Tim Wise's Blog, page 9

…More Thoughts on the Myth of American Exceptionalism

So in following up the earlier post on the pathology of patriotism, I figured it might be worth re-posting links to a few additional older essays, all of which addressed this subject of “American Exceptionalism.” It is that, after all, which Rudy Giuliani and other right wingers accuse President Obama of failing to endorse (when actually he does, problematically, endorse a liberal but still false version of it). I think it’s important for progressives and leftists and radicals to reject the notion of exceptionalism. It’s a dangerous concept, for our own country and the world. Not to mention, it is simply a lie. Is the U.S. a great place with great people? Sure. Are there many things to love about the country, its institutions and its people? Undoubtedly. But is it exceptional in this regard when compared to other nations? Of course not. Or rather, I should probably say I have no idea because like most people, I haven’t traveled widely enough to make that judgment. But neither have most people who insist upon it. I’ve been enough places to know, however — and know enough about the quality of life elsewhere to know — that in many categories we are positively worse than other countries. without question. And when it comes to things like brutality and terror, we are certainly no better in most cases.

So anyway, and because these pieces are old (and were published before this website went live in its current form, and thus, may have been missed by most of my current readers), here are three links to pieces addressing one or another version of the American exceptionalism mythology…

The Same Only Different: Reflections on the Myth of American Exceptionalism

Selective Indignation: Bin Laden’s Inhumanity, and Ours

Anywhere but Here: Examining the Crimes of Thee, But Not of Me

Patriotism is Still a Pathology (Revisiting an Old Essay, More Relevant Now Than Ever)

In light of the recent ventilations of Rudy Giuliani, to the effect that President Obama doesn’t “love America” like “the rest of us do” — because of the way the president has framed, among other things, the actions of ISIS and our response to it — I thought it might be worthwhile to revisit an essay I wrote back in 2001 at the outset of the so-called “war on terror.” Though dated in places, it also seems more prescient than ever, especially the point that patriotism — and what those who cleave to this concept consider “patriotic” — is often against the actual best interests of the country they claim to love so much. In this sense, patriotism is not merely, as the old saying goes, the last refuge of a scoundrel, but it is also the thing such persons readily substitute for a sober-minded assessment of the real interests of their country and its people. Such “love of country” as endorsed by Giuliani, Sarah Palin and the “isn’t America exceptional?” bunch, in other words, is decidedly counterproductive and dysfunctional in most cases. Although I am working on a newer piece addressing these issues, and challenging the notion that those on the right “love” the United States more than those on the left, I also felt it would be worth circulating this piece again too. Because as was true then, so is it true now that patriotism (which goes beyond merely loving the country and its people, descending instead into a form of nation-worship) is a pathology, and one worthy of being discarded.

This essay was originally published in LIP Magazine, October 23, 2001

Since most Americans fail to appreciate irony, it may be impossible for us to acknowledge how fitting it is, and how typical, that we should launch a “war on terrorism” just in time for our own national celebration of one of the most prolific terrorists in modern history: Christopher Columbus. Still reeling from the terrible attacks of 9/11, New Yorkers turned out recently to commemorate the “peerless” explorer, who by all accounts oversaw the slaughter of Taino Indians on Hispaniola, and to “demonstrate support for what our country is doing,” to quote Grand Marshal, and Mets Manager, Bobby Valentine.

The failure to recognize the inconsistency of condemning terrorism while yet celebrating one of its most dedicated practitioners is predictable, and explains much about why others the world over view the U.S. as a bastion of hypocrisy. As with our lack of historical perspective, our military actions are also predictable, as are the likely consequences. With bombs pummeling Afghanistan, turning rocks into smaller rocks and searching for buildings over two stories tall to wipe out, the President insists that the collective will of the world is behind his “war on terror.”

Yet, in the pit of one’s stomach, the distinct feeling emerges that coalition or no, by our actions the U.S. has sealed the fates not only of thousands of Afghans, but also many of our own citizens who shall one day feel the wrath of those seeking revenge. If history is any guide, air strikes will rip up real estate, kill innocent people, and do nothing to end the extant threat of terrorism or even diminish it. Quite the opposite.

As we cozy up to the Northern Alliance — whose version of Islam is little different from the Taliban and whose only complaint about the current regime is that it’s not them — let us pause to consider what happened the last time we decided a ragtag Afghan army was comprised of “freedom fighters.”

To expect that we might learn from history would, I suppose, be asking too much. Arming one set of thugs so as to combat another — who used to be our thugs after all — may seem logical to those whose vision extends no further than the next election cycle. But to those who seek an end to the violence such action entails, it makes no sense at all. Of course to most people, the only thing that doesn’t make sense is why there is so much anger directed at America from people around the globe. Knowing literally nothing about our nation’s activities in the Middle East, South Asia, and the broader Muslim world, many “Amur’cuns” as the President might call us, wonder even as children lay dying from bombs we drop in darkness, “Why do they hate us?”

My guess is, if we had to view the devastation daily as those in Kabul are now, or as those in Iraq have been for a decade, the question wouldn’t enter our minds. They hate us for the same reason we hate those who turned the Trade Center into a pile of twisted metal, concrete and glass. It’s not hard to understand.

So I listen as my government cautions that future terrorist attacks are guaranteed, especially now that we have shed the blood of others, and I wonder what good was done, that being the case, by these bombardments? Of course, to ask such a question is verboten now, and this too is predictable. In the wake of actual shooting, there has been a new rallying ’round the flag that seeks to shut off speculation and lack of patriotic fervor.

The flags will go up, even higher than before. Perhaps the yellow ribbons that were war chic under Bush the First will find themselves tied tightly around the trunks of trees again. Testosterone-addled ex-soldiers like David Hackworth, for whom bloodshed is like Viagra, will insist that those who question the wisdom of this course are traitorous. Cries of “support the troops” will rise from the kitchen tables and water coolers of American homes and businesses. And in this environment it will grow especially difficult for many to maintain their opposition to war. So be it. But one thing I can say without fear of contradiction is this: I will not be among the flag-wavers, ribbon-tiers, or heart-crossing anthem singers. While I have no ill feelings towards those who do any or all three, I cannot imagine joining them, under any foreseeable circumstance.

I must confess that I have never been a patriot. I have never been comfortable waving a flag, or pledging allegiance to one. Nor have I found myself misty-eyed at the sight of Old Glory flapping in the breeze, nor during the playing of patriotic songs. Long before I was consciously political, to say nothing of radical, I felt that pride in my country made little sense. I had done nothing to deserve being born here, after all, so to be proud of my country would be no more logical than to be proud of my white skin or the mix of X- and Y-chromosomes that render me male.

And since children elsewhere are taught pride in their countries too, and to think their nations are “number one” — an admittedly American concept, but one that perhaps has global counterparts — it always struck me as especially absurd to cleave to national identity. After all, we couldn’t all be number one, and since there is no objective judge to sort out real greatness from mere hubris, what at long last would be the point of such vapid aspirations?

