[Peace-discuss] Why the Democrats are as they are
C. G. Estabrook
galliher at uiuc.edu
Wed Jun 18 11:20:33 CDT 2008
Some Democrats are more equal than others:
Race and gender distract from class in US primaries
Class is the great unmentionable in the Obama-Clinton campaigns. US progressives
want to diversify the elite across colour, gender and ethnic background, while
accepting ever greater inequalities of wealth between the elite and the rest of
the nation.
By Walter Benn Michaels
There have been two defining moments related to race in the Obama campaign, and
more generally in United States progressive politics. The first was in January
on the night of the Illinois senator’s victory in South Carolina when, in
response to comments by Bill Clinton about the size of the black vote, the Obama
crowd started chanting: “Race doesn’t matter.”
“There we stood,” said the novelist and Obama activist Ayelet Waldman, “in the
heart of the old South, where Confederate flags still fly next to statues of
Governor Benjamin Tillman, who famously bragged about keeping black people from
the polls (‘We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it’),
chanting race doesn’t matter, race doesn’t matter. White people and black
people. Latinos and Asians, united in our rejection of politics as usual. United
in our belief that America can be a different place. United. Not divided” (1).
The second moment was in March when, in response to the controversial sermons of
his former pastor, the Rev Jeremiah Wright, Obama gave his “more perfect union”
speech, declaring: “Race is an issue this nation cannot afford to ignore right
now” and inaugurating what many commentators described as a supposedly
much-needed “national conversation on race”.
I say supposedly because Americans love to talk about race and have been doing
so for centuries, even if today the thing we love most to say is that “Americans
don’t like to talk about race”. What we aren’t so good at talking about is
class, as Obama himself inadvertently demonstrated when he tried to talk about
class on 6 April at a closed-door San Francisco fundraiser (“Bittergate”). He
tried to explain the frustrations of some small-town Pennsylvanians: “It’s not
surprising that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to
people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment.”
’Change we can believe in’
There seems to be an obvious contradiction here. First, the chant of race
doesn’t matter; then the speech about why race does matter. But after reflection
the contradiction fades, since the need for the speech, the history of American
racism, is what prompted the promise of the chant: the idea that electing a
black man would be a major step toward overcoming that history. Which, of
course, it would.
It is the promise of overcoming the long history of racial division, the promise
of solving in the 21st century what W E B Du Bois (2) described as the
overwhelming problem of the 20th century, the problem of the colour line, that
gives the Obama campaign its significance. The “change we can believe in” is not
ideological, it’s cultural (Obama and Clinton are ideologically almost
identical; if people had wanted ideological change, we’d be talking about John
Edwards). And at the heart of that cultural change is the fact that it cannot be
proclaimed. It must be embodied, and only a black person can embody it. We can
elect white people who say that race shouldn’t matter, but only the election of
a black person can establish that it really doesn’t.
So the Obama campaign is and has always been all about race, and especially
about anti-racism as progressive politics. Whether or not he ultimately wins,
and especially if he doesn’t, we are still being shown the “progressive” wing of
the Democratic Party leading Americans toward an increasingly open and equal
society, for African-Americans and also for Asians and Latinos and women and gays.
But the problem with this picture – a problem that is also a crucial part of its
attraction – is that it is false. There has been extraordinary, albeit
incomplete, progress in fighting racism, but the picture is false because that
progress has not made American society more open or equal. In fundamental
respects it is less open and equal today than it was in the days of Jim Crow
when racism was not only prevalent but was state-sponsored.
The hallmark of a neo-liberal political economy is rising sensitivity about
differences of identity – cultural, ethnic, sometimes religious – and rising
tolerance for differences of wealth and income. Readers who are familiar with
the jargon of economic inequality will have an immediate sense of what it means
to say that equality in America has declined when I tell you that in 1947, at
the height of Jim Crow and the segregationist laws in the South, the US Gini
coefficient was .376 and that by 2006, it had risen to .464. Since on the Gini
scale 0 represents absolute equality (everyone makes the same income as everyone
else) and 1 represents absolute inequality (one person makes everything), this
is significant.
Back then, the US was in the same league as the countries of western Europe,
albeit a little more unequal than them; today we’re up there with Mexico and
China (3). In 1947, the top 20% of the US population made 43% of all the money
the nation earned. In 2006, after years of struggle against racism, sexism and
heterosexism, the top 20% make 50.5%. The rich are richer (4).
Legitimate the elite
So the struggle for racial and sexual equality – the relative success of which
has been incarnated in the race and gender politics of the Democratic Party over
the past six months – has not produced greater economic equality, but been
compatible with much greater economic inequality, and with the formation of an
increasingly elitist society (5). There is a reason for this. The battles
against racism and sexism have never been to produce a more equal society; or to
mitigate, much less eliminate, the difference between the elite and the rest;
they were meant to diversify and hence legitimate the elite.
