Australopithecus hoosierensis

This article also originally appeared in Examiner.com--GF

Contrary to accepted opinion, Indiana is not populated by and large by Homo sapiens, but rather, by a deceptively human-appearing species of nasty, stupid, erect-walking ape, Australopithecus hoosierensis.  Australopithecus hoosierensis differs markedly from its cousin, Australopithecus mississippiensis, in that, while Australopithecus hoosierensis professes to love music, and often inflicts itself on others with this profession by doing fifth-rate karaoke versions of third-rate country and pop songs, it cannot sing the blues, and thinks “My home is in the Delta” refers to a frat house!

Needless to say, this designation, Australopithecus hoosierensis, goes over poorly with that half of the allegedly adult Indiana population that does not believe in evolution.  This half is thus prone to complain volubly, “I ain’t descended from no ape!  I is an ape!”   Then there is that that invariably appreciative and supportive Hoosier work supervisor (hah!), who is often given to say to an underling:  “You made ten mistakes this morning.  You did the work of an idiot.  If I wanted the work of an idiot, I would’ve done it myself!”

 

Then there is that classic cultural characteristic of Australopithecus hoosierensis, doing things according to Indiana ‘Round to It Time (“I’ll do it when I get ‘round to it.”).  Needless to say, this can often cause consternation, especially to those not accustomed to Hoosier ways.  Consider this little dialogue that went on when someone came into a repair shop to check on an item he’d brought in for repair some time ago:

“I was just checking on that small appliance I brought in for you to repair.”

“I haven’t gotten ‘round to it yet.”

“But it’s been ten years!”

“I said I’d do it when I got ‘round to it!”

But that’s nothing compared to Indiana “I Woulda, But…” Time.  This is heard frequently in the Hoosier state, “I woulda, but…,” followed by some excuse that one is expected to automatically accept as a perfectly good and valid reason, no matter what it is. To do otherwise is considered very bad form.  Here’s a typical example of what I mean:  “I woulda, but…well, I got drunk instead.  And then, because I was drunk, I had to fuck the dog.  And, by the time I finished fucking the dog and sobered up, it was too late.  But I woulda!”

Australopithecus hoosierensis is not the only unusual fauna found in Indiana.  The Hoosier state is home to those other weird (by non-Hoosier standards) but common denizens, the Two-legged Pigs and the Two-legged Sheep.  Two-legged Pigs are especially prevalent in Indiana among politicians, notably Republican and Tea Party ones; among “community leaders,” businessmen, many labor leaders (which are actually an endangered species now in “right-to-work” Indiana), numerous clergy and “spiritual leaders,” and, naturally of course, bosses and managers.  Two-legged Sheep comprise the vast majority of the rest of the population, especially voters, and are characterized by their constant passivity in the face of everything while bleating loudly, “Baa, baa, baa,” at anything that disturbs their desired brain-dead tranquility.  The Two-legged Pigs, for their part, constantly bark, “Oink, oink, oink” authoritatively as though they were giving orders they expected to be obeyed without question.  The Two-legged Sheep then respond with bleats of “Baa, baa, baa” to the all the “Oink, oink, oinks” that are uttered by marching off, mindlessly and herd-like, to be turned into lamb chops.  

 

 

 

     

A bad forum advocating a really horrible idea

This article also originally appeared in Examiner.com.  While I stand behind what I wrote below, and believe that what I wrote is essentially accurate, I may have overstated the anti-college opposition of the KI EcoCenter participants; but that was because the presentation was so incoherent, so definitely below the usual high standards of KI forums, that I may have given more coherence to what was actually said than it deserved.  I may have read coherence into what was just confusion, and thus the participants' stated objection to me, that they "didn't completely say that," may be somewhat true due to this incoherence and confusion--GF

 

Last Tuesday, October 28,2014, a group that I’ve usually admired, the KI EcoCenter (KI) of Indianapolis, Indiana, http://www.kiecocenter.org, held a public forum, “College Isn’t the Answer,” in which the various panelists advocated directly for—let’s face it—ignorance, anti-intellectualism, and giving money to black people as “reparations” for slavery instead of intellectual improvement of the black communities of Indianapolis and the U.S., by coming out squarely against college education.  But that’s putting it generously, as my thumbnail description of the forum gives the “discussion” that ensued by the panelists and the approving audience participants a far greater coherence and understanding of the issues than actually ensued.  In reality, what transpired was incoherence, intellectual confusion of the worst sort, constant comparing of the proverbial apples to oranges, massive tendentious omissions, lack of a truly serious approach, and significant omission of data and evidence.  Instead what was proffered—in all seriousness!—was a pseudo-populist “left black nationalist”  exercise in derision and self-abnegation, a rather hypocritical posturing by black college graduates themselves on how they were supposedly duped by becoming college-educated; a masochistic display of anti-intellectualism by the panelists made all the more pathetic by the basic fact that, without their supposedly worthless college educations, they would’ve lacked even the basic erudition and coherency to present their own presentations against college!

