Steve McFarland is a divinity student in social ethics in New York City. Community is his journal of ethics, politics, and design. It's a place to play around with the intersections of these topics in the urban context, and to store other bits and bobbles.
"[Kimberly Smith] argues that racial oppression, slavery, sharecropping and segregation altered the meaning of the American landscape for black people. She argues that these injustices alienate black Americans from the land in critical and enduring ways. Therefore, when black Americans reclaim their interest in land, nature, and the environment, they do so in ways that are uniquely concerned with equity and distributive justice."
For a while now, the “season” whose statistics, subplots, and relative greatness I track with the most enthusiasm is that of the Supreme Court of the United States, and we are in the thick of things this year.
Although it’s invigorating to see that this court found in favor of a consumer (a consumer!) in the Wyeth drug labeling case, this civil libertarian is entirely consumed by Al-Marri v. Spagone, which was just featured in a great piece in the New Yorker.
Al-Marri is the ultimate test of Bush-era indefinite detention holdings, which have represented perhaps the most shameful abrogation of American values since 2001. The Obama administration did the right thing (the right thing!) by indicting him on criminal charges and beginning a path towards justice this week, as you likely heard. They’re doing the wrong thing, and perhaps attempting to hold onto illegally broad detention powers, by using the fact of that indictment to attempt to push Al-Marri’s case off the Supreme Court docket.
Anyhow, all of this inane background for one piece of real news, via the SCOTUSblog: the justices will conference Friday on what to do with the case, and we’ll probably know by next week. As reported in the link, “The Court agreed in December to rule on Al-Marri’s case, and the government’s brief — if the case is not dismissed — is due March 23.”
A criminal indictment is a deeply reassuring first positive sign from Obama that he’ll do right by civil liberties, but here’s hoping that the SCOTUS steps up to the plate and begins to reign in executive authority. I could have ended with a sports metaphor there, but I didn’t want to bowl anybody over.
"If Cosby’s call-outs simply ended at that—a personal and communal creed—there’d be little to oppose. But Cosby often pits the rhetoric of personal responsibility against the legitimate claims of American citizens for their rights… His historical amnesia—his assertion that many of the problems that pervade black America are of a recent vintage—is simply wrong, as is his contention that today’s young African Americans are somehow weaker, that they’ve dropped the ball. And for all its positive energy, his language of uplift has its limitations."
— I don’t yet know what I think about this Atlantic piece on Bill Cosby’s conservative racial politicking of the last few years, but I’m glad I read it: ‘This Is How We Lost to the White Man’
Unprocessed notes from the Town Hall on Race and Class in America to kick off the New Yorker festival last night. These are my best attempt at transcription from the balcony of a darkened theater, but should only be taken as paraphrase. Posting this is the height of laziness, but I’m not sure what my critical reaction is at this point. I’m mulling it over, and hell - maybe I’ll even write something up here when I’ve got it together. For now:
“…all of this was held afloat by easy credit. Easy credit has been our nation’s substitute for decent wages.” -Barbara Ehrenreich
“Running a deficit defunds the left. They’ve learned how to kill social spending.” -Thomas Frank
[Speaking of placing black civil rights struggles, Dr. King, and historicizing the present] We have to have people who are willing to tell the stories, so you don’t just jump in without the context and start looking at x, y, and z. And that’s part of the discourse we’re not having.” -Cornel West
[On the ‘Culture Wars’ and discontent of the conservative heartland] “Why can’t my team have that sense of grievance?! People are seething and Palin speaks to that. They’re fucking furious!” - Frank
“[Barack Obama] is not the product of a native Black American experience.” - John McWhorter
“Martin [Luther King] has been deoderized since they had the holiday for him. If you can’t mention Martin who can you mention? There’s a difference between a quest for truth and justice, and power and the White House.” - West
“[Race is] already part of the mix. That’s part of what it is to be American, the question is when does it drop? If it comes down to Ohio, and it’s 49% Obama and 40% McCain and the Bradley Effect takes over and people get into the booth and say, ‘I-I-justcan’tdoit,” then we can say…” -West
"Competitions among grievances do not ennoble, and both Clinton and Obama strove to avoid one; but it does not belittle the oppressions of gender to suggest that in America the oppressions of race have cut deeper. Clinton’s supporters would sometimes note that the Constitution did not extend the vote to women until a half century after it extended it to men of color. But there is no gender equivalent of the nightmare of disenfranchisement, lynching, apartheid, and peonage that followed Reconstruction, to say nothing of “the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil” that preceded it. Nor has any feminist leader shared the fate of Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. Clinton spoke on Saturday of “women in their eighties and nineties, born before women could vote.” But Barack Obama is only in his forties, and he was born before the Voting Rights Act redeemed the broken promise of the Fifteenth Amendment."