This is why policies such as affirmative action in university admissions serve
such a crucial symbolic purpose for liberals (6). They reassure them that no one
has been excluded from places like Harvard and Yale for reasons of prejudice or
discrimination (the legitimating part) while leaving untouched the primary
mechanism of exclusion: wealth (the increasing-the-gap between the rich and
everyone else part). You are, as Richard Kahlenberg put it, “25 times as likely
to run into a rich student as a poor student” at 146 elite colleges, not because
poor students are discriminated against but because they are poor. They have not
had the kind of education that makes it plausible for them even to apply to
elite colleges, much less attend them.
What affirmative action tells us is that the problem is racism and the solution
is to make sure the rich kids come in different colours; this solution looks
attractive long after graduation, when the battle for diversity continues to be
fought among lawyers, professors and journalists – in fact, any profession with
enough status and income to count as elite. The effort is to enforce a model of
social justice in which proportional representation of race and gender counts as
success.
If what you want is a more diverse elite, electing a black president is about as
good as it gets. Electing a woman president would be a close second. But if you
want to address the inequalities we have, instead of the inequalities we like to
think we have (inequalities produced by inherited wealth and poverty); if you
want a political programme designed to address the inequalities produced not by
racism and sexism, which are only sorting devices, but by neo-liberalism, which
is doing the sorting, neither the black man nor the white woman have much to offer.
They are two Democrats who can’t even bring themselves to acknowledge publicly,
in their last debate in April, that Americans making between $100,000 and
$200,000 a year hardly qualify as middle class. Clinton committed herself “to
not raising a single tax on middle-class Americans, people making less than
$250,000 a year” and Obama (who was, as a commentator put it, “a lot squishier”
about it) also committed himself to not raising taxes on people making under
$200,000.
Root of inequality
But only 7% of US households earn more than $150,000; only 18% earn more than
$100,000; more than 50% earn under $50,000 (7). Once you have Democrats who
consider people on $200,000 as middle class and in need of tax relief, you don’t
need Republicans any more. Clinton and Obama are the emblems of a liberalism
which has made its peace with a political ethics that will combat racist and
sexist inequalities, while almost ignoring inequalities that stem not from
discrimination but from exploitation. The candidates’ death match prominently
features charges of racism and sexism.
In 1967, after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and at the beginning
of the effort to make the rights guaranteed by that act a reality, Martin Luther
King was already asking “where do we go from here?”
King was a great civil rights leader but he was more than that, and the
questions he wanted to raise were not, as he pointed out, civil rights
questions. They were, he told the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,
“questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth”.
There were then, as there are now, more poor white people than poor black people
in the US, and King was acutely aware of that. He was aware that anti-racism was
not a solution to economic inequality because racism was not the cause of
economic inequality, and he realised that any challenge to the actual cause,
“the capitalistic economy”, would produce “fierce opposition”.
King did not live to lead that challenge and the fierce opposition he expected
never developed because the challenge never did. Instead, not only the
anti-racism of the civil rights movement but also the rise of feminism, of gay
rights and of all the new social movements proved to be entirely compatible with
the capitalistic economy King hoped to oppose.
It is possible but unlikely that Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton might some day
take up King’s challenge. Neo-liberalism likes race and gender, and the race and
gender candidates seem to like neo-liberalism.
______________________________________________
Walter Benn Michaels is professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and
author of The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore
Inequality, Metropolitan, New York, 2006
(1) http://my.barackobama.com/page/comm ...
(2) William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963), the black civil rights leader,
Pan-Africanist historian and writer who became a naturalised citizen of Ghana in
1963.
(3) France is .383, Germany is .283, Sweden is .250.
(4) Social mobility in the US has declined. In a recent study for the Pew
Foundation, Isabel Sawhill and John E. Morton report that by some measurements
the US is actually a less mobile society than Canada, France, Germany and most
Scandinavian countries; http://www.economicmobility.org/ass .... They suggest
that if you want to pursue the American dream today, you need to learn German
and move to Berlin.
(5) See Serge Halimi, “US: Republican deficits”, Le Monde diplomatique, English
edition, November 2006.
(6) See John D Skrentny, “US: whose land of opportunity?” and Christopher
Newfield, “Education for sale in the land of the free”, Le Monde diplomatique,
English edition, May 2007 and September 2007.
(7) American Census Bureau; http://factfinder.census.gov
<http://mondediplo.com/2008/06/05equality>
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