Tim Wise's Blog, page 27

Trayvon Martin, White Denial and the Unacceptable Burden of Blackness in America

By now, you probably know the shameful details, but they are worth repeating, in any event.

On the evening of February 26, George Zimmerman, a self-appointed "neighborhood watch captain" in a gated, upscale Orlando suburb, shot and killed 17-year old Trayvon Martin.

Because Martin was black.

And no, don't even think of rolling your eyes at the suggestion. That is what happened, just as surely as so many might well be loathe to admit it.

Oh sure, he denies such a motivation, as does his family, but the details of the incident, now emerging from that evening leave very little question about it.

This was not, as we too often hear in the wake of such incidents, "a tragedy."

This was not, as some would have it, "a terrible accident."

It was murder, plain and simple. And it would be called such by everyone in a nation that had any commitment to honest language, which, sadly, would pretty much rule out the one in which Martin's life began and ended, and in which Zimmerman continues to operate as a free man, unarrested by the police.

Trayvon Martin is dead because George Zimmerman believed his neighborhood needed and deserved to be protected from young black men, who could not possibly belong there, in his estimation. Never mind that Martin was in the community with his father, visiting friends. Never mind that Martin was armed only with Skittles and iced tea, while Zimmerman carried a loaded weapon.

Zimmerman, who has a history of aggressive behavior (including assaulting an officer a few years ago), appears to have something of a Dirty Harry syndrome about him. He is someone described by his own neighbors as overzealous, motivated by an obsessive desire to guard the perimeter of his community and pose as a crime-fighting hero to those around him. It doesn't take much imagination to size up Zimmerman psychologically. He's like so many other utterly unaccomplished males who fantasize about being a badass law officer, meting out justice to the ne'er-do-wells. He's the kind of person who, if he weren't playing at policeman, would be one of those guys fabricating stories of his war heroism, buying fake military uniforms and medals on eBay and telling strangers in bars how he single-handedly held off insurgents in Kandahar or some such shit. He's one of those guys. If you've met one, you've met them all: a wannabe somebody with a gun permit and a healthy dose of amped up, testosterone-fueled anxiety about outsiders; and so too, in his case, it appears (not only from this incident but also from dozens of previous 9-1-1 calls he'd made), a consistent fear about black men, whom he seemed to consider, almost by definition, as not belonging in his neighborhood.

If Trayvon Martin had been, say, Todd Martin, a 17-year old white male, in the same neighborhood on the same evening, it wouldn't have mattered that he was wearing a hoodie, looking at homes as he passed them by, or fiddling with his waistband. These, it should be noted, were the apparent indicators of criminality that Zimmerman felt compelled to share with the police during his 9-1-1 call, before opting to chase Martin himself, in brazen defiance of their explicit instruction to stay put. Had he been white, Martin's humanity would have been clearly discernible to Zimmerman. But he was black, and male, and that alone inspired Zimmerman to conclude that there was "something wrong with this guy," and that he appeared to be "on drugs," a judgment Zimmerman felt qualified to render based on his extensive background in behavioral psychology, bested only by his prodigious law enforcement training, and by extensive and prodigious, in this case, I mean none whatsoever.

Indeed, if you do not know that Martin's race (and more to the point, Zimmerman's racism) is central to the former's death at the hands of the latter, it may well be that you are incapable of ever comprehending even the most obvious manifestations of this nation's longstanding racial drama. Worse still, it may suggest that you are so bereft of empathy as to render you morally and emotionally dangerous to decent people.

And by empathy here, I don't mean merely the ability to feel for the family of this murdered child. I'm guessing most all can manage that much. Rather, I refer to the kind of empathy too rarely attainable, by whites in particular, in the case of black folks who insist, based on their entire life experience and the insight gained from that experience, that their rights to life and liberty are too often subject to the capricious whims of those with less melanin than they, and for reasons owing explicitly to the color of their skin.

Empathy — real empathy, not the situational and utterly phony kind that most any of us can muster when social convention calls for it — requires that one be able to place oneself in the shoes of another, and to consider the world as they must consider it. It requires that we be able to suspend our own culturally-ingrained disbelief long enough to explore the possibility that perhaps the world doesn't work as we would have it, but rather as others have long insisted it did.

Empathy, which is always among the first casualties of racist thinking, mandates our acceptance of the possibility that maybe it isn't those long targeted by oppression who are exaggerating the problem or making the proverbial mountain out of a molehill, but rather we who have underestimated the gravity of racial domination and subordination in this country, and reduced what are, in fact, Everest-sized peaks to ankle-high summits, and for our own purposes, rather than in the service of truth.

And please, let us have no more ignoble and dissembling rationalizations for Trayvon Martin's death and Zimmerman's killing of him. If you are one, like those firmly ensconced in the pathetic Sanford, Florida police department, trying against all logic and human feeling to square this pernicious circle, just stop it. That there had been a half-dozen or so break-ins in Zimmerman's community, ostensibly orchestrated by black males matters not a whit. Likewise, that there was a string of robberies in my New Orleans neighborhood during my senior year of college, which were the handiwork of white men, would not have justified my being stopped by police every time I returned home from a late afternoon class, to say nothing of being accosted by some community asshole with a Charles Bronson complex. But of course, such an analogy is silly isn't it? We all know that whites are never subjected to this kind of generalized suspicion, even when we do, indeed, fit the description of one or another bad guy on the loose. We are not all looked at sideways when yet another white male serial killer is at large, or yet another abortion clinic bomber. We don't face police roadblocks in lily-white communities so as to catch drunk drivers, even though the data is quite clear that whites represent a disproportionate number and percentage of those driving under the influence.

As for Zimmerman's claims of self-defense, that anyone could believe such a demonstrably transparent lie as this is stunning. Or rather it isn't. It makes perfect sense in a nation where blackness and danger have long been considered synonymous, such that any black male over the age of perhaps 10 can "reasonably" be assumed a predator whose designs on decent people and their property are so concretized as to warrant virtually any measure invoked to monitor, control and incapacitate them. However much has changed in the U.S. since the 1960s, or for that matter the 1860s, make note of it that at least this much has not: black folks are still, in the eyes of far too many whites, a problem to be addressed, a riddle to be solved. And deprived of the old mechanisms of social control to which we were once so wedded — formal segregation, regular lynchings, forced sterilization, even enslavement — we have opted for the development of new forms: racial profiling, gated communities into which we shall police entry, zoning laws that limit who can live among us, and mass incarceration for non-violent drug offenses, among others.

Under what rational interpretation of self-defense could Zimmerman's actions qualify? Zimmerman chased Martin down. Zimmerman tackled Martin after Martin demanded to know why Zimmerman was following him. Martin screamed for help. And Zimmerman shot him. Even if Martin fought back, how could such a thing — a quite reasonable response, it should be noted, to being attacked by a total stranger — justify pulling a gun, pulling the trigger and shooting the person who was acting in self-defense against you? To those who accept Zimmerman's claim of self-defense, let us ask a simple question: would you be so willing to buy that argument if a black person were to chase down a white person in a mostly black neighborhood, and then upon catching him, end his life when the white person resisted being pummeled? You know full well the answer. We all do.

If I chase you and jump you, and you resist my assault, and in response to your resistance I kill you, I am the bad guy. Period. End of story. No exceptions, no prevarications, no ifs ands or buts. It's me. Trayvon Martin is the innocent one here. He is the one who was acting in self-defense, when he resisted the assault of a total stranger, whose purposes for chasing him and accosting him made him rightfully afraid. After all, "neighborhood watch captains," whether duly elected as such or just in their own heads (as seems to have been the case with Zimmerman), don't wear official law enforcement uniforms, which might help identify them to the persons they may find themselves pursuing. And ya' know why? Because despite their fervent and pre-adolescent desires to play cops and robbers like they used to do when they were eight years old, they are not cops. They are not even security guards. They are self-appointed enforcers with no authority whatsoever, save that which they have chosen to fabricate so as to make themselves feel more important.

Oh, and when you abuse that ill-gotten authority and take the life of a young black man in the process, you don't get to be taken seriously when you swear that your actions couldn't have been racist because, after all, you're Latino (this being the latest fanciful insistence of Zimmerman's family). Dear merciful Lord, what is that supposed to prove? Racism is not about the identity of the person acting it out so much as those upon whom it is acted, and for what purpose. There were black slave owners in the South, after all, and what of it? American slavery was a racist institution because it subordinated people based on racial identity, and was predicated on the notion of black inhumanity and white supremacy. That there were some black people who bought into both sets of lies does not acquit the institution of the charge of racism, nor those among the African American community who participated in it. So too, that there are persons of color (or at least partial of-color ancestry) who are just as anti-black in their thinking as many whites, pathetic and heartbreaking though it may be, means nothing. And in the case of Latinos like Zimmerman (affluent enough to be a neighborhood watch guard in an upscale section of greater Orlando, surrounded by whiteness in every way), that he would have internalized the norms of white racism — perhaps even consider himself white for all intent and purposes, as do a disturbing number of Latinos who so often feel compelled by the lure of whiteness to ingratiate themselves to the larger power structure — should surprise no one.

It should be especially unsurprising that Zimmerman would have internalized racially-biased assumptions about black males, given the society in which he (and we) reside. And although this hardly lets him off the hook — one must be responsible for one's own actions in any event, no matter the social contributors to those actions — it is worth noting a few things about the milieu in which this wannabe police officer was operating. In other words, Zimmerman's culpability, while total and complete, is not solitary.

After all, we are a society in which research has shown quite conclusively that local newscasts overrepresent blacks as criminals, relative to their actual share of total crime, and overrepresent whites as victims, relative to our share of victimization.

A society in which other studies have shown that these racially-skewed newscasts have a direct relationship to widespread negative perceptions of black people. Indeed, a substantial percentage of anti-black racial hostility can be directly traced to media imagery, even after all other factors are considered.

A society in which the disproportionate incarceration of black males — especially for non-violent drug offenses, which they are no more likely (and often even less likely) than whites to commit — feeds the perception that they are so treated because they are dangerous and must be kept at bay.

A society in which criminality is so associated with blackness that whites literally and almost instantly connect the two things in survey after survey, and study after study, even though we are roughly 5 times as likely to be criminally victimized by another white person as by a black person.

A society in which anti-black racism has been so long ingrained that not only most whites, but also most Latinos and Asian Americans, demonstrate substantial subconscious bias against African Americans in study after study of implicit racial hostility (and even about a third of blacks themselves demonstrate anti-black racism).

George Zimmerman was very simply taught to fear black men by his society, and he learned his lessons well. And while he must be punished for his transgressions — and hopefully will be, now that the Justice Department is investigating and a Grand Jury is being convened — let there be no mistake, he cannot and should not take the fall alone for that which stems so directly from a larger social and cultural narrative to which he (and all of us) have been subjected.

Black males are, for far too many in America, a racial Rorschach test, onto which we instantaneously graft our own perceptions and assumptions, virtually none of them good. Look, a black man on your street! Quick, what do you see? A criminal. Look, a black man on the corner! Quick, what do you see? A drug dealer. Look, a black man in a suit, in a corporate office! Quick, what do you see? An affirmative action case who probably got the job over a more qualified white man. And if you don't believe that this is what we do — what you do — then ask yourself why 95 percent of whites, when asked to envision a drug user, admit to picturing a black person, even though blacks are only 13 percent of users, compared to about 70 percent who are white? Ask yourself why whites who are hooked up to brain scan monitors and then shown subliminal images of black men — too quickly for the conscious mind to even process what it saw — show a dramatic surge of activity in that part of the brain that reacts to fear and anxiety? Ask yourself why whites continue to believe that we are the most discriminated against group in America — and that folks of color are "taking our jobs" — even as we remain roughly half as likely to be out of work and a third as likely to be poor as those persons of color. Even when only comparing persons with college degrees, black unemployment is about double the white rate, Latino unemployment about 50 percent higher, and Asian American unemployment about a third higher than their white counterparts.

George Zimmerman must be held accountable for his actions, and hopefully he will be. Innocent until proven guilty of course, there is a process for determining matters of formal legal responsibility, and may that process now move forward to a just conclusion. But beyond the matter of legal guilt or innocence, beyond that which can be addressed in a court of law — one way or the other — there is a bigger issue here, and it is one that cannot be resolved by a jury, be it Grand or otherwise, nor by judges or prosecutors. It is the none-too-minor matter of the monster we as a nation have created, not only apparently in the heart of George Zimmerman, but in the minds of millions: individuals far too quick to rationalize any injustice so long as the victim has a black face; persons for whom no act of racially-biased misconduct qualifies as racist; persons who have allowed their own fears, anxieties and occasionally even hatreds to numb them, to inure them to the pain and suffering of the so-called other.