On the most basic level, it seems a truism that the things most Americans view as patriotic never serve the best interests of the nation’s people, or even national security. The more nationalistic among us, after all, thought it patriotic to support the arming of the Mujahadeen in their fight against the Soviets, since patriots hated communism. Not so smart, as anyone not blinkered by red, white and blue Russophobia knew at the time. The patriotic thought it wise to support the war against Iraq, even though doing so not only failed to topple the regime of former friend, Saddam Hussein, it has led to the blowback of increased Wahabbist Islamism, a la bin Laden. Those who supported the toppling of the elected government of Iran in 1953 — leading to the vicious reign of the Shah and his replacement by the fanatical Mullahs — no doubt would think themselves patriots. Yet look at what their ill-conceived actions wrought. On this level alone, patriotism seems hardly related to the well being of one’s nation. As such, caring for the nation and its people, as I certainly do, has almost nothing to do with being patriotic.

Patriotism appears to be nothing if not a pathology, by which I mean a deviation from an otherwise healthy, normal condition. Patriotism is unnatural and unhealthy because it requires, almost by definition, that one place one’s own countrymen and women above those elsewhere, in terms of moral desert or the right to life, liberty and happiness. It requires that one see nationality first and humanity as an afterthought: a process that is only possible within a structure of separate nation-states that itself came about not naturally, but as the result of specific historical circumstance.

Patriotism asks one to reify authority as manifested in national governments, and to believe, or act as if one does, that those who stand in the way of one’s supposed national self-interest should be brought under heel. That one only ends up in the nation one does because of happenstance becomes irrelevant. Patriots assume they earned their status as the chosen.

Adding to the problematic nature of patriotism in America is that to pronounce such a mindset good, one must also, so as to be consistent (which has never been a pressing concern for most Americans), consider patriotism elsewhere to be good. And by this standard, Osama bin Laden — a Saudi patriot whose “love” for his land inspires distaste for the presence of U.S. forces there — would have to be considered a veritable role model. One can’t have it both ways. If patriotism means, as it inevitably does in practice, a reflexive defense of one’s nation, then those Chinese who applauded the crushing of dissent in Tiananmen Square, or those Soviets who went along with Stalin’s purges, or those Germans who assented to mass murder by their silence and support for lebensraum, would merit respect on par with patriots of the American variant. By the same token, if we see in those other examples of patriotism real problems, shortcomings, and dangers, then so too must we accept that those flaws are across the patriotic board, the U.S. included. They are not merely the result of others’ inability to separate responsible from irresponsible nationalism. It is, all of it, fruit from a poisoned tree.

What’s more, flag-waving patriotism serves to paper over the real divisions and disunity that continue to plague our nation, claims of togetherness notwithstanding. It allows us to push to a tertiary region of our consciousness the racism, poverty, unequal health care access, crumbing schools attended by far too many of our nation’s children, or the police brutality and misconduct that has gone unchecked in city after city for years. It promotes the lie that we are “all in this together,” when in fact our interests are not the same. In a nation where stock prices, and thus shareholder profits, go through the roof whenever a company lays off a few thousand workers, we can hardly pretend that the interests of all Americans are similar, or that the dream of America is a shared one for all.

And yes, I know there are those who insist one can reclaim symbols like the flag, or concepts like patriotism; that one doesn’t have to accept the supremacist interpretation of either one. There are those who are convinced that one can wave the flag as a symbol of potential and promise, in hopes of what America could become, despite our failure to live up to our vaunted principles thus far. But while true on an individual level — persons can, after all, decide what symbols mean for themselves, irrespective of what others might think — in the court of public opinion, reclaiming icons en masse is more difficult. After all, when the meaning of a symbol or concept is widely accepted to be that held by the majority, and when the majority is insistent on that interpretation being maintained, those proffering a different meaning are likely to be thwarted in their efforts for reclamation.

In those few cases where symbols have been effectively reclaimed, such as the pink triangle by the gay rights movement, circumstances were different. Transforming the triangle from a symbol of Nazi repression into one of liberation didn’t require activists to contend with others seeking to use it in the historically traditional manner. The pink triangle had long since ceased being an active symbol of anti-gay bigotry, so “reclaiming” it was less about trumping another interpretation, than merely picking up a symbol with which many were not even familiar and turning it to good use. That doing the same for the flag would be infinitely more complicated is an understatement.

To speak of the deep flaws in the American experiment and the hope of transformation to a more equitable and just republic, requires one to criticize, often harshly; to rebuke; to even condemn the actions of one’s government. And to expect to be able to do those things and still be viewed as patriotic is asking for a much more nuanced understanding of national pride than that which is likely possible in a soundbite-dependent society that favors easy answers: especially at a time like this, when falling back on old understandings is more comforting.

It may be that new realities require new symbols, new concepts, and new slogans. For those who seek peace with justice, in the Middle East or right here at home, that means giving up the fight for the flag, and instead engaging in the more meaningful struggle for the soul of America. While not denigrating the flag, or ridiculing those who find value and virtue in patriotism, we should yet not be fooled into believing that we have the power to turn chants of “USA, USA” into something other than what they are: a dangerous projection of nationalistic machismo, likely to precede more bombing, more gunfire, more retaliation, and more death.

For me, the only way to accept patriotism, and this war that the patriotic seem to think is so necessary, is to accept that American mothers and fathers love their children more than Afghan mothers and fathers do. And that our children are more precious not only in the eyes of the parents but in the eyes of God, however defined, and that ours are more valuable. And that is very simply a lie; and not one that I am willing to say is true just for the sake of national unity.

Another Day Another Hate Post…

Can people be this illiterate? Even white nationalists?

I find myself wondering this today, having come across a new posting from the Council of Conservative Citizens (which despite its rather innocuous sounding name is a well-established hate group), encouraging people to show up at my speeches over the next several months and challenge me, presumably with words, but one suspects quite possibly with more than that.

According to the CCC, I deserve to be confronted because I have openly advocated killing members of the Tea Party. Wait, what? Oh, you missed where I did that? Yeah, that’s because it never happened. Thus my earlier reference to the rather stunning inability of right wing racists to read the plain English found in my tweets or columns. Sadly, this claim is believed by others in the larger Nazi orbit, like the folks at DailySlave (yes, they actually think white people are being enslaved, seriously), who announced on their site: “JEW RAT TIM WISE TO SPREAD ANTI-WHITE HATRED ON NEW SPEAKING TOUR” Ah yes, spreading the anti-white hatred. Because — and much to the surprise of my very white wife, children, mom and best friend — I am all about the anti-white hatred. And if you don’t like it, cracker devil, you can kiss my white ass. Oh, by the way, later the same folks who called me a “JEW RAT” also called me a “pig devil” (sort of a mixed metaphor and totally ironic given the whole Jew thing), so you know they mean business. Just sayin’.

Anyhoo, I was concerned when I saw the thing about calling for the murder of Tea Partiers. Though I certainly didn’t recall saying such a thing, I suppose one never knows. I have said some shit on social media I later regretted (haven’t we all?), so I must admit I was curious and clicked the link provided by my Nazi friends just to make sure…

Oh, that…nope that’s just Nazis being Nazis: either unable to to read (education not being their strong suit), or deliberately distorting the facts so as to gin up hostility and possibly violence against me. Well played skinheads. Well played.

So let’s clear some shit up, shall we?

First, I have never advocated violence against anyone. Ever. I have called repeatedly for the right to be crushed politically, utterly and completely destroyed as a viable political force. But not through violence, as I actually think violence for those ends would be not only immoral but counterproductive and only engender more violence and repression from the right in response. I want the Tea Party politically decimated, in other words, as with the larger conservative movement, but not physically harmed. There is a huge difference here as any remotely intelligent person should be able to discern. The fact that I have to actually explain it is pathetic, but sadly, this is the illiterate social media world in which we live, where context and analysis don’t matter, so when you say you want people “crushed” there will be those who accuse you of wanting to drop heavy buildings on them for that purpose…sigh.

