Letter on Local Housing Segregation

I live in a suburb of New Jersey that sees itself as a progressive paragon, but which has also been the subject of reports about its racial segregation. It's a place that has "Black Lives Matter" signs everywhere, but also resists any attempt to build denser housing. This contradiction inspired me to write a letter to the Village Green, which is the local news resource. In case you don't want to click on the link, here's what I wrote below.

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Last year the New York Times stirred up the town when it published an article about segregation in Maplewood’s public schools. That article highlighted a dirty not-so-little secret about this place, which prides itself on its progressive nature. A year later, the same town maintains that self-image and is conspicuously involved in protests against racist policing. Signs reading “Black Lives Matter” can be seen all over. However, the deeper structural racism behind the town’s segregated schools has not gone away.

Maplewood’s elementary schools are segregated because Maplewood’s neighborhoods are segregated. In fact, some of the neighborhoods with the thickest presence of the aforementioned Black Lives Matter signs are almost exclusively white. At a time when so many are rightly speaking out against institutional racism, Maplewood needs to examine how its zoning and land use policies reinforce segregation. 

Like suburban New Jersey more broadly, Maplewood’s segregation is rooted in older racist policies intended to make the suburbs white. Redlining established through the post-New Deal FHA’s programs made it so any neighborhood that wasn’t exclusively white lost access to subsidized mortgages. Other policies, like exclusionary zoning, are less obvious but just as important. Whole areas are zoned exclusively for single family homes, shutting out the less affluent (who are disproportionately people of color in New Jersey) by limiting the building of more affordable apartments. These policies in Maplewood and elsewhere contribute to residential segregation. Combined with the neighborhood school model, that residential segregation has major consequences.

Tight zoning rules make it difficult for developers to build and easy for those inclined to stop multi-family dwellings. Developers thus must request variances to get things built, making it easy for all kinds of ridiculous roadblocks to be put in place. If you don’t believe me, come to a public meeting sometime to hear the often Byzantine legal challenges to proposed apartment complexes. The firepower behind these NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) challenges is stronger in whiter, more affluent neighborhoods. Good urbanist policy says that we should have dense housing near transit hubs like the train station, but every time any multi-family development is proposed in the Village, the disproportionately white residents of the neighborhood fiercely resist it. 

For that reason new multi-family dwellings are invariably built in areas of town that are less white. The challenges and hurdles to getting apartments built also ends up making them more expensive, since developers need to build luxury apartments to make up for the expense of getting something built under these circumstances. The artificial housing scarcity also drives up home values in Maplewood and New Jersey more broadly, allowing the disproportionately white group of homeowners relative to renters in this town and in this country to profit off of a racist housing system. 

This has all been going on for decades. The racial segregation that maps onto these housing disparities should be no surprise to us. Yet despite the Black Lives Matter signs on the lawns of Maplewoodians, it’s still just as hard to get multi-unit buildings constructed in the Village as it ever was. 

A great many of the people who make NIMBY arguments may see themselves as anti-racist, or think this is about preserving “neighborhood character” and not systemic racism. However, intentions have little to do with it. To be more blunt, systemic racism, like the coronavirus, doesn’t care about our feelings. 

The way forward should not just include the school district’s integration plan. It should also challenge the zoning and land use restrictions that contribute to the underlying segregation. Other cities have been putting an end to exclusionary zoning, it’s high time that Maplewood did too. The town can do more to support the building of more affordable housing, but the big change needs to happen in the mentalities of Maplewood residents. Those who genuinely care about institutional racism need to be attuned to how exclusionary zoning contributes to it, and stop resisting the building of a town that is more affordable and inclusive. If your opposition to denser housing is framed as “saving the neighborhood” take a moment to think long and hard about the deeper implications of that statement. They might not be as noble as you think. 

The White Supremacy Of Not Caring

The phrase "white supremacist" conjures up visions of Klan robes and shaved heads and swastika tattoos. These days one might also think of a Trump rally. These very obvious manifestations of white supremacy are the proverbial tip of the iceberg. White supremacy is maintained in this country less by openly expressed hate, and more by quiet, subtle, apathy.

One of America's dirty little secrets is that while white Americans by and large don't give a shit about the lives of people of color they don't talk about it much, either. Sometimes silence speaks louder than words. I know a lot of quiet white supremacists who are not vocal Trump supporters, do not express open bigotry, and in some cases are not even conservative. Many of them also don't even really seem to think a whole lot about race.

It's something they'd rather not think about at all. They have internalized the racist hierarchy in their minds, and so feel no need to examine their skin privilege, or even to think that such a thing exists. Their position in society is natural, as far as they are concerned, the product of hard work. When things happen that display the massive levels of racism in this society, they just choose to ignore it and just not care about it.

When Trayvon Martin was murdered, they assumed he must have done something to deserve it. (Repeat this for every time a black person is murdered by the police.) They look at the system of mass incarceration and only think that it's a fine thing that so many criminals are off of the streets. When Flint's water was turned into poison, they just turned the page and moved on. When immigrant children were kidnapped and jailed, they told themselves "well, they were breaking the law" and maybe, just maybe, thought "it's really too bad that had to happen." They heard Trump's racist rants and maybe didn't like them, but still went in to vote for him for a tax cut or an anti-abortion judge on the Supreme Court.

The protests by NFL players are the ultimate litmus test of this phenomenon. While I support the protesting players, I can understand but not agree with those who disapprove of their methods, if and only they are also upset about the police killings inspiring those protests. The thing is, I have never met one of these unicorns. The same people made at the kneeling are, surprise surprise, the same who never said a single word when Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, and so many others were murdered. Why? Because they tacitly support the racist system responsible. 

And when you meet these people, you will often find that they are "nice" people. They are friendly, respectful in their speech, and may even have close friends and family members who are not white. Some people are amazed at the stories of white Trump voters whose immigrant spouses were later deported. I am not surprised in the least. White supremacy in America is violently maintained by the state, but those who approve of that system mostly do not do so by screaming "Build the Wall!" but by hearing about immigrant children abused in custody, shrugfully saying "that's a shame," and not giving it a second thought. 

The "Ground Zero Mosque" Controversy Was A Harbinger Of Our Times

Hey folks, I've got a new piece over at Tropics of Meta, "The Ground Zero Mosque Was A Harbinger Of Our Times." It was inspired by an off-hand comment by Tropics editor Alex Sayf Cummings about that particular event. I happened to be present at the protest against the Cordoba House (which was not within site of the WTC, by the way) by accident. The hate-filled mob I witnessed on a  summer day in 2010 scared me. Back then they were called the Tea Party, now we call them "Trump supporters."

Read the piece, and tell me what you think.

MLK Day Thoughts

Martin Luther King Jr died fifty years ago this year at the age of 39. I can't get over the fact that I am three years older than he was when he was murdered. This was a man with so much potential, so much ahead of him, and on the cusp of a movement that was aimed at bringing the strands of race and class together into a powerful force for change.

I was born in 1975, and my entire life has been a story of backlash against the changes wrought by Dr. King and others. As Ibram X Kendi pointed out in his recent and superlative work Stamped From The Beginning, racial progress has been met in American history by racist progress. The forces of racism may face occasional defeat, but they keep coming back and recalibrating their mission and appeal.

While so many well-meaning but deluded white people thought that racism had been consigned to the dustbin of history by MLK and the election of Barack Obama, the first Klan president was elected in the form of Donald Trump. In 1924 the Democratic Party, dominated by segregationist Southerners, actually managed to prevent the Klan from getting their preferred candidate the nomination. The Republican Party in 2016 gladly and proudly managed to give the nomination to the Klan candidate. Just eight years before the fatuous voices of our media were telling us that America was a "post-racial" nation.

