Father K

I've gotta stop writing about depressing things.

Or, better: depressing things have to stop happening.

Today's depressing thing: a snippet of a Radiolab episode I heard today while driving. The episode, "Father K," concerns Khader El-Yateem, a Lutheran minister of Palestinian descent and Brooklyn resident for over 23 years. He was running for New York City city council. The episode looks at his campaign through the lens of the shifting demographics of the southern Brooklyn area. Historically white (Irish), it's been diversifying--gentrifying, really--lately, particularly with immigrants from parts of Asia and the Middle East. Unlike other kinds of gentrification, in this situation older white people are feeling the squeeze, seeing local housing they had long considered "theirs" gradually being priced out of their reach.

El-Yateem seems like precisely the kind of unusually patient, passionate, outgoing person who's born to be a politician--or a pastor. I mean both those in the best way. Politicians get a bad rap. Calling someone a politician can sound like a smear. But, just as our complicated society requires bureaucrats, technicians, and other specialists, so too do we require politicians. Our representative-democratic system requires that there be people like El-Yateem willing to sacrifice their privacy and mental well-being for a shot at being a servant of/by/for the people. To be sure, some are attracted to politics for less than altruistic reasons. But El-Yateem struck me as the real deal.

That hardly seems to matter, though, to a lot of the white people in south Brooklyn who'd have to vote for him if he were to find a way onto the council.

To be fair, the episode does a good job taking us on a deep dive into the complex politics of this area and of Arab-Americans in this era particularly. Arab-Americans have of course had a rough time of it in the last few decades in the US. If you come from the wrong country, you're pushed to register. The government has given this community plenty of reasons not to trust their names and information to government entities. That makes it hard to get people registered to vote. There's also a good bit of mutual distrust within the Arab-American community, between Christian and Muslim Arabs, for example, who know and hear about inter-religious violence in places like Egypt. El-Yateem, a Christian minister, is sometimes distrusted by other Arab Christians for his close ties to Muslims.

All of that tension, however, pales in comparison to the good old-fashioned racism readily apparent in some of the anonymous Brooklynites interviewed.

"That one that is running," said one, "He's Egyptian."

"He's Palestinian," journalist Simon Adler corrected gently."

"Okay. Palestinian, still Egyptian," the voice asserted flatly. "That's how I feel. It just completely turns me off." Others echoed this sentiment. These were Democrats. The "how I feel" person continued:

Anybody asks me to vote for Donald Trump. When he was running, I would turn around. I said, hell no, but I feel this is our country. This is America. And I feel American person should be in for office.

Pastor El-Yateem is of course American. 

Democrats, El-Yateem notes, are often a little more "under the table" about their anti-Arab, xenophobic, racist sentiments. But Republicans, echoing Trump, are just fine saying the quiet parts loud: immigrants are bad for white people, aka the "real" Americans.

The election in September came and went. El-Yateem lost. There were many reasons. None of the polling stations in the area (where about 10% of the population is Arab-American) had translation in Arabic available. The campaign's volunteer translators were turned away--illegally, it appears--from polling stations. The bigger reason for El-Yateem's loss? White folk. "Just in this moment," says Adler, "there were not enough white folks who would be willing to vote for an Arab candidate. Uh, no matter what."

The episode did its best to explain the white Brooklynites' sentiments in terms other than racism. And those contexts matter. Racism isn't magic; it doesn't just appear out of nowhere. But neither is it merely a side-effect of economic duress and fear. It becomes its own thing, acquires its own malignant agency. 

I'm so disappointed in white people. Just when I think I'm really, thoroughly disappointed, I hear a story like this and discover a new sub-level, an underground bunker, for new levels of dismay.

A conservative columnist today has a standard, "isn't critical race theory dumb?" column up today. "Is there any criminal thing whiteness cannot do?" his headline (which he may not have written) asks. He means the question ironically.

I'll ask it unironically and slightly altered: Is there any criminal thing whiteness will not do?

I dunno. I just don't.

JF

The Zero-Sum Frame

This last week, Boston Review writer Ronald Aronson noted a fact simultaneously stunning and depressing: President Trump's approval ratings are, so far as we can tell, among the most stable of any recorded president's.

No matter what Trump does or fails to do, he remains within the relatively narrow 35-45% range of approval. Aronson quotes Jerry Falwell, Jr. "I can't imagine him doing anything that's not good for the country," says Falwell. "I know anything he does, it may not be ideologically ‘conservative,’ but it’s going to be what’s best for this country,”

Aronson seizes on this "anything he does" as the core of Trumpism, which Aronson links to white evangelicals, Trump's strongest demographic of support (80% in the last election). Wondering how this could be so, Aronson draws on sociological research to locate this "anything he does" support in a white fear of displacement.