As for what I actually said, and which was twisted into “Tim Wise encourages his followers to shoot Tea Partiers in the head,” here’s the deal. All of this, literally all of it, is based on a tweet. This tweet:

Ok, Ok, so saying “fuck these assholes” wasn’t very nice. My bad. I would have written, “aggressively fornicate with these cretinous anal sphincters,” but it was Twitter for God’s sakes and one only gets 140 characters, so ya know, give me a break. Anyway, as for the rest of it, only a complete fool or craven liar could think it amounted to advocating killing people.

The story to which I was referring in the tweet had to do with Tea Partiers who had openly said they were going to try and stop certain people (of color, of course) from voting. In other words, they were announcing their plans to interfere with the most fundamental privileges of citizenship—the liberty of voting. I was merely saying that if someone tries to suppress your liberties, you should exercise one of the most basic of those (at least, according to the very right wingers who are now complaining), by pulling a gun from your waistband, to which you are legally entitled apparently, and pointing it at anyone who would do such a thing, in effect telling them in very obvious terms to back the hell up. Such a thing is not tantamount to advocating murder unless one believes that “exercising their second amendment rights in their faces” means shooting people, which would first require believing that the second amendment gives one the right to kill people, which even the Supreme Court hasn’t said (yet!)

Ironically, the threat of force against those who would interfere with basic liberties is pretty much the daily banter on right wing websites. They don’t just threaten it, they promise it, if any of those awful black UN helicopters show up at their door to “take their guns,” or send them to a FEMA camp or whatever the hell. In short, reactionaries regularly call for pulling guns, and even using them against those who would interfere with their rights. But when I say the same thing — basically calling for folks of color to demonstrate their second amendment rights if and when conservative activists try and keep them from exercising their liberties — then I’m the bad guy, and I’m the one who is calling for murder? Seriously, the stupid hurts it’s so raw and filled with infection.

So no, Tea Partiers: I didn’t advocate shooting you in the head. I mean, with those stupid revolutionary war tricorn hats y’all wear that wouldn’t be a very high percentage shot anyway. Everyone knows, body mass fool, body mass…*

*This is a joke assholes.

Take Two Seats: What’s Really Behind Jewish Anger Over “Selma?” (Guest Commentary by Stacey Patton)

The following is an essay by author and journalist Stacey Patton, which I have decided to publish on my site for a few important reasons: first, because as with all of her work, this piece is hard-hitting, analytically on-point and presents a vital perspective that needs to be heard; and secondly because despite the above, it has been rejected for publication by several other sources. Why? Because according to those who rejected it, the commentary is “anti-Semitic.” As a Jew who knows how quickly many of us are to scream “anti-Semite” at anyone who says anything critical of any Jewish leader, individual (or of course, Israel), I was intrigued. So I read the essay and could not find even one syllable that qualified for the designation. And because many in the Jewish community have been complaining about the “erasure” of Jewish participation in the civil rights movement, as portrayed in the movie Selma — and because I feel that this complaint reeks of hypocrisy and even a kind of group-based narcissism — I decided it was important to publish Patton’s piece here.

By Stacey Patton

It’s not just Chris Matthews, the LBJ loyalists and George Wallace’s son that are unhappy with Ava DuVernay’s Selma; there is a group of Jews that are equally outraged.  Despite claims about historic accuracy and erasure of Jewish leaders involved in Selma and the broader civil rights movement, there is much more to these gripes over a film about African American protests.

Leida Snow’s review, “Selma Distorts History by Airbrushing Out Jews,” in the Jewish Daily Forward, asserts that, “the narrative strategy of the film leads to a glaring omission … the contribution that thousands of white people, many of them Jewish, made to the Civil Rights Movement.”

Snow points out that, while Dr. King is shown embracing a Greek Orthodox priest, and visible among many whites is a Catholic priest and a minister, she “looked in vain for the embrace of a man with a yarmulke, a scene that would reflect the historical moment when Dr. King marched with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a leading Jewish theologian and philosopher widely respected beyond the Jewish community.” Although Heschel was present in the grainy documentary footage at the end of the film, Snow notes that the rabbi was not visible in the body of the film, nor were any other Jews openly recognized.

The omission of Heschel is central to Peter Dreier’s rant, “The Rabbi Missing from Selma,” in the Jewish Journal. He argues that having King and other leaders featured in the front row of the Selma protest, including Heschel, would not have diminished the film’s emphasis on the centrality of African Americans in the civil rights struggle.  However, he adds, “it would have lent the film more historical accuracy, not simply about one man but as a representative of the role Jews played in the freedom struggle.”

Even Heschel’s daughter, Susannah Heschel weighed in via JTA the Global Jewish News Source, stating that, “…for my father Abraham Joshua Heschel and for many participants, the march was both an act of political protest and a profoundly religious moment: an extraordinary gathering of nuns, priests, rabbis, black and white, a range of political views, from all over the United States.”

Interestingly, not all Jewish observers agreed that Selma should have focused more on Heschel or other Jews. Katie Rosenblatt’s response to Snow’s criticism of Selma in The Jewish Daily Forward calls Snow out as “dangerous for several reasons.” Charging that “Snow makes this critique by drawing selectively from American Jewish history,” Rosenblatt states that Snow’s review revises history to ignore the act that the Civil Rights Movement was led by Blacks with a “small proportion of Jews playing significant roles.”

A piece in My Jewish Learning by Lonnie Kleinman and Lex Rofes titled “Selma: It’s Not About Jews and that’s Okay,” refutes Snow’s criticism by pointing out that Selma “could have mentioned Jews. It could have featured inspirational Freedom Summer veterans, as Snow asserts—and just as easily, while we may not like to admit it, it could have featured Jews like Sol Tepper, who wrote dozens of articles for the Selma Times Journal advocating for segregation and was quite hostile towards Civil Rights advocates. Good or bad, Jews could have been included more—but that’s not the focus of this film. This omission is not a ‘distortion.’”

Why is the inclusion or omission of a Jewish person a major point of criticism about a Black-helmed film that focuses on a slice of history to spotlight the African-American struggle for voting rights?

Despite the conflation of “Selma erases Jews” and “Selma erases Jewish rabbis,” the criticism is really about the lack of representation of Jewish clergy or the visibility of religious Jews.  Few of the critics have lamented the absence of Stanley David Levison, which is not surprising given his radicalism and his ties to communism.  Nor has the criticism focused on the erasure of Black Jews, from Sammy Davis Jr. to the unknown foot soldiers.

The questions about “historic accuracy” haven’t focused on the erasure of tensions between Black civil rights activities and their White allies.  An accurate representation of Jewish or White civil rights activists would demand a focus on the very real anti-Black racism, white privilege, and White paternalism that was part and parcel to the history.  Is this the film critics wanted to see?

Or did they want a movie that spotlighted Black anger and grief in response to a nation that cared more about White suffering and sacrifice when White and Jewish lives were lost on the frontlines of the struggle for justice, than about the fact that many Black lives were—and still are—lost every day. The selective outrage reveals that these criticisms are about whiteness and a narrow definition of Jewishness that emphasizes religiosity and its impact on Jewish involvement in the civil rights movement.