For things to get better we have to abandon our narrative of progress and face things truthfully. People like to quote Dr. King's lines about the moral arc of the universe bending towards justice, but when he was analyzing the situation rather than rallying the troops, he very much questioned the narrative of progress. His "other America" speech at Stanford in 1967 expressed this very well. Here he addressed very directly the backlash against the changes wrought by the movement and the difficulties remaining. In doing so he recalled how the changes wrought be Reconstruction met a similar response.

 My entire lifetime has been a litany of racist backlash, from mass incarceration to murderous policing to "welfare queens" to Willie Horton to Trump. The complacency that so many white people in the middle have on racism is partly due to their misbegotten understanding that the problem was solved back in the 1960s. As a teacher of American history I am reminding myself on this day to fight that horrendously damaging myth in the classroom at every opportunity.

Trump And Fortress Suburbia

A classic tale of fear in fortress suburbia from Patton Oswalt's youth

There is this narrative going around that "Trump voters" are all "traditional" rural folk feeling embattled by changing times, lost jobs, etc. While Trump did very well among rural whites, those people are a small part of the electorate. He got over the top (at least by the standards of the electoral college) by winning suburbia. According to the Miami Herald, his performance among suburban whites won him Florida, and by extension, practically the entire election.

With Democrats dominating in the cities and Republicans in the country, suburbia has long been the crucial swing zone, and Trump won it. This was in large part due to his campaign of fear, which tapped into the fundamental underpinnings of suburbia itself.

American suburbia is a fortress zone. It is set up to allow certain people in, and others out. It is what helps maintain the racial and economic segregation of schools and housing in this country, and which thus maintains the most pernicious aspects of institutional racism. In most of white suburbia there is a constant fear of encroachment, that the tidal wave of "inner city" migration will hit their town and destroy it. This is the reason for such beefed-up police in low crime areas.

In my experience this way of life fills its residents (especially the white ones) with a constant, nagging anxiety that they are threatened. Hence as well the proliferation of so-called "gated communities" in affluent areas. It is very, very easy for someone like Trump to mobilize fear to court voters who are already live in an environment of constant fear of infiltration. These are the people who took the "knock out game" urban legend seriously. These are the people who bought duct tape and plastic sheeting after the government told them to in the wake of 9/11. These are the people who shoot trick or treaters. These are the people who fight to keep mosques from being built in their communities. These are the people who think the very existence of transgendered people is somehow a threat to their kids. These are the people who make excuses for George Zimmerman, who murdered Trayvon Martin in a typical suburban fortress subdivision.

They needed someone to tell them they were protected and that their fears of other people were not hateful, but justified. The wall Trump talks of so fondly has real symbolic weight with them. They want walls around their communities, and want them heavily guarded. And they want the people they don't like who cross those walls to be shot. There have been far too many tragic cases to prove that point in the last few years.

So please, national news media, when discussing "Trump voters" get out of Akron and rural Mississippi for a change, and go to Suffolk County on Long Island or Morris County in New Jersey, two populous suburban counties in heavily blue states that went for Trump when the state as a whole did not. Those voters are key to understanding why Trump won.

Takeaways From The Kaepernick Affair

I don't want to write yet another hot take on a subject that a lot of other people are hot taking. Instead, I'd like to analyze Colin Kaepernick's protest and the reactions to it, and what they say. Here are some simple observations.

The Inability Of White America To Acknowledge Racism Is On Display (again)
I mean, we already knew this, but the reaction to Kaepernick's very silent, unobtrusive protest has touched off a firestorm among white people. The folks upset about his refusal to stand for the national anthem are also the type who never seemed to have a problem with the police murder of African Americans. His protest is meant to address systemic injustice, a thing that the vast majority of white Americans actively or tacitly or implicitly support. The fact is, a very large chunk of white America, probably the majority, cares more about the national anthem than it does about the lives of black people.

Nationalism Is A Very Powerful Force In American Life
This is a drum I keep beating, and I am going to keep banging on it until people listen. In America we coerce children to say a secular prayer to the flag in school every morning with words they don't even understand. At every sporting event we play the national anthem. The flag saturates our clothing, and politicians are expected to wear flag pins on their clothing. Hell, even many sportscasters do it. This behavior is highly unusual in a country that purports to be a democracy. When someone challenges these practices, just watch the lizard brains of so many people in this country go into rage spasms, as we're seeing now.

It's Okay For Athletes To Beat Their Spouses But Not To Engage In Critical Politics
One of the times this year that I've felt the sickest happened at a Mets game. The team had brought back Jose Reyes, who in the off season brutally battered his spouse. While Reyes served out a suspension, the crowd cheered him lustily. If Kaepernick showed up to CitiField, however, I would fear for his safety. Other players have also abused women, such as Aroldis Chapman, and their careers are going just fine. Contrast this to Kaepernick, or even Michael Vick. In our misogynistic society flags and dogs rate higher than women for some people. Athletes are allowed to do a great many terrible things, but for them to be politically critical of this country opens them up for attack. Little has changed since the days of Muhammad Ali.

American Nationalism Is Militarist In Nature
Those who are critical of Kaepernick often say that he is somehow disrespecting veterans and "the troops" who fought and are fighting for "freedom." I find this disturbing on many levels. That so many so easily conflate the nation's symbols with the military's symbols makes me think a military coup could be successful in this country. It also shows tremendous ignorance about what Kaepernick his doing. His protest has fuck all to do with the military; it's about the police and the justice system. Some seem to see the conflate the police with the military, which says a lot about the militarization of the police, and how they are perceived as fighting an internal enemy. (That might explain the willingness in white America to let the murder of black people at the hands of the police slide.) The stuff about the flag being connected to the military as a freedom fighting force not only shows a lack of understanding of American history, but a disturbing tendency to view the military as infallible. Most American wars have had little to do with freedom, from the empire building of the Spanish-American War to the empire building of the Mexican-American War to the empire building of the war in Iraq, and many other in between.

The farcical view of American history as a story of freedom also contributes to the inability of white Americans to see how they have and continue to profit from racism. I salute Colin Kaepernick for jolting those people.

Trump And German-American Identity

A nineteenth century German beer garden in New York, fun for the whole family

I am a German-American, which is a phrase that very few people of my ancestry use to describe themselves. This would've been surprising back in the nineteenth century, when German language newspapers abounded and German beer halls were a common meeting place for German immigrants in cities across the country. Today, according to some measures, German is the most common ethnic ancestry in America, just ahead of African-American. At the same time, one does not see many outward expressions of German-American identity, not nearly what one sees for say Irish, Greek, Italian, Puerto Rican, etc.

I've long pondered this question, and if I had the time, talent, and resources, I'd love to write a sweeping history of Germans in America. A lot of it certainly has to do with the effect of the world wars, which made identifying with Germany very problematic. My German immigrant great-grandfather, for instance, fought in the American army in World War I, even as his own brother was fighting in the Kaiser's forces. Matters weren't helped by Nazi sympathizer groups like the German American Bund in the 1930s. Those events added urgency to the broader erasure of German ethnic identity, something already common among those groups deemed "white." That process for German-Americans (or at least those who were not Jewish) first began back in the nineteenth century, when German Protestants would often be compared favorably to Irish Catholics by WASP elites. The wave of hatred against German Americans in World War I changed that perception, and accelerated assimilation.

Another thing that probably contributed to the lack of a strong German identity was the fact that Germany was an extremely divided country before 1871, and even after that regional and religious divisions were very stark. One of my ancestors actually emigrated because he did not want to be drafted into the Kaiser's army. He was Catholic, and at the time the church had been attacked by the Protestant Prussian dominated new national state in the name of national unity. Most of my ancestors would have spoken the Plattdeutsch dialect of the swampy northwestern places they came from like Oldenburg and Ost Friesland, which would have been unintelligible to someone speaking "high" German.