 

Yes, their very articulateness (such as it was—really not at all at the high level KI panel participants have presented in the past) in arguing against college, and thus de facto for ignorance, would not have been possible even at this disappointing level had it not been for the panelists’ own college educations!  Their position, as presented by these three college-educated African Americans, became simply a whining complaint of “Don’t go to college! We’ve been there, it’s not worth it.  Savor your mere high school-educated ignorance instead, despite our token lip-service to the general notion of education.  Do as we say, not what we ourselves did!”    

 

This display of articulate self-abnegation by the three black panelists was of course echoed by the one token white panelist (himself hand-picked by KI and given a voice, I take it, in name of “diversity”), who himself was also another self-abnegating college graduate.  This panelist offered to entertain us by deliberately tearing up his college diploma that evening; but that was a “promise” left unfulfilled (undoubtedly for the better).

 

These four panelists—the three African Americans Paulette, Imhotep (usually referred to simply as M.) and Khalil, along with the token white panelist, John—are all people I’m acquainted with as an active supporter of KI in the past, and it is no pleasure for me to trash them.  But I feel obligated simply because I am a lower-rungs-of-the-socio-economic-ladder college graduate myself, a working-class white man who worked hard to achieve my degree; a college degree and educational immersion I myself find invaluable in enabling me to do my avocation of writing prose and poetry for publication, something that would not have been possible without it.  And so, while my degree has not paid off for me economically in terms of a good job, it has contributed immensely in granting me a sense of self-worth, in giving me a fulfilling life, and making me a positive contributor in the cause of social and economic justice for all, African American, Hispanic, other ethnicities, as well as my own white working class—all those excluded from the American Dream by the 1%, whose domination of our lives the Occupy movement made us so rightfully aware of.  Getting that degree (Bachelor’s in economics from Indiana University, supplemented by later paralegal training) gave me an education in the broadest and most proper sense, it opened for me the vast realm of knowledge, enabled me to commune with the greatest minds of humanity past and present—something that would not have come about had I remained a mere high school graduate, or even as someone with only some college.

 

This, and more, I tried to articulate in the technically open and extensive, but actually perfunctory and limited, audience discussion of the panelists’ remarks.  Needless to say, my remarks in favor of education were completely ignored by the panelists themselves, who were too absorbed in promoting their own anti-intellectual shtick to “bother” with me.  But I was “answered” with vociferous objection by audience members who had only high school educations themselves, or who were disgruntled college dropouts, themselves inadvertent advocates of the value of higher education through their own angry denunciations of that which they didn’t have themselves, but which they disdained because they lacked it. Confirmation of a positive good by denunciation of it as worthless by those who had never possessed it in the first place!  Or else, trashing at the hands of those who failed to realize the value of what they themselves did possess, resentful discarders of the gold at their feet in favor of the tawdry glittering tinsel of ignorance their pseudo-populism inclined them to embrace in its stead.

 

As I stated above, I’ve long been a supporter and enthusiast of the KI EcoCEnter, which I first encountered at a community jobs forum it held in October 2012, and on which I published a very extensive-praising post in my “Politically Incorrect Leftist” BlogSpot blog, http://politicallyincorrectleftist.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2012-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2013-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=7. But lately, KI has allowed its ideology of “black cultural nationalism” as articulated by Maulana Karenga (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maulana_Karenga), to weaken the quality and multiracial appeal of its earlier work and public forums; most recently it has focused less on its organizational philosophy of “social entrepeneurship” and “bootstrapping” as positive aids to the empowerment of the primarily working-class African American residents of Indianapolis’ Near North Side neighborhood where it exists, and more on being an angry, and at times highly incoherent, megaphone of black grievances against what it claims is an all-encompassing structure of “white privilege;” something this decidedly unprivileged member or the white working class finds very much at variance with actual reality, and who objects strongly to Paulette’s and M.’s insistence that I, struggling just to get by, also partake of.  This vague, generalized, all-encompassing “white privilege” so “politically correct” to assert, but which is so factually compromised, truncated and rebutted by so much of white working-class reality.  This “privilege” I allegedly have despite only my receiving Social Security standing between me and homelessness—something I’d hardly call a “privilege”! 