Yesterday, I received an e-mail from someone suggesting that perhaps we should begin to sport buttons like those that became so ubiquitous in the case of Troy Davis last year. You know the buttons, right? The ones that said: "I am Troy Davis." The ones that aimed at solidarity with an unjustly executed man, but which, on the lapels and t-shirts of white people seemed, to me at least, more banal and offensive than anything else, since we were not, in fact (and would not likely ever be) in the position of Troy Davis. And while in this case too, I understand the sentiment and appreciate the real compassion underlying the suggestion — or the no-doubt-soon-to-be-witnessed insertion of Trayvon Martin's name in many a Facebook profile handle — I feel that perhaps we who are white should remind ourselves, before we jump on either bandwagon, that unfortunately, we are much less like Trayvon Martin and much more like George Zimmerman.

And that is the problem.

For sources pertinent to the various data and study claims made in this piece, please see Tim Wise's 2010 book, Colorblind: The Rise of Post-Racial Politics and the Retreat from Racial Equity. To join the call for a serious Justice Department investigation into the killing of Trayvon Martin, please sign this petition at ColorOfChange.org

Thinking While Black: Barack Obama, Race and the Politics of Conservative Smears

Forget Barack Obama's praise for legal scholar Derrick Bell.

Never mind his decades-long association with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

Neither of these connections will matter once you get a load of what I've uncovered: a linkage between the president and someone at least as radical if not more so than either of those. A man whom President Obama has openly praised, and not just twenty-two years ago at some fairly innocuous law school protest, but regularly, in his books, in his speeches, repeatedly, over the course of his political career. Someone whom he has still never repudiated, as he did with Wright, no matter the many statements this individual is on record as making, and which line up rather nicely with many of Wright's views.

What does this radical for whom Obama has shown so much gushing and uncritical praise, say about economic issues? Only that capitalism is a system "permitting necessities to be taken from the many to give luxuries to the few," and that, "Something is wrong with capitalism…Maybe America must move towards democratic socialism."

What does this militant, for whom the president shows so much love, say about white folks and race in America? Only that "Racism is a way of life for the vast majority of white Americans, spoken and unspoken, acknowledged and denied, subtle and sometimes not so subtle — the disease of racism permeates and poisons a whole body politic," and that whites largely refuse to acknowledge "the debt that they owe a people who were kept in slavery," for hundreds of years.

What is the position of this dangerous subversive to whom Barack Obama is clearly tethered, when it comes to the role of the United States in the world? Only that, "We've committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I'm going to continue to say it. And we won't stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation."

There is more, much more in fact: pointed condemnations of white racism and arrogance, trenchant critiques of American nationalism and patriotism, and withering bromides against the wealthy, all from a man whom Barack Obama praises often, and apparently regards as something of a national role model.

Indeed, he said as much a few months ago, when he dedicated a monument to this man on the Mall in Washington — the recently unveiled statue for Martin Luther King Jr.

One can only wonder how Andrew Breitbart would have spun this, or how Sean Hannity might still. But then again, we do know how the right would handle such material. We know that they won't touch it at all. Despite King's radicalism — a radicalism about which most Americans remain unaware thanks to our four-decades long sanitizing of his work and message — the right will and must remain silent on this score, lest they bump up against the obvious: namely, that King is iconic (as well he should be), and as close to a secular Saint as one can get.

But while the right will no doubt avoid smearing King, they have no trouble condemning others whose views, about U.S. foreign policy, racism and economic justice largely mirror his own. It is as if they believe anyone who dares note the ongoing reality of racism (as Bell did until his death), or the role the United States has played in propping up dictatorships and collaborating with human rights abuses abroad (as Wright did in the various sermons that brought down nationalistic jeremiads upon his head back in 2008), is ipso facto a racist and a traitor. To mention racism makes one racist. To speak of injustice in your own nation makes you un-American.

It is a position ultimately requiring the right to believe that most all black people in the country are racist against white people and fundamentally treasonous, since most African Americans do indeed believe racism to be a real and persistent problem and since most continue to insist that there are various injustices afoot in the nation's economic and justice systems. If believing these things makes one racist, then most all people of color would have to be written off as such. Likewise, the entire civil rights movement would have to be considered racist, for daring to criticize the United States and its white population for its foot-dragging lethargy with regard to ending segregation.

Let's remember, just as whites today largely deny that racism is an obstacle for people of color — and thus, consider it anti-white bigotry to tell them otherwise — so too, when the movement of which Dr. King was such a central part was forcing America to look at itself and the evil it perpetrated daily, most whites didn't see what all the fuss was about. Polls in the early '60s, before the passage of various civil rights laws, found that most whites (between 63 and 85 percent depending on the wording of the question) thought blacks were treated equally in their communities with regard to housing, jobs and education. So if condemning racism makes one racist, just because white folks disagree with the assessment of social reality being put forward by black people, we would have to conclude that the movement led by King was racist too, just as we are presumably to conclude about the positions of people like Derrick Bell, Jeremiah Wright and most all African Americans today.

If the right wants to argue the points made by persons like Bell, Wright, most all folks of color or those of us in the white community who echo their concerns, so be it. They are free to do so. Decent people can disagree about the extent and force of racial discrimination in the modern era. But to suggest that it is by definition racist against white people to believe in the persistence of racism against persons of color is intellectually obscene. It is an argument intended to shut down debate, to cow people of color into remaining silent about their own lived experiences, to make whites into victims of black and brown reality — in other words, it is an attempt to invert the structure of oppression, by suggesting that whites are more victimized by the feelings of people of color than people of color are victimized by the actions of white people and the institutions within which we exercise so much disproportionate control. It is an attempt to make it, in effect, an inexcusable moral crime to merely engage in thinking while black.

That conservatives condemn Bell, Wright, and others for speaking forcefully about racism in America, while ignoring the equally strident positions of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement itself, proves beyond question that the right lacks anything remotely approaching a consistent ethical core. If their positions were principled, rather than the stuff of crass and opportunistic politics, they would stand up and condemn Martin Luther King, Jr., and those who praise him. That's what conservatives used to do, after all, when King was still alive: every one of them, without a single solitary exception. All the conservative press, their foot-soliders at the grass-roots level, their national standard bearer in the form of Barry Goldwater, all of them opposed the movement. If they were still operating from a position of principle (albeit a ghastly one to behold), they would have opposed the statue for King on the Mall. They would condemn Representative John Lewis for having been a part of the movement and for his own personal associations with King. They would bash Obama for daring to praise King.

At least back in the day the right was consistent. They reviled the civil rights struggle. They stood with the segregationists, openly. Today, the right plays games with race: using coded language to smear a black president, playing upon racial anxieties about immigration, welfare spending, ethnic studies programs, affirmative action, and textbooks that dare to tell the truth about racism in American history. They prevaricate as if racial dishonesty were tantamount to a religious sacrament.

And still, they can produce no one as towering in their greatness or as capable of moving Americans as a Dr. King.

That must hurt. To know that while we on the left have heroes like that, they must make do with John Wayne, Jerry Falwell, James O'Keefe and the recently departed Andrew Breitbart.

As the saying goes, haters gonna hate. But at least they could do us all a favor and apply their hate consistently.

Essay for CNN: What Is Post-Racial? Reflections on Denial and Reality

Here is my just released essay for CNN, addressing the subject of "What is 'post-racial'?"

Short (for me), but to the point and easily digested, with hyperlinks to sources provided…

Flying Below Radar: Race, Privilege and the Evidence of Things Not Felt

Recently I was driving down I-95, between Baltimore and Wilmington, Delaware, behind the wheel of a GMC Yukon: a rental car procured a day earlier from the airport. It was larger than my normal rental, and more of an incipient threat to the planet than what I would have preferred. But I long ago learned that when it comes to travel on roads with which I am unfamiliar, it's better to be ensconced in the heavy armor of a monster SUV than to glide along, self-righteous in a snub-nosed compact, the structure of which can all too easily be transformed into mush by a semi, driven by someone whose company is pushing him (or her), despite their own conscientiousness, to make a 14 hour drive in 12.

As I cruised along, I was only partially mindful of the social, cultural, and as of late, racial meaning of this roadway. I vaguely remember, as if tucked away in some far region of my conscious mind, the reports from about a decade ago, in which it was noted that this particular corridor was especially notorious for racial profiling. I remember, again, vaguely, that in the mid-to-late '90s this stretch of road was the scene of an all-too-common injustice, in which a disproportionate number of black motorists were stopped and had their cars searched, despite being no more likely to possess illegal contraband than drivers of other races.

To be specific: about 70 percent of those pulled over by state troopers on this portion of I-95 were black, despite African Americans comprising only about 20 percent of all drivers and those speeding or breaking other laws on this road. Such disproportionality was hardly confined to I-95 in Maryland of course — similar problems have been documented in Florida, New Jersey, Louisiana, Missouri and elsewhere — but it was this part of the nation's interstate highway system that, for a while at least, had commanded the attention of the courts, thanks to a successful lawsuit brought by the ACLU on behalf of black motorists.

Since the time of that suit, I haven't seen much in the way of new studies, or claims of profiling along I-95. Yet, given the anecdotal reports that one can hear from large percentages of persons of color who drive this or any other thoroughfare in America, it seems reasonable to suspect that the practice continues, albeit perhaps a bit less blatantly than before. National data still suggests, for instance, that black and Latino motorists are stopped and searched in far greater percentages than whites, even though they are less likely to actually have illegal drugs or other items on them than whites are.

But sometimes, even in the absence of hard quantitative evidence that something pernicious is going on, you can have one of those experiences that clues you in to the presence of something amiss. And driving down I-95, still on the Maryland side of the Delaware line, I was to have such an experience: the flipside, if you will, of racial profiling.

So it is at this point that I should probably make note of the fact that not only was I in a GMC Yukon, but it was a brand new Yukon, with shiny black paint and tinted windows — windows that were just dark enough to make it a bit difficult for one to discern, from the outside, the physical features of the driver behind the wheel or any passengers therein.

About 20 minutes before crossing into Delaware, I passed two state patrol cars, parked in the median between the North- and Southbound lanes, their respective drivers pointing their speed guns at oncoming traffic in either direction. As I had approached them I noted that I was hurtling along at slightly above the speed limit, but not by much — perhaps four or five miles faster than that which was legally protected — and certainly not by an amount that would normally trigger a ticket or even a stop by police. Nonetheless, as I approached I slowed a bit, so that by the time I reached the cars and passed them, I was driving at exactly the legal limit, along with the rest of traffic, equally mindful, I would imagine, of the presence of law enforcement.

Instinctively I look in the rear view mirror whenever I pass a police car, a habit that I suspect is not mine alone. Even when I know I have done nothing wrong, I do it, more or less on reflex. Cops make me nervous and always have, even though as a white man my reasons for such skittishness in their presence are far less rational than they would be for almost anyone else.

This time, as I looked in the mirror I saw — as is usually the case — the officer remain put, apparently having not clocked me going at a pace that would have necessitated a pullover. Relieved I averted my gaze from the mirror and returned my focus to the road ahead. Then, as if out of nowhere, I glanced back up and noticed a car advancing on me from a distance at a high rate of speed. At first I couldn't tell that the approaching vehicle was a police cruiser, let alone the very cruiser I had eclipsed just a few moments earlier. Thinking it was someone wanting to pass, I moved over to the middle lane, leaving the lefthand lane open for whomever was in such a hurry.

But then, rather than pass, the car — the official provenance and inhabitants of which I now recognized — slowed to match my speed and pulled up parallel to the Yukon. Puzzled by this behavior, especially since the officers had not put on their lights, and thus, had done nothing to suggest that I had violated any rule of the road, I turned and looked at them. Perhaps they wanted to tell me that I had something hanging out of the rear of the SUV, or that I had a tire going flat, or something else, ya know, helpful like that.

But no. As I looked into the passenger side window of the cruiser, the reason for which it had pulled alongside me became obvious. The officer riding shotgun peered into my window, his hand just above his eyes so as to block the glare of the bright January sun. It took all of three seconds for him to get a good look at me, aided in that process by my own decision to turn towards him to see what all the fuss was about. A look of recognition — and, frankly, disappointment — washed over his face, right before he turned to his partner behind the wheel, shook his head in an easily readable "no" motion, and pointed to the quickly approaching turn-around spot in the median, as if to suggest that they should turn back around. Nothing to see here. Not having found what (or more to the point, whom) they were searching for, they did just that, and headed back south, presumably to join the stake-out spot where they had been perched previously.

Now, there is no way to know for sure what this interaction (or non-interaction as the case may be) meant. To suggest that there was anything racial about it — for instance, that the officers were hoping I was a man of color so they could pull me over on suspicion of something — will likely provoke howls of righteous indignation from those who deny the problem of profiling, or who accuse people of color and whites like myself of "making everything about race." But that said, I would ask that you keep an open mind and just think for a second about the incident objectively.