The vast, vast majority of Americans of German ancestry spend little to no time thinking about their ethnic origins or know much of anything about German food, culture, language, or history, apart from World War II movies. I grew up in central Nebraska, a very heavily German area, and I didn't get a taste until I took German classes in high school from the son of Volga Germans forced to flee the Soviet Union. No one in my family ever cooked German food or spoke in German or encouraged me to learn or know much about German things. (This despite the fact that two of my grandparents had grown up speaking German in the home with their immigrant parents.) A couple of genealogists in the family were interested in researching the family's German roots, but not really at all invested in a German-American identity. We were certainly not ashamed of it or anything, it just didn't really matter that much. German-Americans, by and large, like my own family, have long fully accepted whiteness.

I get depressed that Donald Trump too is a German-American, but his history with his identity is very interesting and telling, both about him and about German-American identity and the lack thereof. Just today the Times published an article on Trump's immigrant grandfather, and the fact that for years his father Fred and Donald himself had claimed their ancestry was "Swedish" rather than German. His grandfather of course Anglicized his name from "Drumpf" to "Trump" much earlier. The Trump talent for self-fabrication seems to go back really far in his family. His own family history shows the larger story of German identity being shed very quickly in the twentieth century, within a generation of arriving in America. (Donald Trump having a Scottish immigrant mother certainly helped with that distancing, too.)

While the article paints this decision as a way for Fred Trump to have easier dealings with Jewish businessmen, the Trump family went well beyond a change in ethnic origin in its embrace of whiteness. Fred Trump was notorious for building segregated housing, and Donald himself was sued for housing discrimination in the early 1970s. He has gone on to run the most explicitly white supremacist presidential campaign since George Wallace.

While this German-American will not be voting for Trump, I see in his family history the larger, unfortunate dynamics of German-American identity. Take for instance Milwaukee, probably the most German large city in America, and also by some measures the most racially segregated. (Having been there I would not doubt that assessment.) The borders of whiteness are even starker there than in most American cities, and that's saying something. Like other white Americans, German-Americans have gladly accepted the benefits of whiteness and tossed what once made them "other" in the trash, with the usual social, moral and spiritual consequences.

It was not always this way. The first big wave of German migration after the 18th century "Pennsylvania Dutch" came after the failed revolutions of 1848. (This wave included the first of my German ancestors to come to America. He was an artisan, I'd like to believe that he was a political radical, but I have no evidence.) Those immigrants, many of whom were political refugees owing to their commitments to democracy and equality, took their beliefs with them. In Texas, those anti-slavery German immigrants refused to cooperate with the Confederacy during the Civil War. In the north, a large number of German immigrants served in the Union army, including '48er Carl Schurz, who was a general and later Republican senator. Cartoonist Thomas Nast, a German immigrant himself, used his pen to attack slavery, the Klan, and mistreatment of Chinese immigrants and to support Reconstruction. German-Americans helped build up socialist parties and institutions, putting socialist mayors in charge of Milwaukee. And, I would like to add, the antipathy of beer-drinking Germans to temperance forced the Republican party to hold back on the issue for decades, and their proclivity for beer helped undermine Prohibition when it did get put in place.

Nowadays these roots are unknown in American society apart from historians. German-Americans have been melted (with their enthusiastic participation) into the white mass, and Donald Trump is now the most famous German-American in the country. This, I guess, is the ultimate endpoint for opportunistic cultural amnesia, and it makes me despair.

The White Man's Party

A friend who lives in Texas recounted an interesting story in an email to me today. While waiting in line at the airport, he overheard a conversation about Trump from Trump supporters. Evidently one of them thought that the wall with Mexico was necessary, because without it the influx on Latin immigrants would make it so that the Democrats would always win, and that then the country would be a one party state on the road to dictatorship.

The latter claim is, on its face, ridiculous. However, this person's assumptions say a lot. He assumes, essentially, that anyone who isn't white will be voting for the Democrats, and that his party would rather dwindle into irrelevance rather than appeal to those voters. At base, he is consciously or unconsciously thinking that the Republican Party is the white man's party, and that he wants to keep it that.

It's easy to forget, but George W Bush won substantial percentages of the Asian and Latino vote back in 2004.  There was a time when it looked like the Republicans were going to use values issues and promises of prosperity to lure voters for these groups into their tent. With Trump as the nominee, that has now obviously changed. His appeal is primarily to ethno-nationalism, which is why working class people of color are not attracted by all of his tough talk on trade.

By embracing Trump, the GOP may finally be admitting that they are indeed the White Man's Party. It's not so unprecedented in American life. Back in 1868, when the Democrats were fighting Reconstruction and appealing to the racist whites who now back Trump, they proclaimed themselves thusly:

Of course, times have changed. The shifting demographics feared by that man in Texas make this strategy more difficult. Then again, the reactionaries today are using one of the same weapons used by their Redeemer forbears: vote suppression.

Trump is certainly doing nothing to disabuse anyone of the notion that he represents the white man's party. His campaign even announced that it would only be considering white men to be Trump's veep, since anything else would be "pandering." This statement and Trump's rampant misogyny point to the fact that he is indeed the leader of the white MAN's party, not white people's party. You may wonder if this is a winning strategy, considering that it potentially alienates white women. The thing is, intersectionality cuts both ways, and also interacts with whiteness.  A majority of white women voted for Mitt "binders full of women" Romney, and I would hazard to guess that white women, when it comes to politics, are more invested in whiteness than in their gender.

The fact that a majority of my white brethren will probably vote for Trump in the general election is deeply upsetting to me.  It's also a reminder that, as others more famous than I have said, treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.

Untangling Class, Race, and "The Good Old Days"

Quite a few trees have been felled and servers burned out in the cause of explaining the support for Donald Trump's presidential bid. As is usually the case with complex questions, people are looking for monocausal answers. Some in the mainstream media have gone out of their way not to talk about racism as a factor in Trump support, preferring to see him as the candidate of downtrodden working class whites. Others (more rightly) have highlighted the obvious face that white racial resentment is a huge element of Trump's support, but also tend to see talk of formerly middle class workers longing for the "good old days" to be a fig leaf for white supremacist yearnings. Though the latter group may be much more correct in their outlook, they also conveniently set aside the legitimate reasons so many would in fact pine for "the good old days." Not understanding that will make it very difficult to defeat Trump.

In the first place, the white racial resentment driving Trumpism is obvious, and the evidence for its strength grows with each passing day. A recent article in Salon shows this very starkly. Even without the statistics handy, the fact that working class people of color are not supporting Trump is a pretty glaring sign that his appeal is in no way purely or even mostly class based. As the article shows, Trump supporters are more likely to hold negative views of African Americans, Muslims, Hispanics, and the LGBTQ than even other Republicans, and higher opinions of white people as well.

At the same time, Trump supporters look to the past, when things were better for "people like us." In my mind that's why I call them Archie Bunkers. If you remember All In The Family, Archie was always railing against the same people Trump voters don't like, except for Muslims, who had yet to become as vilified by his ilk. Every show started with he and his wife Edith singing "Those Were The Days," a song that longed for a former time when "men were men" and there was no "welfare state." Then as now, this pining for the past before the social revolutions of the 1960s is politically reactionary when put in those terms. Archie himself benefitted from the white affirmative action aspects of the New Deal, from his union job to a house whose mortgage one could assume was backed by the FHA. It's when others benefitted from the welfare state that he got mad, a pretty typical occurrence after the Great Society among Nixon's "silent majority."

