This first ran on Splice Today.
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My wife is white, and she was taking the train to the Southside where we live. The train was crowded, almost entirely with African-Americans. One black man saw her sitting, and harassed her for the entire 20-minute train ride. How dare you be here when you know that this is a black train going to the black Southside, he told her. “Here’s this white women taking a seat. Are there any black women who need a seat? Or any black men. Or anybody?” He talked at length about how white people disrespect black people. He kept repeating, “You think you don’t have anything to do with it, but you have to pay.” It was that “you have to pay” that my wife found especially worrisome. Other people on the train punctuated his dialogue with laughter or shouts of encouragement.
She got home safely and was none the worse for wear. And nothing like this has ever happened to her before; she doesn’t feel unsafe taking the train as a rule, and not infrequently chats pleasantly with fellow riders. Still this incident was obviously very uncomfortable, and more than a little frightening. It also shows, I think, that the liberal default claim that “there is no reverse racism” is not entirely accurate. My wife was harassed, threatened, and told that she should not be allowed to use public facilities because of the color of her skin. It’s hard to imagine how you could define racism in such a way that her experience wouldn’t qualify. Certainly, if the reverse had happened—if on a train full of white people going to the Northside, a black person had been singled out and harassed on the basis of her race while other white onlookers cheered—it would be considered racism, and rightfully so.
There are a couple of possible takeaways here. First is the obvious point that black people, like white people, can be hateful if given the chance. That hatefulness can take a number of forms, but one is racial prejudice.
Racial prejudice doesn’t exist in a vacuum though. And in this case, the context, or the possibility, of black prejudice against white people is predicated on the context of white prejudice against black people. What happened to her only makes sense because of black history.
I don’t mean that the history of white oppression is an excuse for what happened to my wife. There isn’t any excuse for it, and treating people as if the sin of their skin color trumps who they are as individuals is simply a restatement of racism, not a mitigation of it. Rather, what I’m saying is that the black-on-white racism directed against my wife was made possible by the structural white-on-black racism that has shaped Chicago.
My wife’s assailant said that the train to the Southside was a black train. But it wasn’t African-Americans who decided that the Southside would be black. It wasn’t African-Americans who decided that Chicago should be the most segregated city in the country. For that matter, it wasn’t African-Americans who decided that people in the US should be categorized first and foremost on the basis of race in order to morally justify and practically facilitate slavery. My wife was visible as a white person going to a majority-black section of the city because her country and her city had made a systematic, centuries-long effort to mark and segregate black people. Without that history of racism, the reverse-racism my wife experienced would be impossible.
In a recent piece at Counterpunch, Tanya Golash-Boza argues that racism harms not just black people, but white people as well. She points out, for example, that when qualified people of color are passed over for advancement, less qualified white people get the jobs, so that “mediocre white people are teaching our children, leading community businesses, and fixing our telephones.” She adds that the structural concentration of wealth in the U.S. goes, not to all white people, but to a select few, so that racism is part of a system in which most black and white people “are fighting over the crumbs.”
My wife’s experience could be seen as another, even more direct way in which structural racism against black people can, in particular circumstances, result in harm to white people. The creation of racial difference and of segregation results in categorization on the basis of race.
Golash-Boza concludes: “Once we see the harm that racism causes all people in our society, it will be easier to form multi-racial coalitions to eliminate racism.” I’d like that to be true. But I think that when pointing out the harm that racism does whites, it’s important to realize that those harms are accidental—a kind of gratuitous fall-out of the hate and misery intentionally targeted at black people.
My wife’s story is the story of Chicago’s Southside, which is the story of America, which is in a lot of very important ways the story of racism. Doing a cost-benefit analysis on how and whether racism hurts white people can elide the uncomfortable fact that racism is entwined with the very existence of “white people” as a category, and for that matter with American (and certainly with Chicago) identity and history. Wanting to get rid of racism, then, isn’t so much about cost-benefit analysis. Rather it’s about no longer wanting hatred to be what we live with, day in and day out, what we see in the faces around us, and what we come home to every night.
[Comments probably shouldn’t have intro notes, but: Thanks to Noah for encouraging me to post this reaction. I’ve been following the discussion about his piece on FB, but decided to leave these words as they were this morning.]
A fine and thoughtful piece, Noah. But I’d like to suggest, as a addendum of sorts, that there’s a perennial problem with saying things like, say, your wife’s experience “only makes sense” because of the structural oppression and history that made such an encounter possible. And the problem, it seems to me, is this: the “structural” argument is potent and powerful, but sometimes too powerful.
