Anti Racist Struggle and Socialism

Metro DC DSA’s Socialist Night School presented by Bill Fletcher.

‘Race’ Isn’t an Explanation

Nothing so well illustrates that impossibility as the conviction among otherwise sensible scholars that race ‘explains’ historical phenomena; specifically, that it explains why people of African descent have been set apart for treatment different from that accorded to others. But race is just the name assigned to the phenomenon, which it no more explains than judicial review ‘explains’ why the United States Supreme
Court can declare acts of Congress unconstitutional, or than Civil War ‘explains’ why Americans fought each other between 1861 and 1865.

Only if race is defined as innate and natural prejudice of colour does its invocation as a historical explanation do more than repeat the question by way of answer. And there an insurmountable problem arises: since race is not genetically programmed, racial prejudice cannot be genetically programmed either but, like race itself, must arise historically. The most sophisticated of those who invoke race as a historical explanation—for example, George Fredrickson and Winthrop Jordan—recognize the difficulty. The preferred solution is to suppose that, having arisen historically, race then ceases to be a historical phenomenon and becomes instead an external motor of history; according to the fatuous but widely repeated formula, it ‘takes on a life of its own’. In other words, once historically acquired, race becomes hereditary. The shopworn metaphor thus offers camouflage
for a latter-day version of Lamarckism.

Barbara Jeanne Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America.”

Choice and Narratives of Blackness

By illuminating the idea of black criminality in the making of modern urban America, it becomes clear that there are options in how we choose to use and interpret crime statistics. They may tell us something about the world we live in and about the people we label “criminals.” But they cannot tell us everything. Far from it. For good or bad, the numbers do not speak for themselves. They never have. They have always been interpreted, and made meaningful, in a broader political, economic, and social context in which race mattered. The falsity of past claims of race-neutral crime statistics and color-blind justice should caution us against the ubiquitous referencing of statistics about black criminality today, especially given the relative silence about white criminality. The invisible layers of racial ideology packed into the statistics, sociological theories, and the everyday stories we continue to tell about crime in modern urban America are a legacy of the past. The choice about which narratives we attach to the data in the future, however, is ours to make.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Urban America,

Five Posts You May Have Missed in 2014

These posts didn’t get as much love. Sadly, none of them is out of date.

1. Criminalization is Pretty Harmful Too

Here is some push back on the idea that decriminalization of things will lead to harms, as if criminalization isn’t a massive source of harm.

Is prison harmful? Is ripping apart families harmful? Is the endemic sexual assault found in prison harmful? What about the risk of violence, or the torture of solitary confinement? Or overcrowding, or lack of medical care? How about the collateral consequences of imprisonment–unemployment, being barred from public housing, food stamps, federal education aid and a whole host of professions or voting? What about the impact on communities where many people are shuffled between prison and the neighborhood? What about the police harassment that comes with hyper-aggressive law enforcement?

[Speaking of which, High incarceration may be more harmful than high crime h/t Gerry Canavan.]

2. Charter Schools’ False Promise

Charter Schools’ False Promise

Amidst all the debate about charter schools, one thing has often been left out. They are not delivering on what their advocates claimed they would do, as the New York Times reports:

A primary rationale for the creation of charter schools, which are publicly financed and privately run, was to develop test kitchens for practices that could be exported into the traditional schools. President Obama, in recently proclaiming “National Charter Schools Week,” said they “can provide effective approaches for the broader public education system.”

But two decades since the schools began to appear, educators from both systems concede that very little of what has worked for charter schools has found its way into regular classrooms. Testy political battles over space and money, including one that became glaringly public in New York State this spring, have inhibited attempts at collaboration. The sharing of school buildings, which in theory should foster communication, has more frequently led to conflict.

Now, I’d push back a bit here.