But the old Archie Bunker still lived in the postwar world of high paying blue collar jobs and a growing middle class. Large swathes of the country in the last forty years have experienced great economic decline, from the Great Plains farm belt to Appalachia to the Rust Belt cities of the Great Lakes. The Rust Belt declines have had an even harder impact on African Americans (just look at Detroit, Cleveland, and Flint), but it is working class whites who have leveraged these declines into Trumpist anger. Whereas deindustrialization kept other groups from getting the entree into the middle class that they sought, the same factors have been pushing whites in many areas out of the middle class that had just been entered into by their parents' generation. The anger over losing has been transferred onto the "other," which Trump has exploited. Loss of economic power can be blamed on immigrant laborers and foreign trade, not on the vicissitudes of capitalism.

When a lot of older white folks answer poll questions and say life in America was better before 1965, they're not necessarily pining for an older social order. My own hometown in the farm belt of Nebraska is a place that was certainly a lot better off economically before the massive blows to the farm economy in the 1980s. However, it is possible for voters to be driven by BOTH racial resentment and economic privation.  The latter is not imaginary, and the notable spike in deaths caused by drugs, alcohol, and suicide in working class whites shows the human toll this is all taking. But a lot of the same people who are upset at seeing their towns crumble as the jobs have moved away also have plenty of hate in their hearts and cling to a threatened white supremacy which they used to count on.  Working class people of color continue to have it a lot worse, but the discrepancy is not enough to satisfy the need by many white people in this country to be in a special slot on the hierarchy.

The thing is, a lot of those whites unhappy at the economic turn are not turning to hate. The Democratic party has to reach those voters. I am not making the usual call for Democrats to appeal to working class whites at all costs, because those days are over and the Democrats ought to prioritize those loyal to them. Instead, I want the party to solidify its connections to those working class white voters willing to be in a multiracial coalition. While there is a stereotype that the white working class is overwhelmingly Republican, that is actually skewed by the numbers from the South. Outside of the South, it's much less the case. The Democrats can use the "good old days" narrative in a more positive way by arguing for worker protections, strong unions, and support for college and child care. Trump is actually handing them an opportunity, I only hope that they take it.

The Revenge Of The '90s

A Bill Clinton ad from '96 touting a capital gains tax cut and expanded death penalty. If he ran today his campaign would do about as well as Jim Webb's did

It is hard for me to fathom, but the 1990s are officially The Past. They are past enough that we can begin to grasp that time period in a more historic sense, and evaluate it as such. This strikes me every time I see a Seinfeld rerun while I'm flipping channels, and I wince at the clothes and hair. It struck me even more this week, of course, when Bill Clinton offered an uncharacteristically artless defense of the 1994 crime bill, which he had championed.

That bill was part of the wave of policies leading to a massive uptick in incarceration. It added 100,000 police officers to forces recently enamored with "broken windows" policing and included a "three strikes" provision at the federal level. At the time it had a lot of support across the political spectrum, and was also a typical "New Democrat" exercise in courting the middle by being so "tough on crime" as to disprove the perception of liberal permissiveness.

This was the story of Bill Clinton's presidency. His major policy moves included welfare "reform," deficit reduction, NAFTA, signing the Defense of Marriage Act, slashing bank regulations, and prison building. On the other hand, Clinton's attempt at health care expansion was such a legislative failure that it killed the chances for reform for over a decade. A friend of mine likes to joke that he was the best Republican president since Eisenhower. From Clinton's point of view this was all fine, since it resulted in the thing he cared about most: keeping Bill Clinton in the White House.

At the time it worked gloriously for him, since progressive Democrats had been taking a beating in the post-Reagan era. I still remember the 1988 election, when George HW Bush called Michael Dukakis a "liberal," as if that very fact disqualified him from being president. Clinton had few strong opponents to his left back then. I remember disliking him intensely from a left perspective, and being very lonely in that position, especially later during the Dubya years. "At least he wasn't Reagan or Bush" was what I'd hear from Democrats.

Bill Clinton's exchange with Black Lives Matter activists, and the reaction to it in social media, are a stark illustration of how times have changed. Barack Obama has governed well to the left of Clinton, and his successes despite the letdown from the expectations of 2008, have given progressives a great deal of confidence. This has also made them much more critical of the compromises of the past. Clinton's triangulation helped him keep power in 1996, but in 2016 the obvious failures of policies like mass incarceration are glaring. The bill has long come due.*

The high levels of support that Bernie Sanders is getting is perhaps the most telling evidence that we are not in the 90s anymore. As is the much more progressive cast of Hilary Clinton's policy positions this time around. Bill Clinton continually gave up bigger goals for short term gains and power in the 90s. Back then he looked savvy, but events of this week are showing that we aren't in that political world anymore, and I for am glad for it.

*I should add that the 1990s being two decades old has also made people forget that the crime bill didn't come out of nowhere. The murder rate in big cities in the early 1990s hit the highest point ever. Real people were dying in awful numbers, and people across racial lines really wanted strong action in response. This was not just a case of chasing phantoms. At the same time, the policies of incarceration were extreme, racist, and have more than outlived any usefulness they once had.

Tamir Rice and the American Police State

I don't watch videos of police shooting suspects anymore because I watched the Tamir Rice video when it was first released.  I have never, ever seen anything so absolutely horrifying in my entire life.  The image of a 12 year old boy being shot down by a police officer in about two seconds has been burned into my mind and I cannot get it out.  From time to time over the last year it has bubbled up to haunt me whenever I hear about new cases of police violence.  I think about my students, many of whom fit Tamir's profile, yet older apparently more "dangerous," and get sick to my stomach with fear and anxiety.

By all accounts the officer who shot him was an incompetent, trigger-happy shithead.  The fact that he was allowed by the city of Cleveland to have the power of life and death over a child is in itself a crime of epic proportions.

Yes, there were some odd circumstances, namely that the dispatcher had made the situation sound much more dangerous than it actually was.  But even if Tamir Rice was holding a real gun, there's nothing, absolutely nothing that can explain the fact that he was left laying there, bleeding out, without any medical help, other than the complete and utter disregard that the officers on the scene had for his life.  If do not think he race had anything to do with that lack of regard then I don't even want to bother talking to you.

Of course, he didn't have a real gun.  He didn't point it at anyone.  Tamir lived in an open-carry state, where it is not a crime to carry a gun openly.  Watching the video, it is completely obvious that there is no way that Timothy Loehmann was able to properly assess the situation.  He was intending, perhaps from (or before) the moment he arrived, to shoot and kill Tamir.

And yet, there is no indictment.  Indictments are so easy to procure that lawyers like to joke that "you can indict a ham sandwich."  Yet in Ferguson, New York, and now Cleveland, it seems impossible to indict a white police officer who kills an unarmed black person.  It's almost too obvious to state this, but so many people in America don't want to believe it, so here it goes: when it comes to African Americans, the United States is a police state.  Any police officer who kills an African American will not be punished, because white society is so deeply invested in its fear of black people and its desire to enforce white supremacy.  Few white people will say that openly, of course.  But their lizard brains react in terror when they see black people taking to the streets to protest brutality, and those same lizard brains automatically search for ways to exonerate white police officers who kill black people.  Anything that challenges the status quo of radical residential segregation with black ghettoes patrolled by police officers who are above the law in their ability to use violence makes their fear reflexes go off the charts.

And yet white people are vastly overrepresented in the militia, open carry, and anti-gun control movements.  Many of them are constantly fearful of a "big government" that they think is trying to control their lives, all while endorsing that government's surveillance of Muslims and mass incarceration of people of color.  The crime rate goes down, but they freak out nonetheless about a perception of rising crime.  That perception is merely a barometer of their own fear that white supremacy is being undermined.  Again, they are not fully conscious of this fear, because in "post-racial" America the only racists are the ones wearing white sheets, and they think that to notice and talk about race makes someone the "real racist."

