[Peace-discuss] Interesting Progressive article: The Real Divide

[Joan Nelshoppen]

The Real Divide

By Adolph L. Reed Jr.

THE PROGRESSIVE   
November 2005  pp. 27-32

NEW ORLEANS IS MY HOMETOWN, and most of my family members live there. Right
now, they're mainly strewn across south Louisiana and Mississippi, staying
with other relatives, with no idea when they'll be able to return even to
assess the damage, much less to salvage and reconstruct their lives. So
we're all in a kind of limbo, or suspended animation.

By the time this article appears, something like a final death toll from the
horror in New Orleans will be known, and there will be dollar figures in the
incomprehensible billions assigned to the total damage.
We will have been told repeatedly and in definitive tones by gushing talking
heads where New Orleans and Katrina in general rank on the all-time list of
American catastrophes-none of which, of course, conveys any real sense of
what has occurred and its impact on the city and its people.

Everyone who reads The Progressive will know that the horror that has
occurred in New Orleans was entirely preventable. For years, the New Orleans
Times-Picayune annually had punctuated the hurricane season's arrival with
detailed articles warning that the levee system needed shoring up and quite
possibly would not survive a category 4 or strong category 3 storm. As many
readers know, similar articles in major newspapers and magazines around the
country at one time or another had reported on the city's precarious
situation and described how much of it could be inundated in case of a
storm-induced levee breach. Many will know also that in 2001 the Federal
Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) listed a major hurricane in New Orleans
as one of the three most likely disasters in the United States.

Most readers, therefore, will also know that when George W. Bush offered as
an explanation for his continuing inaction nearly three days after the city
began filling with water that no one could have anticipated that the levee
would break, he was a lying sack of shit.

But he was worse than that. He was an active agent in bringing this
catastrophe about. Most Progressive readers' will know already that the Bush
Administration last year slashed funding for the levee project, in part to
feed the war on Iraq. The cuts brought work on the project nearly to a
standstill. The city of New Orleans, the state of Louisiana, even the U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers had all emphasized the imminent danger. Their
entreaties fell on deaf ears; in fact, the Administration scuttled a Corps
of Engineers study of how to protect the city. And this is not even to
consider how Bush's wetlands policy made New Orleans more vulnerable by
speeding erosion.

Bush finally proclaimed that he takes responsibility.
Well, Mable and Salvatore Mangano, operators of St.
Rita's nursing home in St. Bernard Parish, were indicted for negligent
homicide because thirty-four people died in their facility after the
Manganos failed to evacuate them. Bush also should be indicted.

Self-important nincompoop Michael Brown, the abominable former FEMA director
and failed horse show lawyer, should be in the dock with him, as should
Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security secretary. They should spend the
rest of their lives in jail.

Of course, that won't happen.  That's not the way things work in the United
States.

Bush, after all, was already a mass murderer in Iraq, to the tune of perhaps
100,000 Iraqi civilians and more than 1,900 American soldiers. But it's
considered over the top or politically irresponsible to say so plainly.

In any official investigation of Katrina, impeachment for Bush and criminal
trials for him, Brown, and Chertoff will never surface as a consideration.
The investigation will no doubt focus in flamboyant meticulousness on who
knew what when. There will be much back and forth about which agency or
branch of government was responsible for which actions or inactions. The
federal government's unconscionable delay in response will be explained as
an unfortunate circumstance, a concatenation of mistakes and
miscommunications, and perhaps some incompetence. Maybe Brown will become a
symbolic fall guy. Not that he'll do any time, as he probably will follow
his predecessor at FEMA and former college buddy Joseph Allbaugh into a
lucrative lobbying/consulting career.

I seriously doubt there will be any consideration of the role that the Bush
Administration's systematic hostility to government's functions played in
bringing about this catastrophe in the first place. That's largely because
Democratic liberals for the last twenty-five years have aided and abetted
the right in shrinking and privatizing public functions. As Paul Krugman
noted in The New York Times and Michael Parenti pointed out in Z, the
travesty in New Orleans is the expression of the right's essential contempt
for any public institutions, for the idea of the public.