 

Sadly, I find KI moving from being “pro-black,” which it should be, to being more openly “anti-white,” except toward those whites who uncritically subordinate themselves to KI’s “cultural nationalism.”  To me this is a disservice to what was so positive in KI’s earlier activity, and which garnered my strongly admiring allegiance and support in the first place.  I feel uncomfortably on the receiving end of “reverse racism.”  Not that whites, and especially my own white working class, haven’t done a lot to harm African Americans; they certainly have.  But they themselves are also Bob Dylan’s “pawns in their game” who ride only “the caboose of the train;” they themselves are also the inarticulate and dispossessed victims of whole hierarchies of economic, social and institutional power held by the overwhelmingly (but not entirely) white ruling 1%, which oppresses and subordinates both white and non-white in very similar ways, and increasingly, to very similar, if not exactly identical, degrees.  While white people can be said to have a relative “advantage” in many (but not all) cases vis-à-vis African Americans, this is far from an absolute “privilege” that ensures whites always come out on top, are always psychologically satisfied, materially sated, and economically secure, no matter what their socio-economic status.

 

And yes, while whites too often can be openly racist, and even virulently so, this is far from being a “benefit” to them, is far from a “psychological bonus” they not only receive but profit from; rather it is a liability, a delusional sense of superiority, a pernicious illusion that blinds them not only to the commonalities of oppression they share with their brethren of color, but makes them dupes of Occupy’s 1% (really 0.01%).  The 1% (or rather, 0.01%) who comprise those corporate and financial elites and their satraps who manipulate far too many ordinary white people as puppets, who set them against people of color as (often eager) attack dogs,  but who are still tightly leashed by the 1%.  “White privilege” is thus an often-unacknowledged liability that undermines the white working class every bit as much as it oppresses African Americans.

But back to the “College Isn’t the Answer” forum.  The forum based its anti-college position on two very bad articles which appeared in the Washington Post (a dead giveaway in itself of how the anti-intellectual initiators of the forum themselves profited from their own college degrees—knowing about these articles, knowing about the Washington Post as a primarily college graduate-appealing elite source of information and opinion in the first place):  “sociologist and writer” (nothing more)  Tressie McMillan Cottom’s  “No, college isn’t the answer. Reparations are,” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/05/29/no-college-isnt-the-answer-reparations-are/?mc_cid=a19a9ef833&mc_eid=[UNIQID]&mc_cid=9f4ac1282f&mc_eid=[UNIQID]) and Valerie Strauss’s blog, “No, algebra isn’t necessary — and yes, STEM is overrated,” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/no-algebra-isnt-necessary--and-yes-stem-is-overrated/2012/08/26/edc47552-ed2d-11e1-b09d-07d971dee30a_blog.html) which reprints a New York Times Op-ed by one Roger C. Schank, described as “a cognitive scientist, artificial intelligence theorist, and education reformer.”  These two articles are at best but half-truths zealously overstated. 

 

Cottom tries to make a case that only reparations are the solution to the problem of glaring economic inequality (as though it were only a problem for the black community, which is blatantly false), and counterpoises reparations for the past enslavement of African Americans to African Americans today getting a college education, which she sees as just another way of perpetuating black inequality through substantial black college-graduate unemployment. Which is an undoubted fact of our economy still not overcoming the Recession of 2008 (Cottom is correct here), but which has also meant high rates of unemployment and underemployment for college graduates as a whole, not just for African Americans (and which is really a problem that goes back to the 1970s and has continued since, only exacerbated, but not created, by the ongoing recession). 

 

Schank states baldly, “The average person never does abstract reasoning,” “You can live a productive and happy life without knowing anything about macroeconomics or trigonometry…,”  and that our supposed societal obsession with math and STEM all goes back to a claim made in 1892 by the president of Harvard University of what should be taught in high school.  As with Cottom, Shank is half-right (but remember, half-right is also half-wrong!).  Yes, “The average person never does abstract reasoning,” but that’s really a problem more than a superfluity, a problem well-articulated by 1920s iconoclastic journalist H.L. Mencken, “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.” The same with “You can live a productive and happy life without knowing anything about macroeconomics[.]”  All we have to do is look at the level of public political discourse and electoral appeals in this 2014 election to give the lie to the beneficence of these statements of fact.   The simple fact of the low level of political discourse, open demagoguery, and statement both of half-truths and outright lies in the 2014 electoral appeals, plus the facile (but fallacious) appeal of free market-fundamentalist economics making supposed experts out of people such as Paul Ryan and even Ayn Rand, shockingly exposes how We, the People are directly harmed by voters who “never [do] abstract reasoning” and who vote “without knowing anything about macroeconomics.”  Voters who “never [do] abstract reasoning” and who vote “without knowing anything about macroeconomics” frequently determine through their ignorance just who our political leaders are—and through them, what social and economic policies are put into practice!  Proof positive that ignorance is far from bliss, though ignorance may be popular, deliberately promulgated and disseminated, and even celebrated (the Tea Party being a stellar example of the last).

