History, narrative, race, and CRT

a long reply to Mary Harrington's "Gen Z's radical race politics"

I’ve been following Mary Harrington for a while now, and I’ve written a critical, but very favorable, review of her book, Feminism Against Progress. Our first point of contact—via media, I’ve never met her—was based on her critique of gender ideology, about which we very much agree. In fact, she’s an ideal spokesperson in this regard, as a veteran of genderwang herself. She’s also intelligent, insightful, and a fine wordsmith to boot.

So, I hope no one thinks I’m hating on Harrington based on this one reaction; but I have more than once been taken aback by the kind of nescience this British writer has displayed about race matters, most especially in the United States. I remember being taken aback once, watching one of her interviews, when she suggested that the Civil Rights movement (or Black Freedom movement, in my own preferred Black Radical Tradition idiom) may have been a “bad idea.”

Whatever pointed her down that path—and I give her the benefit of the doubt that she’s not herself motivated by racial animus, but by some obscurely ill-informed historical analysis—it’s certainly a remark with which many here in the US agree; you can spot them by the Confederate flag decals on their vehicles. This is why we have to be careful with our words.

To be completely fair, her editorial is not about the US, except as a kind of bad influence on the UK.

It’s a dreary day in a provincial English town. A tracksuit-wearing teenage boy affecting an exaggerated version of the “Jafaican”, which has replaced Cockney as the capital’s working-class dialect, asks a similarly dressed individual: “What nationality is the best to date?” His interviewee shuffles, then replies: “I like my white girls, innit.”

One TikTok account doth not a trend make. But, really: no one is ready for race relations Gen Z style. Wince-making discussion of the relative sexual merits of “Chinese tings” and “Punjabi tings” is, in truth, the least politically virulent version of an emerging race-first mindset, already discernible in far more aggressive forms across the youth on both Left and Right.

The bipartisan rise in the salience of race reflects the changing priorities of an empire whose attitude to ethnic politics has always been ambivalent: the United States. And the demographic at the bleeding edge of the new racism is Gen Z, the group born 1997-2012.

And so begins her editorial . . . the “rise in the salience of race” is “racism”—a ubiquitous and erroneous right-wing talking point, intended as such or not.

Mary Harrington is part of a kind of pre-political discussion called postliberalism, about which I’ve written in the past, and of which I count myself a not particularly significant participant. If there were a Venn diagram of participants, one of the overlaps from “right” and “left” would certainly be opposition to gender ideology. More and more, one of those overlaps is also capitalism . . . a welcome development from where I stand.

In explaining my discomfort with Ms. Harrington’s editorial for Unherd, "Gen Z's radical race politics," I’m going to subdivide the prologue into the categories of peer-bias, online-bias, ahistoricism, and over-generalization.

Peer-bias

Peer-bias is a well-understood phenomenon. We all tend to both absorb and reflect back the biases and preoccupations of our peers. For one thing, we seek acceptance. But beyond psychologizing, which can be employed as a form of lazy dismissal, there’s the combined matter of narrowed exposure and thought silos. Those of us who critically observe US media are well familiar with what Katherine Dee, iirc, described as relatives who’ve been “body snatched” by Fox News or MSNBC. In a milder form, peer-bias likewise comes with certain blinders. In fact, it can be a simple matter of position and exposure instead of ideological capture.

I’ve followed several “gender-ideology-critical” women’s recent careers as public intellectuals—Mary Harrington, Nina Power, Abigail Favale, Christine Emba, and Louise Perry—all of whom have had contact with one another, and I believe, in some cases, have become personal friends. What they’ve shared is a similar misery, that of being “cancelled” and even attacked for their quite sensible views on gender ideology. For that, they’ve been denounced as TERFs.

Common enemies can be the basis of social solidarity, even fast friendship. Being labeled a TERF (trans-exclusionary-radical-feminist) is, in many liberal circles now a form of social death, and one that can be applied not merely to the tiny subset of actual McKinnon-style “radical feminists” but to anyone who refuses to bow to this pop-poststructuralist ideological idol.

These are public intellectuals who need to be heard, because this has become no small issue, if that means being heard through outlets with whom one does not necessarily share the same orientation—political, cultural, or metaphysical—then so be it. These women have been welcomed into more “right wing” spaces (a term I’ll take on momentarily under the heading ahistoricism), where they’ve found common ground with people others have already declared mortal enemies. As a Christian, I’m compelled to approve of the inhering pacifism of this reaching out.

This isn’t without its problems. No doubt, when “conservative” think tanks and the Patreon Right invite these women, they are at least to some degree tactically motivated by what they perceive to be a fight-to-the-death culture war.

I doubt any of these women are so naive as to miss this; and yet, contrary to culture war ideologues, they are also cognizant of the fact that this may not be their hosts’ sole motivation. Some of their interlocutors from “the right” are, in fact, as principled as they are, in spite of any disagreements, and willing to suspend hostilities for the sake of conversation and plain human decency.

To be more specific, and to bring my own heterodox point of view into the mix, there really are some potential metaphysical convergences orbiting around the “zero measure in an embedding phase space,” or strange attractor.

That measure involves a suspicion of liberal modernity’s certainties. Mary Harrington, especially, has made a point of calling into question the myth of Progress. She’s even been challenged by several “right” interlocutors on this, because this challenge goes to the heart of where liberal modernity got it wrong. I’ve enjoyed her incisive and articulate responses on this account.

She’s been more well-received by those with greater philosophical (and often theological) depth on this question.

Where I admit to growing uncomfortable with her conversation partners, and with her at times, is in their embrace of “tradition” as The Alternative, in particular when this entails apologetics for nationalism and clutching at the skirts of a reification (or idol) called “Western civilization.” (No, I’m not “against” Western civilization, because it is a reification. I prefer more granular narratives.)

Capital T “Tradition” is most often invoked as a toxic combination of mythicized nostalgia and authoritarianism. Unlike tradition, as described by Aristotelian philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, which is a “handing down” (tradere), concretized in various practices and subject to constant refinements, Tradition is a resistance to any change that challenges existing (or past) power. I won’t say resistance to authority, because there’s some further distinction required here to understand when and how power is legitimated by authority or delegitmated by its lack, and how this evades the apprehension of “authoritarians.”

Turning to Augusto Del Noce, Catholic critic of liberalism par excellence, he unpacks this subtle distinction with great precision. I won’t do justice to his 58-page argument in The Crisis of Modernity, but I’ll try to list the crucial highlights. At the outset, Del Noce warns against “reaction, in the sense of idolizing a past historical order.” Being a good Catholic philosopher, Del Noce describes genuine authority as resting metaphysically upon the “superhuman,” or God: “Thus, the idea of authority implies (a) that truth has a super-human character, so that dependence on it coincides with liberation from domination by other men: (b) that man not obey some arbitrary power; (c) on the other hand, that such dependence not be transferred into God Himself; in other words, that his ‘wisdom’ not be understood as a norm . . .” (p. 195)

Mentioning super-humanity leads us to connect the the idea of authority with those of tradition and religion. But the idea of authority [etymology—to help grow -SG] is not compatible with any content whatsoever: in that case, it would reduce to faithfulness to and continuation of some past. It is in this sense that people speak of “national tradition,” inverting the correct order and subordinating the “traditional spirit” to the philosophical tradition most opposed to it, namely pragmatism (the philosophical foundation of nationalism is indeed positivistic or pragmatic). In this way, values are not respected—even if they are said to be supreme—inasmuch as they are considered only from the perspective of their civilizing function. (p. 196)

This is part of my issue with the integralists, by the way; but this is the company many of us keep from time to time in the context of the larger postliberal conversation. The trick is to step back occasionally and take stock of where it’s leading. Whereas liberalism (this is a claim by Ivan Illich, who both Mary Harrington and I read) begun as an historical perversion of the Gospels is now leading us into a kind of managerial nihilism, there is also the danger of peer-bias in the direction of reaction . . . one reason I remain very uncomfortable with her internet brand, “reactionary feminism.” It’s not something one should wish to live into, no matter how it entertains us by triggering the libs or how effectively it functions as clickbait.

Online-bias

Speaking of clickbait.

Harrington has admitted, and even ritually decried, the fact that she (and all of us, to an extent . . . the reader now is probably online) are denizens of virtual “reality.” We’re operating in a disembodied and deceptive conceptual space that can lull us into passively believing that what goes on in this “here-not-here” is representative of the world and our lives. But the fact is, online media are designed for us to “self” select into intellectual silos, nation- and class-specific obsessions, and warring tribes.

Harrington herself begins the second paragraph of her editorial about “Gen-Z’s” racial “radicalism” with the concession, “One TikTok account doth not a trend make.” But then she goes on to claim that the post in question is exemplary . . . of an entire generation.

One of the other pernicious features of the internet—to which I myself often fell prey when I was a kind of professional ideologue more than two decades ago—is that one can seize onto an idea, like the perceived politics of a generation, and in very short order find all manner of selectively supporting material. Online-bias meets online-confirmation-bias. This tendency is enhanced when one writes for publications. I was a regular contributor to Counterpunch, Huffingtonpost, and several far more sectarian online publications back in the day, and of course that also made me a regular reader of other contributors, who—even though we weren’t physically co-located—felt as if they were colleagues. It would be dishonest for me to say that I wasn’t unduly influenced by them to the exclusion of many unseen points of view.

As people from Audre Lorde to Robin Dunbar have understood, the human being has a finite amount of time and attention. This banal fact coincides with another fact: that each person is a phenomenological world unto herself. Put these together, and we are each of us predisposed to the—again, passive—belief that the world at large is a larger version of our own ideational homunculus.

In Ms. Harrington’s case, especially as she’s gained a following (which has included me), I suspect she’s become even more enclosed by virtual reality, and by its class-allocations. Most of her generalizations really only apply to what she herself refers to as the “chattering class.” PMC liberals, if you will. I crack on them myself occasionally, because they’re a source of constant political frustration to me as someone who has been politically “left” since before I retired from the Army some 29 years ago. This subclass exercises power. They’ve exercised it against the left far more effectively than they have the right (2016, PMC defeats Sanders, loses to Trump. I even heard then-MSNBC-blowhard Chris Matthews say, at one point when Bernie Sanders was particularly strong, perhaps it’s better to have Trump and try again in four years.)

Ahistoricism

Now that we’re on the whole right-left thing, it’s time to talk about how the editorial under review here cops entirely to a right-wing version of the left-right polarity that appears utterly blind to the history and content of this taxonomy. And to the way it has articulated with race in the US, for that matter. First of all, we’ve had the “ratchet effect.”

The French Revolution is where this right-left terminology started, but we’ll give that a pass today, and just begin with the Great Depression. Back then, and even until relatively recently, “left” referred to working class solidarity and “right” referred to ruling class solidarity. These were primarily labor activism and economic-policy categories.

Race entered into the equation, because the entire US economy still structurally depended upon the economic and political subjugation of African Americans in the former Confederacy. “WASP” hegemony in the South (and mostly in the North, too, to be honest) was not characterized by what Harrington calls “Western-style egalitarian universalism.” That is a far more recent cover story.

