RacISM-1: Hard-Core Racism (and We Still Need the Term)

On my mind, as often: words. In this case "racism," recently discussed on my time-line on Facebook in a meme I can no longer locate. Anyway, re: RACISM:
I informally edit for a big-time scholar who had to use the same word in different senses and finally resorted to assigning a number to each different meaning. Elegant that was not, but it recognized a problem and, down and dirty, dealt with it.
There's clearly a need — several needs — to talk about structural racism and racism woven into the history, culture, folkways, political unconscious and figurative psyche and "DNA" of the United States and other countries and cultures involved in the slave trade, Early-Modern and Modern colonialism, and other exploitation. 
But we also need to talk about Racism-1: a necessarily conscious ideology (an "-ism") that races exist, that they are in competition for limited resources and (necessarily) in conflict; that some races are better than others, and that (of course) one's own race is best and had damn well better destroy or keep down the others, rightfully functioning as Master Race in order for that Master Race to survive and for the fully-human species to prosper.
Bigotry and prejudice are more insidious than racism, and deserve their own definitions and condemnations.
Arguably, we can get pogroms and lynchings with bigotry and prejudice but for full-scale modern slavery or genocide one needs racism. BIGOTRY AND PREJUDICE CAN STILL PRODUCE POGROMS AND LYNCHINGS, and those are bad enough. And maybe the phrase "institutionalized racism" will serve for subtler horrors.

Reparations Debate: John Conyers, Ta-Nehisi Coates and House Resolution 40

            During the US National Student Strike in the spring of 1970 — after the US Invasion of Cambodia and the shootings at Kent State University and Jackson State — there was a meeting of Illinois "student leaders" in Chicago or Springfield or some such appropriate place, and I went there as one of the representatives of the Graduate Student Association of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.

            Early in the meeting, an undergrad got up and started making a speech, and, after a few minutes, I said something like, "Point of order, sort of," at which the undergrad stopped and told me he was making a speech. I replied that I understood that, that I'd heard his speech from others, that I could make his speech myself. (It was against the War and for peace and racial justice and other good things, and, actually, I had made that speech or soon would.) I noted that there was a useful custom in parliamentary procedure to start with someone's making a motion, which usually gets seconded, and then people start speechifying and debating and discussing: "Something specific! What do you want us to do?"

            The undergrads looked at me with bemused disapproval as the graduate students in the room applauded. If you were in "The Movement" and over 23, you'd heard The Speech and had attended many too many meetings with people working on our consciousness and enthusiasm and really just wanted to know what someone wanted you to do.

            There was and is much to be said for putting a motion on the floor to do something and have the debate and arguments start there. Even if it's a bad idea, if the motion is well stated, it focuses the discussion and can lead to a better idea. In any event, having a motion on the floor — as they say in parliamentary jargon — having something specific that at least a couple people want done is a better place to start a practical political debate than philosophical First Principles or appeals to shared sentiments.

            If you’re the American Continental Congress, first you decide whether or not you want independence, and then you get some bright folk to come up with a Declaration proclaiming and justifying the act.

            Sooooo … So here I want to repeat a suggestion from Ta-Nehisi Coates: "For the past 25 years, Congressman John Conyers Jr. […] has marked every session of Congress by introducing a bill calling for a congressional study of slavery and its lingering effects as well as recommendations for 'appropriate remedies.' […] A country curious about how reparations might actually work has an easy solution in Conyers’s bill, now called HR 40, the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act. We would support this bill, submit the question to study, and then assess the possible solutions," Coates adds, "But we are not interested." We are not really interested, he says, in "The Case for Reparations" for "Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy," not interested even though, "Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole" (Atlantic, 24 June 2014).

            I'm interested.

            Partly I'm interested because "the old schooling sticks," and I was brought up in the "Justice, justice shall you pursue" tradition; and Justice, the Prophet Amos insisted, should "flow forth like rivers / And righteousness as an every-flowing stream," not trickle down drop by drop. Also, I'm interested in the debate in itself and how simply — if honestly — pursuing a serious debate in itself ensures this much justice: making us examine our history and ourselves.

            The reparations issue is complex.

            Women as a very large group — a majority of the American population — have an argument for money owed for uncompensated labor, and, God knows, if we are going to talk about White Americans as receivers of stolen goods, the descendants of peoples Europeans weirdly called "Indians" have some bills to present for the deaths of a number of cultures and theft of two continents.