— Hendrik Hertzberg nails some elements of this gender/race oppression one- upsmanship dialogue which, if it was avoided by the candidates themselves, was seized upon with gusto (to much gnashing of teeth from your author), by partisan camps on many sides. From the New Yorker’s Talk of the Town, Exhillaration.
And when I say Hillary, I really mean to include what seems to be an increasing number of Second Wave feminists advocating on her behalf: first Gloria Steinem got me worked up with her Op-Ed in the Times a month ago, detailing the case for how Women Have it Harder Than Blacks.
I really started shouting at the radio yesterday, however, when Women’s Media Center founder Robin Morgan made the similar but exponentially more outrageous implication on Day to Day that while Barack, as a man, moves through this patriarchal political system with ease, Hillary is pathologically harassed. To wit,
When a sexist idiot screamed at Hillary, “Iron my shirt!” it was considered amusing, there was a lot of chuckling on all the airwaves. If a racist idiot had shouted, “Shine my shoes!” at Barack Obama, it would have inspired pages of newsprint and hours of airtime, analyzing what would in fact have been our national dishonor. [The nutcracker made to look like Clinton] is being sold in airports. If it were a tap-dancing blackface doll, we would be righteously outraged, and yet people think this is amusing.
The essay discussed in this piece, ‘Goodbye to All That (#2),’ is here. A few things: I agree that much of this is pathological “woman-hating,” in Morgan’s word. Duly noted that Hillary’s womanhood conflicts with cultural norms around female power to her great disadvantage.
Yet Morgan’s sycophantic outrage at Hillary’s treatment completely silences racist elements of national discourse around Barack. In fact, Morgan does something worse: she acknowledges and dismisses the contemporary perniciousness of racism altogether.
By caricaturing the actual operation of racism with references to “extreme far ultra-right racists” and blackface figurines at airports, Morgan reinforces her own great white fantasy of racism’s being restricted to a small fringe of (racialized) poor whites in trailer parks. In what strikes me as her callow, threatened finger-pointing of “if this were about the Jews!” and “if this were Racists!” she does great disservice to her movement (well, it’s my movement, too, if I’m allowed that) but causes much greater harm to people of color - not only Blacks, but all communities for whom lived experience tells them that racism is not a distant memory restricted to “far ultra-right racists,” but a daily, hourly act performed on their bodies by whites and others in power. Morgan denies all that to her ends.
Of course, that’s exactly what white male patriarchy likes to see. After all, if we can keep them all fighting amongst themselves (see: Blacks and Latinos), dividing the opposition, whites maintain and even increase their supremacy as others knock each other down. It has been happening in this country for centuries (see: The Wages of Whiteness) and continues to be a powerful mechanism for the maintenance of white power. Enter Steinem and Morgan.
Finally, there is a whole other element to this discourse which I have hardly touched on in my focus on Morgan’s article but is pushed to the fore in Steinem’s ludicrous false premise of a thought experiment: “What if Barack were a black woman?”
The answer, you might guess, is “By gum, he’d have it harder! See?” In this first clip (of 4) below from an episode of Democracy Now, the crazy-impressive Melissa Harris Lacewell similarly calls out Steinem on the invisibilization of racism’s death grip on all black bodies. Where Morgan wishes to ignore race altogether, here Lacewell systematically picks apart Steinem’s more nuanced assertion that sexism is worse than racism. Things get going around 2:00 if you’re in a hurry (but I don’t think you’d be here if you were):
Lacewell makes several points I really like in that clip and the following ones, but I think I’ve said my piece - you can click through for more interesting conversation (well, Steinem basically evades engaging with Lacewell, so I’m not sure it could exactly be called a conversation).
Do I have a pithy conclusion? I don’t know, this shit tires me out. To see white woman feminists I respect divide the fight for equity and - I feel - actively, perniciously, and knowingly step upon the fight of others for their own gain and self-satisfaction makes me sick and, as Harris Lacewell says, represents the very worst of the women’s movement.
More directly: when white people use their location of power not just to grab more, but to single out historically oppressed communities as a point of leverage to that power, it is racism - plain and simple. Even when those white racists are women carrying the mantle of ‘feminism.’
No feminism I accept sees it necessary to harm others’ fight for equity for self-gain.
"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."
— Chief Justice Roberts and a majority of his court miss the boat on race, precedent, and human nature in the rendering of an infuriating decision yesterday that does much damage to the intentioned climatic ends of Brown v. Board and again opens a very large door to de facto segregation and schools that are “equal” and “integrated” like we meant it in 1954. I am so angry right now.
