Intro: When the left minimizes the effects of racism, it looses credibility
Section: race and politics
A well published progressive journalism professor asserts that racial disparities of income and opportunity in the United States are not the result of institutionalized racism. Rather, they are vestigial remnants of a long standing ideology of white supremacy which permeates our culture. A powerful editor on the left tacitly endorses this hypothesis. Both seem to agree that however deplorable racial disparities may be they are best addressed through a long process of re-education and gradualist political intervention. Racism does not, in any event, constitute a priority for activism at the moment.
I wrote both to the professor and to the editor suggesting that the weight of social scientific evidence does not support this definition of racism. (See "Racism and denial on the left" and "Z responds to racism concerns" at http://www.dailykos.com/...). The evidence shows that racism is more likely a deliberate policy of powerful interests. This policy produces unprecedented impoverishment with no hope of relief, and shortened life-spans, for a select group of U.S. citizens. If I am correct about this, then the professor and the editor, by defining racism away are helping to bring about its terrible results. This is something to be concerned about.
Here is why I think it is appropriate and necessary to consider that what is happening in the United States today may well constitute racial genocide; and if so, requires a dramatic, not a passive response from the left..
1
My Websters defines "genocide" as "the use or a user of deliberate, systematic measures toward the extermination of a racial, political or cultural group." Websters does not specify that this policy need be advertised, executed with malice, or even constitute an end in itself. With this in mind, let us review some universally agreed upon facts:
(a) There is no disagreement that young black men fill prisons far beyond what their percentage of the population - even of the impoverished population - would predict.
(b) There is no disagreement that inner cities are remarkably unhealthy environments and that they are far "blacker" than other communities housing U.S. citizens.
(c) There is no disagreement that inner city schools fail to provide the education people need to qualify for life sustaining employment.
(d) There is no disagreement that unemployment in inner cities, particularly for black men, is far greater than elsewhere in the nation.
(e) There is no disagreement that all of the above conditions result in a reduced life span for a substantial portion of the black population of the United States.
(f) There is no disagreement that the slope of this trend has increased since the elections of 2000.
Three hypotheses are usually offered to explain the depressed condition of poor African Americans:
(1) The maladaptivity of African American subculture in the United States (genetic arguments, passé for nearly half a century, are re-emerging as well). Somehow, unlike Asians and even Latinos, most African Americans have not been able to figure out how to survive in America.
(2) Bad luck. As the result of racial discrimination in the past combined with shifting job market requirements in a high-tech nation, many African Americans have been left in a slippery hole they can't climb out of without help. While liberals and many conservatives deplore this sad state of affairs, no source of adequate assistance is available. Nor can one be viewed on the horizon.
(3) Ongoing racism. Even if the conditions of poor African Americans exist in part for the reasons stated in hypothesis 2, it is a policy of continuing, in fact worsening institutionalized racism that explains the nation's failure to respond. This policy protects the interests of a ruling elite threatened by the potentially explosive demands of a middle-class and working-class white citizenry experiencing steady, irreversible downward social mobility for the first time in this nation's history.
Hypothesis 1 no longer has valence. Gunnar Myrdal's extraordinary study, An American Dilemma, 1944, was one of the most lavishly funded and prestigiously staffed research projects in U.S. history. It showed persuasively, to everyone's surprise including Myrdal and his team's, that African ex-slaves were as resilient as any group migrating to America had ever been. Given the opportunity, they were likely to achieve full assimilation into U.S. society just as quickly. The barrier to their integration, therefore, was neither cultural nor psychological deficiencies on their part - not withstanding the ravaging effects of slavery. It was the determined opposition of many white citizens who viewed them, often accurately, as competitors in a tough job market. During the 1960s, James Coleman was recruited to resurrect the hypothesis of Black inadequacy. Based upon a thin proposition set forth by (Democratic) Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan to the effect that black families were uniquely, and pathologically unstable in U.S. society The Coleman Report was published with great fanfare. It documented black youth's failure to benefit much from U.S. public education and contended that the cause of this failure was that proposed by Moynihan. The Report was immediately attacked and discredited by critics citing Myrdal and other studies, but it was the solid empirical analyses of William Julius Wilson that laid it finally to rest...
Wilson, who holds the Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor's chair at Harvard University, debunked the widely held beliefs that welfare policies encourage Black women not to marry, that African American men singularly lack the ability to commit to family and that crime causes poverty. He showed that any heavily concentrated, isolated group in poverty, where men cannot find work, demonstrates the characteristics observed in U.S. inner-cities today. Family solidarity among whites in such circumstances is no greater than that among Blacks. The relationship between poverty and crime, Wilson showed, was precisely the opposite of that commonly asserted. Poverty, especially poverty with little hope of escape, produces crime - not the reverse. Based upon poverty rates alone, in any event, whites would outnumber blacks in prisons by a considerable margin. Respected chroniclers such as Jonathan Kozol and the highly regarded Harvard Civil Rights Project have compiled impressive evidence that inner city schools are institutions that warehouse rather than educate youth. This body of evidence, which is still growing, supports Wilson's findings -- and hypothesis 2.