And it’s not as if Selma made countless historic choices because of its aesthetic and narrative decisions. Selma is radical not in DuVernay’s decision to make girls and women central to the narrative, but to present King as a fleshed-out human rather than a one-dimensional icon, and spotlight key figures in that chapter of the movement. Likewise, its decentering of SNCC, people like Bayard Rustin and Diane Nash, embody the choices of film and its creators to tell a story that has been erased from both the history books and the cinematic memory.

The real issue isn’t the omission of a well-known rabbi, but rather the lens through which we are accustomed to viewing racial history, politics and culture. So often, in films like Glory, Amistad, Mississippi Burning and countless others, the history of African Americans and the struggle for freedom has been told through interracial narratives that centers white protagonists. Reinforcing stories of “white saviors,” Hollywood has a long history of using African-American history to chronicle and celebrate the contributions of whites to fulfilling America’s “exceptional” promise.  Seeing these things from a solidly Black perspective is often unnerving to non-Black people. It is so strange, so new, and so unfamiliar, that it causes cognitive dissonance for some viewers, especially those who are accustomed to controlling the narrative in film and television.

The most glaring recent example is leading Jewish director Steven Spielberg’s 2012 Oscar-winning film, Lincoln, which focused on the Civil War and slavery, yet ignored Frederick Douglass, who was central to the story and close to Lincoln.

Noting that Douglass’ impact on Lincoln was “nowhere to be found in the film,” Michael Shankwrote in The Root, an online publication of the Washington Post, that omitting the famous ex-slave-turned abolitionist was “a missed opportunity to educate American audiences about the myriad Black leaders that inspired, instigated and were involved in Lincoln’s leadership on the issue of civil rights … Douglass … a friend of Lincoln’s, was an ambassador, educator, landowner, musician, linguist and, among many other assignments, the first recorder of deeds for, and U.S. Marshal of the District of Columbia.  He should have been in the film.”

I wonder if those so outraged about the erasure of Jewish activists in Selma considered the lack of inclusion of Black soldiers within World War I and II films like Saving Private Ryan where these men, despite being marginalized and lynched in America, lost their lives in the fight against Nazi oppression. Or how about the lack of representation of other people of color within Holocaust films? From 1933 to 1945, in Nazi Germany and in German-occupied territories, African Americans and other Blacks from throughout the Diaspora, suffered all kinds of persecution that ranged from being imprisoned in concentration camps, to sterilization, medical experimentation, and murder.  One has to look no further than the silence from the Jewish community of the whitewashing in Exodus to see the depths of hypocrisy and the selective investment in historic accuracy.

Switching to the smaller screen, we can’t forget the numerous times that New York City is portrayed as lily-white in such hit TV shows as Seinfeld, Sex in the City, Friends and now the HBO hit, Girls—all with Jews in decision-making roles. As Cord Jefferson wrote in a 2012Gawker piece taking these and other shows to task, “It’s a failing of contemporary American culture that if there’s ever a discussion about adding a Black character to a show, people immediately think that means a slang-spitting, wise-cracking stereotype. They assume [that] is asking for the show’s creator to change the entire dynamic of the program.”

Hypocrisy should be clear but that still doesn’t explain what’s behind Jewish criticisms about not being granted moral credit for their participation in the Black freedom struggle.

The complaints about Selma not focusing on Jews surely reflect outrage over “Jewish erasure,” yet in the end this is about a “possessive investment in whiteness.” Demanding centrality and visibility, expecting to be included, ultimately reflects a historic process where, as Karen Brodkin has argued, Jews have secured whiteness.  The expectation of centrality, and the ability to demand visibility is part of the history of how “Jews have secured whiteness.”

The privileges of whiteness is to expect to always be central to every narrative and portrayal. Just like the folks who attacked the film’s portrayal of LBJ for not conforming to their agenda, the idea that a film about the Black struggle for voting rights is flawed for not centering Jewish contributions is about the privilege of seeing whiteness as dominant no matter what.

The idea that Selma should have focused on interracial coalitions reflects a discomfort with seeing the Civil Rights Movement and Black freedom struggle being led by African Americans. Yes, whites, a disproportionate number who were Jewish, participated in the civil rights movement.  From the NAACP, to the Freedom Rides and Freedom summer, Jews participated at the frontlines. But the desire to center Jewish involvement, to spotlight participation, reveals a yearning to co-opt the Black struggle as an  “American struggle,” as if something Black-focused cannot possibly be American as well.

Why is the notion of Blacks leading the movement for their own equality so disturbing? It conflicts with the over-arching mythology of Blacks as inherently less intelligent and capable than Whites, less able to think for themselves and act on their own behalf. Notions of Black inferiority undergirded everything from centuries of slavery to the apartheid-like realities of Jim Crow. They are alive today, in everything from the oft-touted “academic achievement gap” to the fact that Black students are routinely disciplined, suspended and expelled from school at much higher rates, to the cradle-to-prison pipeline that feasts on Black bodies and lives.

This is also about Jewish identity. The call for more Jewish inclusion in Selma demonstrates how some Jews want to simultaneously enjoy the earned privilege of Whiteness attained through assimilation while distinguishing themselves as different from ordinary Whites.  It, according to the race scholar David Leonard, reflects a historic anxiety about what Jewishness means as the community has become white.

“For the last forty years, with anti-Semitism waning in the United States, with Jewish securing assimilation and inclusion, there has been uneasiness of what that means for Jewish identity,” notes the professor at Washington State University. “Highlighting Jewish involvement in the civil rights movement is about noting Jewish difference, exceptionality, and our unique contributions to the nation all while downplaying whiteness and its privileges.”

Ava DuVernay is the first-ever Black female director to be nominated for a Golden Globe—a great milestone in film history. It is all too common for the stories of African-Americans to be told by people who are not African-American (including two generations of historians who’ve written award-winning books on the Black experience and sometimes did so because it was a less crowded way to secure tenure), and we all have the right to tell our own stories. Telling our own stories is a powerful way for us to fight racism, challenge White supremacy and allow the recognition of Black people, who have been “othered” into near-oblivion in much of contemporary film and TV.

The moves to attack the Black-focused storytelling in Selma are part of the dynamic that led to #AllLivesMatter popping up in response to the grief-drenched hashtag #BlackLivesMatter—the compulsion to marginalize Black people and minimize our truths.

With all these dynamics simmering in the background, what stands out about Selma is that it is written and directed by Black people, and frames history in that context. This causes some people to experience cognitive dissonance, and challenges their sense of superiority and importance. But with a population that is rapidly browning and more works being created by those considered “other,” white anxiety and sense of entitlement is real.

The Oscar snub of Selma is revealing. It is hard not to wonder if it focused on Rabbi Heschel or how the Jewish activists Goodman and Schwerner’s deaths propelled the movement if it would have garnered 1,000 nominations. The virtual protests marked by the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite, which called out Hollywood’s perpetual “diversity problem,” challenges filmmakers and audiences alike to see past their own perspectives to appreciate and embrace different voices, diverse views and the counter-narratives that reflect all the inconvenient, messy truths of our nation’s racist past and present.

The Jewish critics should take note; if there is a desire to embrace the civil rights struggle, how about becoming accomplices in the fight diversify the Oscars and Hollywood’s representations; how about getting on the frontlines in the fights against voter disfranchisement, police violence, and the assault on civil rights.

