Conservatives, Brothers and the Flag

Vice President Mike Pence walked out during the National Anthem at the Indianapolis Colts game on Sunday because some of the players were continuing their protests by kneeling or locking arms. Pence said that he wouldn't hang around for any action "that disrespects our soldiers, our Flag, or our National anthem. 

Let me just say that the flag is about more than the US military. It' about the the American national ideas --- life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; liberty and justice for all --- stuff like that. It's also about equality before the law. People who felt that they've been left out of these great ideals have frequently embraced the flag as they fought for inclusion. Martin Luther King was a great example of that. 

When the anthem is playing, its meant to be a time for reflection about those ideals and our love for them. It's a solemn moment, and I believe it's perfectly justifiable to use that moment to make symbolic statements that suggest that the republic is not living up to its ideals. Regarding the Black Lives Matter Movement, pro athletes protesting during the anthem is a brilliant way to make America pay attention to an issue that it has consistently ignored. If we don't get it right, we could lose the sport that more of us spend more time and money supporting than any other. That 70% of the NFL that's African American are not unaffected by what goes on in their communities. They have a lot of power in the market place to push for concessions from society and government that they like to see.

What a great Achilles Heel the players have revealed. A society that continues to operate on the basis of institutional racism, being pushed to the wall by Black gladiator class, at pain of losing it most precious leisure time activity. I can't wait to see whee this goes ... I'm all in with the brothers!

The NFL Players versus Donald Trump

The NFL Players versus Donald Trump

Donald Trump knew he was stepping into the “culture wars” that are at the heart of our political polarization. He has benefitted greatly from taking the right-wing side in these wars since he began questioning President Obama’s citizenship several years ago. His call for the border wall and the Muslim ban are the foremost of many examples of how Trump has consciously to divide our country and forged a conservative majority that does things their way without compromise with the millions of Americans who don’t agree with them.

But when Trump referred to NFL players protesting police brutality as “sons of bitches,” he unknowingly stepped into a quagmire, because he doesn’t possess the social capital to know how that would play among a workforce which is 70% African American. Many African American players grow up in communities that are predominantly Black, in which single-female-headed households are prominent. Though I don’t know the number of NFL players themselves who are from such households, I’m guessing many are. And even those who aren’t are familiar with the phenomenon.

Black youngsters on the streets in those communities play a word game we used to called “the Dozens.” It is a contest of insults waged between two people and continues until one is left speechless. When it gets intense, frequently one person will turn the insult toward the other’s mother. “Your mama is so (this or that) that she can’t even (whatever).” You fill in the blanks!

Sometimes when one goes down that “your mama” path, it ends in good humor, but it can go badly, if the loser is particularly stung by an insult. Sometime fistfights can result, or those watching have to intervene to keep the two parties from fighting. 

In any event African American mothers are especially revered in communities where fathers may not be consistently present in young people’s lives. So when Trump called the players “sons of bitches,” he was calling their mothers bitches. I recall in the day or two after his remark a couple of players tweeted things like “my mother isn’t a bitch. She’s a queen!” From the anecdotal evidence out there, we know that large numbers, if not most African American pro athletes don’t like President Trump. I’m sure they think he’s a racist. But most of them aren’t political activist either. Some are, and the protest that began with Colin Kaepernick last season had continued, but with only a handful of players participating. Some of the most serious ones, like Malcolm Jenkins of the Eagles and Michael Bennett of the Seahawks had begun talks with the league over how to build racial justice work into the community service that all NFL players are required to do.  

Then Trump opened his mouth, and in doing so created a legion of players ready to go to the wall out of a sense of personal injury. Although Jerry Jones of the Cowboys has said he’d fire any players who continue to protest, a unified team could force him to backdown. After all, does anyone want to watch an NFL, with no Black players? I believe the league and the players should continue their negotiation around community service and ignore the President. If the league can come up with a worthwhile program, the tit for tat might involve the players once again standing for the anthem.

