The “Woke” Discover Racism

 And in doing so, immediately disregard any and all issues of social class, or classism, in favor o “identity politics” racial essentialism, and deride any and all serious attempts to inject socio-economic class into the discussion of race and racism as nothing but “class reductionism.”  As if merely being black, or Latinx, or another person of color, no matter what one’s class standing, wealth (or lack of it), influence (or lack of it) or power (or lack of it) automatically made one a “spokesperson” for the whole of the community on issues of race, racism, power, influence, wealth, or any and all else.  Thus, a black college professor at an elite university, or a grad student, is automatically an expert on how the black poor and working-class experience race, racism, and all other matters sundry to these.  For there is no class difference in the communities of color, all are essentially in the same boat because of allegedly “lived experiences,” don’t you see?  And when people such as retired black professor and socialist activist Adolph Reed, Jr. try to point out the non-truth of this, and note pointedly that “racial solidarity” has often been but a get-out-the-vote ploy to win support among masses of ordinary working and poor people for an essentially middle-class, professional-managerial political and social agenda, they are vilified in no uncertain terms as—worse than an avowed Uncle Tom!

 

But socio-economic class is real, and so is societal stratification because of it.  People of color are not all “essentially in the same boat” anymore than white people are.  It is indeed as the Preamble to the Constitution of the radical union Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) put it, “The working class [i.e., those who work for the rich and powerful, whose labor turns the wheels of, and makes the goods and services that arise from, capital and the means of production] and the employing class [i.e., the rich and powerful, the owners of capital and the means of production]  have nothing in common.”  Except to be bound together in continual struggle against each other, no matter how individuals within both such groupings may subjectively feel otherwise.

 

This lack of commonality was vividly brought home a few years ago on an iconic video that appeared on the Internet, where a Latina woman employee of McDonald’s confronted the African American CEO of McDonald’s at the stockholders meeting, and vociferously agitated for a $15 an hour Living Wage for herself and her fellow employees, and the African American CEO had her arrested and thrown out of the meeting by the police!  A very clear case of socio-economic class trumping any form of racial essence, may I point out!  An African American CEO of a corporation such as McDonald’s no more has the desire to pay the employees a Living Wage any more than a white CEO has!  It is simply—not—in their class interest, no matter what “identity” as a person of color might “indicate.”  In today’s largely integrated equal-opportunity, workplaces, it’s not uncommon to have managers, supervisors, bosses over one, who are black, or Latin, or women, or intersectional:  Yet how many ordinary employees in such workplaces can specifically say they benefit because their manager, supervisor, boss, is a “fellow” person of color, or a “fellow” member of one’s gender, and thus is not a—boss—in the usual sense?  To ask the question is to answer it; and the answer is, overwhelmingly, “It makes no difference!”  Why?  Because of the social position of the boss, an alienating power over the worker, not at all because of the accident of race or gender.  An insight which is but an updated understanding in this age of “identity” of that which was noted long ago not only by Karl Marx, but those first who tried to organize their fellow workers into trade unions!  Which explains why the “ideal” spokesperson for the race or gender as a whole (most of whom, overwhelmingly, are ordinary blue- and white-collar workers) is simply not some lawyer, or politician, or grad student, or whatever, who is not of the ordinary working class him (or her) self!  Something at the heart, by the way, of what Adolph reed, Jr., says, or his son Touré Reed says, or other alleged “class reductionists” say!  Yes, class does matter, and it infuses the whole of social structure.  The Haves differ greatly from the Have-Nots, even if the Haves and the Have-Nots are of the same race, or gender, or share a common intersectionality!  The Ruler is simply “not essentially” the same as—the Ruled!

 

The only good fallout (but it’s only a paltry one) from this obsession of the “woke” over racism to the detriment, dismissal, of class has been to broaden somewhat our understanding of class in notably the U.S., but throughout the capitalist world, to include gender and racial components in the working-class’s composition.  We of the left no longer have as much the conception of the “working class” as predominantly comprised of white males.  We of the left are now more consciously aware of the role racial minorities, marginalized groups generally, and sexual divisions play in the working class’s composition.  But this seeming “slight” of women and minorities in the working class was only implicit, an oversight, rather than a conscious manifestation.  Simple truth is, the vast majority of minorities and women in the workforce are ordinary blue-collar and white-collar workers forced to sell their labor power (in Marxist terms) in order to make a living (or somewhat alternatively, their education and skill sets to qualify for selling certain more advanced forms of labor power to the employers).  Overwhelmingly, they are not, decidedly not, of the professional-managerial class, nor are they business owners or business executives; nor, even if they own some stock, are they major stockholders.  They are as “ordinary” a part of the working class are supposedly “privileged” white workers, and thus share a class commonality with them—something leftists have pointed out all the ways back to the days of the Communist Manifesto, even if racism among whites has obscured this commonality ofttimes—to the detriment of the working class as a whole, black, brown, yellow, red and white, male and female, gay and straight alike!   Racism and sexism is thus not a “white privilege” that benefits white male workers to the detriment of non-white, non-male workers, it is but a form of false consciousness (to invoke an “archaic” term our left has wrongly forgotten) that works to undermine white and male labor as well as colored and female labor.  It is an injury to all.  Period.