In 2015, when African American voting rights are still threatened, despite the blood that was spilled, the skulls that were cracked, and the dignity that was constantly assaulted, we need a future that reflects what the activists in Selma marched, fought, suffered and died for. That simply cannot happen without some Black-centric storytelling that stands on its own merit without being challenged for not meeting the expectations of every other group. Just as it was demeaning and disrespectful for the cry that #BlackLivesMatter to be dissed by #AllLivesMatter, American history cannot be told without Black history, which necessitates a Black point of view.

Selma was about more than voting rights. It was about our right to be recognized as fully human and understood for who we are—not for everyone with their own agenda who keeps telling us who we are supposed to be, and demanding that Black people be inclusive even while excluding us from nearly all aspects of American life. Demanding our voices be less prominent so that others get their due is a denial of this humanity.

And let’s be clear: as this nation continues its rapid march toward a Black and Brown future, white people are going to have get used to not always being central, dominant, or in charge of how others narrate their own stories. It would behoove our White brothers and sisters to challenge their own presumptions, assumptions and sense of entitlement. After all, they’re going to be the true American “minority” soon, at least as numbers go. We can only wonder how popular culture will represent these realities.

Dr. Stacey Patton is a senior enterprise reporter for The Chronicle of Higher Educationand is the author of That Mean Old Yesterday – A Memoir. Follow her on Twitter@DrStaceyPatton

Not Just a Joke: Reflections on Free Speech, Violence and Mislabeled Heroism

Many years ago, when discussing the issue of hate speech and how it should be addressed on college campuses, my friend Paul Gallegos at Evergreen State College smiled and said, “Ya know, just because speech is free, doesn’t mean that it has to be worthless.” It’s a concept and a phrasing that has stuck with me for years. His deft appropriation of the double-meaning of “free” (both as liberty but also as a statement of non-existent value) was a stroke of genius, and one that has informed my understanding of these issues ever since. I am thinking about it again in the wake of recent events in France.

Following the horrific killings of journalists at Charlie Hebdo in Paris, much has been said by pundits and prolific purveyors of tweet: about fanatical interpretations of Islam, about free speech, about the importance of satire, and about religious profiling and the notion of collective blame. Some of this commentary has been helpful and instructive, while other iterations of it have been incendiary and useless. But through it all, and although I am most horrified by those right-wing voices who seek to use the tragedy as a way to stoke their well-cultivated Islamaphobia, I am also troubled by what seems to be a prominent if not dominant narrative among many a liberal. It is a narrative that posits the victims of this grotesque crime as high-minded truth-seekers worthy of praise and emulation, and even as heroes, perhaps martyrs for the cause of freedom and liberty.

It strikes me that we should be able to roundly condemn the senseless and barbaric murders of journalists while still managing to have a rational conversation about free speech, in which empty platitudes about heroism need play no part. For instance, I believe it is possible to agree that free speech is an essential value, and that journalists should have the right to say what they want—even to offend others—without then proceeding to act as though every utterance (just because people have a right to it) is therefore worth defending as to its substance, and that free speech protects one from being critiqued for the things one says.

What I mean is this: I have a right, I suppose, to stand in the middle of Times Square and shout racial slurs or insult peoples’ religions. I could, for instance, stand on a soapbox outside the TKTS booth and say things about the Prophet Mohammed or Jesus or Mary. I could call them all kinds of vile things, and all of it would be protected by the Constitution. And I surely should be able to do that without fear of being murdered for it. This last point in particular is so obvious as to be beyond debate, I would hope. But if I do this, whether in Times Square or in print, it makes me an asshole, and one who deserves to be labeled as such. Not a hero, but an asshole. And I don’t become a hero just because some of the people I happened to insult (and was trying to insult) end up being even bigger assholes than me, and so dangerous and unstable that they decide to hurt me. In that case I am simply the unlucky victim of a bigger and more evil asshole who was unsatisfied with the pen or keyboard as a weapon and decided to use something more deadly. Nothing more and nothing less.

People seem to confuse the principle of free speech with the idea that one’s speech should be protected from pushback; and while violent pushback is always wrong—always—I am more than a little uncomfortable with the idea that we should make heroes out of those whose job appears to have been insulting people they deemed inferior (whether because of culture or because they were just “silly superstitious” believers who deserve ridicule because Richard Dawkins or Bill Maher say so). I’m especially uncomfortable with the political canonization we’re expected to endorse for these satirists, because historically, satire has always been about barbs aimed at those who are more powerful than oneself (the elite, royalty, the dominant social, economic, political or religious group), rather than being aimed down the ladder at those with less power. In the old days, when the King would bring in the jester or the royal fool to tell jokes and entertain the nobility, the court comic didn’t spend 20 minutes doing “can you believe how bad those peasants smell” jokes; rather, he told jokes at the expense of the nobility. The King and his royal prerogatives were the target of ridicule.

So whereas it would be legitimate satire for Muslims to satirize their own extremists in countries where Muslims hold power (and this is done by the way, more than most of us realize), in France, satire aimed at Muslims, who are the targets of organized attempts to restrict their rights and even their presence in the country, is not brave; it’s piling on. Likewise, for Jews to satirize Palestinians in Israel would be asshole behavior, while satirizing the nation’s Jewish religious leaders who have such outsized influence on state politics would be the very definition of legitimate satire. In the U.S., where Christians hold the bulk of political and economic power, satirizing the religious right is quite different from satirizing Muslims who are being targeted in regular hate crimes and who are facing communities trying to block them from having mosques in which to worship.

As an analogy, I find tedious and cringe-worthy the never-ending stream of sitcoms that revolve around a married couple where the husband is sorta stupid and child-like and bumbling, and his wife is always rolling her eyes and making fun of him, but they love each other and it all works out in the end. And yet, however ridiculous I think this formula is—and however much as a man and husband I think it presents an absurd, one-dimensional picture of those things I happen to be—it really would be different and a whole lot worse, to have those sitcoms revolve around a husband who constantly demeans or pokes fun at his ditzy wife. And ya know why? Because patriarchy, that’s why. The social context within which humor takes place matters. It’s why telling jokes about rich people really is different than rhetorically ganging up on the poor with jokes about homelessness and government cheese.

In short, power dynamics really do make a difference. To satirize people who are the targets of institutionalized violence (whether for religious or racial or cultural or linguistic or sexual or gendered reasons) is not brave. It’s sort of shitty, in fact. Should it be protected legally? Sure. Should those who do it be killed or punished in any way? Of course not. But should we hold them up as exemplars of who we want to be, all the while ignoring how the exercise of their freedom, without any sense of responsibility to the common good, actually feeds acrimony and violence on all sides? I think not. And I fear that if we fail to separate the principle of free speech from those who hide behind its cloak—often simply to justify their own dickishness—we’ll only make the chasms between all peoples greater.

A Serious Question About Free Speech, “Heroism” and Violence

Post by Tim Wise.

James Baldwin: “I Can’t Afford Despair” (and Neither Can We…Organize!)

Starting off the new year with a reminder from the incomparable James Baldwin that we haven’t the time for despair. There is too much work to be done…May 2015 bring justice to those denied it for so long.

Of Makers and Takers Revisited: The Right’s Latest Lies About Dependence on Government

On the one hand, I get it. Census Bureau reports can be pretty dry and a bit vague. They tend to be heavy on facts but pretty open-ended as to how one might interpret those facts. Census researchers aren’t paid to explain what the numbers suggest in most cases; rather, they are charged with compiling data and leaving it to social scientists to ascribe meaning to the numbers they divulge.