The anxieties around white supremacy are so deeply ingrained in the backs of the minds of white people that even I have to tell my own lizard brain to shut the fuck up from time to time.  (The implicit bias tests get at this issue.)  That's just how powerful this mental disease is.  Until it is eradicated, and more white people can choose humanity over fear, I worry that the American police state will be able to maintain itself, killing more innocents as it goes along.

America 2015 (A Year On The Brink)

"So It Goes" by Nick Lowe seems to be an appropriate song for this year

Every year about this time I take stock of what's happened, both in my personal life and in the larger world.  This year, 2015, will either be seen in the future as an important turning point (a la 1968), or a momentary outbreak of change that quickly subsided (like 2011, the year of Occupy.)

The thing that dominated the political scene in America this past year was the color line.  In regards to the Black Lives Matter movement, the protests related to the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner in 2014 did not quickly become a thing of the past, as unrest in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray showed. In that case the attorney general actually secured indictments, but the trial process has been difficult.  Movements against racism went well beyond the police.  In Chicago the mayor himself was implicated in covering up a cop's murder.  At the University of Missouri students actually managed to get their president to resign for not doing enough to address racism on campus.  Pressure was put on Democratic candidates for president, and now Bernie Sanders is explicitly endorsing the movement's goals. The Democrats rely on black votes to win elections, and the BLM movement might thus finally break the two-party consensus of "tough on crime" dating back to Clinton.  Despite the setbacks recently in Baltimore and the continuing headlines of police shooting unarmed African Americans, the new anti-racist movements could be poised to bring about some major changes.

Of course, whenever the color line gets challenged, white people spring forth to its defense, and fight that defense more fervently the more that line gets challenged.  The Republican Party has been using racial resentment against president Obama for years, but in 2015 that coded resentment was out and proud, thanks to Donald Trump.  His campaign initially benefited from him being perceived as a straight-talked who would upend traditional politics.  He achieved staying power, however, by going after Mexican immigrants in openly bigoted terms.  The success that this has brought him has forced many other Republicans to follow suit, leading to the opening of an Overton Window.  Trump has advocated mass deportations of millions, the kind of thing carried out in only the most repressive states, and yet his popularity keeps rising.  Fear and resentment of Muslims has grown in staggering fashion, so much so that Republican officials fell over themselves to be the first to castigate Syrian refugees and proclaim that they weren't welcome.

In a sign of the times, the violent white supremacists are coming out of the sewers and out into the open in ways I've never seen in my lifetime.  Some of them shot four black protesters in Minnesota, and the protests at the University of Missouri were partially spurred by white supremacist graffiti. Anti-Muslim hooligans have been defacing mosques and Muslim centers all around the country.  Trump is speaking to these and their grievances, and white power groups and figures have now endorsed him.  Trump may very well go down as a historical oddity, like Boulanger in France in the late 1800s.  But like Boulanger, Trump represents deeper forces at play.  Just as France in the fin-de-siecle was a place of extreme political and cultural divisions, so is America.  In both cases reactionary elements have a romance with authoritarianism and removing "internal enemies."  The anti-Semitism of the late 1800s has been replaced with Islamophobia and racial resentment, but both rooted in the desire by a particular group to "take our country back."  If 2014 finally ended the fatuous talk in the media of a "post-racial America," 2015 was the year that openly expressed white supremacy came back into the national discourse.

In the midst of all of this, guns played a big role in 2015, from San Bernardino to Umpqua. This past year confirmed something we already knew after the Newtown massacre: gun control is just not going to happen.  If a room full of dead children wasn't going to move the issue, nothing else ever would.  Something most progressives don't seem to understand is that for a large group of people, guns are a crucial element to their very identity, and many of those people think gun ownership is a bulwark against government tyranny.  Beyond the headline-grabbing massacres, the open carrying of guns at protests has gone from something that once caused great alarm a few years ago to a commonplace occurrence.  America was always a heavily armed society, but it is now one where guns are allowed almost everywhere, and where they are being used in protests to intimidate and imply the threat of violence.  Americans now think that in response to the threat of terror that we need MORE guns, not fewer.  Banning assault weapons used to have huge amount of support, now only a minority would back it.  2015 may very well go down as the year that the NRA's interpretation of the role of guns in society actually became conventional wisdom.

Looking forward I try not to let my usual pessimistic tendencies predominate.  There are levels of political action and activism by young people that I have not seen in my lifetime; it's the kind of thing I so sorely wanted to be a part of in college where I formed a club with a handful of friends to that end because there were no organizations on campus for social activism.  While Bernie Sanders will likely not get the nomination, the fact that he draws the level of support that he does is heartening.  Anti-racists are making the likes of Rahm Emmanuel run for cover and are forcing many institutions to confront structural racism.  Years of activism by the gay rights movement paid off this year with the Supreme Court's ruling on gay marriage.  Transgender people are getting rights and recognition when they used to only get scorn and mockery.

At the same time, I can't escape the thought that these green shoots of progress will only prompt a much stronger reaction, uprooting them violently.  Trump is leading the Republican race as a quasi-fascist, and even if he doesn't win, his army of supporters is still out there, ready to act and ready to listen to another demagogue.  There is still no justice for Sandra Bland and countless others.  The most fearful among resentful white people are literally sticking to their guns.  2015 was a year on the brink in America, 2016 will likely decide whether that brink will be breached or not.

Reagan, Neshoba, The Voting Rights Act, And The Eternal Return

Today marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of an event little known in the general public but widely known among historians of recent American history: Ronald Reagan's speech in favor of "states rights" in Neshoba County, Mississippi, spitting distance from the site where civil rights workers James Cheney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman were murdered by white supremacists only sixteen years before.

It's good to see Reagan's statement about "states rights" in context, so here is the relevant section of the speech:

Today, and I know from our own experience in California when we reformed welfare, I know that one of the great tragedies of welfare in America today, and I don't believe stereotype after what we did, of people in need who are there simply because they prefer to be there. We found the overwhelming majority would like nothing better than to be out, with jobs for the future, and out here in the society with the rest of us. The trouble is, again, that bureaucracy has them so economically trapped that there is no way they can get away. And they're trapped because that bureaucracy needs them as a clientele to preserve the jobs of the bureaucrats themselves.

I believe that there are programs like that, programs like education and others, that should be turned back to the states and the local communities with the tax sources to fund them, and let the people [applause drowns out end of statement].

I believe in state's rights; I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we've distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I'm looking for, I'm going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.

Of course Reagan never mentions African Americans or segregation by name, but he sure implies a lot.  "States rights" itself had historically been used mostly (and vociferously) by the South to defend slavery, and then Jim Crow.  Reagan also talks about "welfare" and "education," which likely conjured up images of poor African Americans in the first place and integrated schools in the latter in the mind of his audience.  Note as well the sustained applause mentioned in the transcript, so loud that Reagan had to stop for a moment.  I doubt a crowd of white folks in rural Mississippi in 1980 was cheering that hard at the mention of "states rights" because they truly believed in the efficiency of state-level agencies.  No, I can bet that they had something else in mind.

And that's why the Neshoba speech matters, because it shows how modern conservatism has deftly incorporated color-blind racism into its arsenal.  According to a depressing article in the New York Times Magazine, that same color blind racism was used by conservative operatives and jurists to dismantle the enforcement mechanisms of the Voting Rights Act.  Since the Supreme Court invalidated preclearance and allowed voter ID laws several states have passed a wave of legislation to restrict the vote, restrictions that fall especially hard on African Americans.  Such a wave of voter restrictions hasn't been seen since the 1880s and 1890s.  Gee, I wonder what was going on back then?  (Lee Atwater's infamous 1981 interview pretty much lays out the basis of this whole strategy.)