Might they have been looking for a specific criminal suspect (white or of color), driving in a black late-model Yukon, and merely needed to get a visual to ascertain whether I was he? Sure. That's possible. But given that there were two cars parked side by side in the median, facing opposite directions, both with speed guns focused on passerby mitigates against it. They were, from all reasonable inferences, looking for vehicles that were speeding. I was not speeding. Had I been, and they had decided to come after me as they did, they would have pulled me over and given me at least a warning if not a ticket. That they left a speed checkpoint to chase me and then, having gotten a look at my face, gave up and went back to square one, suggests they were looking for something else. And given the history of that roadway, policing in America, and race in the same, it is not at all untoward to suspect that my white skin was not that something.

But here's what I know for sure, and what I hope all of us are willing to consider. Whether or not those officers were hoping to be able to pull over a man of color, and whether or not they would have done so, had I been such a man, isn't really the important thing. What matters is that at no point would I, a white man, ever have to fear as I travelled that or any other interstate or road anywhere in my country, that my color alone might trigger sufficient suspicion in the eyes of law enforcement so as to warrant a stop, even when I had done nothing illegal. That is not a luxury possessed by anyone who is black or Latino in this country — their country — and that matters.

Had I been a man of color, heading to Delaware that day for a speech corresponding to what has now become a week-long commemoration of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday — a possibility to be sure, given that most speakers for such events are people of color — how might the incident have differed? I don't mean differed in the sense that I would have necessarily been pulled over. Again, maybe they weren't looking for a black person. Maybe they were looking for a white female who had just robbed a bank and escaped in a black Yukon. But how might it have differed psychologically and even physiologically, as I, the black man, glanced into my rear-view and spied the police cruiser advancing on me at a high rate of speed? As I saw it pull even with me and then stay there? As I looked to my left and saw the white man with the badge, the gun, and the full authority of the state behind him, staring into my eyes, calculating in that moment whether I was the one, wondering if perhaps I might have a wheel-well filled with drugs, or a gun under the seat despite nothing but my skin to even remotely imply that either of these things might be true?

No matter how much money I might have, what size home, what kind of job, what beautiful and perfectly functional family, or my level of education, were I a black man in that situation (or a Latino in this era of generalized suspicion towards brown folks as de facto undocumented) everything would have been different, from my heart rate to the anxiety-related activity in my amygdala to the tightening of my muscles to the lump in my throat. And while these may appear to most whites as momentary discomforts with no larger import, imagine those kinds of experiences happening not once or twice, but regularly over a year, two years, a life. Imagine the uncertainty, the trepidation, the second-guessing of every glance, comment, or stare, made necessary by a lifetime lived in self-defense mode, the need for keen observation and interpretation of the most mundane interracial encounters made as critical to your safety and survival as nutrition, as vital as love.

See, that's what race means, even now, and that is what (among so many other things) gives the lie to all claims of post-raciality made by those who refuse to feel what people of color are all too willing to tell them, if only they could hear. That some must contend with almost daily reminders that they are perpetual outsiders, perpetual suspects, perpetually in need of proving their belonging — indeed their very humanity — while others need not concern themselves with such things, leaves the latter with an edge, however subtle, and the former with a weighty and pernicious hindrance, the consequences of which cannot be overstated. To know that one can not only drive without subjecting oneself to presumptions that one is less-than, but also apply for jobs or loans while knowing the same, or raise one's hand in class, hoping to demonstrate one's brilliance to the teacher, similarly secure in the knowledge that that teacher will not ever see the hand as belonging to a walking, talking stereotype of incapacity matters. In a society as fully in thrall to bloodthirsty competition as ours, such an edge can make all the difference. It frees up cognitive space for problem solving rather than worry, and for confidence rather than self-doubt.

That advantage — one might even say, privilege — of being seen first as an individual rather than as the member of a defective and problematic group, can even be the difference between life and death. And here I am not merely referring to the way in which so many people of color have been killed by police who saw their cell phones, keys, or merely black skin as evidence of danger and shot first, only to ask questions never. Here I am referring to the way that black and brown folks who are fortunate enough not to go the way of Sean Bell, or Amadou Diallo or so many others, nonetheless have their lives shortened by the racialized stresses that flow from life lived as a problem.

Years of research about which most have no awareness — because it doesn't make the news — tells us that the daily coping with racialization, which people of color learn to do from an early age, but which whites rarely if ever experience, leaves scars. It contributes to the excess release of stress hormones in the black and brown body, causing something called allostatic load — a reference to the short-circuiting of the body's natural defenses against anxiety-producing events and traumas. That allostatic load then corresponds to higher blood pressure, higher rates of heart disease, and early death. The research has found that even affluent black folks have higher markers for allostatic load than poor whites, despite the real stresses that the latter contend with each day.

In a nation that was even remotely interested in becoming "post-racial," let alone one that was well on its way to being there, one would imagine that issues like this — like the lives of millions of Americans, compromised by racial injustice — might register on the radar screens of all persons seeking to be president. That it might register in the discussions about health and health care, or criminal justice. That it might at least rate as highly on the measures of political importance as, say, cutting the capital gains tax or colonizing the moon.

But it doesn't. It never has. And unless and until we stand up and demand otherwise, it never will.

Of Broken Clocks, Presidential Candidates, and the Confusion of Certain White Liberals

This commentary is rated MA for mature audiences. It contains some foul language, although honestly, only so much as is needed to get the damned point across. Parental discretion is advised…

Attention to all self-proclaimed liberals and progressives.

I would like to properly introduce you to a man about whom you've heard much — especially from his enemies and those who prefer a continuation of the status quo — but at whom you might wish to take a second look, and whom you might consider supporting for president.

Unlike Barack Obama, he supports an immediate end to our current and ongoing wars abroad.

Unlike Barack Obama, he supports an end to predator drone attacks by the United States military, which kill innocent civilians and foment growing hatred of America. He believes that the so-called "war on terror" as we've engaged it has undermined American freedoms at home and contributed to greater tensions and anti-American sentiment abroad.

Unlike Barack Obama, he supports an entirely revamped Middle East policy, in which the U.S. will no longer subsidize the oppression of the Palestinian people by the state of Israel.

Unlike Barack Obama, he supports either abolishing or fundamentally reforming the Federal Reserve system, and he opposed bailing out the banks with public funds.

Unlike Barack Obama, this individual opposes government spying and believes in absolute freedom of speech and the press, and as he puts it, "reduced government intrusion into our lives."

Clearly, with such a progressive vision, no one of the left would want to pass up the opportunity to support a candidate such as this for president! Surely it would be a vast improvement over Barack Obama, that Wall Street- friendly, imperialistic, war-monger, who promised to close Guantanamo but didn't, among other unforgivable crimes.

So by all means, let's get behind someone who will close down the national security state, stand up for civil liberties, and stop handing out money to bankers.

Ladies and Gentlemen of the left, I give you your perfect candidate for 2012:

David Duke.

Oh I'm sorry, did you think I was talking about someone else?

Yes, that David Duke: former head of the nation's largest Ku Klux Klan group and lifelong neo-Nazi, who once said Jews should go into the ashbin of history, and that it would be possible to do what Hitler did, even in America, if white supremacists could just "put the right package together."

But ya know that whole racist thing doesn't matter, right? Because he's against wiretapping.

I mean, yeah, he has analogized Jews to cancer, has called for the partition of the United States into distinct racial sub-nations, and believes in a eugenics program to create an Aryan master race. But who cares? Because he's against the Patriot Act.

And hey, I mean, let's be real, none of that really awful stuff he believes in — ya know, like the racial sub-nations, or the eugenics, or the sterilization of welfare recipients, or the whole Hitler-in-America thing, could really happen. I mean, Congress would never agree to all that stuff. So the fact that Duke believes so many truly horrible, inexcusable, thoroughly fucked up, one might even say evil things, shouldn't deter us from praising him, or even supporting him for president. We have to stop Obama: that spineless coward who didn't stand up for single-payer. And no, Duke wouldn't support single payer either. But so what? At least he'd tell the TSA to back off with their whole nudie-picture-body-scans-at-the-airport thing. And that's what really matters.

And he'd end that Iraq war. Yes, I know, it's already ending, but he'd end it faster. Like tomorrow. Because ya know, that's possible: A president can just snap his fingers and poof! The troops all suddenly appear at Andrews Air Force base! It's fucking magic!

And he'd shut down the Fed! Woo-hoo! That would be awesome: so then interest rates and the money supply could be controlled entirely by private banks, without even a theoretical modicum of public accountability! What progressive wouldn't love that? And sure, the Fed was created by an act of Congress, but that doesn't matter: a president with the determination of David Duke can just snap his fingers and poof! All the central bankers will be begging on the streets for change! Like I said, it's fucking magic!

So yes, he may want to abolish all welfare programs for the poor; and he may want to crack down on immigrants who are trying to make their lives better, by repealing birthright citizenship as guaranteed in the Fourteenth Amendment and militarizing the border; and he might want to repeal Roe v. Wade, by way of a constitutional amendment that would grant full personhood status to zygotes, thereby limiting the reproductive freedom of women; and he may want to slash taxes on the rich, and give tax breaks to parents who want to homeschool their kids and perhaps teach them that dinosaurs and humans co-existed, but who cares? He's a straight-shooter who stands on principle and will shake up the system and break the political stranglehold exercised currently by the approved establishment candidates. Take that! Zip-Zow!

Alright, enough. Can we just cut the crap?

Even a broken clock is right twice a day, and even the most retrograde political candidates are capable of stringing together a few ideas that make sense. Even David "The Holocaust was made up by some Jewish script writer in Hollywood," Duke.

And yes, I realize that Ron Paul — this election season's physical embodiment of the broken clock — is not, literally, as bad as David Duke. Yes, he supports all those incredibly ass-backwards policies rattled off above (about welfare, immigration, abortion, taxes and education), but he is not, like Duke, a Nazi. He is supported by Nazis, like Stormfront — the nation's largest white nationalist outfit, which is led by Don Black, who's one of Duke's best friends, and is married to Duke's ex-wife, and is Duke's daughters' step-dad — but I'm sure that's just a coincidence. Surely it's not because Paul wants to repeal the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act, and allow companies to discriminate in the name of "free association." And it couldn't have anything to do with those newsletters that went out under his name, with all kinds of blatantly bigoted commentary about black people being IQ-deficient predators, at a time when he was promoting those very newsletters (and so, presumably, reading them), and not objecting in the least.

Yet to the so-called progressives who sing the praises of Ron Paul, all because of his views on domestic spying, bailouts for banksters, and military intervention abroad, the fact that 90 percent of his political platform is right-wing boilerplate about slashing taxes on the rich, slashing programs for the poor and working class, breaking unions, drilling for oil anywhere and everywhere, and privatizing everything from retirement programs to health care doesn't matter: the fact that he'll ostensibly legalize drugs is enough. And this is so, even though he has merely said he would leave drug laws up to the states (which means 49 separate drug wars, everywhere except maybe Vermont, so ya know, congrats hippies!), and he would oppose spending public money on drug rehab or education, both of which you'd need more of if drugs were legalized, but why let little details like that bother you?

Yessir, legal weed and an end to the TSA: enough to make some supposed leftists ignore everything else Ron Paul has ever said, and ignore the fundamental incompatibility of Ayn Randian thinking with anything remotely resembling a progressive or even humane worldview. And this is so, even though he wouldn't actually have the authority to end the TSA as president, a slight glitch that is conveniently ignored by those who are desperate to once again be able to take large bottles of shaving gel onto airplanes in the name of "liberty."

I want those of you who are seriously singing Paul's praises, while calling yourself progressive or left to ask what it signifies — not about Ron Paul, but about you — that you can look the rest of us in the eye, your political colleagues and allies, and say, in effect, "Well, he might be a little racist, but…

How do you think that sounds to black people, without whom no remotely progressive candidate stands a chance of winning shit in this country at a national level? How does it sound to them — a group that has been more loyal to progressive and left politics than any group in this country — when you praise a man who opposes probably the single most important piece of legislation ever passed in this country, and whose position on the right of businesses to discriminate, places him on the side of the segregated lunchcounter owners? And how do you think they take it that you praise this man, or possibly even support him for president, all so as to teach the black guy currently in the office a lesson for failing to live up to your expectations?

How do you think it sounds to them, right now, this week, as we prepare to mark the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, that you claim to be progressive, and yet you are praising or even encouraging support for a man who voted against that holiday, who opposes almost every aspect of King's public policy agenda, and the crowning achievements of the movement he helped lead?

My guess is that you don't think about this at all. Because you don't have to. One guess as to why not.