True, any act — positive or negative — can be explained to a determinate level by the structures and causal histories that make such action possible, or thinkable. The mugging I just experienced is “only possible” within the context of economic predation and privation, the system of property and capital, etc. Or on a much lighter note, the wonderful movie I just saw and my reaction to it is “only possible” within a certain system of cultural capital, of aesthetic practices, and so on. In other words, all those causal and determining structures made those events possible — created those actors, actions, events, and meanings.
All that is true. At the same time, though, the use of system as an explanatory device only gets on so far, in part because it covers so much ground. For lack of a better metaphor, we may be part and parcel of the system — may be of the system — but we do not live or experience life within the system. We tend to life and experience life in the middle-ground, somewhere between our individual minds and the invisible structures that shape them.
This form of explanation has real-world consequences, at least on the individual level. The systemic explanation may frame your wife’s experience as one thing (not racism or reverse-racism), but that probably does nothing to change her experience of the power dynamics and emotion at play right then and right there. (And you never said otherwise.) The structure may tell her that this was just “accidental” side-effects of white supremacy, but what does that do the life she lives there (or even, how does it help to distinguish that day’s experience with power with any other day’s)?
Or to pull from other conversations we’ve been having, the systemic explanation might tell one tale about where the structural lines of force and oppression lie in an online conversation, reactions to a piece of art, or a political browbeating. But that super-fact or transcendent explanation often has the effect of simply dismissing or disallowing people’s experiences. Again, I know this isn’t your point here, but I try to imagine what good it des your wife to be told that her experience of race and hatred is not a real experience of race and hatred, because it’s not a structural experience of such.
Micro-power – or maybe just human-scale power – is still power and still, much of the time, feels like power. A man, to take a recent example, may learn to hate and fear his own sexuality by way of feminism, but when he expresses this, he is told (and this is the nicest version) that your trauma is not real trauma because it’s not structural oppression. And of course it’s not, but where does that get us – or him?
Sometimes I think my ideas are now boiling down to this. Systemic explanations are helpful and powerful; unfortunately, there is no such thing as a system (with an emphasis on “thing”). The structures of the world may construct our live. Good for them and for those that can invoke them. But they don’t have to live here.
They say the “real” natives, the indigenous “americans”, the so called “red Indians”, of early Hollywood fame with their wow wow scalping escapades, died out due to disease. It’s written in the history books, so it must be true. History, existing in the present, in the language of the victors.
“People of color” is that an Americanism? It seems strange to my European ear. Suggests you can divide people into two groups 1) People of color and 2) People without color. It makes no sense, but as the late Wittgenstein wrote, if you’re not in the game it won’t ever make sense.
A white man shouts racial obscenities at a black man. The white man is labelled a racist. A black man shouts racial obscenities at a white man. The white man is labelled as responsible for the black mans plight, history, power. What’s the answer …
People of color: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_color
As I’m trying to say in the piece, racial epithets, hurled by whomever, exist in a historical and structural context. They make sense, or have power or meaning, because of a history of racism designed to persecute, control, and kill black people, in America and elsewhere.
I think what Noah is saying makes a lot of sense: violence perpetuates violence. This is true for every kind of evil, and racism is no different.
Great piece, Noah.
I enjoyed reading this article and found it to be insightful. The topic of race relations is something close to my heart and has been throughout my 33 years of life. A vivid childhood memory of mine sprung to mind while reading this post. I was about six years old and swimming at a public pool in my home town of Akron, Oh. While swimming by myself I was jumped by four young African American children, held under water until nearly losing consciousness, then struggling back up and out of the pool. On the surface this incident happened because I was perceived as being white. More importantly, given appropriate context, this incident happened because of a long running, systemic history of racial segregation and oppression of blacks nationwide and specifically in this community. A person might suppose this incident could have very well fostered in me a deep seeded fear and antagonistic mentality towards black folks, however this wasn’t the case. African Americans have never been an alien species to me. I was lucky enough to be raised by parents who encouraged me to interact and befriend as wide and varied a swath of persons as possible. I had numerous black friends growing up as well black role models and black teachers. It wasn’t until getting into my teens that I was even cultured to see black people as BLACK people. For most of my life growing up they were just people. Friends, teachers, role models. Not black anything. Today, I understand the importance labels can have, for better or for worse they are here and we are stuck with them. Black power is a term of empowerment for people who have been made to feel ashamed of their skin color by a white dominant media. I understand why it’s important to keep the distinction between hash tags #blacklivesmatter & #alllivesmatter. All lives do matter, obviously, but not all lives have been discriminated against equally. I guess that I would just like to make a few suggestions to anyone who identifies themselves as a “white” person. Make friends with people who are different from you. Study cultures that are not your own. Try and be sensitive to the plight and mentality of those that have been alienated and discriminated against for such a long, long time. Context is everything. If you are living in a cultural bubble it is likely that you will be highly susceptible to media propaganda, sensationalism, and fear mongering. If your elevate your thinking past what is immediately apparent then you can start doing something about the big picture problem, on an individual and community level. That’s something I try to think about and remind myself of consistently.
“We have to change the way we see the world”-Angela Davis 2015
One always needs to be careful with generalisation. This was a news report appearing in the BBC in December:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-30391163
If you are unable to access the BBC iplayer this is from youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH8j_kBGzYk
Systems are an illusion. Logic is an illusion. Math is an illusion. Everything is equal.
That makes me sad.
On the other hand, I appreciate Adam’s comments re: leaving one’s bubble.
Don’t worry Bert, it’s only from the systemic vantage that everything can be truly equal. To the system, your tears don’t matter, nor your appreciation.
Joyce, come on. Prejudice against albinos is awful, but it is not well describd by pretending it’s the same thing as racism. Don’t play word games, please.
I agree with commenters concerns about the ways in which thinking in terms of systems or structures, (be they outcomes of history, discourse, economics, technology, ideology, or some combination thereof) can and does obscure the irreducible character of human experience. However, I also think it’s important to understand that if we want to recognize individual experience as more than an exchangeable data point then it’s important to understand how these structures operate through individuals, and how individuals operate through these structures. Here’s an example:
In 1998 I was mugged. It happened on a reasonably busy sidewalk in broad daylight. The mugger was a 30-something African American dude. He walked up alongside me and asked for some change. He was smiling and chatty, (he’d missed his bus, he just found work, etc.). I gave him some coins. He continued to smile, but pressed something into my side and told me that I hadn’t given him enough. I told him I had nothing else, which was true. He kept smiling, but made it clear things wouldn’t end well if I didn’t help him out. I gave him my wallet; or rather, he grabbed my wallet from my hand as soon as it was out of my pocket. Still smiling, he looked at it and shoved it back into my hand. He then dropped the smile, put on a look of righteous indignation and yelled “I did not ask you for this, what’s your problem?” He stormed off. Why did he do this? It was broad daylight on a busy street. Had a cop seen any of it, the final exclamation (combined with the smiling act) would have allowed him to argue that he’d just asked for change, but dumb white kid thought it was a mugging. Witnesses probably would have agreed.
To unpack, the mugger took advantage of a long history of systematic oppression to make possible a broad daylight mugging. He’d made history work for him, and against me. I recognized this at the time. This didn’t make me feel any better about it in the moment, nor did it make it easier to walk home from work later that day, of for many months to come. However, at no point did I think that his ability to game the structure portended a life in which I would be looked at with suspicion. The system was still on my side, though its structure had made me vulnerable to another individual, an individual who, somewhat paradoxically, was normally vulnerable to it.
TLDR: The individual/system binary is false, and best left to libertarians and vulgar marxists.
Cos’ I is black …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAorQUzjz0g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgcnwmL0OBA
It certainly sounds like he was a loud mouth jerk…were the people laughing along his buddies or just random other people on the train.
The problem I see with the racism/reverse racism idea is that it reduces things to black vs. white, without taking into account how individuals of various races or ethnicity may perceive each other, or colorism within member of particular racial groups, or other types of bigotry (against sex, gender, sexuality, age, mental or physical ability, etc.)I think looking at intersectionality covers it better.
Intersectionality may cover it better…I guess the problem there is that, in my experience at least, people are really reluctant to use intersectionality to talk about incidents or situations where white people (or folks who are usually not oppressed) may be on the wrong end of power dynamics, even in limited ways.
This:
“In my experience at least, people are really reluctant to use intersectionality to talk about incidents or situations where white people (or folks who are usually not oppressed) may be on the wrong end of power dynamics, even in limited ways.”
Also this:
I apologize to libertarians… Thinking about it, I’m not sure the individual/society dichotomy is any more pronounced in libertarian thinking than it is in (neo)-conservative or (neo)-liberal thinking. I am pretty sure it’s a flaw of vulgar marxism.
Also, also this:
The danger of intersectionality when discussing reverse-racism is that the notion of a reversal can imply an exchangeability of experience at odds with the goals of intersectionality. That is, as a term reverse racism implies that all oppression is the same, and differs only in its object, whereas intersectionality holds that oppression differs according to the systems of power at work.
Ugh! My apologies to Jenny Gonzalez-Blitz. I simply repeated her point about the problem with reverse racism and intersectionality…
As an ideological young liberal Chicago Democrat in the late 1960s and early 1970s, my dream was that someday all the racial strife would end and we’d all live together in peace and dignity.