In the Times Magazine article former Kansas Senator and majority leader Bob Dole says something very interesting about what has been happening in his party:

But as [John] Roberts pressed his case [against a strong Voting Rights Act], a powerful opponent, Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, was working against him. Dole, who voted for the Voting Rights Act in 1965, thought the Reagan team’s ideological fervor put the party’s efforts to build a broad, winning coalition of voters at risk. His argument prevailed, and Reagan ultimately signed the strengthened version of the Voting Rights Act in 1982, with the new standard for bringing discrimination cases intact. “I tried to make the point to the White House that, as a party, we needed to demonstrate that we cared and were concerned about votes from African-Americans and Hispanics,” Dole, now 92, told me earlier this summer. “I don’t know where we lost track after Abraham Lincoln.”

It's obvious from this statement that Dole does not think that the Republican party is making any effort whatsoever to concern itself with representing the interests of either African Americans or Latinos.  As others have said before me, the Southern strategy has ended up, fifty years later, turning the Republican party into a white identity party.  Considering the changing demographics of American society, the only way to ensure the success of such a plan is to disenfranchise those who would be likely to vote against Republicans.  For that reason new voting restrictions target people of color, the poor of all races, women, and college students.

That desire is sadly nothing new in American politics.  From day one there have been voting restrictions, whether they be by property or race.  During the Gilded Age nativists argued against immigration in order to suppress the power of immigrant voters, and some in New York even toyed with bringing back property requirements.  The Voting Rights Act wasn't passed until 1965, only fifty short years ago.  In a society where universal suffrage is the legal principle behind voting, those who defend the interests of the privileged will always attempt to drown democracy, since they can't win any other way.  In the wake of Neshoba, Reagan's followers fought to end the Voting Rights Act, and they effectively did, to this nation's great shame.  Much like the period of postwar prosperity that lasted until the 1970s, the 48 year stretch of actual equal voting will likely be remembered in the future as a bright blip in a much more dismal story.  Of course, things could change, but I'm not holding my breath.

Fort Campus

Today University of Cincinnati campus cop Ray Tensing was indicted for the murder of Samuel DuBose, an unarmed African American man that he shot in the head during a traffic stop.  The continued litany of black people killed by the police, whether directly like DuBose or more indirectly like Sandra Bland, is this nation's greatest shame.

Strikingly, this killing was done by a campus police officer off campus.  It reminded me of college campuses I've been affiliated with that had a heavy police presence, where the school seemed to relate to the surrounding neighborhoods like a fortress in hostile territory.  For example, my undergraduate institution sat right between downtown Omaha and the city's north side ghetto.  The police presence on campus was very apparent, although I mostly saw the cops issuing parking tickets.  Nevertheless, I felt like the school was very deliberately trying keep the mostly black local population from setting foot on campus.

The show of force was even greater when I was at the University of Chicago for my master's degree.  I would commonly see UChicago police patrolling off campus, and had heard through the grapevine that most of them were off-duty CPD cops earning extra money.  While there was a high level of street crime in Hyde Park when I lived there (I know multiple people who were threatened with knives and guns during robberies), I've seen robust campus police in the sleepiest of locations.  Campus cops were everywhere when I taught in a small East Texas town, and as faculty salaries were frozen, the massive police force maintained its outsize position.

The fact that so many college campuses feel like fortresses is telling.  It is part of a larger trend in America where social inequality is accepted and dealt with through force and violence.  Rather than trying to increase the life chances for all, our society builds walls and arms sentinels to keep what were once called the "dangerous classes" in the Gilded Age from getting inside the havens of the more fortunate.  Ray Tensing felt so empowered in this role that he pulled over Samuel DuBose even though he was off campus, and tried to make an arrest for what should have been simple traffic citations.  Yes, he appears to be a particularly violent and murderous officer, but our system apparently finds it fit to employ such people to defend college campuses.  As long as white America persists in building its fortresses and arming them to the teeth, more tragedies like this will keep happening.

The Silence on Housing Discrimination

MLK in 1966 in Chicago, where he pushed to end housing discrimination, an action largely forgotten in public memory due to its tendency to raise uncomfortable questions

There has been a great deal of discussion and action recently when it comes to the Confederate battle flag and of the memory of the Civil War generally.  While I am all for taking down the traitor flag and have called for a "memory offensive" on current public ways of viewing the Civil War, I do think that the discussion over the flag can be limiting.  It is easy for whites who live outside of the South to decry it, since they see it as embodying an Other.  Speaking from my time in East Texas, I can tell you that yes, there are a lot of good ole boy goobers in the rural South with violently racist dispositions.

However, there a lot more white people both inside and outside of the South who have benefited and continue to benefit from institutional racism in the form of housing discrimination.  I would even say that residential segregation is the root tool of racism in this country.  Living here in northern New Jersey it couldn't be plainer.  Those suburbs (like, say Summit)  touted for their safety and "good schools" are very, very white, while cities known for their crime and poverty, like Newark and East Orange, are overwhelmingly not white.

The historical past that made this present is well known.  These divisions are not natural, but are the intentional results of decades of policies that subsidized suburbanization, warehoused the poor in urban areas, and that made it easy for whites to get access to cheap home loans, and difficult for people of color.  When African Americans began moving into new neighborhoods and suburbs, white flight and block busting often followed.  The vast majority of white people, both in the postwar period and now, simply refuse to think of sharing a common fate with black people, especially poor black people.

Because of residential segregation, schools are more racially segregated than they were at the time of Brown.  This segregation leads to vastly different outcomes for children in different municipalities and neighborhoods that border each other.  Again, this is all by design, not by accident.  To give a local example, the grandchildren of Newark white flight living in nearby Livingston (where Chris Christie, born in Newark, went to high school after his family left Newark) have access to a renowned public schools system.  Their fate is entirely different than the children of Newark, who are currently being used as guinea pigs in a misguided "reform" scheme because Newarkers aren't allowed to run their own schools.  Those living in the protected municipalities can simply forget about those less fortunate, and never give them a dime of their local taxes.  Unless residential segregation is broken down, there is no hope whatsoever to stop either racism or severe economic inequality.

For that reason, the issues of fair housing and residential segregation ought to be prominent in the public sphere, especially now that the government is taking action on it.  The Obama administration recently announced that it is going to push for stricter enforcement of the Fair Housing Act of 1968.  There is a lot at stake in this announcement, which could potentially radically alter residential patterns in large swaths of the USA.  It's interesting, then, that there has hardly been any public discussion of it in the mainstream media.  Perhaps this is down to a busy news cycle, with Greece and Iraq dominating headlines, but I doubt it.

Most Americans (white ones especially) would really, really like to avoid a discussion of fair housing and residential segregation.  In the first place, it is a key example of how racism is systematic and institutional, when most would pretend to see it as a nasty attitude held only by the type of redneck who waves the rebel flag.  The vast majority of white people do not want to see themselves implicated in racism in any way.  Politically, as Thomas Edsall pointed out yesterday, this is a difficult issue for Democrats.  If their party is perceived as bringing poor minorities into affluent white communities, a lot of white voters will react extremely negatively.  That said, Republicans are also hesitant on it, partly because they do not want to admit that systemic racism exists, and also because they would prefer not to make their collusion with it so obvious.