It's the same reason you don't have to think about how it sounds to most women — and damned near all progressive women — when you praise Paul openly despite his views on reproductive freedom, and even sexual harassment, which Paul has said should not even be an issue for the courts. He thinks women who are harassed on the job should just quit. In other words, "Yeah, he might be a little bit sexist, but…"

It's the same reason you don't have to really sweat the fact that he would love to cut important social programs for poor people. And you don't have to worry about how it sounds to them that you would claim to be progressive, while encouraging support for a guy who would pull what minimal safety net still exists from under them, and leave it to private charities to fill the gap. And we all know why you don't have to worry about it. Because you aren't them. You aren't the ones who would be affected. You'll never be them. I doubt you even know anyone like that. People who are that poor don't follow you on Twitter.

There is a reason why Ron Paul rallies, and the street-corner Paul-supporting pseudo-flash mobs are overwhelmingly, disproportionately comprised of white, middle class men. And it matters. Surely it is not because white, middle class men are more likely than others to oppose war, torture, drone killings of Muslim children, or bailouts of rich bankers. It is not because white, middle class men are more progressive when it comes to civil liberties than women, poor people or folks of color. Indeed, the opposite is true.

I've talked with them on numerous occasions, these Paul devotees, with their "Who is John Galt?" signs, with their 20-minute spiels about why it's so important to invest in gold, and whispered assurances that "they" will never tell you the truth about the Illuminati, or the Rothschilds, or the Bilderbergers, or Tower 7, or vitamin supplements. They never talk about the institutional racism at the heart of the drug war. They never talk about how we need to rethink the war on terror (except insofar as it inconveniences them to be body scanned at the airport, when everyone knows, we should just be checking brown-skinned men in turbans). These guys are largely attracted to Paul because he'll get government off their backs, by lowering their taxes, cutting spending that helps poor people whom they regard as lazy, ending the "suffocating" regulations that they believe stifle innovation, and vouchsafing their God-given right to own any and all manner of assault rifle they desire, the latter of which they simply "know" President Obama is going to forcibly confiscate, along with their handguns, rifles, and maybe even Super-Soakers any day now.

In short, regardless of what Paul may believe on certain issues, and which may fall squarely in the orbit of that which is progressive or left, his hard-core acolytes (and the ones who would be empowered most by his success) are anything but that. They want the government to stop taking their tax dollars and "giving them" to Mexicans and blacks, or anyone of any race or ethnicity who in their mind isn't smart enough or hard working enough to have their own private health care. They don't want the government to help homeowners who got roped into predatory loans by banks and independent mortgage brokers: instead they blame the homeowners for not being savvy enough borrowers, or they blame government regulation for ostensibly "forcing" lenders to finance housing for minorities and poor people who didn't deserve it.

And no, you can't separate the man from his movement, so don't even try.

When you support or give credence to a candidate, you indirectly empower that candidate's worldview and others who hold fast to it. So when you support or even substantively praise Ron Paul, you are empowering libertarianism, and its offshoots like Ayn Rand's "greed is good" objectivism, and all those who believe in it. You are empowering the fans of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, in which books they learn that altruism is immoral, and that only the self matters. You are empowering the reactionary, white supremacist, Social Darwinists of this culture, who believe — as does Ron Paul — that that Greensboro Woolworth's was right, and that the police who dragged sit-in protesters off soda fountain stools for trespassing on a white man's property were justified in doing so, and that the freedom of department store owners to refuse to let black people try on clothes in their dressing rooms was more sacrosanct than the right of black people to be treated like human beings.

See, believe it or not, judgment matters. If a man believes there is a straight line of unbroken tyranny betwixt the torture and indefinite detention of suspected terrorists on the one hand, and anti-discrimination laws that seek to extend to all persons equal opportunity, on the other, that man is a lunatic. Worse than a lunatic, that man is a person of such extraordinarily obtuse philosophical and moral discernment as to call into real question whether he should even be allowed to go through life absent the protective and custodial assistance of a straightjacket, let alone hold office. That one might believe in unicorns would still allow one to profess a level of sagacity and synaptic activity in one's brain several measures beyond that of the man who thinks liberty is equally imperiled by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as by the CIA.

That any liberal, progressive or leftist could waste so much as a kind word about someone as this is mind-boggling. There are not many litmus tests for being a progressive in good standing in this country, but one would think, if there were, that surely to God, civil rights would be one of them. It is one thing to disagree about the proper level of taxation, either on the wealthy or corporations: honest people can disagree about that, and for reasons that would still permit one to claim the mantle of liberalism or progressivism; so too with defense spending, drug policy, trade, education reform, energy policy, and any number of other things. But the notion that one can be a progressive, even merely liberal, while praising someone who believes that companies should be allowed to post "No Blacks Need Apply" signs if they wish, and that only the market should determine whether that kind of bigotry will stand, is so stupefying that it should render even the most cynical of us utterly bereft of words. It is, or should be, a deal-breaker among decent people.

And please, Glenn Greenwald, spare me the tired shtick about how Paul "raises important issues" that no one on the left is raising, and so even though you're not endorsing him, it is still helpful to a progressive narrative that his voice be heard. Bullshit. The stronger Paul gets the stronger Paul gets, period. And the stronger Paul gets, the stronger libertarianism gets, and thus, the Libertarian Party as a potential third party: not the Greens, mind you, but the Libertarians. And the stronger Paul gets, the stronger become those voices who worship the free market as though it were an invisible fairy godparent, capable of dispensing all good things to all comers — people like Paul Ryan, for instance, or Scott Walker. In a nation where the dominant narrative has long been anti-tax, anti-regulation, poor-people-bashing and God-bless-capitalism, it would be precisely those aspects of Paul's ideological grab bag that would become more prominent. And if you don't know that, you are a fool of such Herculean proportions as to suggest that Salon might wish to consider administering some kind of political-movement-related-cognitive skills test for its columnists, and the setting of a minimum cutoff score, below which you would, for this one stroke of asininity alone, most assuredly fall.

I mean, seriously, if "raising important issues" is all it takes to get some kind words from liberal authors, bloggers and activists, and maybe even votes from some progressives, just so as to "shake things up," then why not support David Duke? With the exception of his views on the drug war, David shares every single view of Paul's that can be considered progressive or left in orientation. Every single one. So where do you draw the line? Must one have actually donned a Klan hood and lit a cross before his handful of liberal stands prove to be insufficient? Must one actually, as Duke has been known to do, light candles on a birthday cake for Hitler on April 20, before it no longer proves adequate to want to limit the overzealous reach of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms? Exactly when does one become too much of an evil fuck even for you? Inquiring minds seriously want to know.

Meanwhile, at what point do you stop being so concerned about whether a presidential candidate is pushing the issues Paul raises (so many of which do need raising and attention), and realize what every actual leftist in history has realized, but which apparently some liberals and progressives don't: namely, that the real battles are in the streets, and in the neighborhoods, and in movement activism? It isn't a president, whether his name is Ron Paul or Barack Obama who gets good things done. It is us, demanding change and threatening to literally shut the system down (whether we mean Wall Street, the Port of Oakland, the Wisconsin state capitol, Columbia University, a Woolworth's lunch counter, or the Montgomery, Alabama bus system) who force presidents and lawmakers to bend to the public will.

In short, if you're still disappointed in Barack Obama, it's only because you never understood whose job it was to produce change in the first place. But don't take out your own failings in this regard on the rest of us, by giving ideological cover and assorted journalistic love taps to a guy who believes the poor should rely on the charitable impulses of doctors to provide for their medical needs, including, one presumes, chemotherapy; or that America was meant to be a "robustly Christian" nation, but is being currently undermined by "secularists;" or who puts the term gay rights in quotation marks when he writes it, and believes states should be free to criminalize homosexual intercourse, and who is such a homophobe that he won't even use the bathroom in a gay man's house; or who has all but said that he would like to take America back to the early 1800s, in terms of the scope of government: a truly glorious time to be sure, if you were white, male and owned property.

Ya know, like some of the liberal "thinkers" who have, as of late, decided to praise Ron Paul.

Child Abuse by Any Other Name: When Ignorance and Bigotry Become Parental "Rights"

Some things stick with you.

I can still recall, vividly in fact, an exchange I had with a woman in one of my audiences seventeen years ago, who had come to my talk at Kansas City Community College: an address in which I examined the intersectionality of racism and heterosexism.

The woman, who identified herself as a mother of two, stood up shortly after my speech and insisted that she had every right to teach her children that homosexuality was immoral and that gays and lesbians were going to hell. How dare I, she bellowed, challenge her right as a parent to raise her children as she wished. After all, she explained, they were her property.

Seriously, that's what she said: Her children were her property.

Putting aside the inherently disquieting nature of equating one's offspring with one's ottoman, or perhaps, end table — a point I made rather caustically to her, to no effect, as I'm sure you can guess — there was something even more problematic about her claims to parental supremacy, informed, in her case at least, by her hard-line religiosity. It was something I thought of again this morning when reading two news items, both of which discussed ultra-conservative Christians pitted against the public schools in which some of their children are enrolled, and which, to hear them tell it, are impeding on their religious freedom to teach their children as they desire.

The first, out of my own state of Tennessee, involves attempts by conservative lawmakers to pare back previously adopted anti-bullying legislation, by carving out exemptions for students whose religious beliefs compel them to "share their views" on homosexuality. A recent suicide by a rural Tennessee student who had been bullied because he was gay has led anti-bullying advocates to push for greater protections, while the Family Action Council of Tennessee has stepped up its push to enshrine bigotry into the law, because that's what Baby Jesus would want, after all.

According to the proposed change, students would be immune to a charge of bullying or harassment if their mistreatment of another was impelled by religious conviction, unless their actions involved an attack on the victim or his or her property. In general, and in addition to the religious exemption, for any act to be considered harassment or bullying it would need to involve either a violent or property-related assault, or the creation of a hostile educational environment, the latter of which condition could not be satisfied by a mere showing that the actions in question had caused "discomfort" or "unpleasantness." Even, one supposes, if that discomfort or unpleasantness were to become a daily affair.

In other words, whereas the perpetual reference to a gay student as a "faggot" might qualify as unacceptable, even under the religious right's proposed exemption, constantly telling a gay student that he or she was a sinner, who was going to burn in hell, would be just fine. Even regularly placing notes on their desks, with some verse from Leviticus that the so-called Christian takes to be proof of the un-Godly nature of same-sex attraction, would be protected. After all, just because one is made uncomfortable by the sharing of "Biblical truth," shouldn't protect one from having to hear it, and especially when the proselytizing student feels themselves Scripturally deputized by no less than heavenly authority to serve as God's little messenger.

In other words, if you believe that homosexuality is a sin, and that you have an obligation to spread this theologically-sanctioned condemnation to others, during the school day, when those others are, in effect, a captive audience, you would be allowed to do so under the proposed rule change. That your preachments might amount to psychological torture and even spiritual terrorism for some of your classmates doesn't matter. Students would be allowed to hide behind God, as they interpret God's word, and nothing could be done to them, no matter how obnoxiously the views were shared with others. Even students whose anti-LGBT bullying wasn't motivated by religious belief, could always claim it was, so as to avoid consequences for their behavior.

That such an exemption as this is being pushed by the very same people who previously supported legislation that would ban the discussion of homosexuality by teachers or counselors in Tennessee schools before the ninth grade — the infamous "Don't Say Gay" bill from a year ago — makes the effort even more odious. So if the Christian right in Tennessee had its way, students in middle school would be able to tell other students (many of whom are just coming to terms with their sexual and affectional orientation) that they were repulsive, disgusting, unnatural, or that they should, because of their sexuality, be killed; meanwhile, the students targeted by that behavior would not be able to turn to teachers or counselors for advice, or to discuss their sexuality or the pain this mistreatment was causing them, because school officials would be disallowed from discussing the sexuality of the student being targeted.

The second story is from New Hampshire, where the Tea Party-dominated legislature has passed a law that would allow parents to object to any part of the school curriculum to which their children are exposed, for any reason; and not merely object (which is, of course, any parent's prerogative already), but also to demand that an alternative curricula be developed for their child, which alternative would meet with the parents' approval.

So, if parents took exception to a discussion about the entirely settled matter of evolution (settled, at least, among scientists, if not the millions who believe in a white male God who lives in the clouds and created everything in 6 literal days, including man from dust and woman from the ribcage of that man, some 6000 years ago), they could insist that their children be exempted from learning the science that every other scientifically literate person on the planet will have been taught.

