The White Whine of Privilege

In my last posting, I talked about how race may be shaping the way people frame their arguments against the Obama administration. It's hardly a novel observation. The issue of race exploded several times during the presidential primary season and the campaign between Obama and McCain (for example, see "Race Moves to Center Stage" or "Wright Brings Race Issue Back in '08 Race"). Now Joe Wilson's yell "You lie!" during President Obama's address to Congress has a lot more people worrying that same awful sore on the national skin.

Over at This Week in Black, Elon James White was so flabbergasted by Wilson that he put aside his usually biting humor and just yelled back:

I won’t even get into the “Oh he wouldn’t have done that if it were a WHITE POTUS”, because its so nuts I can’t even deal on a racial level. What makes you think under ANY circumstances that its okay to yell ANYTHING at the President? I don’t care if he said “Yes We Can…run a train on yo mama” you don’t yell something at the Effing POTUS. You sit there and you wait, go on Fox News and talk all the smack you want, but until then STFU.

New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd, said she resisted the idea that race mattered in all the outcries against Obama, but

Wilson's shocking disrespect for the office of the president--no Democrat ever shouted "liar" at W. when he was hawking a fake case for war in Iraq--convinced me: Some people just can't believe a black man is president and will never accept it.

Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason, agreed in the Washington Post's "On Faith" blog:

I'm sure that many of these people carrying posters of Obama with a Hitler mustache are regular, God-fearing churchgoers. During the civil rights movement, most white Protestant churches in the South--those that now make up the Southern Baptist Convention--stood solidly against desegregation. Some of the children of those good churchgoers are as unwilling to accept the legitimacy of a black president as their parents were to accept riding on a bus next to blacks.

NPR's Juan Williams, in his typically calm fashion, said

I think there's a perception that being called a liar during a speech before the joint session of Congress is unprecedented, Renee. It fits with a pattern that lots of black Americans--and I might say it's also on Hispanic radio around the country--perceived as sort of a lack of basic acceptance of the stature that's to be accorded any president, a question of his legitimacy.

(Or see Juan Williams try to explain this point to Sean Hannity, a blowhard who thinks you win an argument by simply talking over everyone else. Hey, Juan, why bother?)

Leon Pitts, Jr., after reading the Southern Poverty Law Center's report on resurgent extremist movements, is alarmed, seeing Joe Wilson as just one symptom of something more frightening, a culture war that is "real and scary."

Well, should we be alarmed? What meaning should we read into Joe Wilson's yelp? One side of me is not so bothered by it. I worked at an academic institution for several years where decorum and a facade of democratic consensus functioned to preserve the status quo, to shield its most stalwart defenders from ideas and criticism too weighty for ossified intellects. The place cried out for some open, unsettling, conversation, rather than all the grousing in private. The same might be said for the formal meetings of the national government, where the rules of conduct (along with the constitutional separation of powers, the purposeful bottlenecks) blunt challenges to the status quo.

And there is a longstanding practice in the US of breaking the informal and formal rules of public conduct to make a political point, to crack the status quo. We call this civil disobedience. Thus it is that that ol' civil disobeyer, Al Sharpton, ended up with a curious take on the "You lie!" affair. Asked by NPR's Scott Simon what he thought of it, Sharpton replied

I thought what he said was offensive to all Americans. It insulted the chamber. You know, as an old protestor, you suffer the consequences of a protest, because that's what he ended up doing no matter how much he was justified. He should have been removed, in my opinion, from the chamber.

It's a curious reply because right after deeming Wilson wrong, Sharpton appears to acknowledge the slight possibility of the legitimacy of Wilson's action, but then calls for an action that would be typical of the defender of the status quo. Civil disobedience is in part about theater, and it increases in effectiveness when the government, or the "upstanding" citizenry, crack down on the disobedient in ways that raise the ire uncommitted but interested public (like all those White TV audiences in the north watching their Southern cousins aim their dogs, water hoses, and worse, at Black protesters).

But here I've just begun to do what many White pundits decrying the role of race have done, make an absurd comparison based on a flimsy syllogism. Joe Wilson broke a rule as protest. Joe was engaged in civil disobedience. Joe was punished (very lightly) for this. Gee, Martin Luther King did the same thing, break rules in acts of civil disobedience. And he and his followers were punished. MLK is now considered a democratic hero and martyr. Joe must be one too, and you liberal lefty socialists who criticize Joe are hypocrites because you don't apply the same standards to MLK.