 

As one who studied mathematics extensively, I myself can attest that its value lies not so much in the mathematical formulas taught but in its overwhelming value as a heuristic, i.e., as a means to understand and practice the daily art and science of problem-solving, something that confronts each of us every day.  Through mastery of math we come to mastery of logic, of logical inference and deduction, how to employ reason correctly, and what is valid and invalid, relevant and irrelevant, evidence on which to base our solutions, our daily decisions.  That is math’s overwhelming strength in “practical” affairs, and is precisely why algebra, plane geometry and trigonometry are taught in our high schools, or should be; and why, given our reliance on statistical information today, statistics and probability should also be.  If that’s “elitist” or not narrowly “practical,” so be it!  As a person of the left who considers the Jeffersonian ideal of “An aristocracy of talent in a democracy of opportunity” to be one of the hallmarks of a good, just and equitable society, I say the teaching of “abstract reasoning,” math, and yes, even “macroeconomics,” is necessary to move us forward in the “democracy of opportunity,” made more of a reality by the Civil Rights and labor struggles of ordinary people than it was before, to become more of what we need to be—a society where those in charge truly represent an “aristocracy of talent” as opposed to the “oligarchy of mediocrity” our political and societal leaders represent today.

 

And as a college graduate who found specific value in that college education, I openly state that all that comes about easier when the masses of ordinary people have access to broad means of education, both formal education and self-education as a lifetime project, through greatly improved primary, secondary, and yes, higher education.  Yes, there are many things wrong with higher education as it exists today—its frequent detached elitism, its cost, its increasingly strictly vocational orientation, its often chilling effect on imagination, creativity and independent scholarship which it should foster instead—but the correction of these major faults depends on deepening the educational experience, not simply throwing it out as an unneeded irrelevancy the way the panelists did at the KI forum.  Because, for all the faults of higher education today, it certainly beats ignorance!  Which is precisely where the panelists of “College Isn’t the Answer” would lead us—inadvertently to be sure, but also inexorably.

 

Furthermore, if we wish to see an example of a society where college is disdained, and where ignorance is enshrined, we need only look at our own Indiana, which ranks 42^nd in the nation in the percentage of its people with at least a Bachelor’s degree, and which ranks last in the Midwest as such.  The Hoosier State is a bastion today of poor job opportunities, abysmal social services, and extreme right-wing politics, and these are all interconnected with our fellow Hoosiers’ lack of education; our notorious Brain Drain, where college graduates leave the state in droves because of lack of suitable jobs for them; and our poor primary and secondary schools, which directly impact on employment opportunities, the lack of which, along with the state’s hemorrhaging of previously unskilled but high-pay manufacturing jobs, has consistently caused Indiana’s per capita income to drop.  Drop so significantly that, today, Indiana ranks 39th in the nation in per capita income when in the 1950s it ranked in the 20s.  As Philip Powell, Associate Professor of Business at Indiana University-Bloomington told the Indianapolis Star as far back as 2009 and which has remained unchanged since, “We’re stuck. We’re stuck because we don’t have the knowledge base we need in the labor force. A lot of that is because of our really mediocre primary and secondary educational system.”

 

(For documentation of the above, see George Fish and Dave Fey, “Mediocrity—A Hoosier affliction,” Bloomington Alternative, http://bloomingtonalternative.com/articles/2009/07/12/10039, and the accompanying “Hoosier Mediocrity Fact Sheet,” http://bloomingtonalternative.com/f/Hoosier%20Mediocrity.pdf; Though some of the statistics cited there are old, sadly, the trends referenced by them are not.  For the overweening right-wing character of Indiana politics, see, Bryan K. Bullock, Truth-out, June 27, 2014, “The Ultra-Right-Wing State Nobody Mentions,” http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/24552-the-ultra-right-wing-state-nobody-mentions.)

 

Sadly, the KI EcoCenter’s forum, “College Isn’t the Answer,” represents just a “left-wing” pseudo-populist variant of that virulent anti-intellectualism so continually prevalent in U.S. society that’s so eloquently scored by noted science popularizer and science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov (himself a Ph.D. in biochemistry): “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”  It is unfortunate that an organization, KI, which I have thought of so highly, decided to perpetuate that.

 

 

  

   

 

 

I’m white and poor. If that makes me “privileged”…

This article originally appeared on the online newspaper Examiner.com, which I wrote for from 2009-2014, when I was summarily dismissed by its Legal Department as not the "right fit."  But since I believe almost all of my Examiner.com articles are still of timely interest, I am re-posting them on my "Politically Incorrect Leftist" blog--GF  

 

I’m white and poor.  If that makes me “privileged”…then my anus is green!