And man, did I see racial strife. I lived in the Chicago neighborhood of Austin, and after the 1968 riots, my neighborhood north of the Lake Street railroad tracks went from almost all white to almost all black in just about three years. Huge chunks of the black west side went up in flames, prompting middle class blacks to flee west and north. And as they moved into my neighborhood, whites fled to other parts of Chicago or into the suburbs.
Austin High School was at one time one of the best high schools in Chicago. However, by the late 1960s it was a hotbed of racial strife, and academics quickly became secondary to simple survival. Things got so bad there was a period where the National Guard was actually at the school to keep the peace. My best friend back then — a big but quiet intellectual type — was attacked almost every day. It got so bad by 1969 he dropped out and never went back. My older sister managed to graduate from Austin HS in 1970, but only after transforming herself into a tough — never backing away from a fight. Fistfights were every-day occurrences, and knife fights were common. One of her friends was badly beaten and had his head caved in with a chair, and when he came back later in a wheelchair, he was summarily thrown down the stairs.
Since I was such a runt circa 1968, it was a good thing I tested well and made it into what was then akin to a magnet school six miles away near Wrigleyville: Lane Tech High School. If I had gone to Austin HS, who knows how things would have turned out. .
But while I went to Lane, due to economic necessity, my family stayed in the old neighborhood. Yet every year, things got tougher and more dangerous — all because of our skin color — and soon we were no longer welcome in an area where we’d lived for more than a dozen years.
Astonishingly enough, my idealism survived this baptism of fire. I still think it is possible for us to all live together in peace and harmony, but I’m enough of a realist to know that it won’t happen unless the racists of ALL races are quashed. I said it before and I’ll say it again. Every racist I knew in Chicago – regardless of their skin color – was a Democrat. So the meme that Republicans are racists and Democrats are not is, too me, a bunch of bullshit. Democrats need to address the racists in their party just as they expect Republicans to do.
Yeah…I think your prescriptions and analysis are really confused, Russ.
Current policy in Chicago is to close schools on the South side. Communities organizing to protect their kids are largely ignored. And that’s in the context of a city that remains massively segregated — and not because black people decieded to segregate it.
Not sure how you’re testing for racism among your friends and acquaintances (is there some sort of Star Trek scanner?) But the Republican party continues to be built on white identity politics that are closely tied to a long history of racism and oppression. Democrats have that history too, but have tried to change, which is why the black president we’ve got is a Democrat, and why the Dems coalition is basically everybody, while the Republicans is older, whiter and ever more male. Seeing the two sides as equivalent on race is thoroughly confused.
Noah — Not sure what you mean about MY confusion. It was black and white racism on both sides that led to Austin’s rapid downfall, and it’s racism on both sides, and the street gangs, that keep it that way.
Change for minorities in Chicago has been nothing but lip service from white Democrats for decades. From what I’ve seen, Democrats have merely developed politically correct talking points, but when it comes to actual problem-solving and action, there is none.
Life on the west side has not improved in more than 40 years. It’s actually gotten worse – especially when it comes to homicides and jobs availability. Compared to the rest of the city, Democrats spend almost nothing on the west side, and the only time there’s a significant crackdown on the gangs in those areas is when their violence spills into the surrounding neighborhoods.
But whites alone are not the problem. Black racism is alive and well on the west side, and by some bizarre double standard, many liberals seem to think that such racism is apparently “justified” because of historical transgressions against blacks.
Yet in my mind, ANY racism is bad, and until both sides get past their overt or covert biases, and until gang activity is crushed, I don’t see how anything can change in places like Austin. You can’t work together if you hate each other.
Noah wrote: “Not sure how you’re testing for racism among your friends and acquaintances (is there some sort of Star Trek scanner?)”
Amusing, but if you are serious, naïve. Because of my upbringing and experience, I can generally spot a racist in short order. Some are harder than others to spot (especially today, because people have been conditioned to hide it), but, given enough time, they eventually show their hand.
As for your assertion that Democrats are trying to change their long history of racism and oppression, all I can say is seriously? You live in Chicago and you honestly believe that?
That’s the big problem with Democrats, in my opinion. They believe they are holier than thou, and they are not. They cannot solve, in their own back yards, the exact same problems they accuse the Republicans of perpetuating.
It’s impossible to solve a problem if one refuses to admit it exists, and that’s exactly what is happening in Chicago.
I don’t think it makes much sense to talk about racism against white people as some sort of systemic problem. Again, as I say in this piece, the only reason such racism is possible is because of massive segregation and a creation of black/white identities which are all a function of anti-black racism. It’s not black people who segregated Chicago. It just isn’t.
