Carl Davidson's comments underscore the necessity of my blog

Carl Davidson is an estimable individual, one of our better left leaders, and someone whom I've admired since the 1960s. Yet he's not been without his confusions over the years, and those confusions are reflected in his two "Comments" to my original blog. In this he shares basic confusions about the nature of racism with far too much of the organized left as it exists today, a confusion that can only continue to undermine the left.

Specifically, he sees the status of black America as basically unchanged over all these years, and thus, transforms living black America itself into some sort of immutable, ahistorical category that, no matter what, cannot ever get out from under the heel of white racism, which is, itself, another immutable, ahistorical category. That is why he has to dwell on what happened back in the 1600s, and not utter one word on the current situation in which race and racism exist here in 2010. In doing so, he exclusively on what existed during the time of slavery, thus omitting the past nearly 400 years of history. While his characterization of what he holds as the creation of a White Race is of interest historically the way he presents it, it completely begs the question, What about now? He gets out of facing that question directly by completely ignoring my references to Clarence Thomas and Michael Steele, who, judging from how they appear in photographs, are certainly African-American, yet whose politics are certainly not those of what he would hold as "properly" African-American.

Right away, his analysis thus breaks on the shoals of what is indeed a situation where the kind of overt racism that would always seem to be unavoldable given his immutable White Race thus created eternally back in the 1600s, and never subject to change. Yet, a young black writer, Richard Benjamin, while finding the U.S. still beset with "structural racism," finds it free of "interpersonal racism." (Taken from David Sirota's interview with Benjamin, "Road tripping through Whitopia," In These Times, March 2009.) Something I would also hold to be true. And that's the rub.

It's the rub because there's no way to understand race and racism in the U.S., or indeed anywhere else, without undrestanding it as the intersection of race and class. It all goes back to a real Marxist analysis, something I would assume Davidson, a socialist activist, would thoroughly understand. But given that so much gets improperly called "Marxism" nowadays (and has been so improperly called since the 1960s, even by those on the left), Davidson's misunderstanding takes on a much larger significance. What was once true is that the class divisions in the black community were not as significant as they are now: all were more or less universally poor, and direct manifestations of racism affected the black middle and upper classes, and limited their upward mobility, as much as it did their poorer brethren. But the palpable, though limited, successes of the civil rights movement and black empowerment widened the class divisions within the black community. While some members of the black community were able to gain great advantage from the opportunities in employment and education now open to them, many were not, and they were simply left behind by both the still-primarily-white established power structure and by their better-off black brethren. Racial solidarity, when almost all blacks were in essentially the same situation, now foundered on the shoals of an increasingly accessible upward mobility that was afforded a few, but a few that was increasing in both numbers and in percentage of the black population. At the same time, the barriers of racial prejudice were also breaking down in the white community, and middle-class blacks were much more accepted than before by white middle-class Americans, while their poorer brethren were not. There was also a loss of leadership in the black community itself, as what DuBois called the "talented tenth" of the black population took their leadership and educational skills out of the black community, both physically and psychologically.

So, to make a long story short, it was now possible for a black man, Barack Obama, to live in the White House while a few miles away, other black people lived in ever-increasing squalor. Further, with the extensive loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs in the U.S. economy, a regularly-employed black proletariat sank more into the immiseration of becoming only a marginally-employed, low-wage employed proletariat, or not in the workforce at all, a lumpenproletariat. With all the social vices that kind of immiseration entails: endemic poverty, crime, drugs, dropping out of school, teenage pregnancy, social instability. Much like the situation that had prevailed before the civil rights successes, only this time without a black leadership of the stature and character of a Martin Luther King or a Malcolm X. A horrible social vacuum with devastating consequences all-round.

This is schematic, to be sure, but all too accurate I say, in its essential features. And that is the class tragedy of black America today. That is the social root of the "structural racism" that deepens, even as "interpersonal racism" generally recedes.

But this is certainly not what Carl Davidson sees, and certainly not at all what he sees when he cavalierly dismisses my notion of "whiteness" as an "attitude." For if "whiteness" is not an "attitude" that can be transformed and overcome, then how does he explain the white Abolitionists, how does he explain John Brown, how indeed does he explain the tens of thousands of white youth like himself (and me as well) who were inspired and galvanized into action by the courageous stand of the civil rights movement? Who joined that movement, and in many cases gave their lives trying to win black freedom from segregation? Who were inspired by the civil rights movement and its employment of direct action to use those same tactics, and to manifest that same courage, to protest the U.S. war in Vietnam, or to fight against the myriad social ills they saw all around them? Including in the white communities themselves? Indeed, if "whiteness" is not an "attitude" that can be transformed and overcome, then how can anyone explain at all that decade of protest called the 1960s? Indeed, if "whiteness" is not an "attitude" that can be transformed and overcome, then how can Carl Davidson even explain himself!

Unfortunately, what did happen is but another aspect of the palpable success of much of white America actually overcoming its "whiteness": it happened with an infusion of counterproductive guilt. But much as we may feel sorry for the crimes committed against black America, as much as we may feel guilty because of it, guilt is a poor substitute for a political and economic program that addresses both the racial and class realities of the U.S. and the world today. It is simply a dead end, and only ends up, quoting Angela Davis from 1995, "automatically exonerat[ing] those who do harm to self and others." And that only leads the left into a cul-de-sac on this vital question of race. Or rather, race and class.