            (Minimally, we might stop celebrating Columbus Day as a holiday: Matthew White estimates the death toll from the "Conquest of the Americas" on at 15 million, making it #12 on his list of the 100 worst mass homicides in recorded history, with about the same body count as World War I, and nobody celebrates Kaiser Wilhelm.)

            Irish Americans might note that the word "plantation" comes from English colonization of Ireland, and the descendants of poor Irish and English in colonial America could argue that the high death rates among indentured "servants" — contract slaves — was one of the reasons African slavery got introduced and became, among the planter class, popular. Which gets us into useful discussions of what I have called (following Steven Pinker) "the continuum of cruelty" of which Black African chattel slavery in the New World was the most horrifically extreme case.

            Alternatively, many of us Euro-Americans can argue that our ancestors weren't around during the era of slavery but back in Europe getting the shit kicked out of us until the family got over here (where we were usually just exploited for a couple generations). My incandescent-White Scandinavian-American colleague who taught a course in The Immigrant Experience pointed out that people doing well back in The Old Country usually remained back in The Old Country; Americans generally are the descendants of European losers. He could note that his ancestors managed to fight on the defeated side in some six different wars; and I could note that my grandparents fled the goddamn Russian Empire of the goddamn Romanoffs, with my father's father one step ahead of a murder rap for killing the goddamn Cossack who was raping my grandfather's sister during a pogrom.

            "We weren't even in America to profit!" is an argument we need to consider; one kind of counter-argument, however, might remind me that I grew up in Chicago, "The City that Works," and it worked better for me than it might have because it systematicallydidn't work well for Black people. Further, my family was in the car wash business, and we made a higher profit than we might have because Black labor was cheap, in part because Black workers were systematically betrayed by unions that were supposed to represent them (and in one case would've been betrayed worse if "the old schooling" hadn't stuck enough with my father that he drew some lines when offered "sweetheart" contracts).

            Another counter-argument to "we just got here" suggests that that "one nation" referred to in the Pledge of Allegiance has real existence and duration over time and that Americans of all ethnicities in complex ways participate in — are part of — that nation. If the nation as a whole owes some debts and dues, we might all have obligations, if different ones, whenever our ancestors arrived and however badly they were treated.

            Now I find the idea of America as "one nation" as overly abstract and metaphysical and "one nation under God" —and given its unity by God — downright mystical and vaguely blasphemous. But that's a minority view. Further, I do believe in the American Republic and have sworn to "preserve, protect, and defend it," insofar as it's most directly embodied in our evolving Constitution. So if not a "nationalist," I'm a republican (by God!) and would have to admit also to debts of honor owed by the Republic.

            And so forth.

            We may decide that there's just no way we can work out an equivalent of "Forty acres and a mule" nowadays, and what we will do about reparations is nothing directly. But at least that would be a conscious decision — choosing not to act is an ethical/political action — and the discussion would almost certainly get the American government doing things we should be doing anyway to mitigate present inequities, whatever their causes.

            So, a motion is on the floor, and I for one urge the Congress of the United States to adopt House Resolution 40, or whatever might be its current form. Serious talk aims at action or a decision not to act, and establishing a serious Commission to Study Reparations for African Americans is a solid, sensible first step.

Sesquicentennial Thoughts: Now Let Us Praise Donald Trump on "Anchor Babies" (and the Fourteenth Amendment)

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. — Amendment XIII (6 December 1865), Section 1

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. — Amendment XIV (9 July 1868), Section 1

         So, what did you do on New Year's Day 2013 for the huge national celebration of the 150^th anniversary ("Sesquicentennial") of President Lincoln's 1863 Emancipation Proclamation? Oh, right; there wasn't any big national celebration in 2013. But that's okay; the Proclamation was important, but it was a unilateral action by the President as commander-in-chief of the military forces of the US in a time of war, so maybe 2013 would've been too soon to celebrate, given what was coming up in a couple years.

         So: What will you do for the remaining huge national celebrations in 2015 of the Sesquicentennial of the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, the Constitutional provision finally and totally outlawing slavery in the United States? Oh, right; maybe some "Juneteenth" celebrations this year were bigger than usual, but as of the end of August 2015 there are no plans for some huge end-of-the-year national celebration of the Thirteenth Amendment.

        

         Well then, how about plans for the national commemoration next year of 20 August 1866, when US President Andrew Johnson formally proclaimed that the Civil War was "at an end and that peace, order, tranquility, and civil authority now exist in and throughout the whole of the United States of America"? It would need to be a somber affair: more Americans died in the US Civil War than in all our other wars combined at least until the 1970s, a number John M. McCardell Jr. brought home by noting that, proportionally, if the USA had as many people killed in our war in Indochina as died in our Civil War, there would be four million (that's 4,000,000) names on the Vietnam Memorial wall. Still, we should certainly commemorate the final conclusion of the war and celebrate, somberly, the end of the carnage.