 

 

And like a lot of poor whites I certainly feel insulted by being scolded that I’m “privileged,” that I’m an automatic, congenital beneficiary of “white privilege”—especially when so much of this scolding comes from far better off white people, people immune from knowing hunger, unemployment, and fear of becoming homeless.  Scolding from people who don’t have to worry about being able to pay their bills.  Scolding from people who don’t have to worry about having food on the table.  People whose romanticizing of African Americans lies in inverse ratio to their trashing of poor and working-class whites as congenitally, incurably, “racist.”

 

I had hoped to go back to work under restrictions accepted as “reasonable accommodation” under the Americans with Disabilities Act, but that was denied by my employer.  My forced “resignation” because of medical reasons was demanded instead.  Now, after three weeks of unpaid sick leave, which followed on less than two weeks on the job before I had to take the leave, which followed further on being unemployed for nearly two months, I’m in the most unenviable situation of having to find employment as soon as I can, and searching for such employment while under medical restrictions on the work I can perform.  In a tight job market.  When I’m down to my last $22 until my Social Security comes in again on December 3, which definitely isn’t going to get me through November.  When, on top of all that, my five-year-old glasses frames broke, so I’m doing a rock ‘n’ roll legend Roy Orbison (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Orbison) imitation by wearing my alternate pair, prescription sunglasses.  Something likely not to be acceptable on a job, and hardly good to wear to a job interview, but I can’t afford new frames, much less a new eye exam.

 

And if that weren’t enough, there’s also being verbally assaulted as inevitably, inescapably, possessing “white privilege” simply because of the color of my skin.  (Judging someone by the color of one’s skin: isn’t that a definition of—racism?!)   This habitually asserted by African American “black cultural nationalists” of my acquaintance, along with certain of their white allies, even in face of my hurt, chagrin, and yes, humiliation due to the above.  (A little sensitivity here, please!)  The only good thing in all this is at least my rent’s paid because of my Social Security received November 3, and my heating gas is assured for the month, because I also paid that bill out of Social Security.  My Social Security—the mere $839 a month that stands between me and homelessness, even when I’m working, because I have to rely solely on temp agencies for poorly-paid work.  But, due to all the obligations that have to come out of it, the Social Security only gets me through the first few days of the month.  And will not get me through at all on the later-in-the-month electricity and phone/Internet bills (but ever try to do a job search without Internet and a phone?).  So, without work, my only option is to become a cringing beggar boy and make desperate appeals to “friends;” “friends” who’ve helped me in the past (because they condescend to Poor Demented Idiot Savant George!), but whose help comes at the cost of psychological usury.  See, I’d better bow and scrape like a medieval peasant before the lord of the manor if I want even a dime!

 

And all that makes me “privileged”!  Gives me as much “white privilege” as it does the Koch Brothers, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner!

 

Yeah, sure; now back to the color of my anus!

 

But yes, while whites often can be openly racist, and even virulently so, this is far from giving them some special “privilege,” this is far from being a “benefit” to them, is far from a “psychological bonus” they not only receive but profit from.  Rather, as far as I’m concerned, white racism is a severe liability, a delusional sense of superiority, a pernicious illusion that blinds them not only to the commonalities of oppression they share with their brethren of color, but makes them dupes of Occupy’s 1% (really 0.01%).  The 1% (or rather, 0.01%) who comprise those corporate and financial elites and their satraps who manipulate far too many ordinary white people as puppets, who set them against people of color as (often eager) attack dogs,  but who are still tightly leashed by the 1%.  “White privilege” is thus an often-unacknowledged liability that undermines the white working class every bit as much as it oppresses African Americans.

 

Further, while white people can be said to have a relative “advantage” in many (but not all) cases vis-à-vis African Americans, this is far from an absolute “privilege” that ensures whites always come out on top, are always psychologically satisfied, materially sated, and economically secure, no matter what their socio-economic status.  (Here I want particularly to thank fellow left-wing writer Barry F. for suggesting use of the relative “advantage” in place of the absolute “privilege” as a much more accurate delineation, especially since it accords to the actual dictionary definitions and connotations of the words.)  So, “white privilege” is a misnomer, a badly-conceived term that overstates what is actually a “white comparative advantage” in many, but not all cases, especially as involves the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder, where poor and somewhat better-off working-class whites are pitted against poor and working-class blacks and Hispanics for the measly (and diminishing) scraps thrown at them by the Occupy 1%; and where racism ends up a divisive force that pits natural allies against each other for who will get to eat these scraps.  (And in this regard, we should also not overlook black racial animus against Hispanics, or Hispanic racial animus against blacks.)  So I long to substitute the invidious misnomer “white privilege” (which is bound to feel insulting to people who barely have even a pot to pee in, or not even that) with the above “white comparative advantage” as a more accurate description of the evils stemming from “white racism” or “white chauvinism,” which the white poor and working class “benefit” from only in a delusory psychological sense—which means white people deluding themselves about their racial “superiority,” even as their “comparative white advantage” may make them only one or two rungs above blacks or Hispanics on the socio-economic ladder, but where they are still in danger of falling off!