The Donald Sterling Supremacism No One’s Talking About

Guest post by Jesse Myerson

Amid the great trove of unattractive qualities revealed to be possessed by L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling in a recently-released tape of a conversation between him and his then-girlfriend V. Stiviano, it is understandable that one should have gone underappreciated. But without taking into account his grotesque economic ideology, Sterling’s segregationist Instagram doctrine and less-than-enchanting romantic life lack crucial context.

When Stiviano asks, sensibly, whether he is aware that the athletes to whom people refer when they speak of “the Clippers” are black, Sterling goes full capitalist:

I support them and give them food, and clothes, and cars, and houses. Who gives it to them? Does someone else give it to them?.. Do I make the game, or do they make the game? Is there 30 owners, that created the league?

What he has articulated is capital supremacy, the position that capital is prior to and independent of labor. In a for-profit operation like the L.A. Clippers, the guy who owns the capital and extracts the surplus is the one really pulling the heavy weight, and it’s the athletes he employs who are living high off the league that he and his buddies created. Capitalists, far from being parasitic, are “job creators.”

Richard Cohen, Michael Bloomberg, and the Suspiciousness of Black Men

I haven’t written anything about the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the killing of Trayvon Martin. Anything I’ve wanted to say directly about the case has been said far better by others. But I did want to weigh in on a tangential matter.

There was a great deal of outcry over an awful column by Richard Cohen (who has a long and undistinguished history) justifying Zimmerman’s actions by insisting that Martin’s wearing of a hoodie made him suspicious.  [No link, but here’s Ta-Nehisi Coates]  That the Washington Post continues to feel that valuable column space should be taken up by Cohen tells us something important about the Post. It’s  perfectly understandable for people to be outraged by Cohen. But what has troubled me is the difference between the reaction to Cohen and another figure who’s tried to justify such things, one who in addition is actually overseeing the policy: New York City Michael Bloomberg.

Bloomberg is undeniably an authoritarian. It’s strange that he’s perhaps best known on this score for his law limiting the size of sugary drinks (forcing those who want more to buy two instead of one, not exactly a grave threat to civil liberties to my mind). But getting beyond that, Bloomberg has overseen NYC’s racist stop and frisk policy.

Scalia and Racial Entitlement (Part II) – 1979

Lots of attention has come to Justice Scalia’s claim about the Voting Rights Act being about ‘racial entitlement.’  [Update – including from me.] The full quote is even more bizarre.  Here’s a taste:

And this last enactment, not a single vote in the Senate against it. And the House is pretty much the same. Now, I don’t think that’s attributable to the fact that it is so much clearer now that we need this. I think it is attributable, very likely attributable, to a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement. It’s been written about. [my emphasis] Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes.

It’s the “it’s been written about” part that jumped out at me on second look. So I did some digging, and learned it’s true. It has been written about – by Scalia himself, in an article decrying affirmative action, 15 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

Justice Scalia, Voting Rights, and Racial Entitlement

Demonstrators walk down a street during the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in 1965. (Peter Pettus. 1965. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Lot 13514, no. 25. More about the photograph)

[updated below]

The Supreme Court, according to many, seems poised to strike down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which would make it far easier for states and localities to engage in all manner of disenfranchisement knowing full well that it will take forever for a federal court to rule against them via the normal litigation process.  Creativity in such things is not a rare quality.

This should have been settled a long time ago.  As Justice Frankfurter said:

The reach of the Fifteenth Amendment against contrivances by a state to thwart equality in the enjoyment of the right to vote by citizens of the United States regardless of race or color, has been amply expounded by prior decisions. Guinn v. United States, 238 U.S. 347 , 35 S.Ct. 926, L.R.A.1916A, 1124; Myers v. Anderson, 238 U.S. 368 , 35 S.Ct. 932. The Amendment nullifies sophisticated as well as simple-minded modes of discrimination. It hits onerous procedural requirements which effectively handicap exercise of the franchise by the colored race although the abstract right to vote may remain unrestricted as to race.

Ironically, the Court (via Chief Justice Warren) used Selma, Alabama to illustrate the necessity of Section 5: