The 1619 Project

Posted on August 7, 2020 by met

If you grew up thinking you are “white”, the New York Times “1619 Project” is a must read.

Slavery was undeniably a font of phenomenal wealth. By the eve of the Civil War, the Mississippi Valley was home to more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the United States. Cotton grown and picked by enslaved workers was the nation’s most valuable export. The combined value of enslaved people exceeded that of all the railroads and factories in the nation. New Orleans boasted a denser concentration of banking capital than New York City. What made the cotton economy boom in the United States, and not in all the other far-flung parts of the world with climates and soil suitable to the crop, was our nation’s unflinching willingness to use violence on nonwhite people and to exert its will on seemingly endless supplies of land and labor. Given the choice between modernity and barbarism, prosperity and poverty, lawfulness and cruelty, democracy and totalitarianism, America chose all of the above.
The 1619 Project

We, the Police

Posted on August 5, 2020 by met

From the London Review:

“Anglo-America’s dingy realities – deindustrialisation, low-wage work, underemployment, hyper-incarceration and enfeebled or exclusionary health systems – have long been evident. Nevertheless, the moral, political and material squalor of two of the wealthiest and most powerful societies in history still comes as a shock to some… every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state. In fact, the state has been AWOL for decades, and the market has been entrusted with the tasks most societies reserve almost exclusively for government: healthcare, pensions, low-income housing, education, social services and incarceration.
Pankaj Mishra

The other dingy reality is that we use the police as a cordon sanitaire between us and the consequences of all of our social and political failures; the police keep the homeless out our minds; the mentally ill away from our door steps, the darker skin tones in their allotted neighborhoods and the desperately poor from stealing from a “middle class” teetering with economic precarity. While we have come to live without a general sense of prosperity, we cannot seem to relinquish our attachment to “order”.

Of course we can’t. We can sense that we are, collectively, a ticking time bomb. Today, American exceptionalism means extreme inequality of wealth, more guns than sense, abiding racism and a pathological distrust of collective problem solving. The way we police in the U.S. is inextricably bound up in the exploitative capitalism to which we as citizens have become resigned.

The police are to capitalism what neurotic or compulsive behaviors are to the psychoanalyst; symptoms of a (death) drive. In Freud’s words, (the drive)… is “like the grain of sand around which an oyster forms its pearl”.

The capitalist death drive is to accumulate, to acquire and to constantly rediscover that that no acquistion really satisifies, no level of profit is sufficient. Impelled by a dread of scarcity and the impoverished view that the only real “wealth” is private, Americans are frantic earners in a bleak zero sum landscape. If I don’t get it, someone else will. We accept that there are “winners and losers”. We accept that folks for whom cost-benefit analyses are difficult, impossible or irrelevant tend to get pissed off when they perceive themselves to be left behind. They are wont to behave in ways that disrupt the “order” that dispossesses them.

The state proscribes violence to its citizens. Not as Freud pointed out, because it disapproves of violence, but because it wants the monopoly on violence. The majority Black population of Minneapolis distrust their police greatly but cannot imagine their absence. In the USA, we have created our own monsters; we are the jailers and the jailed.

As with the neurotic, dysfunction continues until the drive is recognized (and re-addressed). Until we contend with ravening capitalism, our policing will remain unchanged.

Jetsam

Posted on July 8, 2020 by met

Acting together we flattened the curve of the pandemic. Not the government. We did. We the people.

Remember that phrase?

Now …we the people are no longer acting together. On July 1,we hit 50,000 new cases of coronavirus. Our personal best.

Are we so weary of inconvenience and uncertainty, that we are willing to abandon parts of our society? Have we already forgotten that this virus will disproportionately kill our parents? our grandparents? those with underlying health problems at any age? the poorest among us?