To solve the problems of residential segregation would mean action on a vast and massive scale, action that the majority of Americans would really prefer not to take.  They would also prefer to see the current residential dividing lines as natural, and will just go on pretending the problem doesn't exist, and to wail and gnash their teeth whenever affordable housing is proposed for their community.   That issue will continue to be framed as a local, and not systemic one, and nothing much will change.  For it do so would require and actual acknowledgement of the true realities of economic and racial oppression in this country, which I don't see coming anytime soon.  I only hope that the Obama administration's efforts make things less awful. Until white people and the affluent really and truly see the fates of their children as being intertwined with those of children of color and poor children, the base problem will persist.

Has The GOP's Deal With The Devil Come Due?

Back when the Tea Party winds stared blowing back in the early parts of this decade, I wondered whether the Republican Party had signed a devil's bargain.  It was encouraging the support of fringe elements that had long been outside of the mainstream of American politics, all in order to benefit politically from the rising feelings of resentment among white people.

One such example is the Republican eagerness to put the grievances of the "open carry" movement into law, as just recently happened in Texas.  This is a movement that worships guns and views the Second Amendment as a protection against tyranny, as if the only thing standing between the status quo and a dictatorship is a bunch of dudes carrying AR-15's into the local Chipotle.  Voters who vote on gun issues tend to be highly motivated, so the Republicans are willing to break bread with armed vigilantes if it means electoral success.

The same goes for white nationalism, although the connections have been blurred more.  The continued Republican support for the official use of the Confederate flag (which was only shaken after the terror attack in Charleston), is a case in point.  The same goes for the lip service paid by Rick Perry and others to Texas nationalism, which in my experience is an idea limited almost completely to white Texans.  The anti-immigrant rhetoric and "show me your papers" laws in states like Arizona are based in a conception of the United States as a white man's country.  Sometimes the links between the "secure our borders" rhetoric and the ugly truth beneath those words gets exposed.  For example, it came out today that that Earl Holt III, the leader of Council of Conservative Citizens, has given campaign donations to multiple Republican presidential candidates.  In case you don't know, this organization was cited directly by terrorist Dylann Roof in his manifesto as instrumental in affecting his worldview.

Now this is not necessarily a case of Republicans actively seeking out the support of extremists.  Rather, they have been more subtle, in that they will take their money and promote policy positions that make those extremists happy.  Anti-immigrant legislation, voter suppression of people of color, and slashing programs that help Latinos and African Americans in poverty might be called "securing our borders, combating voter fraud, and welfare reform" officially, but everyone with eyes who can see understands that they are all policies that further white supremacy.  (Hence their popularity in large sectors of white America.)  The horrors of the Charleston killing, as well as the almost comical responses by many conservatives that downplayed any discussion of race, have highlighted just how beholden the Republican Party is to extremist elements.  In the wake of a racist terror shooting it must figure out how to spin its long-standing policies of no gun control and defending the flying of the Confederate flag.  It was easy to court extremist elements when no one was watching, now it will be much harder to hide.  Time will tell if this will actually result in any electoral change.

We STILL Need To Talk About White Male Pathology

I woke up this morning to the horrific news of the terrorist shooting in Charleston.  Following the story today, I have seen yet again how the killer/terrorist is presented as an "isolated case" detached from larger society.  This is the way it tends to be with white men when they commit these acts.  The folks at Fox News are even spinning this as some kind of anti-Christian thing, despite the fact that the terrorist liked to sport apartheid symbols and justified his attack to one of the victims with noxious racism.  Many white people in this country are so afraid to admit the persistence of racism even when it has manifested itself in the most violent way possible.  If this is not an act of racist terrorism, what on earth is?

In the aftermath of the horror of the Newtown shooting I wrote about how America needed to confront the pathologies of white masculinity, and returned to the topic multiple times afterward.  A Slate article today provides a list of the many, many terrorist acts committed by racist white men in the last twenty years, a truly scary litany of murder and hate that most white people refuse to see as anything more than a set of unconnected "isolated incidents" with "lone wolf" perpetrators.  They will also likely blame "mental illness." as if someone cannot be both mentally disturbed and a terrorist.  Furthermore, they will not wonder why mentally ill white men often respond to their illness by murdering other people (often people of color) in large numbers, when other types of people don't.

For an illustration, take a foreign example, that of the xenophobic Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik (the president exaggerated today a little about the uniquely American nature of mass shootings.)  He murdered 77 people in a highly planned bombing and shooting spree all on political grounds as an enemy of the Left.  (He targeted a social democratic youth camp for reasons similar to Roof's targeting of a prominent and politically powerful African American church.)  Beyond his politics, Breivik fit the stereotype of the maladjusted, aggrieved loner.  The American media does not have a problem characterizing Breivik as a politically motivated actor.  Why then the reluctance to do so with Dylann Roof?  The answer is pretty simple, namely that it would raise all kinds of uncomfortable questions.

The fact that Roof presented himself online wearing patches of the apartheid regime flags of Rhodesia and South Africa is telling.  He was obviously "radicalized" at some point, since knowledge of those regimes' symbols isn't common among most American 21 year olds.  He didn't commit his act in just any predominately African American church, either.  He chose the church founded by black freedom fighter Denmark Vesey and pastored by Clementa Pinckney, an elected official who had called for mandatory police body cameras.  It is the first AME church founded in the south, and due to its history is a national landmark, official or not.  I can't imagine that a person who was aware of Rhodesia's history would not have been aware of the significance of this particular church.

Will the government start entrapping fellow white supremacists to pre-emptively get them in prison, just as they have with followers of radical Islam?  Will the government be committing psy-ops on white supremacist web pages and forums, as they do with Islamist ones?  Don't hold your breath.  The hatred Roof expressed to justify his shooting is very extreme, but sadly it is not rare.  Go to practically any traditional white barber shop in large swaths of this country for a day and you will likely hear a variation of it.  God knows I have.  It is an everyday hatred that is not taken seriously by many whites, just listen to Roof's roommate.  But don't worry folks, it's just an isolated incident by a quiet loner.  Move along, move along, and don't forget to keep buying stuff.

****

Here's what I wrote in 2012, most of it still sadly relevant:

Whenever a horrible event like the massacre in Newtown takes place, we try to find ways to explain it. This is often a futile exercise, because many people merely superimpose their larger beefs with society onto these events, rather than examining them with any real analytical and factual framework.  Hence, we have people like Louie Gohmert saying the teacher should have had her own assault weapon, or Mike Huckabee lamenting the loss of God in public schools.  We should be very careful of monocausal explanations that oversimplify things.  There are a lot of factors at play in the Newtown massacre, from the perpetrator's mental state to the availability of semi-automatic weapons.  However, I would like to echo others out there in the blogosphere who want to examine the role of white masculinity in all of this.
Of course, there have been other mass shootings in other countries, and the worst such shooting in this country was perpetrated by a Korean student.  That being said, this country has witnessed the lion's share of mass shootings, and disproportionate seventy percent of the shooters have been white men.  I hardly think the connection is coincidental.  Ever since the Aurora tragedy this summer, I have been contemplating this issue, trying to connect the dots to explain the connection between white masculinity and mass shootings.  I finally feel like I have some speculations worth sharing.
Masculinity more generally in this society is defined to a great extent by violence and control, and violence used as a means of maintaining control.  I have long been amazed and appalled by how many public figures in this country who have abused their wives and girlfriends have been allowed to stay on the pedestal.  That sad fact is to me evidence that masculine control through violence is implicitly accepted as legitimate in America.  Action movies predominate at the box office, and the orchestrated violence of the NFL is America's most popular sport.
Furthermore, white men in this country are taught that they are the masters of their own destiny, and are usually not confronted with the same limitations of possibility that men of color are.  When white men fail, an experience our society gives them few resources to confront,  they often lash out at those they hold responsible, or turn inward and commit suicide.  Most mass shooters seem to want to do both, as Adam Lanza did.
The completely atomized nature of white middle class society contributes as well.  Shooters are usually described as "loners," men disconnected from others and hence unable to empathize with the human beings they kill.  We are an increasingly individualized society, which means that those mentally unstable, frustrated white men with access to deadly weapons are so rarely stopped before they kill.  They sit on the margins, alone, without any kind of cohesive social structure to bring them in.  Adam Lanza had stopped going to school and interacted with few outside his home, Eric Harris was able to plan his rampage in a home where his parents took evidently little interest in his doings, James Holmes had been expelled from his university and lived alone in a city far from home.  While atomization is occurring in all groups of American society today, in middle class, white culture it has probably been the most egregious and damaging.
We have a situation where white men are socialized to be the masters of their fate and able to use violence to maintain control over their lives.  These same men lack the tools to handle adversity, and are often left to their individual resources, even if they are mentally disturbed.  When some of the most mentally unstable of these men experience soul-shattering setbacks and are given access to semi-automatic weapons, we can only expect the worst.  We need to educate young men (especially white men) to not see violence as the answer to their problems, or to phantasize violent solutions.  We need to equip them with the tools to withstand failure, and to keep the more troubled of their number from slipping through the cracks.  Last, we need to talk seriously and openly about the nature of American white masculinity, and stop pretending that it isn't problematic.