 

I also find “white privilege” to be a racially-charged derogatory term often used by economically-secure middle-class and upper-middle-class whites to deliberately disparage those “fellow” whites who are below them on the socio-economic ladder, and who are thus “ignorant,” “uncouth” and in some cases, “really not much better than blacks themselves.”  This often presents itself in “left radical” guise arising historically out of the New Left of the 1960s—which was an anomaly as far as left radical social movements are concerned.  An anomaly because it was a rebellious movement primarily of middle-class and upper-middle-class students and student hangers-on without any significant movement among the working class, quite unlike the movements of the late 19^th and early 20^th Century, or of the 1930s. 

 

The working class from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s (i.e., those who worked in blue-collar and lower-level white-collar jobs), especially in the U.S., had been made quiescent—not only by the abnormally-extensive prosperity of the post-World War II years (itself an often-overlooked legacy of the ferment that led to the New Deal, which considerably redistributed the social wealth from the upper classes, where it traditionally lay, toward the middle and even somewhat toward the lower classes), but also by the deliberate cowing of the labor movement and the promotion of “patriotic,” fervently anti-Communist, nationalism by the  Cold War. These were important underpinnings needed for justifying the Cold War as necessary to defend the U.S. as a “bastion of freedom” against “Soviet tyranny.”  Dissent, especially from the left, was quashed and conformity to the “social norm” actively demanded, especially from the working class, concomitant with the celebration of U.S. “democratic pluralism” which allegedly made “socialism” and “class struggle” not only obsolete, but downright subversive. 

 

 

This period, from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s, was a period of “social peace” celebrated under the hegemony of “liberal tolerance and welfare-state beneficence,” the convergence of center-left “liberals” of the Democratic Party with center-right “moderates” such as Eisenhower and the bulk of the Republican officeholders, universally accepted and praised, except for the ever-now-and-then virulent emergence of movements from the troglodytic right “who just didn’t get it.”  Movements such as McCarthyism, the creation and growth of the John Birch Society, and the 1964 Republican Presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater.

 

This, then, is a thumbnail sketch of U.S. society on the eve of when “the lid blew off” in the early 1960s, corresponding with the emergence of the Civil Rights movement of African Americans determined to finally eradicate segregation, racial discrimination and Jim Crow once and for all; and with the Third World challenge to post-World War II U.S. world dominance by rising anti-colonial nationalist and even radical movements and the growing appeal of “neutralism” in the Cold War by such forces—a period marked historically by the victory of the Communist Party-led Chinese Revolution in 1949, India’s independence from British rule under Gandhi and Nehru in 1948, the Bandung Conference of 1955 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandung_Conference), the victory of the Cuban Revolution by Fidel Castro’s guerillas in 1959, and the former Western colonies’ coming to   independence across Asia and Africa in the 1960s. 

 

The emergence of the white student New Left in the early 1960s was also part of this new ferment, and the freedom rides, sit-downs and nonviolent marches and demonstrations undertaken by the Civil Rights movement drew a lot of support for their morally just cause—which also drew a violent, virulent response from the die-hard Southern segregationists, both politicians in office and ordinary white Southerners, and an increasing white backlash against it in the North.  The virulence of both these revealed not only a deep fissure in U.S. society on racial issues; but also exposed the abject poverty of millions of African Americans themselves, as well as their political disenfranchisement.  These the seamy hidden underside of the “social peace” that had supposedly dominated, but which had dominated at the social price of marginalization and invisibility of millions, and the complacency, indifference and denial of the vast majority; a complacency, indifference and denial that often moved to outright hostility when so many were confronted on it by the Civil Rights movement, and which found outlet through white backlash.  The spread of white backlash against Civil Rights was furthered even more by the political savvy of Alabama’s segregationist Governor George Wallace, who found a ready audience for his racial views when he couched them in “states rights” and other non-racially-charged terms—thus giving respectability to the resistance against black demands for equality and justice. 