This they will be able to do, so that those children may instead be instructed that dinosaurs and people co-existed, and led to believe that the book of Genesis is a perfectly adequate substitute for a standard biology text. In other words, New Hampshire is on the verge of enshrining, as if it were a sacrosanct right, the liberty of its young to be rendered wholly ignorant, because their parents prefer it that way. And I'm quite certain that those parents, and the ones in Tennessee who desire that their little bundles of street-preaching energy be liberated from the shackles of secular tolerance (and, for that matter, basic human kindness), would likely agree with the judgment of that woman in Kansas City in 1995: their children are their property, and as with all property, may be handled as the owner of said property desires.

But therein lies the rub, and the bigger problem with this notion of ultimate parental authority, expressed to me that day so long ago, and more recently in the halls of power in Tennessee and New Hampshire: namely, even if we accept the cruel and dehumanizing notion that a person's children are their property, when one's property, by virtue of how he or she possesses it, begins to exact a societal consequence on other people's "property" — like other people's kids, for instance — or the larger commons we share, that is when others, myself included, get to chime in and exercise some limitations on what the first party can and cannot do with their possessions. Just as you are not free to stage cockfights, even if the chickens belong to you, and you are not free to dump toxic waste in your yard, even if it be your name upon the deed that demonstrates legal ownership, likewise, your supposed "right" to raise your children as you see fit, is far from an exclusive one.

By this I mean that your right to teach your kids as you wish does not impose upon the rest of us a limitation in terms of that to which we may rightly seek to expose your children as well. And this is because your children — unless you intend to keep them securely locked in your own basement, never to interact with the rest of society — are to become (already are, in fact) social beings. They attend school with other kids, from different races, religions, ethnicities, economic backgrounds, sexualities and any number of identity categories. And the schools (and society more broadly) have an affirmative interest in seeing to it that your children grow up to be the kind of people who can effectively and peacefully co-exist with those others, no matter the differences between them. If they cannot do this — because you have drummed religious, racial, ethnic, or some other kind of prejudices into them on pain of hellfire, brimstone, or just the threat of parental alienation — then you will have created a problem for us. And that is something you haven't the right to do. As the old saying goes, your rights end where mine begin, and your right to use your "property" (in this case, children) as you wish, is limited by my right to see to it that my "property" (also, in this case, children) are not damaged by yours.

Along these same lines, if raising your children to believe that God can make the sun dance in the sky, or that people can be resurrected from the dead, or that prayer can heal serious illness without the faithless interference of medicine, gets in the way of their learning the biology, physiology, chemistry and physics they will need to be competent doctors, engineers, researchers or any number of other things, then those teachings become a problem for the rest of us; and thus, the rest of us have a right and indeed, obligation to teach them other things, even when those things conflict with the parochial instructions of their parental units. (By the same token, I should note, we have an obligation to teach people who are a bit too enamored of modern science — despite the way in which it has been used to justify the plunder of the Earth and the domination of nature — a little something about ethics, but that's another essay for another day).

Which is all to say that you may fill the skulls of your progeny with any manner of superstitious, hate-filled, reality-allergic codswallop if that be your fervent wish, but the rest of us will equally demand the right to demonstrate to them, however subtly, that their parents are superstitious, hate-filled, reality-allergic purveyors of mindless piffle, and that while they may believe as they wish, they will not be allowed to torment others with their views, no matter the ecclesiastical authority with which they may believe themselves entitled to do so. Children are free moral agents and have a right to be exposed to a range of beliefs well beyond the rigid doctrinal confines of their parent's faith, and we have an obligation to insist that they be so exposed, at least in public schools, if not elsewhere.

If parents wish to home-school their children and raise them on a steady anti-intellectual diet of dumbshittery, all so as to glorify the Lord, so be it, I guess. But in the public schools, the idea that parents should be able to opt their kids out of a common and academically valid curricula, and have those children still remain students in good standing, or that their children should be able to harangue their classmates with Fred Phelpsian hatred, just because they believe an ancient text commands them to do so, is asking that one's own rights to parental authority, religious freedom and free speech should trump the rights of equal protection to which all students are entitled, not to mention the obligation of schools to teach students scientific knowledge, unsullied by the genuinely felt, but utterly unverifiable suppositions of the religious.

I suppose that to this one might argue that tolerance must be a two-way street, and that if evangelical Christians are to be forced to respect others, we must likewise respect them. But note, no one has suggested that the rest of us should be allowed to harass or bully Christians, either in school or elsewhere. The anti-bullying legislation in Tennessee would prevent, as written, any student from taunting any other student about their faith. So that even if one's beliefs were the very definition of lunacy — like the Biblical claim that Noah lived to be over 900 years old, or gathered every species 2 by 2 on a big ship that rode out a literal 40 day flood, or that Jesus fed thousands with one loaf of bread — it would not be appropriate for a student or school official to forcefully and regularly remind one of just how fatuous their worldview happens to be. In other words, it is one thing for me to say it here, but quite another for someone to walk around haranguing pre-pubescent Bible-thumpers about their intellectual vapidity in the halls of a junior high.

As for curricula, the notion that we should be as tolerant of the academic desires of religious conservatives as they must be of scientists, for instance, is utterly puerile. Science is science and religious faith is religious faith. In science classes, only one is worthy of serious consideration, because only one meets the strictures of the scientific method. While the scientific method is not nearly as objective and precise as scientists often believe, and while science can surely become its own kind of religion in the hands of some, doing in the process its own kind of damage, to the planet and its inhabitants — a subject that should be amply covered in science classrooms to be sure — it is surely quite a bit more objective and precise than the exegetical ruminations of some fundamentalist preacher, his wife, or their children, none of which deserve the least bit of respect or consideration in a classroom dedicated to the discovery of scientific fact.

Of course, I'm quite certain that to those who push for the enshrining of their provincial and narrow-minded worldviews in schools, my words here will serve as only further proof that we, the "unbelievers," have declared an all-out war on people of faith, and that Christians are the newly persecuted. Whatever. Though the charge is frankly ludicrous, given the ubiquity of Bible-believing Christians among the lawmaking class, as well as the regularity with which politicians are expected to believe in God — and a Christian one at that — so as to be considered viable candidates for higher office, in the end it hardly matters. If there is a religious war going on, let there be no mistake, the fundamentalists started it. For the rest of us, the obligation is to take up the battle ourselves, lest the nation be turned over to our very own Taliban, whose designs on whatever ostensible democracy we have managed to carve out are quite sincere, and whose wish to govern under Biblical law has been spelled out in their documents and from their pulpits on a weekly basis. It is up to us to stop them.

Telling White Lies: Patriotic Correctness and the War on Ethnic Studies

You're tellin' white lies

You're tellin' white lies

Well I can see right through that thin disguise

Can't you tell I can tell when you're telling' white lies?

—Jason and the Scorchers, "White Lies"

Forget so-called "political correctness." In Arizona, there is a far greater threat to free speech and educational integrity — a new P.C. if you will — that we might label, "patriotic correctness." The fact that conservatives will not only not be bothered by it, but indeed are thoroughly responsible for it, only signifies, once and for all, that their much ballyhooed devotion to the Constitution (which the Tea Party types have sworn is the principal motivator for their activism), is a monstrous fraud.

And whereas the thing they derisively called political correctness was really never more than an attempt by we on the left to get people to not be assholes (by doing blatantly racist, sexist and heterosexist things), patriotic correctness threatens to remake the way schools operate, and limit the access that students in Arizona have to accurate historical information and multiple perspectives.

This week, administrative law judge Lewis Kowal ruled that the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) is in violation of state law because of its Ethnic Studies program. Specifically, Kowal, whose position likely requires less understanding of the law than that displayed daily by Judge Judy on her eponymous television program, decreed that Ethnic Studies violates state statute for three reasons: first, because it was designed principally for one ethnic group alone (and thus, ostensibly promotes a form of segregation); second, because classes in the program promote racial resentment against whites; and finally, because Ethnic Studies as taught in the TUSD promotes racial and ethnic solidarity amongst Latinos, rather than treating everyone as an individual. As an additional aside — and one to which we will return — Kowal added his own grievance to the decision against TUSD, by noting that the district had failed in its obligation to teach about oppression "objectively."

Unless and until the ruling is overturned on appeal, the state has the power to withhold up to 10 percent of the TUSD's budgetary allocation, thereby jeopardizing the cash-strapped schools there and casting its students and teachers into an even greater institutional crisis. All this, because of a program in which a few thousand students each year were enrolled, and which, according to the available evidence, was boosting retention, graduation and college-enrollment rates for those kids who came through it, as opposed to the other Latino students who did not. But success doesn't matter. Because that success, to hear Kowal tell it — or to hear other Arizona conservatives tell it, some of whom have been trying to eradicate the program ever since its inception — was at the expense of patriotic correctness, at the expense of national pride, and at the expense of unity, however contrived.

Having met with teachers, administrators and students involved with the TUSD's Ethnic Studies program — and having seen much of the curriculum they were using with students for years — I can say without fear of contradiction that Kowal's ruling was littered with absurdities. First, to say that the program was designed for one ethnic group is ridiculous: it was designed to teach a variety of subjects through the lens of the state's fastest growing population (and one whose members have been in the area far longer than whites). This is no more exclusive than Asian studies, African American studies, or any other class intended to introduce perspectives that are too often overlooked in regular "American" history and literature classes. Any student could enroll in the program and some non-Latinos did. That most chose not to do so, speaks to their lack of interest in broadening their horizons, not the pernicious intent of the program's designers and participants.

And to say that the TUSD program promoted racial resentment is equally preposterous. That it might have led to a more complete understanding of the role of white supremacy and racism in the shaping of American history (and Arizona's) is undeniable. But there is no reason to assume that subjecting white supremacy to a well-deserved critique will, by necessity, subject white people as people to the same hostility as that reserved for the institutions of oppression. Indeed, well-crafted ethnic studies programs (and Tucson's was one) typically make clear that there have been white allies in the fight against racism, colonialism and oppression of all kinds. Ironically, while the kids in TUSD could learn of those antiracist white allies in the Ethnic Studies program (like those whites who opposed the war with Mexico and viewed it as an unjust war for Anglo-Saxon domination, or who supported Cesar Chavez and the United Farmworkers), down the hall in the regular history classes — the ones conservatives consider "objective" — these antiracist whites are almost entirely ignored, calling into question not only the standard narrative's accuracy, but also the degree to which the reactionary forces in Arizona are really concerned about diminishing racial strife.

Even at a more basic level, if we are to prohibit teaching about the truth of white supremacy, just because it might lead some folks to be angry with whites, then we would have to avoid teaching most everything accurately. History, after all, happened, and the history of the United States is one in which white supremacy was a daily and quite legal reality for hundreds of years, maintained by the active involvement, or at least passive participation of most white people. That isn't said to promote racial hostility, but rather so as to promote historical literacy, the latter of which is apparently a grave threat to some, and especially those whose desire to "take their country back" from the forces of multiculturalism requires that they prevaricate about the most incontestable truths of their national experiment.

Yet in the interest of avoiding the stoking of resentments, I quite doubt that the Tucson schools will be instructed to cease teaching about, say, the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese on December 7, 1941. And this is true, even though it is certainly conceivable that some weak-minded sixteen year old in an American history class could come to see all Japanese through the lens of that horrific act, including some of his or her own Japanese American classmates, who may be descended from families herded into concentration camps (or rather internment camps, because the other term sounds so German) by his or her own government not so long ago.

Nor will Tucson students be denied the opportunity to learn all about 9/11, even though there is no question that such a lesson could well lead to suspicion (even hatred) of Muslims, or Arabs, or both. No indeed, we will not only not prohibit the teaching of such things, we will forever and always mandate their primacy within the curriculum. Anything done to us as a nation by others will be fodder for classroom discussion, no matter the prejudices that could, as a result, be given renewed animation. But for those things done by us as a country, or by white elites even to their own countrymen and women? That and only that will be dumped down the memory hole for fear of creating untoward biases against the perpetrators. It is every bit as convenient as it is venal and without the least bit of intellectual or ethical honor.

Perhaps the most disturbing and utterly Orwellian aspect of Kowal's ruling was the part where he insisted that it was perfectly acceptable to teach about oppression — as the Ethnic Studies program certainly did — but only insofar as that oppression was discussed "objectively." The problem in the TUSD, according to Kowal, is that oppression was being discussed in a "biased, political and emotionally-charged manner." Imagine: oppression being an emotionally-charged or even political subject.

Perhaps we can be forgiven for wondering in complete stupefaction how things like conquest or the deportation of some half-a-million Mexican-American citizens from the United States in the 1930s (so as to free up jobs for white men), can be discussed objectively, as if their perpetrators perhaps had a point, or dispassionately, as if they were no more fraught with moral meaning than, say, the Pythagorean theorem. For that is what Kowal would have us believe: that even in the teeth of historical horrors unimaginable to the average white Arizonan, there are always two sides, and one must give the Devil his due, even while refraining from calling the Devil by that name, lest we encourage an unhealthy aversion to his repeated and iniquitous machinations.