The Battle for the Soul of White America

The United States continues to be two nations, not one. Donald Trump is a traditional American nationalist. At the historic core of that nationalism is racism and white supremacy. The Republican Party, the quintessential party of capitalism and the bourgeois class, has had a problem since the time of the New Deal. With the issue of slavery no longer around to build a grass roots base, the party of capital has struggled to build a majoritarian base since the 1930s,

Beginning with Barry Goldwater, who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and “Richard Nixon, whose “law and order” slogan mobilized many whites against the black rebellions in the late 60s, the Republican Party has found its grassroots base among whites of all classes who opposed assertive measures to achieve true racial equality before the law. That faction has been melded to an economic conservative wing, which supports free markets and opposes taxes. Add to that another cultural conservative faction, the Christian Right, and you have the majoritarian coalition which has dominated American politics since the time of Ronald Reagan.

Republicans have needed whites who are uncomfortable with racial equality to build winning coalitions in electoral politics, but the demographics of this century are not in their favor. So they have expertly used gerrymandering and voter suppression to forestall the day when the emerging majority can take political power. The Republican Party has been trading in racial indifference and outright racial hostility for the last half-century. Law and order, Reagan announcing his presidential bid in 1980 in Philadelphia Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were killed in 1964 … nasty welfare reform and draconian immigration positions in the 1990s … anti-government militias which helped propel many Republicans to office … the “war on terror … Minute Men on the borders after 9-11 … birtherism … racist police forces.

People on the far right who voted, voted Republican. Those of us who were anti-militia activists in the Northwest Coalition for Human Dignity in the 90s, tracked the mainstreaming of far right thinking into the Republican Party. That mainstreaming produced the Tea Party, the Freedom Caucus in Congress, and now, the Trump Presidency.

I have two points to make here. First, Donald Trump is a fascist. He is racist, sexist, homophobic, and if we look at his business dealings over the decades, he doesn’t care much about the working class either. Fascism is rooted in ethnocentrism and bigotry, but in order to be successful, fascist must undermine the liberal institutions of democratic society. Trump has gone a long way down that path by disparaging the press, the judiciary, our electoral system, and even the establishment of “his own” Republican Party. Trump implores his followers to listen only to him for the truth … Sounds like Der Furhrer to me! But so far our institutions have pushed back. If they hold up, Trump’s fascist movement will be defeated by an enduring democratic system.

Secondly, and in a related vein, institutions can only hold up if citizens continue to believe in them. Most Americans continue to be white. And white people will control institutional and political power in this country for a long time. What we are witnessing is a battle for the soul of America, a battle for the soul of white America, and a battle for the soul of Republicans, the party of Lincoln. Most white people have voted for every Republican presidential candidate since Barry Goldwater in 1964. 95% of the people who voted for the moderate Mitt Romney in 2012 voted for Donald Trump in 2016.

White people who care about limited government and free markets have coalesced with white racist for the last half-century to build a conservative coalition that could be an electoral majority. That coalition produced the Trump presidency. Conservatives, mostly white, must now decide if they like their capitalism with fascism, or if they aspire to a future of American liberal capitalism, without racism and bigotry. Our country, and the whole world, is watching breathlessly.

Ode to the Generations of 1967/2017

Ode to the Generations of 1967/2017

Yo Logan,

I had read A.O. Scott's review of the movie Detroit in the New York Times a week earlier.  I can quibble with a lot of things he had to say (not enough character development, etc.). But one big concluding point he made was that American film isn't good at dealing with "division and real-world problems that have yet to be solved. It made me wonder if European, or Chinese films are any better at that. I suspect that you've consumed more serious film than I. So I put that question to you?

He also says that in the film, "the white men, the decent ones, as much as the brutes, have answers, agency," ... not the Black folks. I guess Kathryn Bigelow is a big time director ... liberal ... and Scott talks about how she tried to give us some agency back in the end.

But anyway, as I sat there, getting more and more depressed, I realized two things .... Our generation was some bad MFs, cause in ‘67 and ‘68, we literally kicked the walls down and came storming through. The young kids today, as outraged as they seem, haven't done what was done back then. We got everybody's attention!

But as I salved my wounds from the disrespect I've gotten from the kids post-Ferguson, because we didn't change enough, I realized that the kids are right. The shit the went down at the Algiers Hotel ain't that different than Michael Brown or Tamir Rice, etc. The white boys and their institutions are still holding all the cards ... body cameras, indictments against cops ... ain't worked yet! What can I tell the young to do?