Racist ideas were so blithely accepted back then that even many socialists were timid about challenging the race system. The exceptions, apart from black people who were kicked around as the identifiable racial others, were the Communists. Unlike some of its other leftist counterparts, the CPUSA went head first into the South and “the race question.”

Robin D.G. Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe—Alabama Communists During the Great Depression would be a good starting point for Harrington and others who might be interested in this history. They didn’t only mount the defense of the Scottsboro boys, they helped found and support the African Blood Brotherhood (mostly West Indians), the American Labor Negro Congress, the Sharecroppers Union, and the multiracial Southern Tenant Farmers Union.

This was when “the left” first became identified with “the race question” in America, because there was a clear recognition that race wasn’t merely a social construct, but a material-economic one that constituted an impediment to working class solidarity. It still is. I’d invite Mary Harrington to visit Jackson, Mississippi or Little Rock, Arkansas, instead of New York. There’s no “color-blindness” there. The dominant white minority is very self-consciously so; and the black majorities in those towns can no more afford “color blindness” than a rabbit can afford to ignore a hawk. History matters, and as Faulkner once quipped, “The past is never dead. It's not even past.”

“Western civilization” looks different from different positions.

What the real, historically-situated left recognized—even as modernists—was that racially-coded super-exploitation has been (and remains in many places here) part of the structural foundation of ruling class power. Note in the map above, that these states still retain a white majority, and that white majority has remained strongly Republican ever since Democrats passed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. The most recent exceptions have been in Northern Virginia, and parts of metropolitan North Carolina and Georgia, where large numbers of in-migrants have, driven by economics, arrived from the North and West.

Now, to the “ratchet effect.”

That pretty much sums it up. That’s why one can accurately say that Obama—who idiots on the right have called “a socialist”—was demonstrably a Reagan Republican. I’m sure our British counterparts, who aren’t blinded to all other realities by culture war, might recognize Tony Blair here.

Part of this effect is ideological consolidation, i.e., the redefinition of the terms “right” and “left.” We participate in that ahistorical consolidation when we fail to challenge these redefinitions; and we likewise fail when we allow them to be pulled wholly into a culture war narrative.

This can be intellectually strenuous. It’s far easier, and lazier, to go with the flow, like calling a neoconservative, neoliberal warmonger like Hillary Clinton a “leftist,” because she employs liberal race talk (against the left, I might add) with all the moral sensibility of Genghis Khan.

I realize that I’m staying with African America here as exemplary, and that there are other racial dynamics in the US (especially around immigration, as it is in the UK), but Harrington cited the US as all that’s going wrong in the UK, so I’m going to continue to explicate some nuances that are lost in her over-generalizations and outright errors.

I admit to being a bit triggered—as the length of this post may indicate—because I am myself a member of what I have called a “military creole” family (mixture of white, black, Meso-American, East Asian, American Indian, and Pacific Island); and these panics about “multiculturalism” make all the caution lights on my control panel light up.

Race and class in the US (and UK, I suspect) can neither be totally merged, nor can they be separated. By race, I mean something historical and not biological. Here’s where we start on that intellectually strenuous part.

The Obama Phenomenon

In the United States, every politico-cultural thing is inflected by race. It’s not some imposition from “woke” Gen Z-ers.

We are, after all, the inheritors of racial capitalism, of the racialized colonization of this hemisphere, of racialized genocide and expropriation, of wealth built up on race-based slave labor, of racialized imperial expansion, embedded in a racial “progress” myth (yes, it was racial, not colorblind!) . . . and we live today with official xenophobia, with the legacy of the New Jim Crow of redlining and mass incarceration, and with stubbornly well-sustained racial gaps on every social index.

Our public discourse is still white, phallocentric, imperial, and capitalist—this is part of what hegemony means, and why it’s so difficult to uproot. The colonizers oversee the development of land and labor; but they also oversee the colonization of our minds. White supremacy, male supremacy, imperial noblesse oblige, “social hygiene,” and the myth of progress are the epistemic architecture of liberal capitalist modernity. Historically speaking, white, phallocentric, and imperial have always been constitutive of real capitalism (and inextricable from it). This was the real WASP consensus that Mary Harrington has egregiously mis-characterized.

Celebrity worship is part of that epistemic architecture, too. In a world with no afterlife, public esteem becomes a sort of desperate currency, a blank check written against the perceived nothingness of eternity. We worship celebrities, but also celebrity itself, something about which we can fantasize ourselves. This is the world of modern simulation, our entrapment by modernity’s cold, sterile objectivism, our attempted escapes into representation.

The problem, from the perspective of some of us, is that social orders become self-organized within their hegemonic frameworks, almost like a biome wherein each organism finds its niche until the whole becomes cyclically stable. The difference being that liberal capitalist modernity is a biome that systematically destroys its own diversity—a slow suicide system. (You see, nature has shown that actual diversity is essential to the health of a biome.)

When social orders are generalized across large scales, this niche-maximization (by post-subsistence people who have to seek out money to survive) becomes niche-dependency. I have my little spot, my little job, my little home, and I have to protect it to survive. In this way, I come to protect the larger social order by protecting my little piece of it, situated there in the stable whole.

Cognitive dissonance kicks in around the contradiction between my belief in some form of justice and my need to survive as a dependent within hegemonic structures. To live with myself I seek out narratives that seem to reconcile my actions with my sense of justice. I rationalize, extensively and elaborately, and find that I have now accepted, even naturalized and become an apologist for, the epistemic architecture of liberal capitalist modernity.

This phenomenon is even more powerful when we venture outside of the context of one “individual” in his or her niche to encounter actual people—who live in families, with obligations to others that further complicate the moral dilemmas of we subalterns. I could rebel, but what will that mean for my children? I think it was David Harvey who said something like, “The greatest force for working-class conformity in the United States was the 30-year mortgage.” Defy the establishment, and your children will suffer.

Within the United States, and here I’m cribbing those black communists from the Great Depression, there is another nation (in the older sense of a shared history, language, and culture, not a nation-state) we might call African America. No longer totally African, and not totally assimilated as “Americans”—a kind of creole nationality. In many places in the US, this “nation” is very like a colony—colonies being subaltern social formations that are simultaneously politically suppressed and mined for profit.

World system theorists divide the world into metropolitan cores, and peripheries (colonies or post-colonies, where value is extracted under the supervision of colonial surrogates, and that value is returned to the cores where even the working classes can get an imperial benefit). There are also semi-peripheries —places like India, for example—where the colonial surrogates begin to amass enough power vis-à-vis the cores to begin building up a “middle-class” base of support for colonial and post-colonial ruling classes. African America is further complicated by geography, because it is an internal periphery (and, for some privileged few, a semi-periphery^^^).

Peripheries adapt, and one of those adaptations is this generation of liaisons between the white-liberal-capitalist core and the most powerful members of the semi-periphery which develop into political alliances. These alliances are developmental of something akin to colonial surrogates.

Colonial surrogates can become powerful in their own right. In the US, this often means “delivering votes,” in exchange for support of careers and pet projects. But again, we come back to that cognitive dissonance. If one is performing as a power-broker between the periphery and the core, that person needs a rationalization. No one, even the most cynical, believes he or she is a bad person. We can’t. We need rationalizations, and when there is a threat to our sense of justifiable personhood, we can be quite aggressive in our own defense. People readily believe their own rationalizations.

It’s more complicated still, because one might become part of what I’ll call African American civil society for the genuine purpose of helping one’s community. When you live in a stable biome, you seek out the niches that are available. Let me do a short definitional excursus on this thing I’m calling “civil society.”

Civil society has several meanings, but for our purposes, we’ll just say it means influencers. In modern, liberal-capitalist society, there’s a hierarchy of power. The ultimate power resides with the ruling class—the big bourgeoisie, the mega-money folks . . . in our neoliberal phase over the last four-plus decades, these are Wall Street types . . . or finance capital, to which productive capital has become subordinate. These capitalists exist in a partnership with the state, the state-finance nexus if you will. The state is the official arm of power with its legal monopoly on violence. So far, this class is a fraction of around one tenth of one percent.

On the other end, there is the bottom 90 percent of the people have no appreciable power at all . . . unless they unite in various ways against the ruling class.

In between is civil society, the retainer class. Civil society, this class of influencers, are in that zone between the one-percenters and the 90 percent. This civil society fraction (9.9/100?) is what stands between the tiny ruling class and that vast working class. They engage with the working class on behalf of the ruling class (knowingly or not) to prevent and-or attenuate any restlessness among the 90 percent that might threaten the ruling class. They influence the working class to accept and even embrace the existing hierarchies. Civil society does this through media, entertainment, think tanks, non-profits, churches, businesses, and charities.

I worked for and with non-profits for a while, and we were plugged into think tanks, other bigger non-profits, churches, businesses and charities. Some do projects, some do issues. We did issues. One was money-and-politics (for which we received some of the actual “Soros money”), another was nuclear power, still another was Veterans For Peace, against war, yet another dealt with labor and environmental justice . . . all these are good things. In the current system, the only way to get the resources (money) to advance our cases (and construct a few jobs [niches] in the process) was by filing for corporate status as 501-whatevers. Availability, right? Maybe not, as we’ll see further down.

In subaltern communities—like African America—fewer people have the means and opportunity to get the formal education alongside the informal cross-cultural competencies of relative privilege to participate in African American civil society. Liaison with the white “core” is among the key duties and responsibilities of African American civil society, and it creates a kind of brain drain from the working class into this hazardous demilitarized zone of liberal civil society, by those of good will as well as opportunists. There are many non-profits, for example, that are organized to answer real crises, crises created by the very structures whose epistemic architecture we are obliged to inhabit.

All that to say, I am not conflating all non-profits. Some folks inhabit structures tactically for the purpose of deconstructing them. But in the larger scheme of things, where capital calls the shots, those initiatives that support capital or give it cover will be better resourced than those that do not. The rest will be used as pressure release valves. Whoever pays the piper calls the tune.

Historically speaking, African America—from Reconstruction forward—has struggled to exist inside this white supremacist nation-state. During Reconstruction, African American civil society germinated among self-help groups, schools, churches, funeral societies, cooperatives, and other formations. The general belief (though not totalizing) was that African America might be eventually incorporated into the surrounding society as equals.

With no access to the means of production, however, upward mobility was restricted. The emergent African American sub-bourgeoisie did not control banks or factories, and so could only engage in entrepreneurial activities that remained dependent on credit from white financial capital and supply chains from white productive capital. Wealth within the internal colony was accumulated by church leaders alongside retail and service enterprises—barber and beauty shops, funeral homes, corner stores, etc. Big capital cashed in from afar, concealing their presence behind black bodies, but retaining the real power.

These were the upwardly mobile families that learned two things: first, you have to be able to work with suppliers (white folks), and second, your credibility depends on performing white respectability. The latter emphasis on respectability politics remains powerful today. In 1998, Randall Kennedy wrote about the struggle for respectability in African America:

A . . . core intuition of the politics of respectability is that, for a stigmatized racial minority, successful efforts to move upward in society must be accompanied at every step by a keen attentiveness to the morality of means, the reputation of the group, and the need to be extra-careful in order to avoid the derogatory charges lying in wait in a hostile environment.