That the Arizona law of which Ethnic Studies has been found in violation would never be used to restrict teaching about the historical crimes of others — for instance, the horrors visited by Nazi Germany against the Jews of Europe (as well as Romani and homosexuals, though the latter two receive little attention) — only compounds the fetid nature of the statute and the rank affectation of its supporters. Even though learning of the European Holocaust could, one supposes, cause a degree of antipathy towards Germans, or even whites more broadly (since the crimes of the Shoah were, after all, committed by whites in the name of Aryan supremacy), never fear: the Jewish community of Tucson (numbering perhaps 25,000 at most), will have its pain and oppression discussed. Jewish children will not be denied the status of victim in the TUSD, nor will anyone insist that their pain be handled "objectively," which, I suppose, would require the teaching of Mein Kampf, or classroom role-playing exercises in which at least some of the area's teens would be expected to portray Mengele or Speer or Goebells just for balance.

No, it is only the brown-skinned who will be denied the ability to learn their history from the perspective of their own people. It is only Latinos and Latinas (roughly 215,000 strong in Tucson, or almost ten times as large as the Jewish community) who will be required to learn the rationalizations for their oppression, and to give those rationalizations equal weight with their own lived experience, all in the name of academic equanimity. It is only they who will be forced to treat their history like an Etch-a-Sketch, upon which the errant lines can be erased by way of a vigorous shake or two, orchestrated by small-minded white men in judicial robes whose own grasp of history is apparently no more adequate than their understanding of the law, and specifically that pesky First Amendment which any rational jurist could see quite readily as prohibiting the banning of inconvenient history, no matter how true it be.

Finally, to suggest that Ethnic Studies promotes an unwelcome "ethnic solidarity" as opposed to treating everyone as an individual is the kind of nonsense that could only emanate from the mind of a member of the dominant racial or ethnic group in America — namely a white person — who by virtue of that membership has actually had the luxury of thinking of the world as merely comprised of individuals in the first place. Fact is, and every Latino or Latina in Tucson — indeed, pretty much every person of color in the country — knows it, we do not experience life in America as individuals. So to speak of us as if we were atomistic, isolated "minorities of one," is to ignore the real-life experiences shared by millions of those individuals because of their group identity. In short, black and brown folks have experienced America differently than whites, on balance, and this is not some coincidental accident of history. Likewise, whites, in the main, have experienced a relative degree of advantage and opportunity compared to persons of color, and this too did not just happen, as if the outcome of a random roll of the proverbial dice. No, these truths owe their veracity to a set of systemic conditions, within which individuals who just so happened to be brown were not allowed to be the individuals they were, but were, instead, constrained and marginalized precisely because they were brown.

For Judge Kowal to condemn any attempt to instill pride, purpose and solidarity among the oppressed — worse still in the name of the very individualism that white supremacy has persistently made into a cruel farce — is the ultimate historical obscenity. To suggest that students of color should be required to ingest a history and literature curricula in which their own people's voices are seen as divisive is cruel and callous and unconditionally craven in its reactionary tenor. Judge Kowal, like others on the right in his state, simply panders to the lowest common denominator, scapegoating ethnic studies for problems long since created by our people, in classrooms dominated by a Eurocentric narrative for generations.

You know that narrative of course, indeed you can likely recite it in your sleep. It's the one the Judge Kowals of the nation prefer, and it goes roughly like this:

America was founded by people who were escaping oppression and yearning to be free. Upon arrival in the New World they established religious freedom, except for those people who weren't religious enough, or were suspected of witchcraft, or were Catholic, or who adhered to some silly pagan faith like those practiced by the Indians whom the colonists encountered. The colonists then set about building a new nation in which all men were created equal, as long as those men weren't women, or something other than European, or poor. Along the way, mistakes were made (haven't you ever made a mistake?), and sadly, Native Americans died in large numbers because they didn't have resistance to the diseases brought over from Europe, or the bullets we occasionally were forced to fire at them when they weren't willing to let us live on their land, or when they didn't show sufficient appreciation for the nice spot we had made for them in Oklahoma.

Also, Africans were brought to America and held in bondage as slaves, which was wrong. But most were treated reasonably well by their masters because you can't get much work out of a slave if you kill him or chop off his arms or his foot like John Amos in that movie, Roots. And remember, slavery has existed everywhere, and back then everyone believed in slavery — well, except the slaves or the abolitionists — so, ya know, you can't judge that period by today's moral standards. It's not like the human brain was capable of supporting liberty and freedom as far back as 200 years ago! So stop living in the past. At some point we have to move on. Mistakes were made. Haven't you ever made a mistake?

And yes, after slavery, we had a new racist system known as segregation, but that too was ultimately defeated because Americans stood up and said "no" in the civil rights movement, after hearing Martin Luther King Jr. tell them about his "dream." So even though mistakes were made, the system was corrected. I bet you've made mistakes. And I bet you didn't correct them as quickly as America.

Also, we have never started a war with anyone. We have only acted in self-defense or in defense of our immediate interests. Mistakes have been made, (and haven't we all made mistakes?), but our intentions are good and we are always defending ourselves.

This was true with the Indians whom we had to kill to keep them from scalping us when we would try and take their land.

And it was true with Mexico, when they tried to keep us from annexing part of their country known as Texas, which we had to annex, because some of our slaveholders had gone there and declared the area independent of Mexico, and we had to defend those slaveholders because Mexico was led by a corrupt dictator, and because they might have tried to retake the territory that our slaveholders had taken from them, and that would have been unfair, because the slaveholders had only been able to enjoy it for like a year.

And it was true when we intervened to support the overthrow of the government of Hawaii in 1893, after the Queen decided not to abide by the previous Constitution stripping most non-whites of the right to vote, which some American businessmen (also known as "job-creators") had previously forced upon the nation. Although some mistakes were made (like you've never made a mistake), we had to defend our interests. We needed pineapples and nice beaches. I mean, have you ever actually been to Panama City, or Rockaway?

And it was self-defense that motivated us in the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century, when we had to kill around a million men, women and children just to make sure that we would have control of that country, rather than the Spanish imperialists who had been in control of it before. We were liberating the Filipinos from those awful Spanish who were trying to control them, so that we could show them the proper way to run a country. Mistakes were made, but we did it for their own good. I bet when you've made mistakes it wasn't for someone else's good, it was all for you, you, you. Because you're selfish, unlike America.

And it was self-defense that propelled us forward in Nicaragua in the 1920s, when we sent Marines there to capture a horrible, evil terrorist who had the support of the citizenry, but only because they didn't understand that he was a horrible, evil terrorist. After we invaded their country, Nicaraguans began shooting at us, so we had to shoot back. I mean, that's self-defense. What would you have done? Let them shoot you? That was one mistake America was not going to make, that's for sure.

And when we went to war in Southeast Asia, it was all about self-defense too. We had to protect the South Vietnamese from the communist leader in the north, and so we bombed them. No, not the north. We bombed the south. So they would realize what a bad guy that communist in the north was. But some people are hard-headed and don't learn the lessons we're trying to teach them in a timely manner. So we kept at it for a decade, bombing Laos and Cambodia too, because they were also insufficiently scared of the communists, and if they became communists, pretty soon, we'd have all been speaking Vietnamese, or Chinese, or Lao, or something else Oriental, because it's like dominoes. If one falls they all fall. And yes, mistakes were made in the war, and we ended up losing, but that's because we didn't bomb them enough, because hippies wouldn't let us. So we lost, and Vietnam went communist. And yes, we're still speaking English but that's not because the domino theory was wrong, it's just because English is better.

And Iraq in 1991 and again in 2003? Both self-defense! In 1991 we had to attack them because they invaded Kuwait and might have taken Kuwait's oil, which we need to drive our cars and stuff. And in 2003, we had to invade because Saddam Hussein might have had the ingredients to make weapons of mass destruction, since we and our companies had sold him the ingredients, and then he might use them like that time he used them against Iran, or the Kurds. Only this time, we'd actually give a shit, because he might sell them to al-Qaeda, and then they might use them on us the next time they fly planes into some of our buildings, because even though Saddam and al-Qaeda hated each other, you can't really trust Muslims, because Mohammed commanded them to kill us all, like on 9/11.

Oh yeah, and speaking of that: 9/11, 9/11, 9/11, 9/11, 9/11, 9/11. Did we mention 9/11?

In other words, we've had our problems and mistakes have been made, but we're still the greatest nation that ever existed and ever will exist. God bless America.

This is what conservatives believe to be objective history. In fact, as I've recited it above would likely be seen as not nearly fair enough to the likes of those reactionary forces who would ban Ethnic Studies, and not only for the sarcasm with which I've said it. To them, discussing genocide, slavery, or the slaughter of people around the world at the hands of the United States military at all, even if prefaced with the obligatory phrasing about mistakes being made, is ipso facto a heritage offense, a violation of patriotic correctness, a sign that one hates one's own country and should be presumed traitorous. They would hardly approve of even the above-displayed level of national apologetics, so willing is it to nonetheless reference some of the sordid underbelly of our imperial existence.

No indeed, to many of them, only a sanitized, hyper-nationalistic narrative scrubbed of all reference to injustice will do. They are like Michelle Bachmann, for whom there is apparently no event in American history that she cannot manage to splendidly mischaracterize; or like Glenn Beck, who apparently believes there is a straight line between the Biblical Israelites and the Founding Fathers because a fanatical Mormon (whom the LDS church had to disavow so extreme were his views), said so.

If Judge Kowal's ruling is allowed to stand, students in Tucson will be the worse for it, and the floodgates will be opened for similar reactionary laws to be passed in other states, where whites feel threatened by the growing population of Latinos, and the demographic transformation of the white republic for which they so fondly and wistfully long. The America of their youth — that small town, Leave it to Beaver, Boy Scout troop idyll, which relegated racial others to the margins of national existence — is dead, and they cannot, will not, let it go. So they lash out against those who would teach truth, who would expose students to a critical examination of the history so nostalgically revered by the aging, fading hegemon. Their path is the politics of white resentment, white anxiety, and the last gasp of a white supremacy that demographic and cultural trends suggest is living on borrowed time. But until that system blessedly takes its last breath, its committed practitioners and defenders are capable of doing much damage.

For us, the path is clear. Not only should we demand the reversal of Kowal, and the continuation of Ethnic Studies in Tucson, but we should take matters into our own hands. If truth cannot be taught in schools then let us teach it to our children, in after-school programs, weekend workshops, in our homes, churches, mosques, synagogues and community-based organizations. Relying on a public school system to do the job for us — especially when that system was established by, and ultimately for members of the dominant group, and has persistently perpetuated inequity from the beginning — is a fool's errand.

Just as a sausage factory should be expected to make sausage — and not trusted to turn out chicken nuggets — so too, schools that were set up to generate inequality (thanks to tracking, local control of funding and standards, and norm-referenced standardized testing) should not be counted on to bring about its opposite. If schools are to serve the purpose of justice, it will only be because we have remade them from the bottom up or created our own. Waiting for the courts as currently constituted to do the right thing — even less so state legislatures or Congress — will only frustrate the struggle for equity. There are few brave leaders to be found in any of those places, so committed to patriotic correctness are they as well.

It is time for the rest of us to stop asking for their support or their blessing, and instead, to make the teaching of social justice a first order of parenting and raising a new generation of youth for the America of the future. While the white right tries to take the country back, let the rest of us continue moving forward, with or without them.

"If I Were a Poor Black Child"…White Saviorism and the Politics of Personal Responsibility

Last week, Forbes Magazine's small business reporter Gene Marks penned a column that has set the internet abuzz ever since. Therein, Marks, who quite accurately describes himself as "short, balding and mediocre," proceeded to counsel poor black children as to how they might succeed in America, despite facing, by his own admission, longer odds than white youth like his own children, or other white middle class kids in general. Far from a harsh right-winger bent on condemning the moral decency, character or abilities of the black poor (or like Newt Gingrich in his 1994 vintage, ripping them away from their mothers and dumping them in orphanages), Marks appears to fashion himself an enlightened benefactor of good advice, a caring liberal who believes in the ability of anyone to make it with the right combination of hard work and a positive attitude.

No believer in Bell Curv-ish nonsense about black intellectual inferiority, Marks makes clear that the children about whom he speaks are no less capable than his own kids. Of course, one wonders just how much of a compliment Marks really intends for this to be, given his strange habit of dissing his offspring, on more than one occasion, as rather unintelligent, unmotivated, promiscuous and even inclined to petty criminality. Not sure what kind of asshole says things like this about his children in print, but I suppose we can leave that discussion for another day.