Sadly, there are no social scientists at FOX News, and so rather than cautious analysis in the face of official government data, we are treated to histrionic and transparently disingenuous deception in the furtherance of a right-wing narrative.

To wit, the recent alarm bells set off at Rupert Murdoch’s propaganda mill over a report indicating that sixty-five percent of American children now live in a household that receives some form of public assistance during the course of a year. The report, which was released this month, notes that among other indicators of child well-being, roughly two-thirds of the nation’s youth live in homes where benefits from SNAP (food stamps), TANF (cash welfare), Medicaid, WIC (nutritional aid for certain infants, toddlers and their moms) and/or the school lunch program are received. To FOX commentator and longtime actress Stacey Dash (whose most memorable role was, appropriately enough, in the film “Clueless”), such facts prove that government aid is “the new version of slavery.” Of course it is, because if you receive an EBT card or state-subsidized asthma medication it’s exactly like being whipped, raped, and stripped of all legal rights. Exactly. The. Same.

In any event, and putting aside Dash’s predictable and tired slavery analogy (which we hadn’t heard in at least a week from Ben Carson or Allen West), the entire reaction to the Census report in question indicates why you should never rely on anyone who gets their check from Roger Ailes to interpret social reality for you. Numbers and their meaning are simply above these folks’ pay grade.

So let’s look at the report and actually break it down, unlike the folks at FOX, who probably didn’t even read it, but instead chose to rely on the internet blast about it, sent out by CNS News: a right-wing site only about a half-step up the journalistic food chain from the birther and conspiracy pit known as World Net Daily, and one to which FOX turns regularly.

As for the raw facts, FOX and CNS got them right. In 2011, approximately forty-eight million separate children lived in a home where benefits from one or more of the above-mentioned programs were received, and this represented sixty-five percent of all children in the United States that year. Thirty-five million of these kids lived in homes where someone received benefits from the school lunch program; twenty-six million of them lived in homes where Medicaid benefits were utilized; seventeen million of them were in homes that received SNAP; six million were in homes that used WIC, and a little over two million were in homes that benefitted from cash assistance under TANF (1). Although these numbers have come down a bit since then, for 2011 they are indeed accurate so far as they go.

But this is roughly the point at which FOX and CNS proceed to get everything else about the report horribly, horribly wrong. In other words, when the task shifts from reading numbers off a page to actually comprehending their meaning, conservatives seem utterly incapable of making the transition.

To begin with, the period under review in the report stretches from 2008 to 2011. In other words, the report examines children’s family conditions during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Even the data for 2011 reflects family conditions at the tail end of the recession and while the after-shocks of job loss and wage stagnation in the previous three years were still reverberating for millions. That the number of kids in families having to turn to various government benefits would increase during an economic crisis unparalleled in the past seventy years should hardly surprise anyone.

Second, and as the report’s author makes very clear, among the primary challenges facing children — and particularly those in low- and moderate-income families — are disruptive life transitions like parental unemployment or having to move to a new place often. These kinds of transitions, as the report indicates, are highly correlated with having to rely on one or another government program. As it turns out, forty-two percent of children in poor families (and about a third of all kids in the nation) moved at least once during the period under review; and forty-four percent of poor kids (and about a third of all children) had at least one parent who experienced a change in their job situation during the period under review. This matters because, as the author notes:

Parents who have steady employment may be better able to provide consistent economic support, while parents who go through many job changes may have unpredictable work schedules and irregular income.

In other words, whatever the statistics might say, they suggest that use of these programs is less about culturally-engendered dependence on benefits and more about serious and unexpected life drama that happens often to persons who are on the economic margins, and especially during an extraordinary economic recession.

Third, to argue that the sixty-five percent figure proves the so-called welfare state is creating a self-perpetuating culture of poverty (the standard right-wing interpretation) ignores the fact that most of the kids reaping the benefits from the listed programs are not officially poor, but they qualify for benefits because their family incomes are too low to bring them above eligibility levels. There were 16.6 million children living in poor families in America in 2011, for instance, but 47.9 million kids living in families receiving benefits from these programs that year. This means that two-thirds of the kids whose families benefit from these efforts are not living in poor homes, which in turn means that they will likely be in homes with parents who earn income, but not enough to make it without a little help. Many others live in homes that are poor but still have earned income from work. How the use of these programs can be blamed for fostering “dependence” or discouraging work when most of the beneficiaries live in homes with earned income is a mystery left unexamined by conservative hysterics.

So, for instance, let’s look at the SNAP program (what used to be called Food Stamps). According to the most recent data from 2013, fifty-two percent of SNAP households with kids have earned income from work, and of those which don’t, a large number of them have parents who are disabled. In fact, it is increasingly likely for SNAP recipient households to have earned income, and less likely for them to rely on other forms of assistance, suggesting that receipt of this program’s benefits has nothing to do with dependence, but rather, low-wage work in a faltering economy. For instance, SNAP households are fifty percent more likely to have income from work today than they were in 1989, while the likelihood that they receive cash welfare has plummeted by eighty-five percent, from forty-two percent of such households to only 6.5 percent today.

Or consider the school lunch program. According to the report that so concerns FOX, this is the program that appears to benefit the most children, with nearly half of all kids living in homes that benefit from this one government effort. But there are three huge problems with the way conservatives are reading the data. To begin with, eligibility for free or reduced-price lunch goes up to 185 percent of the poverty line, which means that many beneficiaries of this program are not poor, and thus reside in families that are hardly dependent on welfare benefits; rather they work, albeit at jobs that don’t pay enough to bring them above the eligibility limits. How a program can be rendering people dependent when they in fact work hard every day is again left unexplained by the right.

Second, according to the most recent data, nearly nine million kids who are counted as benefitting from the school lunch program — and who represent nearly thirty percent of current recipients — are called “full-pay” beneficiaries. Their family income is high enough to where they don’t qualify for free meals, or even officially reduced-price lunches, but they are still receiving a slight price break, and are thus counted in the data as beneficiaries of the program. They may not even know that they’re benefitting. They don’t have to fill out paperwork or apply; rather, they just receive a slight subsidy for the cafeteria meals they purchase, and are therefore counted just like folks who get their meals for free. Clearly, even under the most absurd interpretation, these 8.7 million recipients cannot be considered “dependent.”

Third, many children who receive benefits from the school lunch program only do so because they live in high-poverty school districts where all students are automatically enrolled in the program (even if they aren’t poor, and no matter how hard their parents work)—a policy implemented so as to reduce administrative and paperwork costs, thereby allowing the program to operate more cheaply and efficiently. While we could perhaps end automatic enrollment and make all parents prove their low income in order to qualify for benefits, such a change would add to the costs of the program by increasing the kinds of bureaucratic paper-shuffling that the right normally opposes.

In all, when you consider those kids who receive school lunch benefits but are a) not poor and who live in homes with a parent or parents who work; b) poor but whose parent or parents work; c) not poor at all but who benefit from the small subsidy provided even to “full pay” recipients; or d) children who benefit automatically just because they attend a high poverty school but who may not be poor themselves, there is little doubt that the vast majority of the children and families claimed as beneficiaries are not caught in a cycle of dependence, and that none of them are being “enslaved” by the program.