There’s tons of racism among white Democrats and the white Democratic establishment. Absolutely. Is it the same as among Republicans? No, and pretending it is doesn’t help anyone (nthough, again, Emanuel’s policies in Chicago are very racist.)
Democrats are in fact better on these issues than Republicans. That’s not saying much, though, because the Republican party is really, really racist, unfortunately.
Homicides have not actually gotten worse on the south and west sides, is my understanding. They’ve gotten marginally better — but crime on the northside has dropped precipitously, so the different between different areas of the city has gotten much greater. Not sure about jobs; they’ve been rotten on the south and west side for a long time, and certainly aren’t getting better following the financial crisis. The big issue there is cuts in state and local government jobs — cuts which affect black people especially hard.
Noah — Racism cuts both ways. It chills relations, shuts doors and puts distance between affected groups. And while it’s true blacks historically had nothing to do with segregation in Chicago, when integration events such as what occurred in Austin took place, many blacks lashed out viciously at whites, erecting a wall that, to this day, white Democrats at best have not figured out how to take down, or, at worst, simply no longer care. If blacks had followed MLK’s exhortation of non-violence in Chicago, things may have turned out a lot different than they are there today.
As for Republicans, yes, of course there are racist Republicans. But there are many Republicans who are not racists.
For example, polls show that the majority of people in the military tend to vote conservatively, and these days, the military tends to be one of the least racist, and reflects far more diversity, than do most other large organizations in the United States. The reason for this is simple: There is no institutional mechanism in the military, and thus no tolerance, for racism — regardless of how things were for each individual back in their home town prior to joining the military. Like any system, it isn’t perfect, but it sure handles things better on the diversity front than does the Democratic leadership of Chicago.
I mean, it’s pretty frickin’ sad that a 1960s racist hotbed like Selma, Alabama, has had two consecutive black mayors since 2000, while Chicago, which has a minority population of more than 60 percent, and has had allegedly progressive and tolerant Democrats running the show for more than 75 years, has only had had one minority member elected mayor in its entire history.
By the way, the article linked to below is from “The Chicago Reader,” and was written in 1988. It very accurately discusses the fall of Chicago’s west side. The saddest part? This article could have been written yesterday, as nothing in Austin has changed in the succeeding 27 years. Shame on the Democrats, whose decades of cheap talk have proven to be as worthless as a Bernie Madoff investment account.
http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/the-night-chicago-burned/Content?oid=872662
Racism doens’t actually cut both ways on a systemic level. Slavery wasn’t an issue of slaves needing to open their hearts to the slavers, you know? Slavery’s gone, but who has the power hasn’t changed as much as it might. Chastising black people because cops still shoot them and throw them in prison isn’t even-handed, and doesn’t help anyone, except the folks at the very top.
“But there are many Republicans who are not racists.”
Individuals aren’t really that important. Republican party currently is committed to white identity politics. That means that they consistently target and isolate minorities in the name of white interests. That’s what the party was set up to do; it’s what it continues to do. Hopefully at some point it will make some effort to change, but that hasn’t happened yet, unfortunately.
Like I said, Democrats are racist too, and the city system in Chicago absolutely screws over black folks.
Hi Peter, just to address your comment about the traumatized male victim of feminism, I’d refer you to his piece by Arthur Chu:
http://www.salon.com/2015/01/10/the_plight_of_the_bitter_nerd_why_so_many_awkward_shy_guys_end_up_hating_feminism/
He outlines why it’s so important to distinguish between individual experience and structural oppression.
I object to the spirit of your comment (I mean, structural oppression is not The Matrix), but I too find myself questioning Noah’s “explanation” of what happened. I don’t think his wife’s experience “only makes sense because of black history.” In fact, I don’t think her experience makes sense at all.
Is there a distinction to be made between systemic racism and, like, a psychopath who focuses on race? To compare Nate’s anecdote about the mugger (whose motivations are pretty easy to “explain”) with what happened to Noah’s wife is sort of like comparing police brutality with the KKK. There are shared characteristics, yes, but there are different questions of personal agency (and mental illness, etc.) in play, even if it all rises up out of the same broken system.
By the way, Nate A, your mugger was super naive. If a cop had witnessed that exchange, chances are very slim she would have taken your mugger’s side. Same with any witnesses. Because systemic racism.
So anyway, yes, violence perpetuates violence. And Noah’s points about Chicago and the south side are all well taken. But also his wife’s story is the story of her harasser, an individual who chose to do something really, really fucked up. And I think that is lost in this piece.
Except…people cheered him on. That’s why it was especially frightening and unpleasant. It isn’t just, “this one whacko did this thing.” He singled her out by race, and the community (in that train) backed him up.