Going back to Reagan, they've exhibited a thug's approach to government.
Remember how Reagan opened up the Department of Housing and Urban
Development to wanton and rapacious plunder by cronies? They've made a
regular practice of appointing agency and department heads who were on
record as enemies of the departments and their functions, with a mandate to
gut them.
Parking utterly unqualified hacks and cronies in five of the eight
senior-most posts in FEMA shows how flagrant and unmitigated their contempt
for public responsibility actually is.

The fact that Bush, Brown, and Chertoff sat on their hands for three days
after word that the levee had burst was probably not the result of active
malice.
Their basic view of the world prevents them from recognizing the people who
were imperiled on the Gulf Coast as forms of life equivalent to their own.

Bush said as much when he could notice only Trent Lott's fine old house as a
casualty of the storm and reassured us all that he'd be sitting on Lott's
great porch again soon, when the only image of New Orleans he could muster
was a nostalgic, loutish frat boy's.

And they genuinely do not believe that government can or should play an
active role in protecting the general public in any way, other than by
funding the police or invading another country.

The Democrats' critique of the Bush Administration will be wonkish and
abstruse. They will cast as a problem of inadequate management what is
fundamentally the product of a combined commitment to vicious, reactionary
ideologies and plunder. They will give us at best a replay of their lame
attempt at health care reform, which from the outset defined
single-payer--the only adequate option, and the only one with any support-as
"off the table," primarily because of their commitments to the insurance
industry and fear of seeming too different from the Republicans.

Or it'll be another version of welfare reform, which sacrificed federal
income support for the indigent to show the right that they want to reward
only those who "play by the rules."

Or another version of opposing the war by pledging to send more troops and
claiming to be more competent at fighting it.

Worse, the major civil rights, women's, environmental, and other progressive
advocacy groups tail along behind and seem incapable of pushing beyond the
limits of the Democrats' "me too, but not so much" relation to the right.

And neither wing of the labor movement-original recipe or extra crispy-has
come near probing at the roots of the catastrophe in New Orleans in the last
two decades of bipartisan neoliberal policy. While both admirably mobilized
humanitarian aid, the AFL-CIO's initial statement was pro forma and tepid in
its criticism of the Bush administration. Change to Win's was small- minded
and opportunistic; it called on everyone to contribute to the Red Cross and
Salvation Army and demanded that the rebuilding effort not suspend worker
protections. This is especially sad because the labor movement is the one
vehicle we have for reaching and crafting the broad base of working people
who must be the foundation of any political movement that can hope to turn
this tide. And it's failing miserably.

Race in this context becomes a cheap and safely predictable alternative to
pressing a substantive critique of the sources of this horror in New Orleans
and its likely outcomes. Granted, the images projected from the Superdome,
the convention center, overpasses, and rooftops seemed to cry out a stark
statement of racial inequality. But that's partly because in the
contemporary U.S., race is the most familiar language of inequality or
injustice. It's what we see partly because it's what we're accustomed to
seeing, what we look for. As I argued in The Nation, class-as income,
wealth, and access to material resources, including a safety net of social
connections-was certainly a better predictor than race of who evacuated the
city before the hurricane, who was able to survive the storm itself, who was
warehoused in the Superdome or convention center or stuck without food and
water on the parched overpasses, who is marooned in shelters in Houston or
elsewhere, and whose interests will be factored into the reconstruction of
the city, who will be able to return.

New Orleans is a predominantly black city, and it is a largely poor city.
The black population is disproportionately poor, and the poor population is
disproportionately black. It is not surprising that those who were stranded
and forgotten, probably those who died, were conspicuously black and poor.
None of that, however, means that race-or even racism -is adequate as an
explanation of those patterns of inequality. And race is especially useless
as a basis on which to craft a politics that can effectively pursue social
justice.

Before the "yes, buts" begin, I am not claiming that systemic inequalities
in the United States are not significantly racialized. The evidence of
racial disparities is far too great for any sane or honest person to deny,
and they largely emerge from a history of discrimination and racial
injustice. Nor am I saying that we should overlook that fact in the interest
of some idealized nonracial or post-racial politics.

Let me be blunter than I've ever been in print about what I am saying: As a
political strategy, exposing racism is wrongheaded and at best an utter
waste of time. It is the political equivalent of an appendix: a useless
vestige of an earlier evolutionary moment that's usually innocuous but can
flare up and become harmful.

There are two reasons for this judgment.