Maybe it is time to for them/us to throw themselves in waves at the barricades, until, like Czar Nicholas' security police in Petrograd in 1917, the gendarmerie refused to continue the carnage, and the moment of transformation is at hand.

We took it ask far as we could brother, back in our day. Maybe, especially in the time of Trump, the next more awful surge is now needed.

Wes

The Past was Another Country/Is the United States Finished?

The Past was Another Country/Is the United States Finished?

The British historian and journalist Martin Meredith published a book entitled The Past is Another Country in 1979. It chronicled the dying days of white settler colonialism in Rhodesia as guerrilla movements representing the black majority were grinding their way toward power. That settler past was indeed a different place from what Africans had in mind for the future. White Rhodesians didn’t want to live in the “new country” Africans had in mind and they worked assiduously in the 1960s and 70s to prevent it from coming about. Many might argue that given the catastrophic outcomes of the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe today, whites may have been right to fear the new country’s arrival. But let’s save that discussion (which I’m perfectly happy to have) for another time.

Today I want to use to metaphor “the past is another country” to talk about the United States in the era of Trump. The U.S. is often talked about as a relatively new nation. This is usually stated by white commentators speaking from a Eurocentric perspective relating it to the “older nations” of Europe (or sometimes Asia). They rightly observe that the U.S. is the first modern state to break away from European colonialism, and in that sense, it is one of the newer nations.

But in the modern world which has emerged since the Enlightenment, the U.S. is one of the older nations. In their book The Right Nation John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge point out that the U.S. has the world’s oldest continuously operating written constitution. It is the world’s oldest republic (government without hereditary rulers). The Democratic Party originating in Andrew Jackson’s calls for universal white male suffrage in the 1820s is the oldest popularly-based political party in the world.

So America is an old modern nation. It has navigated the course of government by the people for more than two centuries undergirded by the values of individual liberty and equality before the law. Liberty gave us freedom of association and speech. But unencumbered by a communal past, it also gave us an unflagging faith in free markets and a nearly unbridled capitalism. The value of equality in a society founded on conquest, slavery and patriarchy bequeathed to us successive generations of struggle to approximate that great ideal.

But an undying belief in capitalism and tenacious commitment to equality do not sit easily at the same table. Elsewhere I’ve written that the U.S. is not one nation, but two. Individualist economic conservatism and cultural conservatism based in white supremacy and Christianity are juxtaposed to equality before the law, multiculturalism and secularism. More than two centuries of unending political struggle have made us grow weary of each other. All white men hardly had time to savor the achievement of their own right to vote, before women were clamoring for the same right, and blacks and whites began the struggle to end slavery. Then came a bloody war that ended slavery and forced the resentful former slave states back into the republic. Soon however, they would be permitted to reconfigure white supremacy in a Jim Crow system, which by the way, was imposed upon all people of color in differing ways and degrees until the great transformations of the 1960s. Those transformations included positionality in the public discourse for women’s rights, lesbian and gay rights, environmentalism, and a critique of militarism and imperialism.

That progressive nationalism forced its way onto the stage, but was met by the backlash of Reaganism in the 1980s, Gingrich’s “Contract on America” in the 90s, and finally, a resurgent imperialism under Bush junior. Progressives, to our credit, always pushed back. Finally, there was Obama who was black, but not really as far left as many of us would have liked. But by that time demographers were telling us that by mid-century the country would be majority-minority; and the opinion data was suggesting an attendant tilt to the left. But while the Obama generation weren’t voting in 2010, the right took control of statehouses, gerrymandered the hell out of legislative and congressional districts and began passing voter I.D. laws designed to keep people of color away from the polls.

Then in 2016, we stunningly, got the fascist Trump. The left is rightfully traumatized by this turn of events. My (few) conservative associates tell me that many of them were equally in shock when Obama got elected in 2008. How could they have been so fearful of so mainstream a politician as Obama? The answer must be because he was black, and folks on the right had not thought that mid-century would arrive so fast!