This kind of grasping at respectability, especially among classes of people who are trying to “move up,” for whatever group in whatever time, is not primarily motivated by economic concerns; money is a means to an end, but the goals are status and acceptance. This grasping for status, however, has powerful economic consequences. Respectability has fashion and consumption codes; but these in turn demand the circulation and accumulation of money. Respectability, then, lives inside the epistemic architecture of capitalism, and its closest material companion is consumption.

Complicating an already contradictory situation is the struggle of any subaltern community to overcome the dominant narrative of innate inferiority and its attendant self-loathing and loss of self-esteem. The fightback against these conjoined phenomena includes “proof of equality” strategies and the quest for paragons (Oprah, Obama).

In a world of limitations, the most privileged, talented, and driven will press into those arenas which are available. In the US, those available arenas for racial paragons have been entertainment—whether media or sports (often the same thing)—both of which remain dependent upon “white money.” Now, some few African Americans are actual members of the haute bourgeoisie, and identify with its interests completely, which means stability in a system where the subjected status of African America is built into its structures.

Politics has also become one of those arenas . . . Democratic Party politics, that is, for our day and age.

Barack Obama went to law school, worked in non-profits, and rose up as a political figure inside Chicago’s white “Daly machine.” Comfortably bi-racial, with an uncanny practical political instinct, he fitted himself into that bourgeois racial-demilitarized zone where the one-percent celebrates its own diversity without challenging the structures of capital still dependent on the broader stability of racially-stratified capitalism.

Barack Obama became, as the first African American head of the American state, a racial paragon. And I cannot dismiss this . . . our own biracial children were buoyed by his victory, and it gave them—and millions of other black kids (including ours)—a refreshed sense of their own potential. Symbolism is not mere. It has material force.

Obama was not only a paragon and a symbol. He fitted in with a form of African American political conservatism that’s still dominant. Not ideological conservatism, though there’s plenty of that, but tactical conservatism.

Joe Biden’s 2020 candidacy was a perfect example or this. Black folks knew damn well that Biden was one of the chief attack dogs against Anita Hill, that he was an apologist for racist opposition to busing, that he promoted the carceral state, that voted consistently for war, that he peddled influence, and that he can drift into incoherence at the drop of a hat.

The political calculus—possibly from long association with the multiracial Democratic Party—is based on a linear-continuum theory of American politics. The theory goes: there is an ideological left, a center, and a right—equally populated by the white majority—and that to win against the right (read, hostile, frequently-racist Republicans), it’s necessary (as a form of collective self-defense!) to have candidates that are marginally better than Republicans who can “appeal to the (white majority) center.”

This is a niche-protection strategy, and it’s generational. As a rule, the older we get, the more firmly we are committed to our beliefs and the more conservative we become with regard to dramatic change, or the threat of it. One thing that most, older Democratic voters agree on, white, African American, and other, is this linear-continuum theory of American politics. Because, for a time, it was true during that generation’s most politically formative years.

The problem is that it was true only with respect to defeating the right-est of the right-wing electorally. This peaked with Bill Clinton, who, once elected, rode the speculative wave of the nineties to sustained popularity (a highly leveraged speculative orgy that went bust a few years later under Bush with little modification), and it has not worked since. Gore, Kerry, and Clinton all crashed and burned.

Obama defied the trend with a powerful grassroots ground game and strong youth and African American support—riding Hope-and-Change to victory against dreadful Republican opponents who were strapped to the Bush II legacy like a giant shit-bomb.

There’s no doubt that Obama was a skilled politician, as well as a skilled orator, and a man who, with his family, exudes respectability.

“They’re such a classy family.”

It’s a potent mix, and all of us can remember how people admired the First Lady’s social skills, civility, and decorum . . . which came into stark relief as compared with the Trump’s family of psychopathic opportunists, mashers, thieves, and bullies.

The irony was that black respectability—once seen as a way of gaining white acceptance—has not won over white society except among a fraction of white civil society that was already in Obama’s camp.

As African America performed respectability all the way up into the Oval Office, the most reactionary fraction (and a big one at that) of white society had abandoned respectability altogether in favor of open fascistic intimidation and threats of terror.

It was an easy transition, because behind the public political scenes, this intimidation and terror remained part and parcel of black life in parts of America, even with a select group of black leaders and influencers invited into the champagne rooms of the retainer class.

All of this is new and not new. There’s an echo of the historic struggle within African America here, between the ideas and practices of accommodationists, separatists, and rebels—each of whom presented compelling narratives. If we think back to W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, and Booker T. Washington, we can find it. DuBois embraced a race-conscious class struggle narrative. Garvey was one of several popular separatists. Washington was an accommodationist. Of all these, it’s easiest to denounce Washington (from this far distance) for being unmanly or whatever; but we have to bear in mind that Washington did not see the struggle as between rebellion and accommodation—as DuBois had framed it. These debates were backgrounded by waves of lynching. Booker T. Washington saw the choice as one between accommodation and extermination.

It’s never simple.

Right or wrong, effective or ineffective, this is the essence of tactical political conservatism. There are still black communities where this stark choice is closer to the surface than any white community can fully comprehend. White “progressives” (I hate that word!!!) would do well to get their teeth into this reality and not let go. There’s a lot more to reasonably fear from dramatic change of any kind for subaltern communities than there is for white people drinking overpriced coffee as they discuss how they want to “build a new future” and facile white leftist reductions of Obama to a neoliberal. (Yes, he is, but there’s more to it than that!)

Surely we remain aware of the ways in which we, who opposed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and critically supported Obama in 2008 and 2012, had to call out Obama and Clinton on their dreadful policies on the one hand, while defending them against right-wing attacks that were explicitly sexist and racist on the other.

It’s a delicate dance for anyone—especially white folks—to criticize Obama. Obama-as-paragon and Obama-as-symbol are not going away. Because, while it should not be a totalizing idea, it’s still important. And I will say this to the chagrin of some, but white people have little standing to judge on this account. Nonetheless, this has to be understood and further elaborated as part of a shared, and yet unshared, political reality.

What is shared is a dominant class, generalized money-dependency, and the state. What is not shared, or partially-shared, is a great deal of lived experience. Even in our multiracial family, the white folks have a different experience of the world outside our integrated homes than the “marked” racial others.

The background is changing. For starters, the capitalist end-game is coming into view right now—with runaway climate catastrophe less than two decades away, the house of financial cards growing higher and more precarious, and the insurgency of potentially-violent reactionary politics.

The latter was mirrored by a growing anti-austerity movement around the world . . . and one growing inside the United States, embodied for a time in the Sanders electoral challenge—essentially an anti-austerity campaign by another name. Anti-austerity—whether in Haiti or Spain or Ireland or Iraq or Sudan or Chile—meant anti-neoliberal. It was liberals, not the right, who stamped it out.

The African American political establishment has been thoroughly incorporated into Democratic Party politics. The way up, through civil society, is a selection process. Whether through non-profits, small business, or the Academy, that way up is competitive. When I was getting paid with Soros money, we were in a cutthroat competition for grant money, even against our ideological allies . . . sometimes especially against out ideological allies. Upward mobility meant pleasing the money-people, and pleasing the money-people meant delivering something in return. You had to demonstrate your ability to persuade and organize a real base. You had to have influence.

It’s unsurprising that much of the leadership in black communities emerged from the church. Preachers are, by definition, influencers. On the other hand, among black academics, business administration remains the most popular major.

Every gate upward is controlled by capital; and capital, the social relation, makes people compete with their peers to get through those gates. Here is a niche, if you can “earn” it. Once you’ve earned it, be aware, you can always lose it again. This demand to fit in is closely related to the respectability politics that was embodied by Obama, a veteran of non-profit-dom.

When Randall Kennedy—himself a promoter of respectability politics—described “the need to be extra-careful in order to avoid the derogatory charges lying in wait in a hostile environment,” he could have been describing what I saw in the non-profit world. Any black director was subject to the most vicious kinds of opposition research, something true in the larger political world as well. Any misstep drew glee from the right and “what a shame” horseshit from liberals.

One particularly poisonous thing a friend described to me was how 501(c)(3)s that were floundering would hire a black female director. The gamble was (in the “social change” non-profits) that a token of diversity might improve fundraising, and if the already-failing project went belly-up, the white liberal funders could cluck their tongues and say . . . “What a shame,” meaning she just wasn’t ready, or some comparably insipid trope. The she would be saddled with the failure, while her white predecessors would have already been hired elsewhere.

Once you’ve earned it, be aware, you can always lose it again. That’s the white establishment’s finger trap. Remember, we can always shake our heads and mutter, “What a shame!”

Legacy-thought

All these interfolding phenomena, over time, have involved a trialectic between deterministic generalities and structures, particularistic histories and relations, and singular local realities, as well as the dominant perceptions and misperceptions of each era. Sometimes—in fact, most times—the perceptions and misperceptions are based on “legacy-thinking” that hasn’t caught up with existing reality except “at home.” Most legacy-thinking originates at home. That’s why belief systems are so generationally resilient. Our families were our first and most formidable interpretants of the world.

The power of legacy-thinking can be summed us thus:

I can describe with great accuracy what is going on in this room right now.

If I’m describing the town I live in, there is more legacy-thought—ideas about things I have formed earlier and not yet been disabused of—in my perception of the town’s realities.

If I’m describing the nation or the world, I have an even greater reality-deficit.

This spatio-temporal lag is something with a military analog.

In Korea, they fought using WWII tactics through serial failures, then in Vietnam, they fought using Korea tactics through serial failures, then in Iraq, they began using Vietnam ideas that resulted in serial failures, and so on. If the Peter Principle for bureaucracies says that “One moves up to his or her first level of incompetence,” then my own principle for these warfighting doctrines would say, “We always fail with the old tactics first.”

Legacy-thinking may be right or wrong; but what is right one day can be wrong the next. The antidote is more information in new interpretive frameworks (not reactionary return to capital-T Tradition).

The same thing applies more generally to us older folks—of all ethnicities—because we coast similarly into new realities with old ideas . . . new wine in old wineskins. President Obama’s popularity is based in part on this, too. Older white liberals are among the most ardent Obama-worshippers I’ve encountered. “He has such a classy family.” “He is so articulate.” (yup)

Older white liberals, however, are not in anyone’s gunsights the way black folks are. Their perception of Obama-as-respectable-paragon is not the same kind of paragon as he is in African America. White liberals approve of him because he is, for them, “one of the good ones,” meaning he fits white-established norms of education, polish, and respectability. He can be every white liberal’s proverbial “black friend.” Ironically, I see a kind of reverse mirror-image of this in Mary Harrington’s editorial, when she writes:

So as America has diversified, one side-effect has been opening space for a broader spectrum of ethnic in-group lobbies within the corridors of power, all while undermining the Wasp doctrine of universalism.

Again, the WASP consensus has never been one of universalism. This is a cover story. The real demand has always been for total assimilation into the liberal order, not “universalism.”

White liberals will never fully comprehend the attitude of self-defense that African America lives inside every day. African Americans cannot escape their “blackness” in a dangerous white world, where the only political bunker seems to be the perfidious Democratic Party (something the DP depends upon absolutely). And for white liberals, Obama cannot have the same meanings as he does for a people who are constantly bombarded with messages of inadequacy, who are starved for the counter-fact that a black man was once the chief-of-state for “the most powerful nation.”