One is that the language of race and racism is too imprecise to describe
effectively even how patterns of injustice and inequality are racialized in
a post-Jim Crow world. "Racism" can cover everything from individual
prejudice and bigotry, unself-conscious perception of racial stereotypes,
concerted group action to exclude or subordinate, or the results of
ostensibly neutral market forces.

It can be a one-word description and explanation of patterns of unequal
distribution of income and wealth, services and opportunities, police
brutality, a stockbroker's inability to get a cab, neighborhood dislocation
and gentrification, poverty, unfair criticism of black or Latino athletes,
or being denied admission to a boutique.

Because the category is so porous, it doesn't really explain anything.
Indeed, it is an alternative to explanation.

Exposing racism apparently makes those who do it feel good about themselves.
Doing so is cathartic, though safely so, in the same way that proclaiming
one's patriotism is in other circles.

It is a summary, concluding judgment rather than a preliminary to a concrete
argument. It doesn't allow for politically significant distinctions; in
fact, as a strategy, exposing racism requires subordinating the discrete
features of a political situation to the overarching goal of asserting the
persistence and power of racism as an abstraction.

This leads to the second reason for my harsh judgment.
Many liberals gravitate to the language of racism not simply because it
makes them feel righteous but also because it doesn't carry any political
warrant beyond exhorting people not to be racist. In fact, it often is
exactly the opposite of a call to action. Such formulations as "racism is
our national disease" or similar pieties imply that racism is a natural
condition. Further, it implies that most whites inevitably and immutably
oppose blacks and therefore can't be expected to align with them around
common political goals.

This view dovetails nicely with Democrats' contention that the only way to
win elections is to reject a social justice agenda that is stigmatized by
association with blacks and appeal to an upper-income white constituency
concerned exclusively with issues like abortion rights and the deficit.

Upper-status liberals are more likely to have relatively secure, rewarding
jobs, access to health care, adequate housing, and prospects for providing
for the kids' education, and are much less likely to be in danger of seeing
their nineteen-year-old go off to Iraq. They tend, therefore, to have a
higher threshold of tolerance for political compromises in the name of
electing this year's sorry pro-corporate Democrat.
Acknowledging racism-and, of course, being pro- choice-is one of the few
ways many of them can distinguish themselves from their Republican
co-workers and relatives.

As the appendix analogy suggests, insistence on understanding inequality in
racial terms is a vestige of an earlier political style. The race line
persists partly out of habit and partly because it connects with the
material interests of those who would be race relations technicians. In this
sense, race is not an alternative to class. The tendency to insist on the
primacy of race itself stems from a class perspective.

For roughly a generation it seemed reasonable to expect that defining
inequalities in racial terms would provoke some, albeit inadequate, remedial
response from the federal government. But that's no longer the case; nor has
it been for quite some time. That approach presumed a federal government
that was concerned at least not to appear racially unjust. Such a government
no longer exists.

A key marker of the right's victory in national politics is that the
discussion of race now largely serves as a way to reinforce a message to
whites that the public sector is there merely to help some combination of
black, poor, and loser. Liberals have legitimized this perspective through
their own racial bad faith. For many whites, the discussion of race also
reinforces the idea that cutting public spending is justifiably aimed at
weaning a lazy black underclass off the dole or-in the supposedly benign,
liberal Democratic version-teaching them "personal responsibility."

New Orleans is instructive. The right has a built-in counter to the racism
charge by mobilizing all the scurrilous racial stereotypes that it has
propagated to justify attacks on social protection and government
responsibility all along. Only those who already are inclined to believe
that racism is the source of inequality accept that charge. For others,
nasty victim-blaming narratives abound to explain away obvious racial
disparities.

What we must do, to pursue justice for displaced, impoverished New
Orleanians as well as for the society as a whole, is to emphasize that their
plight is a more extreme, condensed version of the precarious position of
millions of Americans today, as more and more lose health care, bankruptcy
protection, secure employment, affordable housing, civil liberties, and
access to education. And their plight will be the future of many, many more
people in this country once the bipartisan neoliberal consensus reduces
government to a tool of
corporations and the investor class alone.     .

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Adolph L. Reed Jr. is professor of political science at the University of
Pennsylvania and a member of the interim national council of the Labor
Party.


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