         Right?

         If there are any such plans, I haven't heard of those either, nor plans for celebrating in 2018 the "new birth of freedom" promised to Americans in the Fourteenth Amendment.

         So now let us praise Donald Trump and his attack on "anchor babies" and pushing the minor technical problem of occasional "maternity tourism"/"birth tourism" to a proposal to repeal the Jus soli principle of the Fourteenth Amendment: the birthright to US citizenship to anyone born on our "soil." The idea isn't new, but Mr. Trump has brought his genius at provocation to it, and "birthright citizenship" is now a matter of public controversy, and with it the Fourteenth Amendment and its guarantee of citizenship.

         And that is a good and necessary thing, as my introductory questions indicate.

         The joke goes that much is the problem in human personal relations is that men can't remember, and women won't forget (from George Carlin, I think; anyway in the title of a book by Marianna Legato and Laura Tucker). On larger scales, a big part of the world's problems in places like Ireland and the Middle East and the Balkans is too many people remembering all too well ancient grudges; balancing that in an ironically Karmic sort of way, a fair number of ghastly problems come from Americans' often falling into the manly problem of general, and/or convenient, amnesia.

         One exception with Americans is our Civil War, where we have the worst of two worlds: those who remember — usually White Southerners — remember all too well; the rest — not always White folk — often don't even know that we're still dealing with some three centuries of North American slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, de facto segregation, and the whole convoluted and blood-soaked history of race-relations in the US and beyond.

         So I'm serious is praising Donald Trump here: he'll get us discussing the Fourteenth Amendment, and, with luck, we'll bracket discussing the great Fourteenth Amendment with (let's say) robust discussion of the Thirteenth and Fifteenth: The game-changing "Civil War Amendments." If Trump can pretty damn glibly throw out the suggestion of rolling back the Fourteenth Amendment, he can get us to consider how much "roll-back" is going on more currently with Black citizenship and voting rights. The Fifteenth Amendment commands that, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude" (section 1), and, as with all the Civil War Amendments, "The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."

         Okay, let's start talking about American Blacks as full citizens, with the basic right to vote and an even more basic right to life and liberty that can be withdrawn only by "due process of law," where "due process" means something more equitable and formal than a cowboy cop with a gun. And while we're on the subject —

                  As itself amended by expanding the right to vote to women and Americans over eighteen, Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment provides that if American citizens are denied the right to vote by a state, then the state's Congressional representation "shall be reduced in […] proportion." So let's talk about cutting back representation in the House of Representatives of states blocking voting rights. And while we're on that subject we can get the Tea Party sorts in on the conversation — vociferously — by talking about representation in Congress on the basis of total population, if that population includes illegal immigrants. Hey, you don't want illegals here? Be sure not to count them toward representation in Congress and in the Electoral College. That could lose Florida and Texas a seat in Congress apiece, but it also might deduct one from the New York delegation and six from my own state of California.

                  Also, let's get some of us White and White-ish non-former slaves "the equal protection of the law" when it comes to voting by punishing states that reduce the worth of anyone's vote through gerrymandering or voter suppression.

                  I can guarantee that the set "race, color, or previous condition of servitude" has always been the primary reason to deny people equality in voting, but not the only one. The Twenty-Sixth Amendment gave the right to vote to all Americans 18 years of age and over. When the Amendment was up for ratification by the Illinois General Assembly, lobbyists (?) and others were at the crucial committee hearings trying to get the Assembly to legislate to forbid students from voting where we lived — I.e., voting effectively — and one city official from Rantoul, Illinois, home of Chanute Air Force Base, tried to get the General Assembly to forbid members of the US armed forces from voting locally in Illinois. (A nice touch on that last one was that the official from Rantoul had a little American flag in his lapel: Love them service personnel, but don't let 'em vote in your elections!)

         Arguing over such matters in a Presidential campaign will get us really quickly to serious questions on the Constitution and public policy — and then recycle back to whom to elect President, keeping in mind that Presidents nominate members of the US Supreme Court — and who you want to vote for "down ticket" to place in the Congress, to vote on, or, as is far more common, fail to vote on to laws enforcing the Fourteenth Amendment and those others guaranteeing rights.