Does all this lead to reflexive defenses of the indefensible? Of course. It’s an aspect of hero-worship that’s generalizable. On the other hand, what indefensible actions taken by President Obama were consistent with likewise indefensible actions by his white predecessors and successors? It’s a negative defense, but sometimes that’s what you have. And yes, Obama substantially strengthened the executive security-state power that Trump came to inherit (and now Biden).

Come the year, 2020

I’ve emphasized race so far, but let’s not lose track of class relations. As I suggested earlier, the US ruling class is all about diversity these days. There is no problem bringing a few people of color, women, and a few sexual minorities into the ruling class. As long as they understand their duties and responsibilities. In fact, the more vulnerable on other accounts the better, because people are going to protect their niche . . . they will conform. They will not rock that little boat. And the boat they’re not rocking is built around a framework of structural inequality.

In 2020, we approached a crucial election, faced in the immediate term with the necessity to rid ourselves of the self-serving pyscho-infant in the White House, and faced with the longer (but still short) term crises of militant reaction, climate destabilization, ecocide, mass migration, civil war, and potential financial collapse.

Not everyone is aware of how immanent these crises are—in many respects they are already here. Ruling class perception managers are hard at work to provide us with the rationalizations we need to reassure ourselves that we are good people and that things will somehow work out. They’ve already been effective at convincing most of us that they are motivated by more than the desire to accumulate more, by some Pollyanna version of the common good (that only incidentally requires us to buy their shit).

The persistence of Joe Biden’s popularity in the face of his personal history was in part attributable to his association in the popular imagination with President Obama. We already know, some of us at least, that the ruling class, embodied in part in the Democratic Party establishment, knows how to tip their spears against the left with women, sexual minorities, and people of color—how to weaponize identity. And that has worked to an extent. But just as importantly, or more so, Biden was the tactically conservative choice as legacy-thinking led us back to the linear continuum theory of elections.

Seldom mentioned was that Obama tactically selected Biden as running mate/VP precisely to appeal to that mythical white center that leans slightly to the right. And this might suggest that it worked because of that tactic. It was not. President Obama was the beneficiary of a confluence of factors, including his phenomenal ground game, strong establishment backing, really incompetent Republican challengers, strong youth support, and record turnouts among African Americans. Given his margins of victory, that five percent that is the actual shifting white center—which included the Obama-Trump voters. Obama-Trump voters are those who voted for Obama in 2008–2012 then switched to Trump in 2016.

The white-right center represented by Biden was insufficient to account for Obama’s victory . . . but this 2016 defection from Obama to Trump (13% of Trump’s vote!) was determinative of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 debacle!

The reality, which flew in the face of our legacy-thinking, our old wine in the new wineskins, was that this fraction of voters, who rejected Clinton but would have substantially supported Sanders, and who finally voted with Trump, hated “free trade” agreements, had experienced decades of Democratic neglect and bullshit, and they registered their boiling resentment in a fuck-you-all vote for the Orange Baboon.

The only time that “leftist” (read: right-wing liberal) race-baiting (and genderwang) actually worked was against the historic left. That’s because “race” had been effectively separated from “class.” Returning to my earlier point about race and class, though, the alternative is not the complete merger of the two, but a continued, and nuanced, creative inter-subjective tension.

Race-class dialectic: left criticism of right-liberal racial discourse

Race/wealth statistics, or “racial inequality” discourse, has a problem: race-versus-class is a false dichotomy. An old debate teacher I had back when I was a road guard at the Red Sea told me that before one ever enters into a debate, he or she needs to read How to Lie with Statistics, by Darrell Huff. I’ll do a quick analysis of wealth inequality now, comparing white and black in the US, again not because there aren’t other groupings, but to give one example of how deceptively constrictive statistics can be.

Race here is an accepted category used in various “race-ethnicity” surveys, based on how people “identify,” whereas “race” as a biological category is rac-ist drivel. Race is an organizing principle and the basis of solidarity in various struggles precisely because this phony biological category marks actual people. Race may not be a biological reality, but it is inescapably a historical and political one. If you don’t like it, or it’s inconvenient to your ideology, so sorry. It’s real.

In the United States, one percent of the population holds around 40 percent of the wealth. The top ten percent holds 70 percent of the wealth. So, 40 percent for one out of a hundred, and another 30 percent for the next nine out of a hundred. It just gets worse from there. Rather than batter you with more numerical breakdowns, I’ll use this graphic:

Yeah.

Within the top one percent, there are stratifications within stratifications. The top 1/10 of one percent—around 160,000 families—holds 15 percent of wealth in the US. The top 1/100 percent—around 16,000 families—make between $7.5 million and $18.9 million a year, so that doesn’t even begin to count those who make $19 million or more.

By 2012, three greedy assholes— Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates—held wealth equivalent to the bottom 50 percent of the US. That’s well above the average for the top 1/100 of a percent.

The US has 643 billionaires. Among them, African Americans total six: Jay-Z ($1 billion), Kanye West ($1.3 billion), Michael Jordan ($2.1 billion), Oprah Winfrey ($2.6 billion), David Steward ($3.5 billion), and Robert Smith ($5 billion).

Jay-Z: 1

Gates: 89

Subtract one white dude with $89 billion and add $6,000 per person to 148 million white people. THAT is how the racial statistic gets thrown off by the top.

Most of these figures have changed, opening the gap further, during and after the pandemic. Forbes wrote in 2022 that after the pandemic hit, “the total net worth of the 643 U.S. billionaires climbed from $2.9 trillion to $3.5 trillion. During the same period, 45.5 million Americans filed for unemployment.”

Bearing this in mind, there are around 1.27 million US households in the top one percent. That leaves 127 million American households below the one percent.

Now among the one percent, 96.1 percent are white. So it’s fair to say that the US ruling class is still predominantly white. But . . . it’s also fair to say that seven out of ten of those who are below the one percent are also white; and four out of ten of those below the artificially low poverty line are also white.

So, while black poverty runs around 30 percent, and while white poverty runs at around 10 percent, when you factor in that whites are 72 percent of the population, there are 7.8 million poor black people in the US and 19 million poor whites. Among the extremely poor, below half the value of the poverty line—20 million plus—42 percent are white, and 27 percent are black. So yes, blacks are over-represented among the poor. But there are still a hell of a lot of poor white people.

When we note that white families hold 90 percent of the nation’s wealth, that does not mean that most white people are wealthy; it means that tiny fraction of white people own most of the wealth and they drive the numbers up within the statistical category, making the rest of white folks en masse look more well off, using race-only statistics, than most really are.

Now, no one is saying that white supremacy didn’t exist or that white advantage doesn’t exist. On the contrary, anyone who wants to delve into the archives of what I’ve been writing about for the last quarter of a century will find that white supremacy has been nearly an obsession. What I’m saying here is that race and class are not some antagonistic binary, and that neither can be sufficiently understood without factoring in the other. That “intersubjective race-class tension” I mentioned earlier.

Four years ago, I watched the ruling class co-opt the slogan “Black Lives Matter” from the movement by the same name in the wake of the mass uprising sparked by the cop murder of George Floyd. That was followed by targeted grants to any number of NGOs who will colonized this message and solid it back to people as a lifestyle . . . a way of diverting attention away from class and economics and trying to stuff the whole issue into a “racial diversity” package.

Ten percent of US households hold 77 percent of the total wealth in the US. Ten percent of African American households have 75.3 percent of all US black wealth. Looks close, and it’s important. There’s race in that class, and class in that race.

The average annual income of black one-percenters is $200,819, compared to the average one-percenter family overall earning $737,697 annually. Just like the general figures above, breaking down the one-percent, this number for black one-percenters is distorted by a tiny fraction of people like the six black billionaires listed above.

The bottom ninety percent is losing ground right now (mostly through debt) . . . and fast. Is there a disparate impact in a society organized around white supremacy? You bet. Can black economic distress be reduced to race? Not unless you ignore those 19 million poor whites. Can you talk about these racial disparities, or the targeting of black and brown communities by the criminal justice system, without including “race”? Not unless you can ignore the “race” statistics on police abuse and incarceration.

What constitutes class? Studied as a relation in good post-Marxian form, most of us are working class. That’s not determined by a number, but by whether or not your household depends on someone working for a wage . . . or aspiring to work for a wage because they have no job. Everyone in this category, hold up your hands. Roughing this out, that’s about nine out of ten. Of the remaining ten percent, we have that one percent owning stuff, and another nine percent who work for salaries for the one percent—the “retainer” class outlined above.

What’s the character of a wage job, apart from working for an hourly wage? Here’s the critical thing: it means your boss owns your ass while you’re at work, because he or she can fire your ass at will. It means you have to put up with whatever abuse and humiliation they heap on you, and you have to swallow it down like a delicious bucket of shit. So there is a structural antagonism built into the boss-worker relation. You always want/need more, and the boss always wants/needs to give you less.

So, here we have a situation that defines nine out of ten of us. That is why some people—myself included—say that class is not the only category of abuse analysis, but it’s the broadest; therefore it’s the category where the most political mileage can be potentially wielded in the event that those who face this form of abuse were to get together to make the same demands.

This was the appeal the social democratic insurgency in the Democratic Party was making with programs like Medicare for All, free college, debt relief, a federal jobs guarantee, and a raised minimum wage. Each and all of these programs would substantially strengthen the whole working class in their structural antagonism with the bosses, or ruling class. We work for wages and drink those delicious buckets of shit, because we have duties and obligations to our loved ones and our own survival, and you can’t survive in modern society without money. They have it, you don’t, so stir a little sugar into that shit and slurp away. Our dependence on them for everything is what constitutes their power over us.

Debt forgiveness, automatic access to medical care, higher minimum wages, free college, and jobs guarantees outside of the private market (and subject to democratic control), all reduce our dependency on the ruling class, and that reduces ruling class power. What did Democrats talk about? Entrepreneurialism and diversity. (What did Republicans talk about? Bad immigrants, and the libs want to take away your fucking guns.)

White establishment Democrats are opposed to all of these measures except a modest increase in minimum wage with plenty of loopholes. Black establishment Democrats . . . well, the same thing. (We talked about this.)

Given that black people are over-represented among the working class, the working poor, and the unemployed, these programs would have a disproportionately good effect on African America. But the black bourgeoisie has been as enthusiastic as the white bourgeoisie in painting these programs as the brainchild of “and old white man.” (In fact, these demands have been around for a very long time, but the Sanders candidacy brought them onto the public stage against the ferocious resistance of the establishment—black and white.)

Structural antagonisms exist that are not class relations—male dominance and white cultural capital stand out here—but neither of these exists in the real world independent of class.

Working class, hold up your hands . . . okay, around 90 percent.

All women, hold up your hands . . . okay, around 52 percent. (90% of whom are working class)

All those who are not white hold up your hands . . . okay, around 39 percent. (95% of whom are working class)

Sexual minorities, hold up your hands . . . okay, around 4.5 percent. (90 percent of whom are working class)

Do women of different races and classes suffer abuse by men? Absolutely. Can there be cross-class alliances of women on issues like spousal abuse, sexual harassment, female genital mutilation, and rape? Yep. Can there be cross-class alliances of African Americans or Hispano-Latinas or indigenous people with regard to police abuse? Hell yeah! Are there people who don’t fit easily into racial categories? Well yeah, that, too.