I found that Scott Aarronson thing pretty fascinating, mostly because I’ve had some of his issues. The Salon piece was good, Laurie Penny’s essay was pretty moving, and I agree that the guy wasn’t really suffering from some kind of structural oppression. But I still think one (maybe minor) lesson to take from his story is that the views of Noah’s beloved Andrea Dworkin should not be taken seriously (or at least literally). I think she was a crazy person.
I don’t think Dworkin is crazy, exactly. I think her ideas obviously weren’t very helpful in this instance. I wrote about that here, fwiw.
Noah wrote: “Chastising black people because cops still shoot them and throw them in prison isn’t even-handed, and doesn’t help anyone, except the folks at the very top.”
We’re talking about two different things here.
Lashing out at white racists by condemning all whites is not simply counter-productive, it is hypocritical and wrong — regardless of past sins. MLK knew this better than anyone, and he practiced what he preached.
Regarding the whole white cop/alleged black perpetrator issue, any reasonable person will readily admit that there’s a problem in certain parts of the country. Personally, I think the demographics of local law enforcement should be reflective of the community it polices whenever possible.
But I find the whole “cops-are-evil-and-the-greatest-threat-to-blacks” bandwagon cry incredibly stupid. The greatest threat to blacks in a black neighborhood like my old one the west side — regardless of age or gender — is gangs. And they are the greatest threat by an enormous margin. The next greatest threat is non-gang-related criminals. After that, the greatest threat are friends or relatives gone bad/drunk/or high. Cops are a distant last.
And unfortunately, cops are pretty useless protecting people in places like Austin. They drive around and stumble across a crime in progress once in a while, but for the most part, the bad guys are long gone before the cops can respond to a 911 call. So if someone is going to kill you, or you are caught in the middle of a gang-related turf war, chances are pretty good you’ll be dead before the cops arrive. All they can do then is put a toe-tag on you at that point. And sadly, the odds in Chicago of the cops then finding your killer (and getting a conviction) is horrible compared to, say, Japan. That’s why most people in my old neighborhood who may witness a crime will say “I didn’t see anything.” They’re not stupid. They know that even if the cops do catch the alleged perp, they can’t really protect witnesses who testify.
No, the big threat to most blacks in the rougher neighborhoods is not the cops — Ferguson and a few other places notwithstanding. That doesn’t mean cop abuses should be ignored. It just means that Democrats, as usual, are either clueless, or are intentionally ignoring the bigger problems.
The state is the biggest threat to black people. Cops are part of that; institutional segregation is part of that; a lack of justice is part of that. Cops are part of a system that creates, and polices, black neighborhoods as foreign enclaves under assault. Black people in this position do not always respond with love and joy, because people in general cannot be counted on for love and joy, especially when they’re being systematically oppressed. But that doesn’t mean that the problem is an equal failure of goodwill on both sides.
Hi Kim. To clarify, I wasn’t comparing my experience to that of Noah’s wife, I was using it to demonstrate that, in your words (which I liked), this isn’t the Matrix. As to the naïveté of my mugger, I’m not saying the strategy was without risk. However, we were in downtown Oakland, where it it wouldn’t have been unusual to see a white kid overreact to a panhandler, and where cops had bigger fishes to fry.
Noah wrote — “The state is the biggest threat to black people.”
That’s intellectual hogwash. I never worried about “the state” doing me harm in my old neighborhood. And “the state” didn’t create the gangs that terrorize the people in the neighborhood — unless you consider making a wide range of drugs from heroin to pot illegal.
And currently, a black guy IS the state, and he hasn’t done shit specifically for neighborhoods like Austin. The Affordable Care Act has trickle down value, but it does little to address the core problems of the predominately black communities that have been in a depressed state for longer than most Americans have been alive.
“I never worried about “the state” doing me harm in my old neighborhood.”
So…wait. You’re black now?
And yes, I know, it’s all post-racial American awesomeness. Thanks for the memo.
Noah — I was part of the neighborhood like everyone else, so by that “I” meant “we.” And if you cannot understand that, than you’re just another aloof and detached intellectual who pretends to understand a situation, but in reality, does not. The cops were the least of out worries. If anything, they were never around when needed.
Ironically, the only time the cops have ever kicked my door in was when I was living in a predominately white neighborhood, and no one was even home. But that’s another story.
I remain uncertain why when you say “we” you appear to mean black people. That seems like an unconvincing rhetorical maneuver.
You’re talking about living in a neighborhood segregated by income and (to some degree) race. And of course, that has absolutely nothing to do with state policies or American history.
This is the danger I think Peter flirts with when asserting the predominance of individual experience over structures. You get to a point where assertions of authenticity (“I was there!”) trump any effort at historical or cultural context.