 

Further, if racism were still as ubiquitous as the “woke” maintain, then the whole of the Civil Rights Movement has been—in vain!  However, 2021 is not 1962, important progress and gains in equality have been achieved, and, as Bernie Sanders has emphasized, while much still needs to be done, much has already been accomplished.  No, we are not an equal society yet; but we are far less unequal than we used to be.  Progress has been made.  And prominence for blacks and Latinos, for example, is no longer confined to athletes and entertainers.  In fact, so much progress has been made that hidebound white supremacists in political office and on the Supreme Court now work assiduously to roll back these gains in equality achieved!

 

But this is something the “woke” don’t seem to see.  Nor do professional anti-racists such as Robin DiAngelo of Ibrahim X. Kendi.  But it bears emphasizing once again:  this is not 1962, this is 2021, and much has positively changed!  And denying that it has is only an ostrich-with-head-in-the-sand outlook.  Worse.  The “woke,” completely lacking a positive program to combat this supposedly ubiquitous racism that’s all around us, can only retreat into a pursuit of secular sainthood and shaming, calling out “racism” everywhere, even it can be ascribed to mere inadvertence, and developing a form of what can only be called a Manichean Christianity filled with sin, but offering no forgiveness.  Thus does the strident call for “racial wokeness” only increase resentment, undermine self-reflection and changing of attitudes, and inhibit the very anti-racism the “woke” demand.  Truly it is counterproductive to create enemies where there are none—but that is precisely what today’s “woke” seem to be aiming for.  And, sadly, succeeding, at least partially.  To the detriment of all of us, black, white, brown, yellow, and red; male and female; gay and straight alike.  An effective “divide and conquer” approach that’s the envy of many an anti-union employer faced with a working-class unity against him!  (Or her.)           

AHISTOICAL “IDENTITY POLITICS” AND THE LEFT NEWSMAGAZINE IN THESE TIMES

 

Normally I like, and am impressed by, articles in the left news magazine/website In These Times (ITT).  However, four articles which appeared in the February and March 2014 issues have raised hackles with me, hackles insistent enough to move me to write this riposte.  For all four show a tendentiousness and “identity politics” lack of clarity that I consider destructive to the further development of the left in our present time—and in their essentially non-class, ahistorical approach both illuminate a severe fault in present left analysis, and through their critique, present ways to overcome it.

The four are:  Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor’s “Where Obama’s Class Speech Failed,” http://inthesetimes.com/article/16121/where_obamas_class_speech_failed, and Dennis Coday’s “The Pope vs. Capitalism,” http://inthesetimes.com/article/16113/the_pope_vs._capitalism, in the February issue; and Susan J. Douglas’ “Grand Old Race-Baiting,” http://inthesetimes.com/article/16260/grand_old_race_baiting,

and Sady Doyle’s “A Canon Without Balls,” http://inthesetimes.com/article/16275/a_canon_without_balls, in the March issue.  While each of the articles does have some merit (in a publication of such caliber as I consistently find ITT to be, it would really be surprising to find an article within that completely lacked merit), this merit is very much attenuated and truncated by the essentially non-class, ahistorical “identity politics” approach that runs through each and all.  An approach that is fundamentally problematic in itself, and only creates more problems when the authors above try to use it.