Will ruling class or ruling class-aligned women, gender minorities, and-or persons “of color,” be keen to highlight class antagonisms or economic inequality?

I hear a screech of brakes and the shattering of glass.

I have disturbing news. A wealthy person—apart from any of these other demographic categories—will think and act like most other wealthy persons.

Does the ruling class have a vested interest in isolating these grievances apart from class?

Yes.

Is the ruling class willing to admit token minorities into their own club?

Yes, because it simultaneously co-opts the individuals and provides great optics, allowing them to use the means of cultural production—which the ruling class owns—to redefine the grievances as personal character defects: racism, sexism, gender-phobias, etc. This allows them to return to the default position of a few rich minorities serving as a symbolic balm and veil while the rest of us suffer along in pretty much the same ways . . . now, with our manifold crisis continuing to unfold, the rest of us are about to see just how much this ruling class gives a damn.

Prior to Trump, Obama oversaw mass deportations and the continued militarization of the police. Prior to Trump, when the 2007–8 meltdown happened, President Obama made Wall Street whole, sent not a single rentier capitalist to jail, and left the rest of us to scratch and claw our way out. President Obama bombed the shit out of black people (and children, and US citizens) abroad. The Obamas now live in an $8.1 million home in an exclusive neighborhood in DC, with Jeff Bezos, Jared Kushner, and Ivanka Trump as neighbors.

The Reed Affair

Aside from attempts by ruling class America to catfish Black Lives Matter as a corporate slogan—and remove any class analysis in the process—I’m reminded of a lefty kerfuffle, circa 2020 iirc, about a piece written by Professor Adolph Reed and Merlin Chowkwanyun for the New England Journal of Medicine, entitled “Racial Health Disparities and Covid-19 — Caution and Context.” In response to this article, Democratic Socialists of America de-listed an online lecture, effectively cancelling it, by Professor Emeritus Reed, who is himself a longstanding black socialist scholar.

The reason he was de-listed by the petite bourgeois DSA was an accusation of “class reductionism.” I cancelled my dues to DSA about this, because it wasn’t the first time I’d seen DSA’s work being hijacked by this kind of inquisitional, arrogant, sectarian clique (especially around genderwang) . . . and because DSA is still a predominantly white, predominantly academic, predominantly top-ten percent organization.

The accusation was that Reed and Chowkwanyun “denied” that Covid-19 was disproportionately affecting racial minorities. I’ve linked the article above as proof that no such thing was ever said or implied. And I’ll say, before I begin breaking this down, that my objection to the de-listing was not about agreeing or disagreeing with Reed—I agree and disagree with him on various topics—but about a putative mass socialist organization that shuts down debates instead of having them.

What Reed and Chowkwanyun said was that data should include more categories than race . . . not the exclusion of race, but inclusion of other categories, including and especially socioeconomic status. One of the dangers they identified—which seemed to have gone over the heads of his opponents in Philly and NYC DSA—was that by exclusively looking at race in these statistics, we actually strengthen the ideologies of white racists in the same way that racializing poverty (making it “a black thing”) led white racists to support the destruction of the social safety net (specifically Aid to Dependent Children, or AFDC) under Bill Clinton, called insipidly “welfare reform.” The majority of those who were actually devastated by “welfare reform” were white women. Reports that showed disproportionate impact by Covid-19 on minorities led may white racists to ignore and even deny that the pandemic was a problem at all.

Was this “class reductionism”?

Not unless you twist yourself into a pretzel.

Reed’s own career began with the Black Panther Party, so his first real passion was a racial justice struggle. The reason Reed dug down further into class was that in his own studies—as he pointed out repeatedly—it was research into white supremacy that led him to class analysis. He found class down in the subsoil of race. His opposition to race-only narratives was based on the fact that these race-only narratives were so easily adopted by the ruling class as a way of diverting attention from economics—the truest source of actual power. Here is an excerpt from Reed’s earlier article for The New Republic, “The Myth of Class Reductionism.”

Politics often makes strange bedfellows, but this is no mere marriage of convenience. Centrist Democrats and left-identitarians are bound in shared embrace of a particularist, elite-driven politics. This top-down political vision—long focused on capturing the presidency at the expense of long-term, movement-driven, majoritarian strategies at all levels of government—threatens to preempt hopes of restoring the public-good model of governance that was at the heart of postwar prosperity and foundational to the civil rights movement.

Class reductionism is the supposed view that inequalities apparently attributable to race, gender, or other categories of group identification are either secondary in importance or reducible to generic economic inequality. It thus follows, according to those who hurl the charge, that specifically anti-racist, feminist, or LGBTQ concerns, for example, should be dissolved within demands for economic redistribution.

I know of no one who embraces that position. Like other broad-brush charges that self-styled liberal pragmatists levy against “wish-list economics” and the assault on private health insurance, the class reductionist canard is a bid to shut down debate. Once you summon it, you may safely dismiss your opponents as wild-eyed fomenters of discord without addressing the substance of their disagreements with you on policy proposals.

Although there are no doubt random, dogmatic class reductionists out there, the simple fact is that no serious tendency on the left contends that racial or gender injustices or those affecting LGBTQ people, immigrants, or other groups as such do not exist, are inconsequential, or otherwise should be downplayed or ignored. Nor do any reputable voices on the left seriously argue that racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia are not attitudes and ideologies that persist and cause harm.

I doubt you’ll see Adolph Reed on Oprah any time soon; but he does a pretty good job of representing the leftist case against something called . . . critical race theory.

Critical Race Theory

This term has lost meaning in proportion to the extent to which it’s been turned into a political football. It’s also the term that Mary Harrington used in the tweet that led me to her editorial, which in turn led me to write this ramble on race. Her claim in the tweet that references the editorial, or complaint as a Brit whose culture is ostensibly being contaminated by a US “race-first” ideology, is that “critical race theory” is the core problem afoot here.

The real problem with CRT in America is that it’s become a right-wing talking point with neither a reference to or similarity with actual critical race theory (of which I, like Dr. Reed, am intensely critical). The further problem is that CRT has also been redfined by liberals (I refuse to call them “the left”) to suit both their agendas and their political warfare with the new lunatic right. So we have a culture war being fought over two competing mis-definitions of CRT, which one side claims should be taught in primary school classrooms and the other wants to ban there. The irony here, I suppose, is that the majority of American primary school students struggle to merely comprehend what they read or perform simple mathematical operations without technical assistance. They and can recite pop stars biographies, but can’t name the US Secretary of State or find California on a map.

My impression, based on what Mary Harrington has had to say on the matter, is that she’s leaning into the culture war misprepresentations, and flirting with the right-wing’s . . . because she’s already explicitly accepted the right-wing definition of “the left” as a cultural and not economic orientation. I say that based on what I highlighted of her piece at the very beginning, where she calls race-consciousness, among a mythical Gen Z discerned from a few corners of the internet, “racism.” The right has long embraced “color-blindness,” which is, and not paradoxically, a liberal shibboleth—classical liberal, that is.

On a personal note, we have four Gen Z grandchildren—all “mixed race”—and I don’t even remotely recognize her characterizations in any of them.

(^^^one of our Gen-Z grandchildren working on her critical race theory)

Critical Race Theory, the right claims, has its origins in Marxism. This—not to put too fine a point on it—is ridiculous.

Actual Marxists, like Haitian-American Professor Paul Mocombe, call CRT “radical liberalism,” and not in an approving way.

CRT, first of all, is not the “critical theory” of post-WWII Marxists of the “Frankfurt School.” There has been one arcane attempt to synthesize the two, identified with Harvard’s Cornel West. But actual CRT was midwifed as a legal theory by the late Law Professor Derrick Bell (1930-2011), when he published his 1970 textbook, Race, Racism, and American Law. Bell was very far from being a Marxist. CRT, as a theory, tried to “expose” the ways in which (American) law was formulated with (shifting) racial categories in mind as well as the ways in which race (as social construct and relation) function in the application of the law. Whether one agrees or disagrees, in part or whole, with CRT, that is still what it originally meant.

By contrast, radical feminist and University of Michigan Law Professor, Catharine McKinnon—heavily influenced by Hungarian Marxist György Lukács—in her book, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, shows how liberal law doesn’t need class, race, or gender to enforce liberal societies’ stratifications. On the contrary, the Rawlsian “veil of ignorance” in liberal philosophy reduces situated, historical persons to ahistorical “individuals” in such a way that actually-existing race, gender, and class hierarchies are preserved precisely with this liberal “color-blindness,” if you will, by making these hierarchies intentionally invisible to the ahistorical eyes of the law. What Mary Harrington calls “the ideology of race neutrality” operates precisely in this way in liberal law.

The tendency in liberal law over time has been as we noted above: as race and gender have been explicitly removed from legal exceptions, e.g., by the abolition of Jim Crow and women getting the franchise, the MacKinnon thesis has become more starkly evident. These hierarchies have been preserved, even as color-blindness and gender-blindness has been more stringently applied, for all . . . except for the ruling class and its retainers, who happily celebrate diversity in their champagne rooms.

Mary Harrington has herself frequently remarked—and accurately, in my view—on a similar class dynamic with regard to the outworking of the supposedly liberatory “sexual revolution,” where postmodern hipsters comfortably ensconced on leafy campuses can casually tell drug-addicted streetwalkers that their situation (“sex-work”) is analogous to a job at McDonalds or Walmart.

(This appears to be a case of wanting to have one’s cake and eat it, too. In this case, we have Harrington as a critic of liberal modernity, taking up the conservative-liberal cudgel of liberal law’s cover story about “race neutral” (colorblind) universalism to defend the very way in which liberal law has always managed to preach the universality of a deracinated “individual” as a means of preserving those “traditional” hierarchies by putting them beyond the remit of the law.)

At any rate, CRT had precisely fuck-all to do with the kind of chicanery now practiced by Robin Diangelo and Ibram Kendi, who pimp some bastardization called CRT to hair-shirt white liberals—Anti-Racism, Inc., where you can pay a facilitator to assist you in denouncing yourself for the inescapability of your “racism.”

“The mainstreaming of Kendi’s brand of anti-racism,” wrote Bates University’s Tyler Austin Harper, “has made ‘racism’ into a word so plastic as to have lost all descriptive power—and with it all moral magnitude. At a moment when actual white supremacy is on the rise, the loss of ‘racist’ as a condemnation with real ethical and political power is of grave consequence and may ironically be Kendi’s most significant contribution to American politics.”

I could say the same of Mary Harrington’s claim that “the demographic at the bleeding edge of the new racism is Gen Z,” though I don’t put her in the same category of NGO con artist as Kendi. (italics added) In a sense, and Mary Harrington intuitively points to this when she writes: “the least politically virulent version of an emerging race-first [not the race-only criticized by Reed, SG] mindset, already discernible in far more aggressive forms across the youth on both Left and Right.” And yet, she has simultaneously adopted the variations of the term from both the right—which takes its cue from deracinated liberalism—and the faux-left of pop-poststructuralist identitarians.

As Dr. Harper says, racism is a real thing, but it requires both definition (personal animus based on perceptions of racial superiority and inferiority) and context (historically embedded in political and socioeconomic structures, e.g., “white” supremacy, Apartheid, etc., with its ideological counterparts, e.g., “scientific” racial theory, ethnic “replacement” narratives, etc.).