Americans have neither the stoicism to actually bear the risk of dying from covid-19 nor the fortitude to embark on an indefinite period of rigorous self-isolation. Nor, even if we could muster those qualities, could we get a majority of our fellow countrymen to go along. And so, instead of deciding upon some basically rational course of action, we have collectively agreed to forget the things we could no longer bear to know.
Megan McCardle

We the people took to the streets after the murder of George Floyd. Changing our society so we can change our policing will require rigor and collective determination and time.

How long before American Amnesia kicks in again?

Flood Debris

Posted on July 2, 2020 by met

Since February, we …comfortable white people…have come to see that even America … our insular City on the Hill …can be attacked by an invisible and inexorable enemy. We have been forced to look mortality in the face.

It became apparent that our government would not help us.

By the time of George Floyd’s murder, we had come to see that our only pandemic defense was our collective willingness to sacrifice the immediate gratifications of easy sociability and retail therapy. We came to see that our individual health depended upon community action. We sheltered in place and experienced oppressive uncertainty. Will we survive? Will our family members survive? Will our incomes survive? Will the “American way of life” survive?

Regardless of our ethnicity, we have all been imprisoned in a radically uncertain future.

The Great Flood

Posted on July 2, 2020 by met

The paragraph that read me:

In “The Jesting of Arlington Stringham,” a story by Saki (H.H. Munro), the eponymous politician in a debate on the Foreign Office in the House of Commons remarks that “the people of Crete unfortunately make more history than they can consume locally.” The United States is experiencing the same excess. More outrage is being perpetrated and felt than can be contained within the existing frame of institutions and discourses. The image of things bubbling over, of energies and emotions that can no longer be enclosed, is physically manifest on the streets, as those who have been privately confined for so many weeks spill out into the public realm. But what there is too much of is not just present injustice. There is a superabundance of the unresolved past.
Fintan O’Toole

I have started several posts since the dawn of COVID 19 and finished none. I was flooded. Even during the best of times, my vicious internal editor only allows me to measure out my thoughts in coffee spoons. I have to thank O’Toole for naming the flood as a shared condition and freeing me somewhat. I can offer up bits of the the flotsam and jetsam the flood has dislodged for me .

To start, I grew up during the worst of the Civil Rights protests. I would watch African American children being spit upon in Alabama and then attend a school where most of my friends were African American. It was this experience that drove the first wedge into the complacent Republican edifice of my upbringing. I have been in and around the labor movement and distrusted capitalism my whole adult life. But so what? Where the f**k have I really been for the last 50 years? I was living my daily life (being a good consumer) in the comfortable cocoon of white privilege; intellectually dozing.

“White silence has been violence”. Yes. That is a weight I will consciously bear in the hopes that discomfort will keep me more alert to present injustice.

Thinking About “Race” pt.7

Posted on January 27, 2020 by met

Blood Quantum

Blood is a bodily substance and a rich and handy referent to a host of social meanings. “Blood is thicker than water”. Blood is not just a fluid it is also a permanent biogenetic relationship “thick” with obligations. Blood can be the symbolic vehicle for the emotions of social life “His blood is up” and “there is bad blood between them“. During the War in Vietnam, soldiers identified as African American were referred to (and referred to themselves) as “bloods” “One of the bloods was killed today.” Here “blood” stands in for “race”.

However, “blood” is not a static repository of linked social meanings, it is a flexible sorting tool. It can include or exclude. It depends on who is wielding it and for what purpose.

In 1887, the Dawes Act gave the Federal government the authority to break up Indian reservations into “allotments” to be doled out to individuals and owned on a fee simple basis. The de jure purpose was to hasten the assimilation of Native Americans into (capitalist) society. The de facto result was that 100 million acres of Native American treaty land was opened to development. In order to preserve the fiction of “fair” allotment, the Federal government had to count Native Americans. In order to count Indians they needed a measurement of “Indian-ness”. From the current Bureau of Indian Affairs website (note that the B.I.A does not put quotation marks around the word blood):

Blood quantum is the amount of Indian blood you possess as determined by the number of generations of Native people you descend from, and it is the process that the federal government uses to determine whether they consider you a Native American or not.