As for Medicaid, the assumption that families with kids who make use of this program are slackers who would rather let the government take care of them than work for a living couldn’t be farther from the truth. Fully eighty-six percent of children who receive benefits through Medicaid or the supplement to Medicaid known as the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), are in families where at least one adult works. Sadly, despite their earned income and even middle class status in many cases, families in high cost-of-living areas where health care inflation has been especially onerous are eligible for benefits and often have to make use of them. But doing so hardly suggests that the families are suffering from a debilitating mentality of dependence, nor that their children are being taught to rely on the state. The parents in these cases are doing their best, they’re working, and doing everything conservatives would have them do. Unfortunately their earnings have been insufficient to cover the spiraling costs of health care.

And when it comes to the WIC program for postpartum moms and their infants and toddlers, forty-three percent of beneficiaries live above the poverty line due to earned income, but still qualify for assistance. If nearly half of beneficiaries aren’t even poor because they receive money from employment, how can the program be seen as encouraging dependence and laziness? And even for those beneficiaries who are poor, how can a program that provides assistance to children at special risk for nutritional deficiencies (like kids who were born prematurely or with particularly low-birth weight), be ridiculed as an effort that fosters a culture of poverty?

Finally, neither FOX nor the CNS News folks from whom they take their lead differentiate between families that rely on program benefits for long periods and those that only make use of them for shorter time frames. For most of the programs mentioned, spells of benefit receipt are short. For cash assistance, for example, half of all recipients who come onto the TANF rolls will exit the program within four months, while nearly eighty percent will be off the program within a year. For SNAP, most who come onto the program will be off the rolls within a year, and two-thirds will exit within twenty months. To suggest that receiving benefits from government programs makes one “dependent” on handouts, even when those benefits are received only for a short time between jobs, or when one’s hours have been cut back in a recession, or because one has fallen ill, seems the epitome of rhetorical sadism.

And finally, until the right tallies up the percentage of, let’s say, investment bankers who work for companies that have been bailed out by the government — no doubt a percentage that would far and away eclipse the share of kids in families getting paltry assistance from the state — they are truly in no position to lecture about dependence anyway. Until they are prepared to point the finger at hedge fund managers and level accusations of parasitism or suggest that TARP is the new slavery, they would do well to remain quiet. And until Stacey Dash is ready to call for tough love and perhaps drug testing of those who have received the largesse of corporate welfare, subsidies or special tax breaks, methinks she might do best to stick to acting and leave the social commentary to people who actually know how to analyze data.

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(1) The reason the combined numbers of children receiving benefits from these various programs is more than the 47.9 million claimed to be beneficiaries overall is because some children live in homes where benefits from more than one program are received.

Of Matriarchs and Misinformation: Fact-Checking Conservative Lies About Black Women

In the wake of recent police killings of young black men — John Crawford, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice most prominently — there has been much discussion about the way in which large numbers of white Americans, and especially white police, view African American males. The criminalization of the black male body has rarely been as apparent as in the past few months. Regarding Mike Brown, we are told — and are expected to believe — that black men are “hulks” and “demons,” so irrational as to attack police without provocation, and then after being shot, throw caution to the wind and seek to run through a hail of bullets, as if possessed of superhuman strength. Because apparently it is easier to believe that than to believe a white officer with a history of belligerence, acting out of over-amped fear, prejudice or an authority jones would have killed a black man for talking back to him.

Regarding Eric Garner, we are told — and are expected to believe — that black men only die at the hands of police because of a stubborn refusal to submit to proper authority, to do what they are told, and to stop struggling, even if said struggle is only one that seeks to remove an officer’s arm from around one’s throat and end the compression of one’s jugular vein, which compression threatens to immediately shorten one’s life span. Because apparently it is easier to believe that than to accept the possibility that a member of the NYPD with a history of violating the rights of black men might actually kill one without cause, no matter the department’s own penchant for doing just that, and quite often.

We are told in the case of Tamir Rice — and are expected to believe — that even at the age of twelve, black males appear to be twenty and that in the cases of both Rice and Crawford, even when they didn’t point their toy guns or air rifles at anyone, they actually did — and we are to believe the police who tell us this, even when video evidence clearly demonstrates no such thing. We are to trust the claims of the officers that Rice and Crawford posed “imminent threats,” even as the videotapes in both cases prove the cops to be vile and unrepentant liars, who are willing to blame (in the case of Rice) a child for his own death at their hands, and to defend the actions of his killer, even as that killer cop was previously found to be emotionally unfit for the job. Because apparently, for some at least, it is easier to believe that than one’s own lying eyes.

The black male body has been popularly pathologized as a source of criminal danger, and the mere fact that black male crime rates are higher than those for whites is used as a justification for treating any and all black males as potential criminals: to be stopped, searched, frisked, detained, beaten, and even killed if an officer feels threatened by them. Or if a pathetic wanna-be like George Zimmerman does. The rhetoric about black men on talk radio and TV is almost uniformly condemnatory. A steady diet of “pull up your pants,” and “stop glorifying thugs,” and “stop killing each other” has been the complete menu of conservative commentary as of late, and the default position of much of white America, beholden to their racialized images.

Less discussed, however, but just as important, is the way in which black women too are being pathologized and demeaned, dissed by the same sources as those who have so continually sought to demonize their male counterparts.

It isn’t new of course: white critiques of the black community have always been nothing if not gender-inclusive. From the days of enslavement, during which black women were de-sexualized as masculine workhorses in the white imagination (even as they were often the object of white male sexual abuse), to the sexist condemnations of so-called matriarchal “ghetto culture” by the Moynihan Report in 1965, black women have hardly been immune to racist caricatures drawn by white folks. For that matter, neither have they escaped criminalization at the hands of law enforcement. Though we don’t speak of it as often, it is not solely black men and men of color being targeted by the cops. While their names may be less well known than those of Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, Oscar Grant, or the recently added names of Crawford, Brown, Garner, Rice, and Akai Gurley, let there be no mistake, Tyisha Miller, Aiyana Jones, Yvette Smith, Rekia Boyd and Kathryn Johnston (among many others) are every bit as dead as they.

But while the knock on black men centers mostly around their presumed propensity for chaotic and nihilistic violence, the attack on black women focuses principally on their unique contribution to the production of such men (and more women like themselves) as breeders of “illegitimate” children—literal incubators of social decay. The trope of black women, especially teenagers, popping out babies they can’t afford and with no regard for the presence of men in the home — and the peddling of this image as normative in the black cultural experience — is by now so widely-believed as to be a virtual article of faith. And as with the stereotypes of black men that give rise to the vituperative narratives about them, so too does this stereotype of black women rest upon outright falsehood.

The attack on African American women as sexually irresponsible baby mamas has two popular iterations. The first — and it’s one I’ve addressed before in previous essays — concerns the commonly-held belief that out-of-wedlock childbearing is out of control in the black community; and the second focuses specifically on the phenomenon of teenage childbearing. Although the latter group of black females are typically part of the first (since most pregnant teenagers are unmarried, regardless of race), the larger group of unmarried black women with children (and the critique of such women) includes those who are older as well.