A Footnote On Baltimore and History

My last post discussed the importance of knowing history to understand the protests in Baltimore, but over the last few days I've been thinking that knowing history is also necessary to understanding the backlash against them.

One of my favorite Twitter accounts is of someone embodying (you really can't say parodying) Richard Nixon, and tweeting as if the Dark Lord were still alive, commenting on current events.  Having an unhealthy obsession with Nixon, I can vouch for the accuracy of the tweets, which have got me thinking about how Tricky Dick used white racial resentment to overpowering affect in the 1968 election.  George Wallace, running as a third party candidate, made such appeals more overtly, getting support not just in the Deep South.  Nixon could claim to be more palatable than Wallace, all the while touting "law and order."

His campaign ads in '68 trumpeted this theme time and time again.  One ad, juxtaposing Nixon's words with scenes of violence in the streets and bloodied protestors over discordant music, ends with Nixon intoning "the first civil right of every American is to be free from domestic violence, and so I pledge to you, we shall have order in the United States."  The uprisings in the ghettoes were, in this interpretation, to be seen merely as chaos to be stopped, not the result of legitimate grievances.  The whites who made up Nixon's "Silent Majority" felt the same way, and rewarded him with the White House.  Once in office, Nixon supported the FBI's infamous COINTELPRO campaign, which set out to destroy the Black Panthers and similar organizations by any means necessary.

That did not necessarily have to be.  The Kerner Commission, set up by LBJ to investigate the causes of the destructive urban uprisings of 1967 in Newark and Detroit (among other cities), concluded in its 1968 report that racism and economic privation were at the heart of the matter.  Instead of addressing these problems head on, the government kept spending money to send more young men from the ghettoes to die in Vietnam, and Nixon unleashed the FBI.  In the ensuing decades, as I mentioned a couple of days ago, the War on Drugs and the prison industrial complex made the backlash even worse.

Today I fear a repeat of the past.  So many in white America are still blind to the reasons why African Americans in Baltimore are so upset, and that blindness is on the tipping point of becoming fear.  When white America's racial fear buttons get pushed, bad bad things happen.  There's always another Nixon there, ready to exploit it.  The key this time is for right thinking people to be prepared to fight back.

Standing At The Crossroads On MLK Day

This MLK Day I see a nation standing at the crossroads.  The horrible deaths of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and too many other people of color at the hands of the police have prompted the biggest protests against racism that I have seen in my lifetime.  Also for the first time in my life, the creeping hand of the prison-industrial complex is being challenged, and those challenges are beginning to get broader traction.  At the same time, hardline conservatives have taken over Congress and an unprecedented number of statehouses, benefitting from white backlash and racial resentment in the process.  The mayor of New York dares to discuss the reality of racist policing, and is met with unprecedented revolt and disrespect from his officers.  Something will have to give.

Lots of people are going to see reenactments of the Selma March in the theaters right now, but the present is just as crucial as the past.  There is a growing recognition, one pretty obvious for people of color, much less so for whites, that the efforts of Dr. King and others in the 1960s were not the end of the story, but the beginning.  Barack Obama's election was supposed to be proof of a "post-racial" society, when in reality the hateful reception he has received in many quarters has proven rather starkly that such claims of a post-racial nation were completely wrong.

Will that knowledge be acted upon?  Will new change come?  I honestly don't know, but what I do know is that I cannot remember a time in my life when the possibility for racism to be pushed back was this palpable.  I know plenty of young people who are getting conscious, getting active and taking to the streets, and they give me the hope that the legacy of Dr. King will not be one of greeting card sentiments, but as an inspiration for future generations to further the work he began.

Scalise and a Peak Behind the GOP Curtain

With all of the crazy and violent events going on in the world right now, it's easy to forget the news that House Majority Whip Steve Scalise once spoke to a meeting of out and out white supremacists.  Despite the calls for "minority outreach" by the likes of Rand Paul, it appears that Scalise will retain his position after the bigwigs rushed to his defense.  In the aftermath of it all David Duke even declared that he isn't a racist, thus proving the observation many archly have made that there are no longer any "racists" left in 21st century America, even among Klansmen.  And yet racism still persists.  Hmm.

Scalise's real crime in all of this was that he was stupid enough to try to appeal to white racists directly instead of cloaking his appeals in thick rhetoric and deploying dog whistles rather than trumpets.  Since the days of Nixon's "Southern Strategy" in 1968, the Republican Party has masterfully deployed white racial resentment in order to garner the votes of conservative Dixiecrats in the South and the denizens of white flight suburbs in the North.  Fifty years later, the former Solid South stronghold for the Democrats has become the Republican heartland, and with the defeat of Mary Landrieu, no white Democrats from the South remain in Congress.

The effects of all of this are obvious in Scalise's home state of Louisiana.  According to one report, the ideas put forward by David Duke in his infamous 1991 campaign are now broadly accepted in that state.  Duke himself even understood that he could go far by chucking the white sheets and assailing welfare recipients and affirmative action.  It is hardly a mistake or coincidence that such policies slashing social funding and building prisons are disproportionately harmful to people of color.  These policies do the work of white supremacy under the cover of "smaller government" and "law and order."

I am not surprised that the Republicans refused to dump Scalise, mostly since they have profited from a policy of never admitting that they are wrong. Our compliant media turns it into a case of "he said-she said" and forgets about it the next week.  Trent Lott's political demise is an exception, but his enemies in the party had been sharpening their knives before his gaffe.  Speaking of Lott, he committed much the same crime as Scalise by openly praising Thurmond's segregationist campaign of 1948 when to that point he had been subtly advancing its ideals under the cover of the usual conservative slogans.  He paid for his stupidity with his job, but his party kept hitting the bong of white racial resentment.

Low level Republican officials typically lack the discretion and care of their Capitol Hill counterparts when it comes to advancing a white supremacist agenda without making it too explicit.  These bush leaguers often get caught sending racist cartoons of the president and watermelon-themed emails about the White House.  Scalise's scandal is proof that their more sophisticated and powerful counterparts in the party are pretty much cut from the same cloth.  Don't worry though, the Scalise affair is already forgotten, and the game of promoting white supremacy and profiting from it at the polls by Republicans will continue on unabated.  With all of the white fear, backlash, and reaction against the protests in Ferguson and New York, conservatives will have plenty to work with.