 

Yamahtta-Taylor’s and Douglas’ articles are about race, and while Yamahtta-Taylor’s does give a gloss of social class and its importance to her argument, she seems to argue more for the irrelevance of class in relation to race and presents an argument that is more a variant of a “new revolutionary working class vanguard based on race” that was once in vogue in left circles, but hasn’t materialized in fact.  This is evident in her noting that blacks and Latinos make up 40% of the low-paid workforce, which, by simple arithmetic, means that a clear majority—60%—of the low-wage workforce is white and “persons of color” generally excluded by the left as such from the “persons of color” distinction—persons of East, Southeast, South and Central Asian descent.  She also omits noticing that often blacks and Latinos fight ethnically and racially with each other over the fruits of labor and entitlements, that they aren’t this homogeneous category of “blacks and Latinos,” even in both constituting major sectors of the low-wage working class.  Also excluded from consideration is that the CEO of the epitome of low-wage labor, McDonald’s Don Thompson, is himself African American—a problem for a race-based analysis, but not so for a class-based analysis, especially one that incorporates Lenin’s understanding of the comprador bourgeoisie.

Susan Douglas notes perceptively how the Republican Party has successfully used race-baiting to divide white workers from feeling affinity with workers of color, especially blacks and, more recently, from Latinos as well, but the illustration accompanying her article contains a photo of Bill Cosby, himself African American and a vigorous critic of what he sees as major dysfunction among his fellow African Americans—an indication in itself that more is involved that simply a black-white dichotomy.  Of course, the real kernel of truth in Douglas’ analysis is that the Republican Party and the Tea Party within have been very successful in the so-called “culture wars” in dividing white workers, especially white male workers, from their counterparts along racial lines, disingenuously channeling white economic populist concerns into racial resentments, into support for policies that go against the needs of white male workers themselves.  Further, this policy has been very successful, and has created a fertile base of support for Republicans and Tea Partiers that has enabled the absolute stymying of progressive efforts to change the political and economic status quo.  But this successful polarization that is so much part of US politics today should give progressives and leftists real concern, because changing demographics that are empowering more and more racial minorities, women and youth to support progressive politics are not in themselves going to end the political impasse that we’ve experienced so frustratingly these past few years, and could well continue for many more years to come. 

Yes, that small but fanatical minority that encompasses the Republican and Tea Parties, and that can also mobilize resentful white male workers as part of its base (a significant part of the Tea Party/Republican base, to be sure, but far from being its entirety, or even its majority), has demonstrated a real political staying power so far unmatched by anything the left and progressives can muster; something clearly demonstrated by the politics of inaction that has plagued the Obama Administration almost from its beginning.  This politics of paralysis has certainly proven its force—another good reason not to abandon the white male working class in favor of a supposedly triumphant future demographics.  Because racial resentment is against the real wishes and needs of the white male working class itself, a nuanced left politics of both race and class could have a positive effect even in the short run, which is as soon as the upcoming 2014 elections—elections which should make all of us progressives and leftists nervous.  But  the progressive and left forces will have to stress commonalities of interest, not triumphalist notions of non-white race-based “vanguard workers,” to bring white male workers back where they belong—in a unified populist movement that stresses social and economic justice for all, while also addressing residuals of past societal racism in a constructive, not divisive, way.

Dennis Coday’s “The Pope vs. Capitalism” strikes this ex-Catholic left writer as too much a gushing, teenage-crush love letter on the new Pope instead of a sober analysis.  Truth is, the new Pope is far more ambiguous and even doctrinally reactionary than Coday portrays.  And the Pope’s first encyclical, Evangelii Gaudium, not only critiques capitalism sharply, as Coday correctly notes, it also upholds the Catholic Church’s traditional opposition to birth control and abortion, insists on the male-only Catholic priesthood, and when discussing women and their concerns, has a distinctive air of patronizing about it.  A patronizing further demonstrated in a later interview with the Jesuit magazine America, September 30, 2013,  http://www.americamagazine.org/pope-interview, in which the Pope dismissed women’s concerns over equality in the Church as “female machismo.”  Further, even Pope Benedict XVI spoke in opposition to “unbridled capitalism” (during his Papal visit to Brazil in 2007; see “In Brazil, pope assails capitalism, Marxism. Sees decline in church influence,” Victor L. Simpson, Associated Press, May 14, 2007), so Pope Francis’ economic message isn’t completely novel, though certainly his tone and his broader sweep are—and are enough to cause the political right to mistake him for an actual Marxist! (Give credit where credit is due.)   However, on the issue of Catholic priest-pedophilia, as Archbishop of Buenos Aires Pope Francis sent very conflicting messages on this, as he hardly moved decisively against priest-pedophiles in his own diocese.  (For further reading on these matters see Adele Stan’s dissection of Evangelii Gaudium in AlterNet, December 6, 2013, “Killing Them Softly: Pope Francis Condemns Income Inequality, Sanctions Gender Inequality,” http://www.alternet.org/killing-them-softly-pope-francis-condemns-income-inequality-sanctions-gender-inequality; the British National Secular Society’s provocative October 31, 2013 blog by Terry Sanderson, “Are we being bamboozled by this charming Pope?” http://www.secularism.org.uk/blog/2013/10/are-we-being-bamboozled-by-this-charming-pope;  and Catholic investigative reporter Jason Berry’s December 31, 2013 article on GlobalPost which examines the new Pope’s ambiguous record on priest-pedophilia as bishop in Argentina, “How Pope Francis took 2013 by storm,” http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/italy/131231/how-pope-francis-took-2013-storm.)  As for the Pope’s establishing a Commission to “study” the priest-pedophilia issue, noted by Coday and now operational, wouldn’t it be far better to just turn over suspected priest-pedophiles and their personnel records over to the civil authorities for investigation and, if warranted, prosecution?  And same with covering-up clergy and bishops—turn them and their personnel records, correspondence and e-mails over as well to the civil authorities for investigation and possible prosecution of child endangerment or obstruction of justice?  Shouldn’t that be at the top of the new Commission’s agenda for “study”?  I believe a lot of people, Catholic, non-Catholic and ex-Catholic alike, would agree!