I haven’t checked the stats lately, but I think the biggest threat to black people — at least black Americans — is heart disease. Same for Americans of other ethnicity. We prioritize intentional threats from other people higher than circumstantial or unintentional ones. You can see by the differences in the way we react to natural disasters or drunk driving and the way we react to terrorist attacks. Attacks from people who are supposed to be our protectors spur the most outrage of all. So even though many, many more black people are killed by private citizens than by police officers, the private homicides inspire few protests. It’s just a circumstance we expect and accept, whether we really should or not.
Well, black people’s life expectancies are lower than white people’s, I’m pretty certain. That has a lot to do with ongoing poverty, and that has a lot to do with being systematically excluded from things like the G.I. Bill and employment over the decades (as well as segregated).
There’s literally, historically, empirically, a vast conspiracy in this country against black people. Always has been.
No, there’s not. It’s a lot more petty and banal than that. Slavery and maybe Jim Crow were vast conspiracies, but not secret ones, because a vast conspiracy cannot be secret. There have been (and to a lesser degree, still are) a great number of small and a good number of medium-sized conspiracies against black people in this country. The same is true of anyone else circumstance has made vulnerable to exploitation — not just in America, but all over the world. I think you’re right to point out that a shorter life expectancy is one result of all that. So is the disproportionate number of single, unemployed, young black males that commit violent crimes, including violence against police officers. But the food deserts Michelle Obama talks about are a far more powerful intermediary effect than the effects of police paranoia. And state-sponsored violence is a far less insidious form of injustice, so it generates more anger.
I don’t think the prison industrial complex is especially secret. Neither is segregation. People can overlook them or not think about them, but they’re very visible.
I think we reached agreement again, or you’ve at least made points I’m unwilling to argue against. I just thought the idea of a single, vast conspiracy was inaccurate and grandiose. The effect is essentially the same, though, and multiple, smaller exploitation schemes are just as evil — just less dramatically compelling.
I think the reason the Democrats have been powerless to do anything about the black communities under there control is twofold: First, they refuse to address any real root problems if addressing them undermines accepted Democrat canon. Second, despite what they say officially, it’s much easier and cheaper for them to simply leave things the way they’ve “always been.” In effect it’s trickle-down economics at its worst.
Noah wrote: “You’re talking about living in a neighborhood segregated by income and (to some degree) race. And of course, that has absolutely nothing to do with state policies or American history.”
It has everything to do with gangs fueled by illegal drug money, and indifferent and/or incompetent city leadership. By the way, I think that anyone who supports or winks at the illegal drug trade has as much blood on their hands as a young gang member pulling the trigger. And that includes those in Hollywood and the music industry who routinely depict such usage as funny and a victimless crime. There’s nothing funny about the murder rate in my old neighborhood: 305 homicides since Jan. 1, 2006, and counting. http://homicides.redeyechicago.com/neighborhood/austin/
You know, when I look at that homicide map I linked to of my old neighborhood, and see the scores of red dots peppering everywhere I used to run, it makes me glad I was able to get out of there. Many of my friends and neighbors were not so lucky.
“Under their control”? What? It’s not a military encampment. Or, it sort of is, but that’s a problem.
And yes, flushing jobs out of the inner cities and then criminalizing the employment that’s left will result in violence and decay. Shocker.
At the risk of being told that I get my news from ESPN, I found this link to be a useful account of the “conspiracy” of which Noah speaks, or one of them.
http://espn.go.com/espn/story/_/id/11984741/whitlock-why-black-folks-breathe
And the comments are filled with the usual idiocy.
One cannot make a theory out of an instance, nor can one turn it into a case study without investigation (interviewing protagonists etc). As an opinion piece it’s fine and it gives sufficient detail for the reader to make up their own decision on it.
Now quite separate to this I have stumbled on a review of a book … the review says the book is grim reading on the US Prison System and there are suggestions of deep seated structural issues. Some of the statistics quoted seem “unlikely” at first glance and maybe they have been exaggerated (or the result of creative accounting):
1 in 23 U.S. adults in jail, prison, probation, immigrant detention, other gov. supervision.
1 in 40 been denied voting rights temporarily / permanently due to a criminal conviction.
1 in 10 children has had an incarcerated parent.
US, with 5% of world’s population, has a third of world’s 625,000 imprisoned women & girls.
World’s highest Incarceration rate: rivals Soviet citizens sent to Gulag under Stalin.
One in four US workers engaged in “guard labour”.
Acc. legal scholar Michelle Alexander … More African Americans under correctional control today than enslaved a decade before the Civil War.
The Review can be found at http://tinyurl.com/nfcn8bq
There may be access restrictions.