This reminds me of a former colleague, a self-professed neoconservative, who felt marginalized in the college because so few agreed with his political and religious positions. He felt forced to "the back of the bus." Hmm, as if a White male academic in the early 21st century is in any way comparable to a 1950s Black working class woman in the Jim Crow south. Simply ridiculous, but these kind of trite comparisons are all too common, as is the practice of the beleaguered privileged to project on to their critics their own hypocrisy.

I use the term "privileged" in the sense that there are categories of people who enjoy entitlements that other categories do not, and these entitlements are usually unrecognized; they are so "natural" as to be invisible. I am a White, heterosexual male. As such, I'm entitled to not worry about whether or not people know my sexual preference (I just have to keep it in check). I'm entitled to speak about race and gender in my classes with more authority than my Black female colleagues because I don't have to worry about students saying "Oh, that's just your opinion because of who you are." I'm entitled to not being considered a higher threat to the property of store-owners, or to taxi drivers. I'm entitled to not have to worry about crafting a persona, adopting a tone, that is less threatening to people of different social origins. I'm entitled to equal rights, whereas Blacks, homosexuals, and women want "extra" rights. And so on.

And because this privilege is usually unrecognized, because the privileged don't feel privileged, they may lash out angrily at those who keep bringing up the problems of inequality, discrimination, or prejudice. Worse, still, is if the privileged are accused of contributing to these problems. So we have a slew of White pundits who "express outrage about charges that their attacks on Obama are racist."

As I said in my last posting, I don't think race is the only factor at work here in this debate. But to deny any role for race is simply untenable. That role can obvious, as in the recent Drudge Report, with a headline referencing Joe Wilson, with a picture of President just below, and then to the left, a video with the caption: "WHITE STUDENT BEATEN ON SCHOOL BUS; CROWD CHEERS. . ." Jon Stewart, as he does so often, identified the implicit message:

Now Drudge won't say this because he doesn't like to play that game, but I will. . . .Because Barak Obama is President, it is now open season on White children.

Others are less obvious. The Washington Post columnist and neoconservative übermensch, Charles Krauthammer, repeated, with his own particular flair, the refrain that our Black president isn't really American, nor our legitimate president.

Unbidden, unforced and unpushed by the congressional leadership, Obama gave his most deeply felt vision of America, delivering the boldest social democratic manifesto ever issued by a U.S. president. In American politics, you can't get more left than that speech and still be on the playing field.

Well, first off, it's just plain wrong that Obama was "unbidden" given the crescendo of calls for the President to play a greater role in getting health care reform going, but the message here was Obama doesn't know his place. Apparently, Obama isn't entitled to being presidential. Krauthammer's too smart to resort to usual labels of socialist, and he uses "social democratic manifesto" to place Obama outside the United States, in Europe (maybe, ugh, France) with all that overbearing government; and "manifesto" we all know is a favorite word of marxists. If you didn't get the point so far, Krauthammer tells us the President's so far left he's no longer really with us. So if Obama's so far left he's out of the American park, where does that put those millions of Americans who staunchly support a public option (unlike the President), or, worse, a single-payer universal health care system?

Well, maybe they're in some sort of parallel "third world" universe, because that's where the President thinks he is according to Krauthammer:

Obama imagined that, as Fouad Ajami so brilliantly observed, he had won the kind of banana-republic plebiscite that grants caudillo-like authority to remake everything in one's own image.

So, Obama urges Congress, the most representative part of our national government, to take on the task of healthcare. When Congress was seemingly stuck, he talks to them to urge them some more. But he just doesn't get to do that. He again doesn't know his place. Not only that, his presidency isn't really legitimate to begin with, since a "banana-republic plebiscite" put him into power. He's a mere "caudillo," a foreign term for a foreign guy.

It doesn't matter that the premises underlying Krauthammer’s dreck are dubious. Go to the comments section following the column and you'll see effusive, thunderous praise. Lots of people drink this stuff up. They love their white whine.