The historical basis for hypothesis 3 can be found in the works of renowned social scientists such as Myrdal mentioned above, W.E.B. Dubois, Oliver Cox, Richard Hofstadter, C. Vann Woodward, Lawrence Goodwin, Rudolfo Acuna and many others. Abraham Lincoln's own sad prediction that genocide was a not unlikely consequence of the Civil War is also part of this historical archive. Hypothesis 3 is currently the position of a cross-disciplinary project in social science called Critical Race Theory. Founded at Harvard University by Derek Bell in the 1970s, its members have been accumulating convincing evidence that racism has always been and still remains a deliberate, although now more subtle, Machiavellian policy of the elite. In Silent Covenants published in 2004, Bell argued that elite support for the civil rights legislation of the 1950s was largely motivated by its perception that overt racist behavior by white provincials and reactionary grassroots activists was damaging U.S. prestige internationally. The ruling class never intended to redress institutionalized racism in the United States, only to insure that it was not too visible. Critical Race scholars point out that the elite's need to reassure working class white people of the stability of white supremacy's guaranteed protections, especially in the face of economic decline and competition for scarcer jobs, has long been acknowledged by influential liberals and conservatives, but rarely discussed publicly.
2
What does this overview tell us? If neither genetic inferiority nor cultural maladaptivity constitutes an acceptable explanation for the disproportionate dying off of poor African Americans in the United States -- an apparently stable trend -- then the only question left is whether the publics' neglect to deal with racism implied by hypothesis 2 might fulfill Webster's definition of genocide. Since the election of 2000, hypothesis 3 clearly indicates this strong probability.
Senator Moynihan, mentioned above, coined the term "benign neglect" when advising President Richard Nixon concerning how publicly to present his position on race. Assigning a lower priority to addressing racial issues in the nation looked better than aiding and abetting racism. Radical critics viewed this as a propaganda device, which wound up being employed more often by liberals than by conservatives. Whether the neglect implied by hypothesis 2 is purposely benign or accidental, as proposed by the progressive journalism professor mentioned above, would seem to matter little in terms of real outcomes since 2000. This administration is impoverishing many white citizens but damaging the majority of African American and almost as many Mexican Americans and other Latinos far more severely. Before the election of 2000, democratic mechanisms and processes may have been sufficient to offer real potential for meaningfully addressing the effects of racism - whatever their causes. As this potential has atrophied, however, public and governmental neglect seems clearly to have become a passive instrument of abandonment and death.
3
Do these arguments establish, beyond reasonable doubt that racism in the United States today constitutes genocide? Perhaps not. What is clear, however, is that solid evidence indicates the need for immediate national dialogue and debate of this question. When leading progressive writers and editors reject even minimal discussion of it, one must wonder about their motivation. There is no doubt about the consequences of their position: activists on the left are encouraged to focus on Iraq and other manifestations of imperialism abroad, but essentially to ignore the main one occurring locally. If my analysis is correct, this is little different than advising people in Germany, at one time, to ignore the white smoke issuing from the chimneys of certain "factories."
At a gathering of anarchists a couple of years ago I put this dilemma to a nationally prominent figure. He said that if radicals attempt to include racism as an issue, they will lose the attention of little white people drifting rapidly to the right. These people are well aware of how white supremacy protects them, he explained, and choose the Neocons' offer of Tammany like protections in lieu of constitutional guarantees. They perceive the latter only to exist on paper. The right wing is well organized at the grassroots level, the left is all rhetoric, he observed. Unless one has a gang-like structure of support, the so-called guarantees of democracy are meaningless.
I countered that however much the masses of getting-poorer white Americans might disdain their peers of color; they also fully understand that it is this group who are treated most unjustly in this nation --notwithstanding the right wing's oft voiced protests to the contrary. When radicals campaign against imperialism abroad, but fail to stand up for their own oppressed, a much more dangerous undertaking, radicals' commitment to social justice becomes suspect. Ironically, therefore, in order for radicals to be taken seriously, they must embrace the very people rejected by the white supremacists radicals need to recruit.
He didn't disagree.
In the final analysis, I feel optimistic that the left's sincerity is a more important determinant for many still supremacist white people than their confidence in the politics of ethnocentrism. Many who join the "Nazi party" hate and fear it. They well may be eager to embrace a real alternative - an organized grassroots movement on the left. Building organization, however, is far more difficult, and riskier than passionately decrying the Incumbency, critiquing the war in Iraq, and organizing gatherings of passion and hype. A necessary if not sufficient requirement of effective radical leadership is to demonstrate an absolute commitment to social justice. If writers and editors identifying themselves as radical are unconvinced that this requires now defining racial discrimination in the United States as genocide, it certainly requires them to debate the issue.