[Peace-discuss] Why the Democrats are as they are
C. G. Estabrook
galliher at uiuc.edu
Wed Jun 18 20:42:56 CDT 2008
So you agree with Benn Michaels?
Jenifer Cartwright wrote:
> Hey check out the Demos report card on civil rights in the latest Crisis
> Magazine (NAACP publication). With one or two exceptions Demos get
> straight As, Repubs get straight Fs. May not matter to some of those who
> post to this list, but it definitely matters to ME!!
>
> --Jenifer
>
> --- On *Wed, 6/18/08, C. G. Estabrook /<galliher at uiuc.edu>/* wrote:
>
> From: C. G. Estabrook <galliher at uiuc.edu>
> Subject: [Peace-discuss] Why the Democrats are as they are
> To: "Peace-discuss" <peace-discuss at anti-war.net>
> Date: Wednesday, June 18, 2008, 11:20 AM
>
> 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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