So the right does not want to live in the same kind of country that we do, and we don’t want to live in the land of Trump. The good news is, the left is pushing back hard. But the right has shown its skill at push back over the generations. Aided by the internet and the man in the White House, the public discourse has never been as vitriolic as it is now. We have become thoroughly exhausted with each other. The past was another country. It was a country that the right, under the mantle of “make America great again,” would like to bring back; but one which the left cannot allow to return. Where doth lie the political center in this depressing societal landscape?

I started to name this essay “The United States is Finished” … Is it???

What Happens When Black Rage Becomes Uncontrollable?

Now that my intensive summer course (on civil rights by the way) is over I have time to reflect upon recent events in the ongoing drama over race and law enforcement in this country.

On June 14th a gunman opened fire on Republican Congress members practicing for the annual softball game against Democrats. Congressman Steve Scalise, was critically wounded, but the gunman was was killed by two African American Capitol police officers. In quick succession over the next two weeks, we saw police officers in the Twin Cities and Milwaukee, one white and one Latino, acquitted in the killings of unarmed black men. And in Cincinnati we saw a second mistrial in another case where a university policeman killed an another unarmed black man.

Two intellectuals of African descent responded on social media to these events. Johnny Williams, a sociologist at Trinity College in Connecticutt, responded to an online article in which the anonymous author disapproved of the actions of the Capitol police saying:

     “If you see them (whites) drowning. If you see them in a burning building. If they are
     bleeding out in an emergency room. If the ground is crumbling beneath them. If they
     are in a park and they turn their weapons on each other: do nothing,” ... Let Them
      Fucking Die!"

So Williams didn't actually say "let them die" himself. He did however, offer that he was ...

     “fed the fuck up with self-identified ‘white’s’ daily violence directed at immigrants,
     Muslims, and sexual and racially oppressed people," (and) ...  “the time is now to
     confront these inhuman assholes and end this now.”

After his post went viral in conservative social media, Williams receive death threats and has since taken his family into hiding. He has also been placed on Administrative leave by the college pending investigations.

Then there is the case of Marlon James, Jamaican professor of English at MacAlester College, and winner of the prestigious Booker Prize for English literature. In an online article entitled "Smaller, Smaller and Smaller," James shares his confusion following the recent acquittals and the mistrial.

    " Do I kneel and get shot? Do I reach for my ID and get shot? Do I say I’m an English
     teacher and get shot? Do I tell them everything I am about to do, and get shot? Do I
     assume that seven of them will still feel threatened by one of me, and get shot? ...
     (Finally) Do I fold my arms and squeeze myself into smaller and get shot?"

James offered us an almost traumatic befuddlement over what black men can do to be safe. He comes across as very reasonable. In contrast, Williams' suggestion that blacks should do nothing when they see whites in life-threatening danger, seems harsh and even inhumane. But when Williams implores blacks not to protect those whose system does not protect them, and James wonders what he can do to secure his black body, they both call attention to what can be done to dismantle institutional racism in law enforcement in this country.

Ta-Nehishi Coates makes a similar to Williams near the end of his Between the World and Me. He calls white people "dreamers," because they believe in the American Dream and can't see how institutions built to assure it systematically oppress black people. Coates also advises his son not to be concerned about white people, but to worry about securing his black body.

White anti-racist educator Robin DiAngelo has written a seminal training manual called What it Means to be White. She talks about active versus passive anti-racism. Average white people; the decent people who teach their kids to treat everyone the same and not see color are passive-anti-racist. They don't actively work to change our racist institutions, elect anti-racist politicians or call out racism when they see it in their day to day lives.

As jury after jury fails to convict black people being murdered by the men in blue, as they allow gross racialized inequities in school funding, as some white people systematically work to suppress the POC vote, and other whites sit back and allow it to happen, one cand see why Coates calls "yall" Dreamers, and Williams supports his kind of black passive humanism, when white folks are in danger. As a black university professor who has been teaching students to assertively work the system since Ferguson, I also wonder if I can continue to sell that argument?

This country is in trouble. I add my voice soon to the debate about the rest of what's wrong with America ... but for now, your thoughts?

Dear friends,

Here's an interview with Asad Haider, a Pakistani American Marxist critiquing identity politics as a deadend street. Check it out! I'll have my own take on it soon.

http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/a-marxist-critiques-identity-politics/