Issac J. Bailey, writing for The Root, spells out what has been obvious (or should have been obvious) since the summer of 2016:
I’m just not convinced that forcing politicians to moderate their frankness about racism will help more Democrats win. Why? Because I know the kinds of voters Gray believes will be moved by such tactics. I know they won’t be. I spent nearly two decades in that mostly white evangelical church, and during much of that time I defended them against charges of blanket racism, prayed with them, broke bread with them, spoke about the complexities of life with them.
And yet, when Donald Trump showed up in our area for well-attended rallies during the 2016 presidential primaries, they flocked to him and his open bigotry. Nothing I had said over those two decades meant a thing. Not even the killing of nine black people in a church a couple of counties over convinced them that rejecting the kind of bigotry Trump was espousing should be a priority for any right-thinking person—especially people who claimed they wanted equality for families like mine. We couldn’t even get a jury to convict a white cop of murdering a black man even though the killing was recorded on clear video—the cop shooting the black man in the back several times as the black man was running away.
As I said it in a diary not long after the 2016 election:
You can’t confront bigotry without confronting bigots. (April 26, 2017)
I’m skeptical that softening the semantics (‘I’m not calling YOU a racist’) produces as much openness to hearing our message as many progressives wish, and in a very important way, I think it is actually harmful to our efforts to oppose bigotry and discrimination— it sends the message to the bigot that they are not responsible for what they do, or the harm they cause others. It’s not you I’m upset with, it’s only those things you do. Where in this formulation is a sense that adults are responsible for their choices, their actions, and the effects of these on others?
There are many ways in which bigotry and discrimination can be compared to abusive behavior. Would we say to the abuser ‘I don’t want you to feel bad about assaulting your partner, I just want you to consider why I might not agree with you assaulting your partner’?
I mean this quite seriously— bigotry and discrimination always involve some form of verbal, emotional, physical or sexual violence. It causes real harm to real people. One cannot be innocently complicit in violence or abuse, nor can one disavow responsibility.
Without recognizing that bigotry is shameful, harmful to others, and deserving of our contempt, the bigot can continue to believe they are not the problem. But they are the problem. Bigotry in the abstract is not what we’re fighting, it’s people who hold bigoted views.
Bigotry and discrimination are perpetuated by bigots, they don’t exist as some amorphous cultural phenomena, disconnected from the individuals who perpetuate them, or tacitly support and facilitate them…
Fundamental social and political change occurs when individuals make the change occur, and take personal responsibility. Telling bigots that they are not the problem, allowing them to slough off any responsibility to recognize how they have caused harm, and not communicating to them that they must work to atone for this, and rectify it, actually hinders progress.
Yet still Bailey, and others, are at pains to convince many who consider themselves progressive that on purely pragmatic political terms (let’s set aside fundamental morality for the moment), failing to name racism for what it manifestly is, among people who would rather not be called racist, is actually counter-productive:
I say this to say that I know—intimately—the kind of Trump supporters the writer of this piece, “Calling Out Racist Voters Is Satisfying. But It Comes at a Political Cost,” is talking about. I know them personally, as well as professionally, given that I was also a leading journalist in that part of South Carolina for two decades. That’s why even though I sympathize with her point, I know it is wrongheaded and futile. There is no safe, or effective, way for a politician to skirt the issue of racism when it comes to white voters who might consider the Democratic Party if politicians did not point out their racism.
You can read what Briahna Gray of the Intercept has to say here.
But here’s a taste of her argument:
Like it or not, the opinions of white voters matter, and politicians have to balance the validation that marginalized communities deserve against the anxieties of white voters. As Cheney-Rice noted, it’s frustrating that white voters’ sensitivity about being called racist often becomes a more central part of the national conversation than the actual consequences of experiencing racism...
Gray acknowledges the well-documented racism that’s running rampant among Trump supporters, including those who may have voted for Barack Obama once, if not twice. She is clear-eyed that the issue needs to be confronted, in no uncertain terms, when it comes to racist dog whistles from politicians and the like. She even recently chided Bernie Sanders, a man she has defended several times over the past two years, for not being straightforward about racism in comments he made shortly after the midterms while discussing the performance of Stacey Abrams and Andrew Gillum…
It’s just that Gray also seems convinced that making non-apologetic arguments about that racism—calling it how it is and for what it is—can lead to political defeat for Democrats...