When I read Sady Doyle’s “A Canon Without Balls,” the first thought that entered my mind was how it reminded me of feminist lawyer Catharine MacKinnon’s Andy Warhol fifteen-minutes-of-fame during her speech before the Harvard Law School in the early 1990s advocating censorship on feminist grounds, dismissing works of “literary or scientific merit” with a cavalier “If a woman is involved, why should it matter?”  For what Doyle seemed clearly to be proposing was a feminist litmus test for deciding if any work of literature was “politically correct” or not.  Indeed, her screed harkened me back to my reading of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s powerful dystopian novel We, and how it had run afoul of militant “political correctness.”  Zamyatin, a Soviet writer in the 1920s, had written We as a science-fiction extrapolation of disturbing trends he’d already found apparent in the fledgling Soviet Union; and in 1923 the reading of his manuscript elicited vigorous and indignant attack from the new commissars of Socialist Realism, i.e., literature that conformed to the “needs” of Socialist Revolution, at the meeting of the All-Russian Writers Union.  My impression of Doyle’s essay is that she is reading literature in the spirit of these Socialist Realism commissars—more concerned with “correct political line” than with quality literature as such.  But all quality literature, whatever its ideological bent, is a contribution by the best of humanity to the best of humanity as its audience, and of course that includes within it that half of humanity which is female. 

As for “bad,” “harmful” and “reactionary” ideas, the purging of them “to protect the innocent” from the “offensive” has always been the rationale of censors, whether overt, or more “benign,” as through “ideological criticism.” Yet it has been censorship or tendentious “criticism” that has more often than not given such “bad” ideas their attractive force—and yes, there are indeed “bad,” reactionary and chauvinist ideas in many great works, and yet—while they may give “offense” to some readers, has anyone been harmed by them who read them as literature should be read, with a critical yet open mind, a mind capable of separating the wheat from the chaff?  In just my own particular case, did I become a neoliberal because I read Wealth of Nations and the popular works of Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom and Free to Choose?  Was I made susceptible to sadism because I read the account of God-sanctioned genocide in the Book of Joshua?  And haven’t feminists themselves been more harmed by censorship than by exposure to “male chauvinist” writers such as Saul Bellow and Jack Kerouac?  To ask the question is to answer it.

Just as an updated footnote to the above, we can also pointedly note what the Atlantic, in May 2014,  termed “empathetic correctness,” http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/05/empathetically-correct-is-the-new-politically-correct/371442/, the new push for “trigger warnings” to preface readings and films shown in academic settings that might—just might, not necessarily would, even among the most  squeamish and vulnerable—set off emotional reactions of unease, discomfort and panic.  Which we should invidiously dismiss as just another unfortunate example of our contemporary left’s penchant for protecting people—from fundamental reality itself!  Of course, this is just another “benign” form of censorship, and is patronizing itself to the 3% of the population (according to the Center for Disease Control) which suffers from PTSD, “concern” for whom motivates the “trigger warning” advocates to embrace yet another variant of censorship.  But just as censorship is no substitute for therapy, it is also no preventative of panic, or any other “disturbance”—although it does encourage, even directly cause, disturbance, disruption, and even elimination of the capacity for critical thought!  Truly a “cure” far worse than any disease it supposedly prevents.