Looking first at the broader issue of so-called “illegitimate children” in the black community, those who forward this argument simply do not understand how to read or interpret basic statistical information. They claim, for instance that the “out-of-wedlock birth rate” for black females has skyrocketed; but in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, actual birth rates for unmarried black women (which means the number of live births per 1000 such women) has dropped dramatically. From 1970-2010, the birth rate for unmarried black women fell by nearly a third, from 95.5 births per 1000 unmarried black women to only 65.3 births per 1000 such women. In other words, unmarried black women are already doing exactly what conservatives would have them do: namely, having fewer children. This means that even if we were to accept the absurd argument that out-of-wedlock childbearing is evidence of cultural pathology, black culture must then be steadily getting healthier and less pathological, rather than more so. In a given year, for every 100 single black females, between ninety-three and ninety four of them will not have a baby—hardly evidence that out-of-wedlock childbearing is a normative experience for black women.

The common confusion on this issue seems to stem from the fact that although unmarried birth rates have fallen considerably, the share of children born in the black community who are born out of wedlock has indeed doubled since the early 1970s. It sounds like a big deal perhaps, but what does that statistic really signify? If unmarried black women are cutting back on childbearing — and remember, that’s what the data says — the increase in the percentage of black births that are births to single moms can’t possibly be the result of those moms’ increasing “irresponsibility.” Rather, this statistical phenomenon must be due to an entirely different factor, and indeed it is: namely, married black couples have cut back even further on childbearing than single moms have. If married black couples are having far fewer children than before, and are cutting back even faster than single women, the overall percentage of births that are out-of-wedlock will rise, owing nothing to the supposedly irresponsible behaviors of single black folks. If black married couples suddenly reverted to their family size norms of fifty years ago, the share of black births to unmarried moms would plummet, even if there were no further drop in the birth rates for single black women at all.

But whereas the claim about general out-of-wedlock birthrates can possibly be due to conceptual confusion and imprecise terminology (or just sloppy research), the more specific argument regarding black teen girls and their propensity to have babies before they can vote or even drive owes to having done no research at all. It is what emerges when ignorance meets prejudice; and there is no better meeting place for such twin poisons than Bill O”Reilly’s nightly television show. To wit, O’Reilly’s recent suggestion that rather than wearing t-shirts that say “I Can’t Breathe” or “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” (references to the Garner and Brown killings), black people should be wearing shirts that say “Don’t Get Pregnant at 14.”

I have little doubt that somewhere in the bowels of the FOX News operation, one might find at least a few individuals charged with the daunting task of fact-checking the inanity that regularly pours forth from the mouth of one such as O’Reilly. Yet if so, it is apparent that such precious souls as these must be taking extended naps at their desks rather than providing something as helpful as documentation to their boss. Their failure in this regard cannot be due to the difficulty of tracking down the facts regarding teenage pregnancy in the black community—after all, it took me literally five minutes to discover the depths of O’Reilly’s mendacity, all laid out in clear tabular form.

According to the National Center for Health Statistics, not only have birth rates for teens in general dropped dramatically since 1991, the largest declines in such birth rates have been to black teenagers. From 1991 to 2013, the black teen birth rate dropped by sixty-three percent. And although the black teenage birth rate is indeed higher than the rate for whites, it hardly constitutes some kind of cultural or group norm. For instance, for black teenage girls and young women between 15-19, only about four percent will give birth in a given year (as opposed to about two percent of similar white females).

As for having babies at age fourteen — something O’Reilly apparently believes is a common occurrence in the black community — in 2012 there were only about 1,200 black girls in the entire United States who gave birth at the ages of thirteen or fourteen. This, out of more than 575,000 thirteen and fourteen year old black girls in all (1). In other words, only 0.2 percent (two-tenths of one percent) of black girls this age gave birth that year, meaning that for every 1000 such black girls, at least 998 of them will not have a baby in any given year. Not only does such a number debunk early teen pregnancy as a normative black experience, but it also indicates that to whatever extent one views black culture as implicated in teenage child-bearing, black culture must be getting progressively healthier, rather than less so. After all, just ten years earlier in 2002, the rate of births to thirteen and fourteen year old black girls was 2.4 times higher, with nearly five of every 1000 such black girls giving birth. Even this wasn’t a number high enough to suggest that giving birth at thirteen or fourteen was common in the black community, but given that the birth rate for such girls has dropped by more than half since then, anyone still believing that thirteen and fourteen year old black girls regularly have babies is either an unreconstructed idiot, a racist, or perhaps both.

In fact, a look at the data makes clear that high teen birth rates are due more to socioeconomic status and perhaps geographic differences in culture rather than racial identity. So, for instance, in states like Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts and Washington — where the black population is more affluent and less rural than in the lower-income South — black teen pregnancy rates are similar to the national average for white teenagers. Meanwhile, in Arkansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, West Virginia and Mississippi — where the white population is poorer and more rural than the national white norm — white teen pregnancy rates are comparable to the national averages for black teens.

And of course, it has long been known that the more opportunities girls and women have for good educations and jobs, the fewer children they tend to have, especially at an early age. Which is to say that if conservatives really cared about teen pregnancy and the supposed damage done to children born to mothers who are so young, they would be advocating not only for more and better birth control access, but also better funding for low-income public schools and real gender equity in the job market. That they show no propensity for advocating these things gives the lie to their incessant moralizing. They care little about out-of-wedlock births as a social phenomenon, let alone teenage pregnancies. What they care about is using these issues as political race-bait for their angry and anxious white constituents.

It is quite apparent by now that conservatives will stop at nothing to deflect attention from issues of structural racism, police violence in black communities, unequal job opportunities, unequal school resources, and persistent racial gaps in every measure of well-being. Rather than address the ongoing failure of America to live up to its purported principles — a failure so utterly complete as to suggest those principles were never meant to be taken seriously in the first place — they retreat instead to victim-blaming, black culture-shaming and reality-challenged slanders against African Americans, both male and female. Only by calling them out for their lies can the movement for justice hope to prevail. And only by noting the way all black people are under attack — not just men — can we hope to build the struggle for both racial and gender equity, both of which components will be critical for the attainment of a new and radical democracy.

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(1) This number is based on the combined findings of two reports from the National Center for Health Statistics, and a check of Census data. The first NCHS report, which is referenced above, indicates an overall number of 1,263 births to black mothers between the ages of 10-14 in 2012. And according to an earlier report from the NCHS, also referenced above, 96 percent of births to blacks in that age range are to 13 and 14 year olds, while 98 percent of births to white girls in that range are to 13 and 14 year olds. So if we apply that percentage (96 percent for black girls) to the 2012 data, it would leave 1,212 such births to black girls between 13 and 14. Then, if one looks at Census data for black girls age 13 and 14 (which are available in the interactive tables provided in the American Fact Finder section of www.census.gov), one finds that in 2012, there were 575,447 such girls in all (see, Annual Estimate of the Resident Population by Sex, Single Year of Age, Race and Hispanic Origin for the United States: April 1, 2010 to July 2013, United States Census Bureau, Population Division, June 2014). Because almost all of these births are single births (rather than twins, etc.), the number of births per 1000 girls 13-14 will essentially be the same as the number of women in that group who gave birth. So, roughly 1200 girls as a percentage of over 575,000 such girls comes to roughly 0.2 percent of all such girls who will give birth (as of 2012), or two girls for every 1000 such girls in the population.

Tim Wise on Racism and Policing: From “Cracking the Codes” (2012)

A brief clip from Shakti Butler’s powerful film, “Cracking the Codes” (World Trust Films, 2012). In this clip (filmed back in 2010 but clearly as relevant as ever), I briefly recount my experiences with law enforcement officials, and an experiment I do with them at the outset of our conversation, which demonstrates how automatic racial biases can be, and why it matters…