[Peace-discuss] Why the Democrats are as they are
C. G. Estabrook
galliher at uiuc.edu
Wed Jun 18 22:16:13 CDT 2008
No. I think it makes the central point that discrimination on gender, race, and
class are not alike. The first two can be overcome by reconciliation; the last,
only by the liquidation of one of the positions (not necessarily the liquidation
of the people holding the positions) -- i.e., discrimination against the
exploited by the exploiter cannot be solved by reconciliation. That's why
defenders of the US system would much rather talk about race. --CGE
Jenifer Cartwright wrote:
> Civil rights matter enormously, and race is top of the list re
> that. Sure I agree w/ some of his points but not others. Mostly I think
> the essay is a buncha mental noise signifying not much, don't you?
>
> --Jenifer
>
> --- On *Wed, 6/18/08, C. G. Estabrook /<galliher at uiuc.edu>/* wrote:
>
> From: C. G. Estabrook <galliher at uiuc.edu>
> Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Why the Democrats are as they are
> To: jencart13 at yahoo.com
> Cc: "Peace-discuss" <peace-discuss at anti-war.net>
> Date: Wednesday, June 18, 2008, 8:42 PM
>
> 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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