – Black History presentation from Harpeth Hall on Vimeo.

Interview With Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy (GRIID), 1/31/13

Here is my recent interview in Grand Rapids, MI, with Jeff Smith of Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy (GRIID). In this 37 minute discussion, we discuss the difference between White Supremacy and racism, the failure or limitations of diversity training, gentrification, Israel/Palestine and the future of the Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions campaign, the importance of doing intersectional analysis that bridges race, sex, gender, class and other identity categories, and my upcoming book, Cruel But Not Unusual: How America’s Elite Demonize the Poor, Valorize the Rich and Jeopardize the Future.