Bureau of Indian Affairs

One “full blooded” parent makes you 1/2 Indian. One “full blooded” great grandparent makes you 1/8 Indian etc. Depending upon the tribe, a fraction less than 1/4 may make a person “non-Indian” and ineligible for tribal membership. One drop of Native American blood does not an Indian make.

Such “blood” fractions were (and are) totally foreign to Native American culture and they were not based on any scientific theory. But they were based on ideas of relatedness still held by “white” people and these ideas provided cover for powerful economic interests to subtract Native Americans from their land and reduce the Federal government’s financial obligations to ever fewer “Indians”.

Contrast this to the “one drop rule” under which any person with one ancestor of African descent was legally a “negro”. Why weren’t the children fathered on enslaved women by “white” owners considered “half-white”?

The ownership of human beings had to be justified on the basis of the “natural” biological inferiority of the “race” being owned. Linked metaphors of race supplied by notions of “white” and “black” reinforced the hierarchy of slave ownership. The color white is achromatic. If colors are mixed into it, it is no longer white. A substance is “pure” when it has no other substance commingling with it. For the slaveholders of the South who labeled themselves “white”, one “drop” of “black” blood was a demarcating impurity that separated “white” from “black”.

Given that there is no black or white on the color wheel of human skin, why the insistence on an imagined impurity? For one, the putative superiority of the owners was a belief which needed to be tightly held. Moreover, the “one drop rule” had the fiscal benefit of adding to the number of human assets on the owners’ ledgers. Fractions of blackness in children were rounded up to whole numbers of slaves.

Blood quantum is subtractive for Native Americans. They are meant to disappear. Blood quantum for “black” people is additive, a mark of inferiority that never disappears.

The moral of the story is this: when the ravening maw of capitalism has to be fed, pay attention to the pronouns. Better it should happen to “them” than to “us”. Pay attention to the words used to decide who “they” are.

Thinking About “Race” -Epilogue

Posted on January 21, 2020 by met

…what happened to America in 2016 has long been happening in America, before there was an America, when the first Carib was bayoneted and the first African delivered up in chains. It is hard to express the the depth of the emergency without bowing to the myth of American unity, when in fact American unity has always been the unity of conquistadors and colonizers – unity premised on Indian killings, land grabs, noble internments and the gallant General Lee. Here is a country that specializes in defining its own deviancy down so that the criminal, the immoral and the absurd become the baseline, so that even now, amidst the long tragedy and this lately disaster, the guardians of truth rally to the liar’s flag.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Thinking About “Race” pt. 5

Posted on January 19, 2020 by met

The takeaways thus far:

Much of our life is governed by “Reasonable” ideas that get us through our daily social life.
“Rational” ideas arise out of the rigors of scientific (or technical) discourse.
“Race” is not an idea that is supported by science yet it persists in our daily discourse.
One of the reasons it persists is that “race” is a notion that is bound up with our cultural mythology about kinship and identity. “Race” encodes the belief that literally superficial aspects of our appearance act as markers for innate differences we can’t see.

“Race” is an active way of thinking that assists in the constitution of our individual identities as well as our social reality. In America, our “race” is a huge determinant or our economic, social and political fates. One of the consequences of 450 years of race thinking is that it has enslaved us all in a self-reinforcing feedback system:

The people who have been subordinated by race thinking…have for centuries employed the concepts and categories of their rulers, owners and persecutors to resist the destiny that “race” has allocated to them…..Under the most difficult of conditions and from imperfect materials that they surely would not have selected if they had been able to choose, these oppressed groups have built complex traditions of politics, ethics, identity and culture….When ideas of racial particularity are inverted in this defensive manner so that they provide sources of pride rather than shame and humiliation, they become difficult to relinquish. For many racialized populations, “race” and the hard won oppositional identities it supports are not to be lightly or prematurely given up.
Paul Gilroy, Against Race

“Race” in America may not be a scientific fact but is an embodied fact. It is only in recent years that the concept of “white privilege” has started to percolate in America. It has begun to dawn upon people of good conscience who think they are “white” that their social position is the result of the centuries-long exploitation of other phenotypes. “White” is not a neutral descriptive term (no human skin is actually white) but a social category larded with invisible values and properties. The term “white trash” refers to people who are born “white” but who fail to live up to the invisible attributes encoded in the term “white”.