The book under review:
Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics, Gottschalk (2015)
Doesn’t sound particularly exaggerated. U.S. has highest incarceration rate per population in the world, and highest overall, both by a considerable margin.
Okay – I am unfamiliar with this but had heard that the prison system highlighted issues in US. There are quite a few reviews around of the book and haven’t seen anything to suggest the book is wrong on its numbers.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/glenn-c-altschuler/no-holds-barred_1_b_6276128.html
I like the image in the following review (people of color behind bars)
http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/scariest-explanation-americas-vast-prison-population-want-way-95477
Gottschalk has written a lot on the prison system. I’m pretty sure at least some of her articles are available through Google scholar. Another book is “The New Jim Crow” by Michelle Alexander. I haven’t read it in its entirety, but I’ve read parts, and it strikes me as well written and well researched.
I’m not a fan of the word conspiracy as a descriptor, if only because it implies something a bit more exotic than what we have here in the US: Namely, a fairly straight line of public policies designed to stabilize extant economic systems at the expense of a African Americans. These decisions aren’t usually made in secret, but in public. For example, the immigration bill in Arizona was written by a committee on which reps from the private prison industry sat:
http://www.npr.org/2010/10/28/130833741/prison-economics-help-drive-ariz-immigration-law
With this in mind, I’ll go a step further up the structural ladder to argue that biggest threat to the African American community is not the police, but a neo-liberal state in which social issues become little more than potential revenue streams, and in which people deemed problematic become commodities.
Also, before anyone piles on, I realize the example to which I linked is about a different group of marginalized people, and non-citizens to boot. I did not cite it to illustrate the public-private cooperation that oppresses African Americans, but to illustrate the openness of the process, which is conspiratorial, but not exactly a conspiracy.
A quick review of recent history (offered in the aforementioned books), shows that prison industry lobbyists had a strong hand in the “get tough on crime” movement of the 1990’s, and that their role was not secret so much as ignored.
Joyce, I checked none of the statistics you gleaned from Gottschalk’s book, but the only one that seems implausible on its face is “one in four US workers is engaged in guard labour.” It could be a definitional issue.
Noah wrote: “And yes, flushing jobs out of the inner cities and then criminalizing the employment that’s left will result in violence and decay. Shocker.”
Wrong assumption again. The decay started in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when blue-collar jobs in Chicago were extremely plentiful for both blacks and whites alike.
And I ought to know. During the 1970s, I worked as a gofer at a print shop, a dock worker for plumbing supply warehouse, a helper on a delivery truck for a bakery, a gofer at an international trading company, a steward at a summer camp, and a union warehouse order-filler. I also worked at McDonald’s and had a paper route, but those were low-paying jobs that are technically not blue collar.
The guy who got me the union job was Hispanic, and many of my co-workers were black or Hispanic.
No, Austin went to shit long before the jobs dried up in the 1980s and 1990s, so your thesis has no validity. Try again, but this time perhaps with an open mind. I’m right, because I lived through it all and saw how it all went down.
I forgot to list the job I had working at an ice cream shop, but I think I only had that for a month or so before I got canned for giving too much ice cream in a pint to a “ringer” secretly sent by my boss, who ran the tavern next door.
Black people never had as much access to jobs. Less so in 60s and 70s than later, even.
Again, “I was there so I know” is not the kind of globally convincing argument you keep asserting that it is.
Noah wrote: “Less so in 60s and 70s than later, even.”
Based on what data? Didn’t you say earlier that Chicago’s manufacturing jobs exodus was the culprit? That started during the 1980s, as I recall.
And actually living experiencing events over a long period of time directly and/or through family, friends and neighbors does, in fact, give my assertions a reasonable amount of validity over largely theoretical and partisan-driven doctrine.
The bottom line is that all of the big brains in Chicago have failed miserably to change life in black neighborhoods over a period of nearly 50 years. And I say that the reason for that is they tackle all problems through a preconceived liberal-only political lens, rather than from one of problem/actual root cause/solution.
And until (in this case) Democrats take their blinders off, no solution will EVER be forthcoming, and the people they purport to care about will continue to lead second-class lives in miserable and dangerous conditions.
It’s not something where anyone’s been trying especially hard to change it, is the point. On the contrary, a certain amount of effort has been expended not to change it.
What your wife experienced sounds like it was unpleasant, mean, and could certainly be described as racial prejudice or discrimination. But the word “racism” should, I think, be reserved for forms of racial prejudice and discrimination that are widespread, systemic, and supported by our legal and social institutions.
In other words: prejudice + institutional and systemic power = racism.
What this means is that the key difference is that she is lucky enough that such experiences of racial prejudice are rare–but for black folks they can be literally an everyday experience.