The problem with the law—which Bell’s CRT intuited, even if it, by some people’s lights, erred in its conclusions—is that liberal law cannot arbitrate personal prejudices, but only institutional outcomes. And therein lies the rub. Because race is too broad a category with too many permutations, the methods employed by liberal law—a blunt and blind instrument—to achieve said outcomes, will always bump up against a plethora of exceptions, contradictions, unforeseen consequences, opportunisms, and fresh injustices. (For this reason, the whole notion of reparations in the US is a non-starter . . . but a great political cudgel to use against honest and thoughtful leftists.)

(As a Pauline Christian, I have adopted a critique of law that cuts against all these modern accounts of the law, but that will have to wait for another venue.)

Now, Harrington actually identifies a real phenomenon, even if she over-generalizes its grip and over-estimates its political potency. Legions of virtue-signaling laptop guerrillas with heads full of fashionably half-baked, pop-poststructuralist talking points have taken the political operators at their words—shame on you—and are defending the teaching of Kendi-esque interpretations of history, suitably dumbed down for the American student, ignoring one big counterfact . . . that in many (not all) places the actual fact of integration already exists to such an extent that it rebukes the Kendi wannabes. I am a veteran of one of the institutions that began the spread of not “multiculturalism,” but something I call creolization: the US Army.

Those who most fear “multiculturalism,” and those who fan those fears for political advantage, are really worried about creolization—an unstoppable force and an already accomplished fact, that will only strengthen in the face of reactionary attacks. (see preceding link)

The right’s opposition to both multiculturalism and what they call CRT has nothing to do with CRT, but everything to do with preserving a decrepit national mythology. They don’t oppose teaching critical race theory. They oppose teaching about the actual and foundational histories of Indian removal, slavery, Jim Crow, and imperial war—all of which they now call critical race theory. They want to restore the myth of America as the City on the Hill and return the country to a kind of comfortably imaginary 1950 Ozzie and Harriet default.

The Myth of WASP Universalism & the Social Hygiene Movement

In her editorial on "Gen Z’s radical race politics,” Mary Harrington gives us this highly “selective” summary of both American and world history:

Even leaving aside the history of slavery, modern America’s foreign policy has tacitly accorded an important role to race—especially in the weaponisation of ethnic fractures as a means of undermining geopolitical rivals. From Woodrow Wilson to (roughly) the Civil Rights Act, 20th-century America called for, and supported, global “national self-determination”—which, in practice, meant the formation of states along the lines defined by a self-identifying (and usually implicitly ethnic) in-group.

First of all, the history of race in the US didn’t end with slavery (which cannot be “left aside” without then dispensing of US history altogether). Wilson himself was a virulent racist, sworn into office by a proud member of the Ku Klux Klan in the early years of Jim Crow, a regime enthusiastically enforced by regular lynchings. Race was important, but not in the way the author suggests.

Wilson ordered the invasion and occupation of Haiti, where white US Marines were known to kill the natives for sport. In fact, US imperial designs were far more focused on Latin America, the Caribbean, and East Asia than they were on Europe—where Wilson was dragged kicking and screaming into the land war by the insistence of Wall Street, in order to assure repayment by the Allies of their war debts. In no case did Wilson or his predecessors connect in thought or deed the notion of “self-determination” with singular ethnicities. Nor did the UK, for that matter, as we can still see the sequelae of arbitrary, cross-ethnic boundaries in Southwest Asia. At the end of the First World War, what came to dominate the thinking of both America and the European allies for the next two decades was that little thing that happened in 1917 Russia. (That’s why, during the Great Depression in the US, there was a quite strong and influential Communist Party.)

See! Anyone can cram decades of complex history into a supporting narrative. Or counter-narrative.

The support-ED narrative in Harrington’s editorial is a myth of WASP cultural universalism in the US, which has apparently contaminated the UK.

I’m going to have to dig down into my repertoire, a la Borderline, to provide a detailed account of why Harrington’s thesis about WASP universalism is so preeminently wrong. From the Chapter, “Nation, Race, and Hygiene”:

The word progress, used in the sense of historical inevitability, didn’t appear until around 1600, and then only occasionally. It was not an ideological term until the nineteenth century, and then mostly in the United States, especially around the time of the Civil War.  The British long considered it to be an Americanism. By the turn of the twentieth century, the term became the root of a new American noun/adjective that was explicitly ideological: progressive.

The “scandal of particularity” with regard to progress is that it is not universal and axiomatic; it is a particular notional construction of a particular culture and epoch. Particularity forces us to turn to an embarrassing question about results. If this is just an idea, what is our idea of the goal of progress? What is the final result that progress aims at, or that it is being pulled toward? How do we know when we have reached the goal? Honest natural science, ironically enough, has confronted us with some pretty scary answers about where our current progressive trajectory has aimed us. Ronald Wright said that “material progress creates problems that are—or seem to be—soluble only by further progress . . . the devil here is in the scale: a good bang can be useful; a better bang can end the world.”

Progress constructed as economic “growth,” the belief in ceaseless commodification, has thrust humanity into simultaneous and terrifying ecological and cultural impasses. Progress has given us the ability to wreck the biosphere and blow ourselves up, yet the very people who seem most interested at the moment in turning these trajectories around insist on calilng themselves “progressives.” This to some degree accounts for why our record at turning things around has been so dismal. We use the methods of progress to correct the problems of progress.

Woodruff Smith documented the emergence of cleanliness, respectability, and progress as part of the same constellation of meaning in affluent Western culture and showed how consumption was part of that movement, tangentially understood but materially essential to it. This constellation of respectability, progress, and cleanliness was inscribed on a worldview that drew a borderline between the civilized imperial cores and the barbaric (we now say “under-developed”) peripheries. Women were charged with upholding civilization through domestic respectability. They promoted progress via domestic femininity, including the provision of an appropriate environment for raising children. Roosevelt emphasized the role of women as breeders, producing vigorous citizens and soldiers. After the war, public relations amplified the notions of Anglo-Saxon superiority, a providential United States tutoring its colonies, and of progress, in order to conform the American public to the postwar buildup of a white industrialized nation.

The discourse was increasingly medicalized. The body, like the soldier’s inducted body, was the object of a program of professional evaluation and optimization; and the body politic was likewise understood as one that had to be simultaneously optimized and protected from disease and disability. The female body became a site of social re-production. The womb became the means of production for new citizens.

On hygiene.

Western Europeans and Americans, prior to the eighteenth century, did not bathe for hygienic reasons. The modern idea of hygiene did not yet exist. They bathed occasionally in baths that were reputed to contain healthinducing minerals and other qualities, the idea being that one could soak these qualities up through the skin. The maternal side of my own family comes from Hot Springs, Arkansas, where geothermic activity heats freshwater springs to which many people still attribute almost magical qualities, including the belief that drinking the water will increase male sexual vigor. People still pay well to bathe along the somewhat famous Bathhouse Row, even to take enemas with the stuff.

Daily immersion or shower baths are a very recent custom, and only a few nations consider daily bathing necessary for health. The natural odor of the body, washed or unwashed, was not considered offensive (it is a learned distaste) until it came to differentiate those who had to do physical labor from those who did not. Reducing the intensity of one’s natural odor came first to be associated with gentility, not hygiene. The hygienic aspect was introduced with the popularization of the idea of “germs” only in the nineteenth century. Inexpensive soap was not generally available until after 1800, and soap manufacturers were, of course, quick to tout its more frequent consumption (which became a weekly bath). The separation between civilization and barbarism, especially during the Victorian era, came to be the separation between the “washed” and the “unwashed.”

Amy Laura Hall, a Methodist minister and ethics professor, collected old ads from the latter nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century pertaining to children, childbirth, motherhood, and family. She published them as part of her analysis in Conceiving Parenthood. She shows how hygiene was conceptually tied to monetized consumption, to the experience of one’s own body, to the boundaries between the civilized and uncivilized (clean and unclean), and to the apotheosis of the nation-state.

Figure 1.1 in Conceiving Parenthood is a poster published by the American Social Hygiene Association, circa 1922. On the poster is a plump, healthy, smiling, naked, white baby, sitting on a blanket. The poster title is “The Baby.” White is generic, normative. The script beneath the baby photo reads, “Human beings, too, are mammals, and fertilization and development take place within the mother. The period of development or pregnancy is nine months. At birth the muscles contract and push the baby through the birth canal (vagina) into the outer world. The human mother can bring more than the simple animal instincts to the aid of her new-born child. Real motherhood develops by the addition of knowledge and understanding to the mother’s instinctive love.”

The story of this baby, this hygienic baby, is specifically a white American baby “of the proper sort.” The story, however, begins with a vagina, or even more functionally, a “birth canal.” In this narrative, the woman has been reduced to an incubator for a new citizen, her body providing a “birth canal” to facilitate production. This poster was part of a campaign for better hygiene. This hygiene extended from the microcosm inside the baby itself to the hazardous social macrocosm, where hygienic babies and unhygienic babies had to be kept separate to prevent cross-border contamination, the infection of the desirable infant.

Hall writes, “This poster is characteristic of a shift that unquestionably enabled notable gains in infant health through public-awareness campaigns for domestic hygiene. But the hygiene came at a cost, for the benefits were socially, economically, and racially encoded. ‘The baby’ on which the domestic hygiene effort focused was too often a specific baby—a baby the logic of the day judged to be worth the effort. At the same time that social and medical scientists focused on ‘the baby,’ they established what were touted as objective, factual, indisputable tools for determining just which babies were worth the effort. The same language system by which the mothers, social workers, and physicians could measure gains lent scientific legitimacy to a calculus of human life. This calculus reflected a growing sense that the individual baby was a precious but fragile commodity to be quantifiably evaluated, carefully habituated, and hygienically safeguarded from those humans and households on the other side of a divide.”

Eugenics

The nationwide push for social hygiene was coupled with the rise of an aggressive eugenics movement. The same leaders, intellectuals, and advertisers who crafted and sustained the social hygiene movement and its emphasis on eugenics promoted a new vision of “the right” family—nuclear, white, affluent, patriotic, and obedient.

Capital accumulation was racialized from the moment that it began to require distant inputs. The world was divided between the civilized us and the barbaric them. By the early twentieth century, the U.S. government was actively involved in eugenics.

Mainline Protestant churches lent a justifying hand in the national campaign with the development of that unique theological amalgam called “natural theology,” which appealed to “nature” instead of revelation. The colonization of Protestant theology by the desire for capital accumulation made social Darwinism synonymous with “nature.” Nature dictates natural selection, and since nature is of God, then capitalist modernity is the progressive fulfillment of the promise of the kingdom of God. The term hygiene described and policed the boundaries of this emerging and ordained future. This meant not only keeping “germs” out of your food; it meant keeping the elect separate from the others. Eugenics was central to this project.

With this new moral framework in hand, the U.S. state felt not only entitled but obliged to take up the task of building the eugenic paradise. It was in 1927 that Oliver Wendell Holmes spoke on behalf of the Supreme Court of the United States, reviewing Buck v. Bell, regarding involuntary sterilization of the “unfit.”