One’s self conception and one’s social identity is a hairball* of psychic, symbolic, social and economic factors. In this America of ours, “race” is a major constituent of this hairball. Changing how we think about “race” will be necessary for us to begin the un-tangling but will not be sufficient to disgorge the hairball. The threads we follow will lead us directly to issues of power, trauma and myths of originary unity which will further challenge our political institutions and our collective self-awareness:

…where politics fails…it is replaced by enthusiasm for the cheapest pseudo-solidarities…forms of connection that are imagined to arise effortlessly from shared phenotypes, cultures and bio-nationalities.
Paul Gilroy, Against Race

*Or in Lacan’s more topologically elegant notion, a Borromean knot

Thinking About “Race” pt. 4

Posted on January 18, 2020 by met

The Teeming Others

So, according to modern science, “race” is not a fact of nature or in Appiah’s terms a “rational” category. Why then does “race” persist in our discourse and our view of the human world? It persists because “race” is a cognitive activity. The notion of “race” allows us to believe that superficial aspects of our appearance are markers of innate differences that are invisible. “Race” does not exist but racial thinking does.

Among the Asante, everybody agrees (indeed, it goes without saying) that the material world is affected by spirits. Spirits are forces in life just as much as “natural causes”. Unusual, inconvenient and bad things happen to people. The “why” of how things happen and the way things happen can be attributed to agents or forces whose motives are as manifold as they are invisible. Why did I get sick? Why did my car break down when it did? Why are my tomatoes blighted? Somebody invoked the spirits against me.

Invisible causal forces are amazingly flexible and convenient explanations. What evidence can be mustered that says an event wasn’t the result of witchcraft? If I am informed that I overwatered my tomatoes, I may choose to conclude that the strange people down the street may not have put a curse on my tomatoes…this time anyway. The unseen workings of unseen forces have no problem accommodating disconfirming evidence….exceptions always prove the rule! As with the Inquisition, whether torture exonerated the accused or not, the validity of the witch hunt was always upheld. Among the Americans, everybody agrees (indeed, it goes without saying) that humanity is divided into “races”. Though there are some visual clues as to membership in a “race”, “race” is also a realm wherein invisible “natural” attributes and motives reside and thereby explain history and the current social world. The race I identify with is kind of like my family writ large. Those other races are indolent, dull, miserly, profligate, hot headed, intemperate, crafty, greedy…fill in the blanks as you need.

“Identity helps us comprehend the formation of that perilous pronoun “we” and to reckon with the patterns of inclusion and exclusion it cannot help creating.” The strange people down the street who might have cursed my tomatoes remind us that other “races” are groups of people who play roles in our social lives that we may view negatively.

Take the situation of the long term residents of Boise Idaho; they don’t like what is happening to their city. It is growing too fast. Traffic is bad. Rents and the prices of houses are skyrocketing. It is widely perceived that this is due to the influx of Californians. Recently a young man who has lived in Boise for years, who was a star on the venerated Boise State football team found a note on his car telling him to “go home”. Recruited to Boise State out of his California high school, he still had California license plates. It is inconvenient that these acquisitive invaders fouling Boise don’t have phenotypic differences to mark them; they only have license plates.