No doubt Marks would say that he was simply encouraging poor African American kids to take personal responsibility for their success. He might even say that by acknowledging unfair and unjust structural inequity (and even, indirectly, white privilege), he was doing so in a politically ecumenical way. Certainly Marks would perceive his words and intentions as quite different from those of right-wingers whose hectoring of the poor so often involves blaming those at the bottom of the nation's economic hierarchy for their station in life. To Marks, poor black kids are not to blame for the position in which they find themselves, but they nonetheless hold the keys to their own liberation, and if they would simply follow his sage counsel they could surely make it, like anyone else: even the cerebrally challenged and oversexed spawn who slumber each night just down the hall from he and his wife.

There is much one could say about Marks's advice — rather typical bootstrapping fare about studying hard, coupled with a more modern emphasis on becoming a techie like him, and thereby, presumably, an irresistible college or job applicant — and most of it has been said already. Like, for instance, this piece, or this one, or this one, or maybe this one, all of which eloquently critique the privileged and naive mindset displayed by Marks, and explain how even when poor kids of color do everything right, the structures of society are too often set up to help them fail anyway.

Or maybe this well-crafted prose from Ta-Nehisi Coates, in which the author examines the pathetic and yet all-too-common tendency to believe that one knows what one would (or could) do, were one subject to oppression, as Marks seems to believe he does. As Coates points out, there is a strange psychological aspect to this self-assurance, in that it demonstrates how badly we wish to rise above our own mediocrity, by placing ourselves in another person's shoes and then ascribing to our fictional self some super-human powers of transcendence that deep down, we know we lack in this, the real world of our daily existence. Heady stuff, more intellectually satisfying (and a hell of a lot better written) than anything Marks has ever committed to a computer screen.

Or maybe this piece, by a staffer at Forbes, in which the author explains how people like Marks are paid for their contributions based on how many unique page views they receive, which means, based on how controversial and enraging their articles sound. In other words, one has every reason to question Marks's real motivation for penning such smug, scatological rubbish, as it may well have been more about generating hits and dough for himself than about helping any actual poor black children, who — and do I really need to say this? — aren't probably sitting around reading Forbes in the first place.

And it's this last point that we might do well to explore further. Fact is, Gene Marks knows his readership at Forbes. He knows that it includes virtually none of the people to whom he is ostensibly offering advice, which means that he isn't really giving them advice at all; rather, he is inviting his mostly white, mostly affluent audience to engage in a perverse moralistic voyeurism at the expense of impoverished African American youth, almost none of whom that readership will ever meet, and whom they will, in fact, go out of their way to avoid. He is offering a kind of secret white-male handshake to others in the club, assuring them that the problems of urban poverty are not theirs to fix, that they are off the hook as it were, and isn't that a relief? That Marks may not be as vile in his desire to blame the poor for their status as some, hardly acquits him of the charge that by pandering to the biases of his readership, he has, with some 700-odd simple (and simplistic) words, managed to reinscribe all the worst of their prejudices, many of which one can see on grand display in the readers' comments section of the original article. Make no mistake, Gene Marks's column is contempt cloaked as compassion and bigotry dressed up as benevolence. And it can do nothing but contribute to the indifference and even antipathy towards the poor that those who rely on Forbes for insights already possess in ample supply.

What is even more disturbing about Marks's phony advice column is what it says about the politics of personal responsibility in America. For years we've heard the same refrain: those people need to take personal responsibility for their lives and stop blaming the system for their problems. We even passed a welfare reform bill in the 1990s named the Personal Responsibility Act, because to hear its advocates tell it, it was a lack of the same that explained why people were poor and in need of public assistance. Yet in every iteration of this grandiose mantra of self-help, we routinely miss the intrinsic irony of its blare: that to point at someone else as Marks has done, while clucking one's tongue about taking personal responsibility is quite possibly the most circle-perfect contradiction, and the most inimitable example of ethical self-negation that one could possibly conjure.

The simple fact is, even were we to accept every bit of advice that Marks dispenses in his column as perfectly sensible, the question would still remain: Is it the job of white men of means to tell other people how to take personal responsibility for themselves, or is it our job, by definition under a rubric of personal responsibility, to figure out what we are going to do about such things as class and race subordination?

That folks can prattle on about personal responsibility and not grasp what I'm saying here is indicative of a substantial and suffocating cultural flaw — and not one that flows from the culture of those who are poor or black, but quite predictably from those who are neither: namely, we have grown so accustomed to showering jeremiads upon the have-nots (and ascribing their state of need to something essential about them), that we have become almost incapable of turning the finger back around and aiming it at ourselves, despite the fact that to do anything else is a violation of the very concept of personal responsibility about which we seem so self-righteously animated.

In short, while it is certainly true that the poor and persons of color should always do their best and try their hardest to overcome the obstacles they experience in life — and that has always been the case, even under conditions of formal apartheid that marked the vast majority of our national existence — this says nothing as to what people like Gene Marks need to be discussing, in print or elsewhere. Marks, like so many other white Americans with a modicum of success, uses personal responsibility as a cudgel against others, when what he (and we) should be doing is figuring out what it means for ourselves.

It's something I've had to grapple with personally for years. As someone who writes about racism, and lectures around the country about the same, I am often asked by people of color, what I think they should do to overcome racial oppression, or to succeed despite its weight. Although I can offer some general insights (based on what the actual research says regarding positive racial identity development and how targets of oppression can effectively fight back against structures of injustice), I am always a bit hesitant to spend a lot of time on the matter. And this surely isn't because I am indifferent to the question or the persons asking it. Far from it, every time the query is put to me it burns like a hot poker, because I realize the all-too-real pain behind the inquiry; I can see in the eyes and hear in the voices of those who are seeking out my counsel on the matter that they really need assistance. And God knows they deserve it.

But what I also know is this: Folks of color cannot depend upon the advice and counsel of white people so as to fashion strategies for their liberation; neither can women, LGBT folks or the poor do so. Simply put, even when our intentions are good, we cannot possibly know what it is to be in the position of the oppressed in those categories to which we do not belong. Even when one is a member of a marginalized group in a particular category (like gender or sexuality), this will not be sufficient to inform them as to what it means to be black, or Latino, or Asian American or indigenous to this nation, if they are racially privileged as whites. So to pretend that we really know what to do in situations we do not inhabit (beyond what certain research can tell us) is to engage in the kind of conceit that Marks so spectacularly demonstrated in his Forbes piece, none of which was rooted in research, bur relied instead on his personal, behind-the-veil-of-white-male-ignorance assumptions as to what will work for others, since, after all, it worked for him.

This is not to say that those in privileged identity groups have no role to play in the creation of a more just society. Of course we do, as allies. That means that what we can do and should be doing, so as to make more successful whatever strategies are ultimately chosen by the disempowered as they seek to overcome their position, is figuring out how we can use our status to open doors, to challenge policies that maintain inequity, and to combat the mentality of denial and indifference that too often grips our number. That is our role: to soften up the underbelly of support that the current systems of racism, sexism, heterosexism and classism rely upon so as to do their damage. It is our role to work as members of identity-based undergrounds, as it were, eroding the ambivalence that so often makes even caring and compassionate white folks, men, straight and cisgendered persons and folks with money turn our backs on our better instincts for justice, equality and democracy.

And it is our job to subvert systems of oppression directly, in our professional capacities, personal lives, as parents in the schools our children attend, and throughout our communities. What does that mean? It means that the question people like Gene Marks need to be asking is not so much, "What would I do if I were a poor black kid?", but rather, what can I do right now, as the person I am, to help address racial and economic inequity?

What is Marks going to do (and what are we who are like him going to do) to reach out to those persons he feels qualified to advise, and see to it that they know of job opportunities like the ones his own kids got for the summer last year, despite not being, in his own words very "bright?" After all, with black teen unemployment rates at all time highs (over 50 percent in many urban communities), unless those with influence in various workplaces do targeted and committed outreach to those persons so regularly left out of opportunity, very little about their condition will change. That is something that black children cannot do for themselves — by definition if they're counted in unemployment numbers they already are committed to work and searching for a job — but it is something over which many of us might have some say.

What is Marks going to do (and what are the rest of us going to do) to challenge the unequal educational resources between the kinds of schools that Marks's children (and many of ours) no doubt attend, and the ones that serve mostly low income persons of color? The impoverished have no control over budgetary allocations, little say in teacher assignments (which often result in the most experienced and effective teachers being assigned to affluent white students and the least experienced and least effective being herded into rooms for the black and poor), and almost no power to influence so-called ability tracking schemes (which are more about race and class than actual ability), or racially-disparate discipline (under which black kids are suspended about 3 times as often as whites despite similar rates of misconduct). Unless and until white parents of means begin to demand equity in education, and join in solidarity with those persons of color and the poor who have long demanded change, those structures will likely continue unabated. And until we commit to challenging ourselves and each other about the need for such change — and piercing the denial and ambivalence that too often prevents us from acting on the truth — such solidarity is equally unlikely.

What is Marks willing to do (and what are we willing to do) to confront racial profiling, police brutality, job discrimination, or housing discrimination, all of which continue to divide the nation racially and marginalize people of color, regardless of their own behaviors, values or work effort? Is he (and are we) prepared to confront our political leaders about their own persistent refusal to address such concerns? Are we prepared to withhold support from those who seek our votes but don't take racial equity seriously?

Are we prepared to challenge our own employers about policies, practices and procedures that may have a disparate impact upon people of color, even if not intentionally? Are we prepared to challenge old boy's networks for jobs or college admissions, even when those may work to our own benefits or the benefits of our kids? Is Gene Marks, for instance, willing to not seek out better opportunities for his own children (after all, their mediocrity suggests they surely haven't earned them)? If they decide to go to whatever college Marks attended, is he willing to eschew using his alumni status to help land them in his alma mater on the legacy tip? Is he willing to challenge his readership to do the same: to not pull strings to get jobs for their kids, or internships, or seats in prestigious universities?

Are they willing to send information about job openings in their companies and workplaces to community groups, churches, mosques, and professional organizations led by people of color, so that those institutions can get the word out to their constituents, thereby casting the net for equal opportunity in the workplace more widely? Are they (are we) prepared to call out racism each and every time we see it, among family, friends, colleagues, neighbors and others? So too with classism and all other forms of oppression?

Unless the answer to all those questions is yes — and sadly, I know that for most of us the answer is not — then it is sanctimonious and vulgar to pretend we have any right to pose as enlightened advisors to the victims of those things we are too weak to confront. Especially when we (or others like us) are the ones who set the systems up that way in the first place, and we who, at least in relative terms, continue to reap the benefits of those institutional arrangements.

In short, to Gene Marks and to all white men like him (and me): Doctor, heal thyself.

Fake Newton: Looking for the Real Newt Gingrich

A shorter and different version of this essay appeared shortly after Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1995, in the political newsletter, Counterpunch (September 25, 1995). Some of the quotes for the article appeared in the New Orleans Times Picayune, in a feature story on Gingrich in 1995, while others appeared in old copies of the Tulane Hullabaloo during Gingrich's time as a grad student at Tulane in the late 1960s. Still other quotes, specifically from David Kramer and Blake Touchstone, are from interviews I conducted with both men in 1995, the former by phone and the latter in person. Though the material has been previously published, it received very little attention at the time, and because of the pre-internet era in which it was distributed, very few people ever saw it. I have now updated the piece to reflect Gingrich's current run for President of the United States. Given the re-emergence of the previously discredited Gingrich as a national political figure, it seemed relevant to re-examine some of Newt's largely undiscussed history.

Some things in politics really don't change, and among the most consistently effective rhetorical memes in the quiver of conservative candidates for the past forty-plus years, "Hey-Dirty-Hippie-Why-Don't-You-Take-a-Bath-and-Get-a-Job," is among the most tried and true. From former Vice President Spiro Agnew to Ronald Reagan (especially in his incarnation as California Governor) to Newt Gingrich (now among the leading contenders for the Republican Presidential nomination), nothing is more sure to whip the troops into a reactionary lather like bashing young people with long or unkempt hair whose attire suggests they are something other than, well, hedge fund managers.

Never one to shy away from slamming anything remotely resembling a countercultural movement, Gingrich recently pilloried the activists of Occupy Wall Street for their supposed inadequate devotion to either steady employment or soap, much to the delight of the uber-right-wing audience members at the 479th GOP candidates debate of the past month. Ignoring the many Occupy activists who are gainfully employed, Gingrich naturally offered no ideas as to where the less fortunate among them might find work in an economy where there are several applicants for every job opening. Clearly appraised of the oversight, he then, within 48 hours offered his plan for job creation: namely, eliminate child labor laws in poor communities so that inner-city kids can be made to work as janitors at their own schools. No word on what would happen to the actual janitors, or when the kids might do their homework, or how any of that would put patchouli-drenched protesters to work, but I'm sure he's still working on that minor detail.