 

The New Left and the Civil Rights movements grew and inspired more and more mass support, particularly among college students due to the rapid growth of university enrollment. This made the traditionally upper-class and upper-middle-class student bodies more diverse as well as filled increasingly with students drawn from more properly middle-class, lower-middle-class and working-class backgrounds.  This happened because obtaining a college education was relatively inexpensive compared to now, something which brought in many such students who were the first ever in their families to go to college, such as me.  Many of these students from more lowly backgrounds, if they were white, joined the primarily-white New Left and anti-Vietnam War organizations; while many who were black formed militant campus black student groups.   The escalation of the Vietnam War moved many campus and Civil Rights activists to become increasingly more “revolutionary,” espouse more hyperbolic and inflammatory rhetoric, and organize more confrontational protests.  The Civil Rights cause became the Black Power cause; the hippie counterculture arose, along with its trappings of unconventional rock music and drug use; and commonplace increasingly on the campus was the frequently florid and uncompromising rhetoric which was so much part and parcel of “the way we all talked in the 1960s,” despite what actual politics many of us had, or whether we really had much of any coherent politics at all.  (I myself, also part of the New Left, had this inner confusion, even as I fancied myself a knowledgeable, yet uncompromising, “communist revolutionary.”)

 

Albert Fried, editor of the 1970 documentary history,

Socialism in America: From the Shakers to the Third International, described the New Left of then as “only a mood” that favored “forms of Socialism that are at once extremely libertarian and extremely authoritarian,” (p. 15) which is pretty much correct.  But despite this lack of clarity, the leading organization of the New Left, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_a_Democratic_Society]  and the anti-Vietnam War movement became battlegrounds and recruiting arenas for the also-newly-emerging (as well as older), far more rigidly-organized, ideologically-coherent-and-inflexible Marxist-Leninist (primarily Maoist) and Leninist-Trotskyist groups, who vied with New Leftists for power, influence and dominance; and were alternately poles of attraction and repulsion.

 

The political quiescence of the working class then, with the AFL-CIO leadership’s automatic subordination to an increasingly-compromised Democratic Party due to President Johnson’s role in escalating the massively unpopular Vietnam War, as well as the massive inroads the white backlash had made among white workers, made many student radicals write off the working class as hopelessly “bourgeoisified” by prosperity and inherently racist in itself, especially in its white sector.  Since much of the radical student milieu (the New Left as well as devotees of the counterculture) came from upper-class and upper-middle-class families that had traditionally disdained workers as “uncouth,” as well as with many middle-class, lower-middle-class and working-class young rebels themselves engaged in generational conflicts with parental and other authority figures, the notion of “white privilege,” i.e., white workers themselves gaining materially as well as psychologically from perpetuating racism and black inequality, came about naturally, even if accidentally. 

 

It came about as a means for the leadership of SDS to counterpoise itself ideologically against its rival within SDS for power, the Maoist Progressive Labor Party (PL) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Labor_Party_(United_States)].  PL denounced Black Nationalism, to which young white radicals were predisposed, because its position was “All nationalism is reactionary,” a position PL used to oppose particularly the Black Panther Party (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Panther_Party), a group especially popular among the white radicals of SDS.  “White privilege” was given ideological coherence by two older radicals, Noel Ignatin (who later changed his name back to its original Ignatiev) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noel_Ignatiev] and Ted Allen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_W._Allen), in a polemical pamphlet against PL’s position, “White Blindspot,” published circa. 1969, and eagerly adopted by the SDS leadership in its fight against PL.  (“White Blindspot” is contained in an anthology of SDS writings edited by former SDS leader Carl Davidson, Revolutionary Youth & the New Working Class: The Praxis Papers, the Port Authority Statement, the RYM II Documents and Other Lost Writings of SDS.  For a favorable yet critical review of Revolutionary Youth & the New Working Class see George Fish’s review in Socialism and Democracy 61 (March 2013), http://sdonline.org/61/carl-davidson-ed-revolutionary-youth-the-new-working-class-the-praxis-papers-the-port-authority-statement-the-rym-documents-and-other-lost-writings-of-sds-pittsburgh-changemaker-publications/.  As this review points out, SDS could produce some compelling, cogent political documents as well as others not nearly so compelling and cogent.)

 

The concept of “white privilege” was later revived in a different fashion in the 1990s by various left academics, notably by Peggy McIntosh’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peggy_McIntosh) article in Yes! Magazine, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” http://www.nymbp.org/reference/WhitePrivilege.pdf.  In this new incarnation “white privilege” quickly became used as a “checklist” to determine just how much an individual was infested with “white privilege,” thereby doing much to foster guilt-tripping on the one hand, and resentment on the other.