“It is better for all the world,” he said, “if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

The scientistic frame of mind that led to the eugenics movement in the United States and elsewhere in the world was based on this very unscientific extrapolation of the ideas associated with, for example, boiling drinking water, to disinfecting the body politic.

“The irony,” writes Hall, “involves my belief that the very Protestant tradition that should have emphasized a sense of divine gratuity, human contingency, sufficient abundance, and the radical giftedness of all life came in twentieth-century America instead to epitomize justification through meticulously planned procreation.”

Echoing Smith’s dyad of rational masculinity and domestic femininity as constitutive of respectability, she calls the emergence of the hygiene/eugenics movement a “culture of carefully delineated, racially encoded domesticity.” These were perceptions fabricated by public relations people and applied to the progressive project. That project established a hygienic chain of being, with its microcosm in the mother’s womb and macrocosm in a world divided between fit nations and unfit ones.

Historically speaking, hygiene and progress are fraternal twins, accounting for the Progressive Movement’s embrace of eugenics as “social hygiene”; neither progressives nor mainline Protestants questioned it until Hitler gave us an example of eugenics-in-earnest.

White liberal feminism has been forced to live with an embarrassment of history. Conservatives and other anti-feminists can cite blatantly eugenicist and racist positions taken by early, high-profile, American white feminists like Margaret Sanger. An ardent Malthusian, Sanger left her selfindictments etched on the annals of history:

“No woman shall have the legal right to bear a child . . . without a permit for parenthood.”

“Birth control must lead ultimately . . . to a cleaner race.”

“We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

“Eugenic sterilization is an urgent need. .  .  . We must prevent multiplication of this bad stock.”

“Eugenics is . . . the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems.”

“Birth control itself, often denounced as a violation of natural law, is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives.”

“As an advocate of birth control I wish . . . to point out that the unbalance between the birth rate of the “unfit” and the “fit,” admittedly the greatest present menace to civilization, can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these two classes. In this matter, the example of the inferior classes, the fertility of the feeble-minded, the mentally defective, the poverty-stricken classes, should not be held up for emulation . . . On the contrary, the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.”

“The campaign for birth control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical with the final aims of eugenics.”

“Our failure to segregate morons who are increasing and multiplying . . . demonstrates our foolhardy and extravagant sentimentalism. . . . [Philanthropists] encourage the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste. Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant. . . . We are paying for, and even submitting to, the dictates of an ever-increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.”

“The undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind.”

“Give certain dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization.”

All Sanger, all the time.

Those who know me know that I am not anti-feminist. The bad leavening in this bread is not women’s emancipation but progress understood as the marker for civilization, which included, and still includes, the delusion that we can “improve” our own species. This is God-playing, the poison pill we swallowed when we learned to do natural science, not science inherently and in-itself, but science in the saddle of (ironically) Euro-masculine arrogance and expansion-economics.

Lest anyone think that this vision has disappeared or was limited to early white feminists and Progressives, other famous eugenicists include Hermann J. Muller, John Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Elmer Pendell, Jacques Cousteau, Glayde Whitney, Barbara Marx Hubbard, and Richard Dawkins—the latter coining the term “the selfish gene” to describe his ideological version of Darwinian evolution. In the 1920s and 1930s, scientists from either the political left or right would not have found the idea of designer babies particularly dangerous, though of course they would not have used that phrase. Today, I suspect that the idea is too dangerous for comfortable discussion, and Adolf Hitler is largely responsible for the change.

“Nobody wants to be caught agreeing with that monster,” writes Dawkins, “even in a single particular. And yet, The specter of Hitler has led some scientists to stray from ‘ought’ to ‘is’ and deny that breeding for human qualities is even possible. But if you can breed cattle for milk yield, horses for running speed, and dogs for herding skill, why on Earth should it be impossible to breed humans for mathematical, musical or athletic ability? Objections such as “these are not onedimensional abilities” apply equally to cows, horses and dogs and never stopped anybody in practice.

“I wonder whether, some 60 years after Hitler’s death, we might at least venture to ask what the moral difference is between breeding for musical ability and forcing a child to take music lessons. Or why it is acceptable to train fast runners and high jumpers but not to breed them. I can think of some answers, and they are good ones, which would probably end up persuading me. But hasn’t the time come when we should stop being frightened even to put the question?”

Hitler’s progress set progress back decades, dammit!

The racialism of eugenics was always inside the seed named “progress.” At one point, “progressive” Protestants actually talked about searching for a “cleanliness” gene! Hall notes in an interview how, while churches have rejected the “excesses” of early eugenics, their members still carefully “plan” their families and seem to have selected progress over the basic tenets of their own faith:

“While studying bioethics at Yale,” Hall writes, “I served at a merged, downtown church—African-American and white, working class and bourgeois-bohemian, professors and homeless folks—a church trying to know every child as part of the Body of Christ. In this context, I wanted to ask why so many mainline Christians are frightened to put our children in schools with children with disabilities or children who speak Spanish or children who live in impoverished neighborhoods? How is it that white Protestants, who worship a babe born in a manger, came to view a birth planned through in vitro fertilization as more legitimately a gift than a child conceived by an undocumented Latina teenager?”

Sanger, who is better remembered for her advocacy of birth control than of eugenics (in her mind, they were inseparable), is still seen by many as a kind of feminist founding mother. Her apologists can take some responsibility for the efficacy of right-wing abuse of her eugenics advocacy to tar feminism with the same brush as Hitler. The reason some of her apologists are partly responsible is that by downplaying or disappearing Sanger’s ideas on eugenics to preserve her image now that eugenics (named as such) has gone out of style, they have opened themselves to the accusation of propagandizing through selective truth-telling, an example of manipulative speech.

In an article for the Methodist magazine Together (1957!), Sanger said, “History’s greatest race is speeding to its climax: Population versus world food supplies. And the way it looks now, there may soon be Too Many People.” The article is accompanied by a photograph of South Asian men in turbans. It exhorts Methodists to support birth control abroad.

“The World is exploding at the seams,” Sanger warns. “From the Orient to South America, from Eastern Europe to the U.S., soaring birth rates are posing future problems potentially more dangerous than the H-bomb.”

Sanger’s language evokes visions of pest infestation with phrases such as “teeming Asia.” She calls for a “new worldwide domestic order through the promotion of properly calibrated, usefully capable children.” The United States, of course, is identified as the proper political vehicle for the export of this progress, an imperial rationalization hardly a step removed from Rudyard Kipling’s exhortations to tutor those who are “half devil and half child.”

Hall includes an eight-page subsection on the 1933–34 Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago, an event that had World Fair atmosphere and World Fair hype. The exposition featured baby-food leviathan Gerber, advertising itself as the bringer of “progress in infant feeding.” The fair also featured a new invention: the baby incubator—with live white babies in them for demonstration purposes.

“The baby incubator,” writes Hall, “with live babies offers a conceptual link between the exposition’s ‘Forward, Ever Forward!’ exhibits of science and industry and the Midway, at the center of the fair, with such attractions as Ripley’s Believe It or Not Odditorium, a sampling of “freak shows,” Darkest Africa, and the Old Plantation Show.”

Echoing through this contrast between modern and premodern are Jean Bodin and Francis Bacon, advocating instrumental order in the face of a female nature’s chaos and disorder, now projected onto primitive peoples and the “unfit.” Nature itself must be conquered, and in this guise, we observe the eternal re-emergence of masculinity constructed as conquest. Even the female womb must be controlled, reduced to a “birth canal,” and managed by men, by the physiological technocrats of the medical profession.

Most of the assumptions of progress, including the eugenics movement, thanks to the success of public relations, were in fact internalized by white America, and these assumptions are embodied today in the ever more anxious testing for genetic defects of adults as prospective parents and of the unborn. They are embodied in the ideal of the nuclear family, which was forged by the eugenics movement (Grandma and Grandpa have some retrograde ideas about raising children!), and in the notion of “responsible” family planning. These hidden assumptions still operate in tandem with gender, race, and class preconceptions dating back to the latter nineteenth century. Chief among those ideas is the idea of women constructed as citizen-incubators, raising “productive citizens” who will “succeed,” because lack of success is a marker of unfitness and a stain on the reputation of parents on the other side of the hygienic borderline. To prove that one’s family belongs among the elect, then, we have learned to measure how many and what kind of kids to have, and how to enroll them at ever earlier ages in the child-success industry, lest they be suspected as one of the tainted.

Hygiene became a social metaphor.

Richard Beck refers to this metaphorical leap as “sociomoral disgust.”

“On the playground, “cooties” seems harmless (unless you’ve been on the other end of that game). But sociomoral disgust can quickly scale up in intensity and become the engine behind the very worst kind of human atrocities. . . . Sociomoral disgust is implicated in the creation of monsters and scapegoats, where outgroup members are demonized and selected for exclusion or elimination.” (Beck, Unclean, 34)

The same logic of extermination can be observed from the manufactured compulsion to kill all the “germs” on every exposed surface, to spraying fields with poisons to eliminate “weeds,” to giving the “dysgenic” a choice between sterilization or segregation (segregation .  .  . how?), to the comparison of Jews with vermin in advance of building extermination camps. Hygiene comes to mean cleansing the body, the family, the social body of impurities, applying the roach spray or the broad-spectrum antibiotic to the threatened body politic. It is medicalized speech, but there is nothing scientific about it. It is an ideology that might best be called “exterminism.”

WWII and the Postwar Movements

As to the Second World War and “WASP universalism.”

Our cultural memory of World War II in the United States has been constructed by film as much as any other medium. Whether battle hagiographies like A Bridge Too Far and The Sands of Iwo Jima, or biographies like Patton, or “band of brothers” films like The Big Red One and Saving Private Ryan, or war-critical naturalism like Das Boot, or a study of nature and grace like The Thin Red Line, or Nazi-milieu accounts like The Pianist and Schindler’s List, World War II films rarely show the ways in which the war was publicized and promoted in the United States as a white man’s war.

The Good War narrative that invariably overwrites accounts of World War II—based on the horrors of the Hitler regime—is embarrassed by the actual degree to which white racism was incorporated into both practice and ideology in the preparation for and prosecution of the war.

Americans still call those who fought during World War II “the Greatest Generation.” This sentiment is closely reflected in Steven Spielberg’s award winning film Saving Private Ryan, featuring Tom Hanks as the protagonist detachment’s leader, Captain Miller.

“Miller’s characterization,” wrote journalist Tom Brokaw, “[is] as benevolent father figure to his subordinates, whose respect he commands with gentle authoritativeness. Miller and his men must find and protect the titular Ryan (Matt Damon), who is to be sent home following the deaths of his brothers in combat. Upon locating Ryan, Miller enacts paternal protectiveness in extremis, using himself as a human shield, and sacrifices himself to martyr his ideal configuration of wartime masculinity.”

This is a story of sacrifice and honor, inflected with a Christian-esque martyrdom. Vin Diesel’s character, Caparzo, the first of the band to be killed, is vaguely “ethnic” in appearance and speech, and has a Jewish pal, Private Mellish, whose bout of weeping when he is given a Nazi youth knife reminds us that the purpose of the war is to stop the Nazi anti-Semites. A Southern white boy is the detachment sniper, fighting alongside New Yorkers and the Midwestern schoolteacher who commands them. As close as Spielberg can get, without reminding us that black soldiers were in strictly segregated units, he constructs a pluralist microcosm in the detachment.