In any event, in keeping with his decades-long obsession with attacking all things reminiscent of the 1960s protest movements — this is the guy, after all, who said the counterculture was to blame for Susan Smith drowning her own children back in 1994 — Newt is at it again. Yet, as was the case seventeen years ago when he first came to real power, few have ever thought to explore Gingrich's own background as regards that very era he so quickly seeks to blame for all the problems of the nation.

Newt in the Sixties: The Tom Hayden of Tulane?

While Gingrich may pose now as the defender of traditional conservatism, during his own years in college — especially as a graduate student at Tulane University in the late 1960s — he was hardly carrying water for the right; quite the opposite. According to friends from that period, and the Tulane student paper, The Hullabaloo, during those heady days of national protest, Gingrich was an iconoclastic liberal, especially with regard to social issues, who despite being a Republican, would regularly complain about how "corrupt and stupid" the white, New Orleans, conservative elite were, and how the city was missing the boat culturally and economically because of the racism of the old-timers. This, according to longtime Gingrich friend, David Kramer. Hardly an enemy of the "Great Society" programs, which have become cannon-fodder for the right over the years, it was commonly known that Newt's own children were enrolled in Head Start at a local pre-school and that he was a staunch supporter of efforts to target opportunities to the poor — and particularly to African Americans.

Beyond mere policy liberalism however, Newt's associations and activities during the era were actually quite a bit farther to the left than that. Though a "Rockefeller Republican" (which among Southern Republicans was almost unheard of), from 1968-1969, Gingrich consorted quite openly with members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) — the preeminent student radical group in America at the time — and even led a mass movement in favor of the campus paper's right to publish nude photographs. In his role as the defender of dirty pictures, Gingrich helped lead a march 700-strong to the home of the University President, protesting administration censorship, at which Tulane's chief was hanged in effigy. Other demonstrations by Newt's activist group targeted the New Orleans offices of Merrill Lynch, a department store and a local bank, all of which had executives sitting on the Tulane Board of Administrators. Got that? Newt Gingrich led a protest against a bank.

According to Blake Touchstone, who was a fellow grad student and friend of Newt's at the time, "Newt and two other graduate students really took over the campus protest movement when they saw that the undergrads weren't doing such a great job." One of those in Gingrich's inner circle was Eric Gordon, an SDS activist known around campus as "Eric the Red." David Kramer, another of Gingrich's friends (who was teaching in Berlin at the time Gingrich assumed his role as Speaker of the House back in 1995), reported to the New Orleans Times Picayune, that Newt was the "spokesman for student rebellion," and a chief proponent of the idea that the campus art and literature journal — inserted in the weekly paper — should be allowed to publish photos of nude statues with enlarged genitalia, along with the sculptor himself, likewise in the buff. Ironically, there were many Tulane students who supported the decision to censor the pictures and condemned Gingrich and the rest of the demonstrators as "radicals" for their "angry protests" aimed at the administration. In other words, in the eyes of conservatives at Tulane, Gingrich was just another troublemaker; a part of the counterculture; someone who was "infringing on our rights as students," by launching "repugnant" demonstrations, as one law school student put it in the pages of the Hullabaloo. Got that? Newt Gingrich needs to get a job, after taking a bath.

The group co-founded by Gingrich, known as MORTS (Mobilization of Responsible Tulane Students), went on to publish (under his leadership) a broader campus political platform which advocated among other things, the abolition of compulsory attendance, the right of students to make all dormitory regulations, and a policy that would allow students to rate their professors in such a way as to determine tenure decisions. Although such demands seem tame compared to those made by activists at many other schools, they are far afield from the traditional conservative values trumpeted by the right today.

Although MORTS faded away as a campus force, students involved in its founding — including Gingrich's friends, Kramer and Bill Rushton — went on to play a central role in the takeover (one might even call it an occupation) of the school's student center in the spring of 1970. Kramer, Rushton and other MORTS holdovers were instrumental in the formation of the Tulane Liberation Front, which held the center for a week, calling for a "cultural revolution" in America. The TLF proposed turning the center's Olympic pool into a public bath, and demanded a number of other things, including the liberalization of campus drug policy and the abolition of ROTC credit courses. TLF set up their own co-ed dorm in one of the center's large meeting rooms, wherein, according to one former Tulane sociology professor, "young women were being sexually liberated in their sleeping bags."

As for Gingrich, although he missed the TLF strike (he was in Belgium at the time, studying colonial educational policy in the Congo for his Tulane PhD), it is nonetheless interesting that his former activist comrades from the previous two years were leaders of that spring's uprising. After all, conservatives have gone to great lengths to smear center-left candidates by way of any and all associations they may have (however tenuous) to political radicals. The fact that Barack Obama even knows Bill Ayers, and served on a non-profit board with him, some thirty-plus years after his days as an antiwar activist, is supposed to somehow tie him to the acts of the Weather Underground. Even Bill Clinton's nebulous connections to some who supported the National Mobilization to Stop the War in Vietnam was used by Gingrich and his ilk in the early 90s to discredit him as a closet radical. Yet in 1970, two of Gingrich's closest friends and associates outdid most antiwar activists with their revolutionary rhetoric. Kramer, who said (as of 1995) that he has maintained contact with Gingrich and that the two remain "reasonably close," called on students to "join the underground conspiracy." Rushton, who had been among Newt's chief MORTS allies proclaimed:

The TLF is beginning a campaign to urge students all over the country to rise up and take control of their student unions, converting them into revolutionary communes. Political revolution in this country cannot be won until the cultural revolution triumphs, by building alternative societies in the belly of the racist, oppressive, war-torn mess that is America.

Got that? Newt Gingrich "pal'd around" with revolutionaries!

Gingrich's Countercultural Educational Philosophies: Wherein Newt Sounds a Bit Like Freire

But aside from his activism, Gingrich's most pronounced countercultural tendencies surfaced in his educational philosophies, which he had a chance to put into practice at Tulane in the spring of 1969. It was then that Newt taught a free, non-credit course for first year students — FUTURE 100 — the class title of which was "When you are 49: The Year 2000″ (Not exactly a classicist meditation on the Peloponnesian War). Interviewed by the student paper about the course, Gingrich opined that his teaching method was based on the concept of "total feedback" (whatever, hippie), and that the course would operate without formal rules, notes or lectures. Exam questions, Newt explained, would be given to students two weeks before the test so as to lessen performance anxiety and allow for better results. Not exactly the kind of educational reforms advocated by the right, then or now.

Claiming that there was "no penalty great enough to compel people to learn," Gingrich complained that colleges and universities were "bogged down with a lot of useless systems…such as credits and rules, and unrealistic requirements," which he favored eliminating completely. Funny, but such a complaint was also at the heart of SDS's Port Huron Statement — the initial manifesto of the student left — which read: "The bridge to political power will involve national efforts at University reform…(which) must wrest control of the educational process from the administrative bureaucracy…"

Although Gingrich has long stumped for a return to traditional educational methods like phonics, and vilified those who "snickered at the McGuffy readers in the '60s," while at Tulane, he did much more than snicker at educational traditions. In 1969, Gingrich wrote that he longed for the day when "gone will be the 18th century tradition of credit hours…gone must be set curricula for earned degrees. And gone must be the lecureship type of instruction." Sounds a lot more like the trenchant critique of education's "narration sickness," found in Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, than anything to be heard from the right and those insisting that education has moved too far away from the so-called basics. Gingrich went on to lament that schools are "dominated by the traditional past," explained that he sought an educational system "less dependent on books and examinations," and went so far as to advocate that "education may have to become a kind of coffee-break way of learning." Got that? Newt Gingrich thinks schools should be turned into hipster latte bars.

In the pages of the campus paper, Newt clearly expressed his anti-traditionalist views on education, in ways that rival anything to be heard from the so-called "tenured radicals" about which he and others like him are so exorcised today. To wit:

The relevance and meaning of education must change, and change will come in wiping out the concept of education as wisdom and knowledge, to a concept of each new idea or piece of information being translated into application to a human being's adaptation to real life.

Though hardly as poetic, such sentiment sounds considerably like that of Freire — arguably the most profound educational radical in history — who noted:

Those truly committed to liberation must abandon the educational goal of (informational) deposit making and replace it with the posing of the problems of men in their relations with the world.

Salamander or Chameleon? Will the Real Newt Gingrich Please Stand Up?

Though Newt Gingrich's hypocrisy when it comes to slamming protest movements and a counterculture of which he himself was a part is interesting, it alone is hardly the most important element of his story and what it tells us about the man today. More important, perhaps, is what Gingrich's Tulane friends regard as the opportunism of his public activities throughout the years and what it says — from the '60s to the present — about his character or lack thereof.

Although few of his old associates question the sincerity with which Gingrich has replaced his once-liberal views with more conservative substitutes, many insist that he has made the transition more dramatic than it otherwise might have been, out of a desire to gain political power. His public persona, they say, has conveniently seemed to morph, whenever necessary, to fit the tenor of the times. So in the turbulent '60s he moved left so as to better navigate the budding progressive narrative among youth culture, and then at the outset of the Reagan years, tacked right so as to curry favor with voters in his conservative Georgia congressional district. One can only wonder if Newt is subtly changing colors again so as to camouflage himself within the right-wing backlash culture of the Tea Party as it seeks to challenge the Obama presidency.

When I spoke with David Kramer in 1995, shortly after Gingrich had assumed the Speakership, he remembered Newt as someone who enjoyed, above all else, "taking on the establishment" whenever doing so would enhance his own popularity or serve his ultimate goal–a goal about which the old friend of Newt's was clear. "I've never met anybody as consumed with the idea of achieving and exercising political power as Newt Gingrich," Kramer explained. Although Kramer believes Gingrich has changed most of his views, he also noted in our conversation that "primarily the change is a change in his vehicle for attaining power. As much as he's changed on one level, I know of few people who are as exactly the same after all these years as Newt." Hans Schmidt, one of Gingrich's history professors at Tulane echoed that perspective when explaining to the Times Picayune back in 1995: "He's Machiavellian. He'll do anything to gain his end." Along the same lines, old associate Touchstone recalls he could "never feel close to Newt, because he was always so focused on himself. Nothing he did was out of an altruistic motive."

Perhaps the quest for power is what explains, more than anything, his '60s pseudo-radicalism. After all, at that time it was more hip to talk about "self actualization" in the classroom than to pontificate about school prayer or harsher discipline. By posturing to the left of his GOP contemporaries, Gingrich could vouchsafe his image as an outsider, fighting great political odds and the corrupting influences of an elite establishment. Aligning himself with SDS and the Tulane free speech movement, and employing radical new teaching theories, were all vehicles for a larger goal that even then, his friends recall, he had in his sights.

"The first time I met Newt," recalled Touchstone, back in 1995, "was in the fall of 1967. A few of us were sitting around the campus pub, having a beer, and talking about what we'd like to be doing in twenty years. Most of us were saying how we'd like to be teaching or writing a book, or something like that. But when it was Newt's turn, he didn't miss a beat, and said just as confident as could be, that he would be a United States Senator from Georgia. It was a very strange moment." He continued, "The thing about Newt is that he would always do anything to place himself at center stage or get an audience. That still seems to be a problem for him. It makes it difficult to know what's genuine and what's a power play."

Kramer, though still fond of Gingrich, concurs. When it comes to Newt's views on moral issues of the day, or even his tough talk about cracking down on the so-called culture of poverty, Kramer expresses doubt that his old friend genuinely believes all the things he says on the subjects. As he explained to me in 1995: "I would imagine he's simply speaking to a constituency which he figures thinks these things are important and valid."

By casting himself as the underdog (fighting the Nixon tide in the 60s or the "liberal media" today), Gingrich has been able to long portray himself as a contemporary Messianic hero, a latter day David battling whichever Goliath seemed an easier target at the time. The bad news, of course, is that this is the stuff of which tyrants are made. The good news is that it also is the stuff of which some of the nation's most discredited political buffoons are comprised. In which direction Gingrich trends will, ultimately, be up to the American people.

Interestingly, Kramer, for his part, told me back in 1995 that he would probably vote for Gingrich if his old classmate ever ran for president, just as a way to "vote for an old friend," if nothing else. After casting said vote, he noted that he would then hold his breath and "hope for the best." Not exactly a hearty endorsement, and certainly not the kind that should persuade any of the rest of us.

Tim Wise on Rachel Maddow, 10/21/11 – Discussing Race in the #Occupy Movement

Here is the clip from the 10/21/11 Rachel Maddow Show, in which I discuss race and the #Occupy Movement (and left activism more broadly) with guest host Melissa Harris-Perry. Didn't get to say much but an essay will be forthcoming with a much more detailed analysis of the importance of crafting an antiracist narrative as part of the struggle for economic justice.

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