Diana Mutz provides Aronson his main thesis in her 2018 postmortem of the 2016 election. It is not economic anxiety, Mutz argues, that motivated this core of white voters. It is status threat, the perception among whites that other racial minorities are taking over, usurping the position of cultural, economic, and political hegemony that white people have historically enjoyed in the US. Mutz explains, "It is not racism of the kind suggesting that whites view minorities as morally or intellectually inferior, but rather, one that regards minorities as sufficiently powerful to be a threat to the status quo.”

I think this is spot-on. When I hear white conservatives grousing about racism as an overused scare-word by progressives, I see them distinguishing their beliefs (everyone is equal) from those of "real" racists like the KKK. They don't see themselves as racists--they recoil at being called racist--because they don't hold what they consider to be racist beliefs. Cue progressive eye-rolls. I'm not sure I've seen much in the way of an effective progressive response to this. By effective here I don't mean accurate but "at least as intuitively appealing as whites' denial of racism is to them."

Confronted with the "I'm not racist" response from white people, progressives like me tend to react in one or more various ways:

• You're lying to me: Sure, Jan. You really are racist--as in you believe black and brown people to be subhuman--but you know they can't just say that out loud (at least not when you think someone who'd object might hear). So you lie. Obviously, this is a strong claim. Obviously, there are some situations in which this is likely true. But, putting myself into a white conservative's shoes, I can see why this response wouldn't exactly elicit self-reflection and trust. It's a battle blow--you're a bad-faith actor--not a call to dialogue. (Sometimes a battle blow is what's called for, but I'm restricting myself to situations of dialogue and outreach.)
• You're lying to yourself (cognitive dissonance): That is, you really do harbor racist beliefs (e.g., distrust of people of color, belief that white people are smarter/better/more deserving than others, stereotypes about black and brown people). But your self-image is of someone who does not believe such things. So you lie to yourself, creating elaborate rationales for racist beliefs and feelings that somehow excuse you of racism (ex: I don't hate black people! I have black friends! I hate lazy people, and black people are more likely to be lazy. That's not racism; that's just facts...). Because the lying-to-yourself response is subtler than a charge of bad-faith mendacity,  progressives like me often proffer it as a way of preserving some sense of good faith (or, at least, preserving the sense that we progressives operate in good faith). And, like the deception response, it may be true in some cases. But, again, in terms of how someone is likely to take it? Well, I wouldn't usually be open to someone telling me that I'm mistaken in or deluded about my account of my own thoughts and beliefs. I'm more likely to hear that message as an attack, which it kind of is.
• You're implicitly biased: This is a favorite of late, a version of the lying-to-self argument that has numbers-based research to quote backing it up. You can take an implicit bias test to see whether your unconscious reactions betray bias for your ethnic group and against others. The validity of these studies, as with so much else in psychological research, has been called into question. I'm less interested here in the truth or accuracy of implicit bias (it makes intuitive sense to me) than in how I'd respond as a white conservative to the charge of implicit bias. How would I respond if told, for instance, that I'm implicitly biased against people I think I'm not biased against? I'd probably be resentful, especially if I view that charge as coming from a hostile source likely to use my implicit bias against me. And that is a problem: insofar as implicit bias exists, it (1) likely exists to some extent for just about everyone; (2) gets framed as something you aren't or can't be responsible for. Of course, studies suggest one can mitigate implicit bias over time. But as a weapon in the you're-so-racist conversation, diagnosing someone with what sounds like a mental condition is of limited efficacy. (Much the same can be said, I think, about "white fragility." I think that model is accurate, but when has "well, you're just being fragile" worked to make me more open to changing my mind?)
• You're systemically racist: This response seeks to displace the idea of racism as an individual failing, replacing it with an understanding that the systems and institutions of society were build of, by, and for white privilege. It shouldn't be surprising, then, that participants in that system behave and react in ways that perpetuate that dominance, even though they may individually wish for racial equality rather than white supremacy. I'm a fan of this view. But it's tough to make it work in practice. The naive view of racism--open, explicit bigotry--is incredibly powerful (it doesn't help that open, explicit bigots are enjoying a level of publicity they haven't seen in years). Once you make racism mean "the overlapping effects of various social structures," critics ask, what do you call those racially prejudiced bigots? Moreover, these critics ask, doesn't a thoroughgoing definition of racism as systemic rather excuse people who hold racist views? Moral accountability (you should stop perpetuating racist systems) without moral agency (your racial privilege inheres in the system; you did nothing to gain it, nor can you simply wish it away) jars with white conservatives' common sense of right and wrong. (Of course, that's what makes systemic inequality so maddening for those on the losing end: they suffer the consequences without having done anything wrong except be born into a marginalized group.) It can work, but it takes a while to do. The systemic approach is so complicated that often progressives themselves avoid it. It's much more fun to label someone racist than to have a long conversation where we get on the same page about how institutional structures can perpetuate racially discrepant outcomes.