The reality in the United States when it went to war with the Axis Powers was Jim Crow in the South, deep structural racism in the North, widespread white hatred of Asians, and Jewish social exclusion. When the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference was held in 1944, as the end of the war came into view, it had to select a site in New Hampshire, because earlier choices for conference sites would not do: they were hotels that did not allow Jewish guests, and several of Roosevelt’s Treasury staff, including Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, were Jewish.

In 1943, between May and August, there were five racial riots in the United States. In May, while German U-boats were being scattered by the United States in the Atlantic, five black Mobile, Alabama, shipyard workers, involved in war production, were promoted to welding positions. White workers organized a four-thousand-strong mob that was allowed onto the work sites by management, who proceeded to attack black workers with bricks and tools, leading to a mass exodus of black workers following the riot.

In early to mid-June, while Allied bombers hit Naples and Sicily, Los Angeles-based white Navy men had become involved in a series of altercations with Mexican-American and African-American youths, who had established a local subculture that included wearing baggy suits called “zoot suits.” Beginning on June 3rd, the Navy men organized themselves into phalanxes, rode in taxicabs to places where the “zoot-suiters” were known to hang out, and moved through the streets with clubs, beating hundreds of young men—many as young as thirteen and fourteen—and every person who tried to defend them. The Navy men stripped their victims in the street, then urinated on their suits before burning them. This went on for almost two weeks before the Navy Shore Patrol stopped it, declaring the Navy perpetrators innocent and claiming they had acted in self-defense.

In mid-June, as the U.S. was winning a decisive battle at Guadalcanal, a riot broke out in Beaumont, Texas, another war production center. Based on two separate accusations from white women that they had been sexually assaulted by black men, white workers led by members of the Ku Klux Klan organized a mob of, again, around four thousand, which marched into the African American section of town, injuring more than fifty people and killing three, destroying local black businesses, and ransacking more than a hundred black homes.

In late June, while the Allies prepared to bomb the Ruhr industrial valley in Germany, in another then-stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan—Detroit—a fight between a black worker and a white Navy man ignited a racial tinderbox, and a three-day street melee erupted between blacks and whites that resulted in more than eighteen hundred arrests, six hundred injuries, and thirty-four dead, twenty-five of them black—and seventeen of those killed by police.

On August 1st, while the Germans gassed 2,897 Roma and U.S. bombers hit German-controlled refineries in Romania, a New York City policeman struck an African American woman, and a black soldier named Robert Bandy tried to intervene. The policeman shot Bandy, wounding him. Bystanders who were outraged began spreading the word. The rumor circulated that Bandy was dead. A riot ensued, fueled by years of resentment against white law enforcement in Harlem, and the violence resulted in six dead, more than four hundred injured, and more than five hundred arrests.

The industrial war forced the state to mobilize as many resources as possible. Black men were hired into war production with white men, and women entered wage labor in unprecedented numbers. Depression-era unemployment and the sudden explosion of war jobs launched waves of migration, shuffling the American demographic deck.

The United States found itself denouncing Nazi racism even as it actively pursued a racist ideological attack on the Japanese and maintained a racial caste system inside its own borders. The white masculinity that buttressed the war would be thrown into crisis by early setbacks against the Japanese that challenged “white superiority.” After the war, the eventual discovery of the scope and brutality of Nazi atrocities would expose the exterminist seed lodged within the category “white.”

There was an ideological reformation during the war, and the category white had to be expanded to mobilize more support for what was still constructed as a “white man’s war.” By the end of the war, the Office of War Information (OWI) found itself selling the idea of a racially pluralist and democratic America, and once that fiction was before the public, as the nation would discover in the years after the war, it would be impossible to take back.

It was following the Allied victory—in the face of Communist bloc critiques of America’s racial hypocrisies—that President Truman, after dropping two atomic bombs on Japanese civilians, decided to integrate the US military.

This, and not some longstanding “WASP universalism,” was what set the stage for the post-war stage of the Black Freedom Movement, which would take some of its cues from anti-colonial movements abroad, especially India.

So much, then, for America’s twentieth century history of “WASP universalism.”

When Martin Luther King Jr. gave his oft-touted “I have a dream” speech, in which he said he looked forward to the day when “our children are judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” this was taken up as liberal “color blindness,” and not before. King gave the speech in 1963. When he denounced the US occupation of Vietnam—a war that had begun as a struggle against French colonialism—and took up the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968, he was abandoned by the liberals en masse, and assassinated shortly thereafter. A few WASPs had slowly and reluctantly joined the movement against Jim Crow, until King was assassinated (and only then rehabilitated in Gerardian fashion as some paragon of “colorblindness”).

Before you do American history, get your stories straight. “WASP universalism,” once a case of “white” parochial altruism, was only theoretically expanded in a series of political contingencies. And at every step, leading all the way to the present, these developments were taken up and manipulated in purely Machiavellian ways in that other American context—electoral politics.

(Harrington’s anticipated impact of purported Gen Z “ethnic in-group politics” completely fails to grasp the particular idiosyncrasies of the American political landscape, confusing internet chatter and media horseshit with the actual and brutally consequentialist character of politics here, played out in fifty different winner-take-all states, against gerrymandered Congressional districts, and a Senate where a voter in Wyoming has 59 times the representative power as a voter in California.)

Our “nation of immigrants story” has always been a very selective one, periodically retrofitted for political advantage.

From another vantage point, it’s a “nation of settlers” story. But if I say that, I’m guilty of “critical race theory,” when this is a simple historical (not necessarily moral) characterization.

Britain

I realize I’m riffing pretty far afield—more than one field actually—and that Ms. Harrington’s chief complaint is about the UK’s paradoxical post-war status as a US “colony.” I certainly agreed with the assessment when I was actively organizing against the dual US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s when people called Tony Blair “George W. Bush’s pet poodle.” In this, I agree that America has “colonized” at last the British political establishment with our special brand of military keynesianism and armed belligerence. We colonized her with Wall Street’s Reaganite neoliberalism all the way back with Thatcher. (Blair was a pet poodle on that account, too.)

Harrington, though, has updated and altered this grievance. The US has now colonized Britain via “Hollywood and the Ivy League.” In this case, she has damned with faint praise the “multicultural aspirations” of this supposedly longstanding WASP universalism, not for its idealism, but for its supposed outcome of having “shrunk the proportion of Western populations that believe in Western-style egalitarian universalism.” WASPs, in other words? idk. I know how I’d read it if I were Tucker Carlson.

And in the wake of this, it’s growing ever clearer that, wherever the culture that espouses race-neutrality loses its numerical super-majority, that ideology will begin giving ground to ethnic or religious in-group preference.

Is she chagrined by some swarthy embrace of anti-democratic authoritarianism? Well, no. It’s that these racial “in-groups” undermine the Rawlsian veil of ignorance underpinning liberal philosophy and law. It’s interesting how in the preceding sentence, she coyly abstracts the particular history of the invention of “whiteness” in support of racial superiority narratives to justify existing hierarchies of power, as “wherever the culture that espouses race-neutrality loses its numerical super-majority.”

I think I’ve already shown, first of all, that the “colonizing” culture of which she complains has never, in practice, been race-neutral; and likewise that her defense of this form of race-neutrality (the veil of ignorance, legal ahistoricism) is a full-throated defense of the very liberalism about which she has, in other instances, rightly criticized.

She veers dangerously close, in her characterization of “the left,” to painting the entire Palestinian cause, and the defense of Palestinians against Israel’s current (and past) genocidal military actions in Gaza, as anti-semitic. This is common practice among Zionist apologists, wherein they will find specific instances of personal anti-semitism among large groups of protesters, then try to tar the whole movement with the views of the very few. We saw something similar when the Canadian government tried to justify its authoritarian actions against the Canadian truckers’ “Freedom Convoy,” when Trudeau’s PR machine found a handful of neo-Nazis among the thousands who were nothing of the kind, whereupon they posted these images everywhere to claim this protest against vaccination passports was some ultra-right conspiracy.

Harrington seems more than a little miffed by the “Jafaican accent,” such that her phraseology in “wherever the culture that espouses race-neutrality loses its numerical super-majority” begins to sound similar, oddly enough, to another American (right-wing) panic: white replacement “theories,” only with “race” displaced by [English? idk] “culture.” This is disconcerting to me—as a fellow reader of Ivan Illich, whose opus consistently railed against the dissolution of cultural particularity by liberal “super-majorities”—to read Mary Harrington implicitly writing on behalf of a totalizing imperial assimilation (as an antidote to assimilation into Hollywood and Ivy League DEI narratives).

I agree Hollywood influences the masses, not with its tokenistic DEI standards, which most seem to exercise the woke-panicked (please see conservative Geoff Schullenberger’s recent and insightful Compact piece on that), but with moronic comic-book CGI spectacles and speculations about Taylor Swift’s sex life, ffs. The latter two have achieved the real “universalism.”

One shift (or split) in right discourse has been the substitution of “culture” for “race” since the Zeitgeist thankfully shut down openly social darwinist race-talk, and the semi-successful cross-racial beleagured-masculinity gambit that Trump successfully employed to draw in male votes from African Americans and MesoLatino-Americans, especially those who’ve successfully assimilated. Acceptance by the right—with the exception of the die-hard white supremacists—has been a case of what I call the “good minority” syndrome. You’re okay as long as you adopt the dominant “culture.” Islamophobia has been very successful in this regard, as a kind of bonding agent.

I get a fairly regular whiff of that from Unherd. I seldom hear from them on the reason why so many people are immigrating, like ruthless leaders, war, famine, and the like; and yet we do hear some of their folks appealing to Christianity. Not as the Via Crucis, which places the emphasis on charitable reception of, and aid to, the broken other; but as capital-T Tradition, to be weaponized as the integralists who’ve thoroughly separated nature from grace would have it, as a brake on the libido dominandi, especially of those dangerously unclean others, and as a means of reactionary social control.

Don’t panic—It won’t change anything anyway.

Yes, the Kendi School of racial discourse among certain sub-groups is misguided, but it is neither “racist” nor is it comparable to right-wing racialism simply by virtue of an emphasis on “race.” To suggest so is to adopt the right’s redefinition of “racism,” not as personal animus based on phenotypes, but as any recognition whatsoever of the existence of race as an historical, cultural, or economic artifact. This is why my most charitable explanation for the Gen-Z-race editorial is peer-bias. She and other dissidents on genderwang have been enthusiastically feted by “conservative” British interlocutors who long for the good old days of the Empire; and it’s good we’re all talking. I’m also happy she found space to denounce the (Fox News-y) racialism of the right in its anti-immigration screeds, but she’s already incorporated one of their premises in its liberal philosophical guise.

As to her dire predictions about Gen Z’s politics, based on those premises I think I’ve disproven above, I would remind her of three things. (1) Most of that generation has and will continue to have little time or interest in politics—a fact that can be missed when focusing on the screaming matches of the interweb. (2) In the US, at least, this is the least electorally engaged generation. (3) As both Mary Harrington and I can and should attest, based on our own biographies, people tend to change as they get older.

Okay, I’m done.