At one level, “race” is merely a category we employ to classify people so that we can make generalizations about them. Unlike license plates, racial markers are neither fungible nor elective. They are either indelible (i.e. skin tone) or they are invisible. In 1892 , Homer Plessy, who presented as “white” was arrested for riding in a “white” only rail car. In appealing his conviction, his counsel argued that since Plessy looked like a “white” man, he should not be convicted. For the Supreme Court, however, the fact that Plessy was an “octaroon” (a creature with some amount of black blood) meant that he was not of the “white” race and the Court did not want to enforce “a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either”. On the flip side, you can present yourself as “black” like Rachel Dolezal but to do so is shockingly fraudulent (not to mention unfathomable…why would you “trade down” from being “white” to being “black”?).

Though we might want to think of Californians as a teeming, acquisitive, insensitive horde we don’t view them as “related” to each other in any biological sense.

Thinking About “Race” Pt. 3

Posted on January 17, 2020 by met

If “race” isn’t in the genes, where is it?

In 2016, thanks to the biological sciences, there were an estimated 15.5 million cancer survivors in the United States. When your pancreas turns on you, the science of biology and the doctors who implement the science may come to your rescue. For this modern biology “race” does not exist. Race is not a “natural” category. This is a fully “rational” conclusion based on modern genomics.

I am not a science writer so I am not going to summarize modern genomics. What I will do is leave you with a few little known facts courtesy of modern biology. What most of us think about “race” is a mash up of decades old Mendelian genetics and the mythology of “blood relatedness”.

Lets start with “blood”, the fluid. There are antigens on red blood cells that determine how blood may be safely shared. There are 8 blood types, 36 human blood system types and 364 antigens that factor into the compatibility of blood for transfusions. Most people are aware that these “blood types” are inherited. But “inherited” does not mean that a person has the same blood type as either of their parents. A mother and child’s blood type can not only be different but incompatible. The 8 human blood types have a wide and varied distribution across populations of people. There is no correlation between blood types and “racial” classifications. Furthermore, blood types are not an immutable gift from one’s ancestors. Disease and medical interventions can change a person’s blood type.

Lets’s move on to genetic “relatedness:

Our notions of how we are related to people are not supported by science. A pair of siblings may share as much as 61.7% of their DNA, or as little as 37.4%. You may share more DNA with a cousin than with your sibling. You may share more DNA with a stranger on the bus with you than with someone you know to be a blood “relative”.
Some third cousins (“blood relatives”) share no DNA whatsoever.
As a living organism you have your own DNA. But you may also have within you the DNA of another organism. Fetal cells can get into a mother’s body and remain. The reverse is also true. This is microchimerism; a single organism harboring a small number of cells from another individual. Hence, you may have acquired an older sibling’s DNA as well as that of your parents.
Viruses move DNA back and forth between cells. Part of your DNA is actually viral DNA from retroviruses that originated outside your bodily envelope. This is called “horizontal inheritance”. As much as 8% of your personal genome is comprised of horizontally inherited DNA. No parents were involved.
A gene is a stretch of DNA that encodes information but genes are not destiny. How each gene is “expressed” can affect an organism’s environment thus allowing for the inter-generational transmission of trauma effects. Trauma experienced by your great grandparents may still be playing out in your and your offspring’s genomes. Dutch famine survivors being the most notable example.
Huge studies of people who trace their descent to one of the five continents have shown that there is less than 5% variability in the genetic inheritance between these groups …and NONE of that variability is associated with the superficial phenotypic indicators of “race”. There is more genetic variability between you and your sibling than there is between historic populations of humans.
There are no single “genes for” visible (phenotypic) characteristics. For example, not only is there no “gene for” height, but biologists have determined that nearly two million genetic variants are involved in a person’s height.
There is no denying biological inheritance but what we inherit is not a shared essence or an “identity” but rather a statistically complex and partially random distribution of genetic information.

“Race” is conjured by up by racial thinking…not the other way around. More on that in the next post.

Self States

Mind is relational.

Category Archives: Inequality