Again, just to be clear, I think each of these responses to "But I'm not racist!" might be true in certain circumstances (in nearly all circumstances for the last two). But I'm not sure whether any of them can work as part of an exchange between progressives and white conservatives. For the record, it's no one's job to participate in such an exchange. No one's under obligation to teach white people to be less racist (nor, though I may wish otherwise, are white conservatives required to listen generously to progressives calling them racist). This is lagniappe work.

But, if you're doing that lagniappe work, trying to move white people to some point where they can at least grok why they're being called out for racism, I wonder if Murtz's framing might have more potential.

Murtz's frame lets us affirm that, yes, you can personally believe that races are equal. But you can at the same time feel uncomfortable or threatened when you see a norm of representation and prestige changing in ways that make it seem like your group is losing. The problem isn't (or isn't only) a frame of "non-white people are inferior" but a frame of "social status is a zero-sum game that only one group can win." This frame can be identified. This frame can be challenged. It may be easier, at least initially, to challenge that frame than to guide/drag someone through an odyssey of self-criticism and systemic reflection.

Or it might not.

More tomorrow,

JF

The Event Horizon of Pessimism

A 2019 Pew Research survey on views of race in America demonstrates, once again, that white and black USAmericans see racism very differently. Majorities of both groups agree that race relations in American are "generally bad," but the gap is telling: 56% of white people versus 71% of black people. Similar gaps persist for questions about whether Trump has made those relations worse (49% white versus 73% black agreement) and whether the legacy of slavery "affects the position of black people in American society today a great amount" (58% white versus 84% black agreement).

The survey registers broader gaps between the two groups' responses on two other questions. Asked whether they agree with the statement, "America hasn't gone far enough in giving blacks equal rights with whites," only 37% of white respondents agreed, contrasted with 78% black agreement. The most disturbing statistic for me, however, concerned the statement, that it is "Not too/Not at all likely that black people will eventually have equal rights." Only 7% of the white respondents agreed with that. Half the black respondents (50%) agreed.

I confess that last one stunned me. I had no idea that (if Pew is accurate here) half of the African-American population shares a view roughly analogous to certain strands of Afro-pessimism. In such thinking, anti-blackness is so baked into the cake of white supremacist society that nothing short of a radical revolution (think along the lines of Killmonger's plan from the film Black Panther). Whiteness as currently lived out cannot--will never--allow black and brown people to have equal standing in post-slavery, white supremacist, settler colonialist society.

As a critical practice, Afro-pessimism works productively to resist sunny (and usually white-produced) narratives of puppies-and-rainbows racial reconciliation. It forces us to grapple with the fact that fighting racism cannot be a matter of defeating individual cartoon racists or magically transforming hearts and minds. It must (also) be a structural, comprehensive transformation--a much taller, more difficult order. Like most potent activist affects, however, pessimism carries some risks. It can curdle into preemptive defeatism and withdrawal from struggle. Things will never change; why even try? 

I don't know enough to tell whether the 50% figure reflects a grim realism, hopeless resignation, or something else altogether. It is, however, sobering for me to see.

And, just as I was thinking about that, I heard this story on NPR. Three college students at Ole Miss  had gone to the site of Emmett Till's murder, shot up the memorial sign, and posed proudly for a pic in front of their vandalism, brandishing their rifles and smiling. They posted the photo on Instagram, where it apparently received over two hundred "likes." The boys have been kicked out of their fraternity. The University condemns the actions (but has declined to take action against the boys).

It's a shockingly vile act, what they did. It's beyond disturbing that they got so much cheering for doing it.

I should amend: it's shocking to me. I suspect that for a lot of black people--maybe 50%--it's no great surprise. What can you expect? They're white people in white supremacist society. Hating black people is inevitable, natural for them.

And I don't know whether to feel grimly realistic or hopelessly resigned. Either way, it's an occasion for pessimism.

More tomorrow,

JF