         It might put the thin edge of the camel's nose heading down the slippery slope to the destruction of the Republic, but a serious Trump run for the Presidency, one with "coat-tails," could sweep into the US Congress and Senate and state legislatures activist reactionaries who will continue the mission of Roll-Back and move to amend the Constitution by getting rid of those pesky Civil War Amendments.

         And that prospect should get the attention of the frequently amnesiac, often downright narcoleptic, American electorate.

So thank you, Mr. Trump, and this much praise: along with forces far mightier than yourself, you are obliging the American people to talk about things we should've been discussing for years, and maybe, just maybe getting us to act.

Happy Sesquicentennials! (Anyone planning parties?)

Unite, Distract — and Rule: Donald Sterling (& Cliven Bundy [and SAE Bus Songs]) 1 May 2014/20 March 2015

            The headline on The Ventura County [CA] Star for 30 April 2014 read "Sterling Tarnished" (the Star has a real thing with cutesy headlines): "Clippers' owner banned for life by NBA." That was above the fold, just below the box referring readers to page 5A for the deaths of "at least 35 people in the South and Midwest" in tornadoes. Under the headline was a story by a local reporter on the celebration that replaced planned protests at the LA Clippers v. Golden State Warriors game (the Clippers won 113-103), and the Associated Press story on NBA Commissioner Adam Silver's announcement of the lifetime ban on Donald Sterling from "any association with the league or the Clippers," plus a $2.5M fine, plus calls that Sterling sell the team. The Star that day commented on Sterling's fall in its lead editorial, and a reporter-cum-columnist reported and commented on the case on page 1 of the Sports section, dealing mostly with the racist comments Sterling had been recorded making, but mentioning briefly — very briefly — Sterling's history of issues with race and misogyny, and housing discrimination.

            And so on with much of America's media uniting in noting that Donald Sterling is a racist asshole.

            Okay, I agree: Donald Sterling is a racist asshole, an ineffective team owner, and one creepily weird dude. Still, people should not be punished for what they are and most of the time only condemned, contemned, and verbally (counter)attacked for what they say. What counts most is what people do, and where the hell was the National Basketball Association when Sterling was quite likely racially discriminating in housing and undoubtedly acting as one shitty landlord!?

            Far more important is this. The attacks on Sterling unite all us right-thinking Americans in enforcing norms of decency in language but do little else. The attacks help assuage White feelings of guilt and help Blacks' self-esteem, but that's pretty much it. It's a legitimate high, but a cheap one, literally cheap; real progress will be expensive.

            I'll repeat a rule, one of the Basics every adult human should know: "Guilt isn't inherited; but the loot is."
            To find the US peculiarly evil among the nations is just another form of BS American exceptionalism, but European America was born in the dual original sins of the dispossession and slaughter of Native Americans and the enslavement and exploitation of Blacks. That is where any serious discussion of race matters in the US must begin and topics to which it must return.

            The loot is the main issue, folks; relatively speaking, all else is distraction.

            Look, it's nice if people admire and like you and potentially dangerous if people hate you. Still, what is crucial for minorities is whether or not and how much you really have to care what other people think. Keep your eye on the prize, and the most initial prize is political clout and social status — as in, initially and largely, money: if you have enough of it, you can laugh off the bigots.

            Sticking with Blacks here: much of the wealth of the United States came from extorted Black labor during slavery and to a lesser but significant extent under Jim Crow. That's the loot when it comes to African-Americans, or the main body of it, and some of us shared the loot far more than others. White folks tend to have more wealth than Black folks in large part because White folks inherited almost all of the loot.
            The serious question is what, if anything White and Black Americans — and the various blends of Americans — are going to do about that.

            Freed slaves didn't get "Forty Acres and a Mule," and figuring out a contemporary equivalent will be very difficult; actually doing anything will be painful for a lot of people because it involves reparations, which means taking some of the stolen property and giving it back.

            So let us enjoy righteous indignation against Donald Sterling and throw in Cliven Bundy, the songsters of Sigma Alpha Epsilon of Oklahoma U, and other such, and rejoice in the fall of Sterling and perhaps when the Federal Marshalls stop Mr. Bundy from going from deadbeat racist to insurrectionist. But let's keep the party fairly quiet, and brief.

            Then we can get down to serious discussion of who has what and how they and we got it: what to do with the loot from Grand Theft Continental, with lethal violence, against the AmerIndians, and kidnapping, murder, and crimes against humanity against the ancestors — some quite recent — of African-Americans.
            That's the issue — not the attitudes and blather of bigots.