So enters here into the fray I myself, a veteran of SDS of lower-middle-class background who’s now become a rather disenchanted member of the of the current left—seeing derivative, uncritically-adopted dogma from the New Left past become undeservedly dominant in the highly marginalized and decidedly uninfluential left of today, seeing in this uncritically-adopted dogma a major contributor precisely to this marginalization and lack of influence.  Among these stands the notion of “white privilege,” which actually masks, rather than exposes, the continuing, quite messy, interplay of racism and socio-economic class in U.S. society today for all those reasons I give above.  This is especially driven home for me by what I see as an unholy alliance between upper-middle-class white radicals and certain strains of Black Nationalism.  This is something I wrote about in my previous article for examiner.com, “A bad forum advocating a really horrible idea,” which will be re-posted on this blog, as explained above.  Both groups uncritically see all whites, even the white poor and just-getting-by white working class, as hopelessly contaminated by “privilege” achieved through racial “benefit.”  Automatically by dint of “white skin privilege,” and unlike African Americans, all whites, even the poor and the just-getting-by, are allegedly living the life of Riley, which Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary defines as “a carefree comfortable way of living.”

 

This rankles me personally, as I’ve been poor, and my now receiving a small Social Security payment only makes me just getting by.  Therefore, this alleged living the life of Riley due to “white privilege” is something neither I nor most of my white friends here in Indianapolis possess.  For they, like me, are uniformly college graduates over the age of fifty, many of them people laid off permanently from their previous good employment who now are stuck making a precarious living from various temp jobs for low wages, often unable to find work for significant periods of time between jobs. No, contrary to what one of these well-off radicals once asserted to me, “I wish I had your time for reading,” an involuntary layoff is decidedly not a vacation, and while there may be some extra time to catch up on reading, there is also, unfortunately, ample time as well to worry where the next badly-needed job is going to come from, as well as the anxiety ever-present of “Just how am I going to pay my bills?” 

 

Further, these upper-middle-class radicals, whether they recognize it or not, are just expressing their hoary social-class animus toward lower-class whites, and remind me very much of that historical disdain Old Money had for the nouveau riche, upstarts without breeding or culture for whom money is a corruption, not a blessing—as it is instead for those who have already gotten it and had it for a long, long time!

 

There’s also a deliberate racial and ethnic bias reflected in those terms especially reserved for lower-class whites:  “white trash,” “trailer trash,” “peckerwood,” to name but a few; plus ethnic slurs such as “Mick,” “Hunky,” “Polack,” “Kraut,” “greaseball,” “Dago,” “Wop,” “hymie,” “sheeny,” “frog,” to pejoratively denote anyone not of pedigreed Anglo-Saxon ancestry!

 

And so they of the upper classes who consider themselves noblesse oblige social reformers and radical restructurers of society latch onto African Americans the way Rousseau latched onto the Noble Savage, the pure, unalloyed soul saved from corruption precisely because of their social exclusion from ordinary society.

 

As for certain black nationalists of my acquaintance, just as they can argue appropriately that there exists among many whites a “white blindspot” that makes them unaware, or inadequately aware, of non-white cultures, societies and social strata, so do I argue that there exists among them a “black blindspot” that makes them unaware also of white people in the U.S. in all their messiness, differentiation, and caste-like strata; that makes many a black nationalist see white people as this undifferentiated monolith, this massive, uniform white glacier moving inexorably to crush them. 

 

But yes, as the KI panelist Khalil, mentioned in my previous examiner.com post, admonished, I should know more about important black figures such as Marcus Garvey and Denmark Vesey (although I’m far from ignorant of either); bur he should also know more about important white figures such as Eugene Debs, H.L. Mencken and Clarence Darrow.  And as far as “Eurocentric history” is concerned, I pointedly note that recorded history is usually the history of victors; and while it is important for whites to know more about the many slave revolts throughout early 19^th Century U.S. history, the truth is, all these revolts ended in defeat for their participants.  Yes, more that is “underground” history should be brought above ground; but it’s still going to be “Eurocentric” in the sense that it can only be a chronicle of unfortunate defeats as much as it can be a history of admirable resistance.

 

It is indeed time to move beyond both “white blindspots” and “black blindspots,” although perhaps a little more important for whites at this time to move beyond their “white blindspots.”  (However, African Americans working diligently to overcome their “black blindspots” would be a real boost in enabling whites to rectify their “white blindspots.”)  Something driven very much home for me by my reading of two classic accounts of the contemporary white working class by authors attuned to this white working class:  Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? and the late Joe Bageant’s Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War, in which both authors lament that, due to their addled concepts of “values,” among them racial values, millions of white workers, i.e., ordinary people, act and vote against their own economic self-interest.  They lament further, and most telling, that large numbers of those of the left who could bring white workers to understand where their real interests lie don’t know how to reach them.  Ensconced in their “politically correct” cocoons, they don’t know honestly how to talk to such people, but can only lecture at them. That is, when they bother with them at all.   But these are precisely the people I work alongside of as a blue-collar worker!  These very people who, same as me, justifiably rankle at being called “privileged.” 

 

 

 

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.