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What Bailey is meticulously dissecting is a variation of the zombie narrative of 2016 — ‘we need to understand why so many white people voted for Trump, and it is anything but bigotry’. No amount of debunking with actual data, evidence, facts has buried the zombie narrative.
To which we must ask “Why?”.
I can only surmise that those who remain steadfastly beholden to the zombie narrative are too emotionally invested to let it go. But this is not a harmless stance to maintain, it does real harm, to real people, every day, and hinders political efforts to address all the concerns progressive hope to:
Racism, not class distinctions, defines economic inequality. (Aug. 28, 2018)
The necessary perspective to address economic inequality requires abandoning the ‘class not race’ formulation, as Noah Zatz explicates in an article for the journal Law and Political Economy:
… separating race and the economy itself does racist work. It functions to insulate the so-called market economy from racial critique, and to confine matters of racial equality to other spheres. Vice versa, it obscures economic injuries of deprivation, of exploitation, of dispossession when they can only be seen clearly with a racial analysis.
Consider, for instance, insights from Michelle Alexander, Bruce Western, and others showing how racialized mass incarceration produces racial stratification in labor and housing markets, via criminal records exclusions and otherwise. These are not merely effects on economic domains. Rather, as Donna Murch’s analysis of criminal justice debt makes clear, these involve the construction of racial inequality with economic tools themselves justified with racism.
Vice versa, scholars and advocates have been showing how economic inequality yields racially specific vulnerability. For instance, people of color get racially profiled, stopped by the police, and then fined. The fines cannot be paid because of lack of income, assets, and credit. At the next stop, they now are vulnerable to arrest because of an outstanding warrant, and, if the encounter deteriorates, to getting shot and possibly killed, again mediated by racialized attributions of uncooperativeness and threat. These kinds of race/class interactions have been ubiquitous among high profile police killings of working class Black men such as Eric Garner, Walter Scott, and Alton Sterling…
The usual conceit here is that looking at differences among white people somehow factors out race to reveal the independent influence of class or gender. So we see class (not race) operating in the large swing between white college graduates (48% for Trump) versus whites with no college degree (66% for Trump). Intersectionality, though, teaches us that class, gender, or race often are not “independent” influences in this way. For example, if class were independent of race, then class differences among people of color should operate like class differences among whites. But these data show that working class people of color turned out overwhelmingly for Clinton. Indeed, they supported Clinton at slightly higher rates (76%) than those with college degrees (72%), a “class” effect in the opposite direction than for whites. This simple analytical point shows that class did not operate independently of race. It recalls Stuart Hall’s insight that “race is the modality in which class is lived.”
Thus, drawing conclusions about class from data about white people ignores working class people of color and consigns them to pure “race” voters. It reproduces a racially unmarked but implicitly white concept of the working class, one that is especially problematic against the backdrop of racially stratified stereotypes of who is and is not “hard working.” Using, as has become common, the racially qualified term “white working class” is an improvement, but too often it goes without an accompanying analysis of how whiteness shapes class among white people nor how class matters to people of color.
Limiting class analysis to white people erases issues tremendously important to the material circumstances of people of color. Generations of research detail the economic devastation inflicted on Black communities from the decline in manufacturing jobs. Likewise, the more recent assault on public employment and public employee unions has dislodged critical footholds in middle-class jobs, especially among women of color. Treating these as “economic” issues, and therefore outside questions of racial justice, dangerously circumscribes racial critique. It also insulates those perpetuating such neoliberal policies from accountability in racial justice terms. (emphasis added)
One factor that perpetuates the notion that a complete and productive analysis of economic inequality can be effected in a ‘race neutral’, class-based manner is blindness to the persistence and extent of racial economic inequality. In an article appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [PNAS], Michael W. Kraus, Julian M. Rucker, and Jennifer A. Richeson demonstrate that most Americans (especially Whites) fail to recognize the problem exists at all...
To be sure, to dispense with the zombie narrative would require quite few progressives to dispense with their core theory of how Democrats should be approaching elections and messaging. Neither the special elections through 2017, nor the midterms earlier this month, which demonstrated that targeting the true base of the party— women and People of Color, especially African-American women, the most reliable cohort of Democratic voters— disabuses those clutching to the zombie narrative.
But its patently clear: dispensing with Quixotic efforts to reach ‘wavering Republicans’, independents or for goodness sake, the mythological ‘white working class who shifted to the GOP’, won big.