Decoding the redbaiting

So President Obama has done gone and committed another outrageous act. What the White House is calling "a sort of pep talk" for students starting a new school year, critics are labeling liberal "indoctrination" (Joshua Rhett Miller, Foxnews.com), and an attempt to spread "socialist ideology" (Florida GOP Chair Jim Greer). It's also "unprecedented" according to another (Robbin Swad, Miami City Buzz Examiner), a sentiment apparent in all the angry surprise, but true only if we ignore that Presidents Ronald Reagan and the George H. W. Bush made similar addresses in 1986 and 1991 (I found these links at Post on Politics). The Reagan speech was particularly partisan--basically his cut-taxes-build-up-the-military policy. But not much hue and cry back in them days.

My first reaction was similar to that represented in this editorial cartoon:

From http://www.courier-journal.com/graphics/2009/09/marcmurphy.jpg

But on second thought, that's an awfully unfair way to respond to the critics. Calling people stupid with whom you disagree is a perfect way to start an argument, but not a useful discussion. Anyway, the criticism is about the lesson plans accompanying the address, which is reasonable. It's not surprising that many Americans, especially in this more distrustful post-Watergate era, don't want their kids getting a lesson in how they can best serve the president.

What troubles me is the vocabulary many people resort to in their criticism of the President, the language in all of the recent criticism that involves the terms socialism, communism, marxism, or even, bizarrely in the same breath, fascism. I suggest that one element--and before some of you start yelling so loud you don't hear the rest--ONE element in this discourse is racial fear.

It is only one element because there are clearly a lot of valid concerns and questions about the whole range of policies the administration has advocated. In the healthcare debate, for example, there are good questions about whether or not we can afford it, whether or not reform will accomplish what it's supposed to do, whether or not it will set up a drift into greater government intervention that may be unnecessary or worse, and so on.

And I don't believe that racism explains why particular people are seemingly mobilizing in opposition to anything the Obama administration proposes. Many Americans did the same thing with the previous Bush administration, particularly as his war in Iraq went sour, and more and more evidence appeared of the mendacity of his administration in promoting the war.

And we’ve heard this kind of talk before in the public square. But it used to be the fringe right—the John Birch Society guys, Opus Dei acolytes, young Talk Radio mavens just starting their move to the right of Paul Harvey, or the occasional old academic squirreled away in some college who hadn't had a new thought since being scared to death in the sixties by Black activists on campus. Now it’s ubiquitous. It’s mainstream. The Cold War ended twenty years ago, so why in the world has redbaiting resurged with a vengeance?

One reason is that the baby-boomer generation was steeped in a Cold War rhetoric that identified and simplified the enemy. There have been laments that Americans have grown culturally illiterate, and it may be true that fewer people know their Bible or their Homer, but we still know our culture’s terms for the bad guys. But, in this supposed post-racial America, the norms of public discourse have changed. They do not permit racialized language. But think about what socialism and its variants mean when used so broadly. They are code for 'un-American,' as in President Obama wants to indoctrinate our kids with 'un-American ideas;' he is engaged in ‘un-American activities;’ the President is 'un-American,' or even 'not an American.' He is not what the vast majority of his vociferous critics are, White Americans.

Consider the broader context. During the presidential campaign, we heard pundits (not necessarily all conservative) repeatedly "slip" in saying "Osama" rather than Obama (e.g., Rush Limbaugh), or emphasizing his middle name "Hussein," (e.g., Mary Matalin), or the popular urban legend that Obama was secretly (still) a Muslim (e.g., Debbie Schlussel, with mosquewatch.blogspot.com keeping the ridiculous legend alive). And there's the ongoing absurd campaign challenging the President's birth certificate, and therefore his citizenship. Nobody's talking race in the public square; but there's been a bunch of White pundits and bloggers making claims, some less subtle than others, that Barack Obama is not American, and linking him to non-White enemies of America.

We also heard VP candidate Sarah Palin tell a North Carolina audience:

We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation.

So, as many wondered at the time (most notably, Jon Stewart), what lies outside these little pockets, these places that happen to include very socially diverse populations, places where Barack Obama lived, traveled, and campaigned? Fake America. Anti-America. Un-America.

Now, we could take any particular one of these, and argue that it was just an unfortunate misstatement that the speaker may truly regret. Taken together, however, they form a kind of collage, a narrative in which the Black man in the White House is always going to be suspect, not just because of the policies he advocates, but because of who he is. And for far too many, the label socialist or communist is enough to make the point.

It's really a rather old narrative--based on categories that separate the real from the un-American. Mid-19th century "Know-nothings" were certain that Catholic immigrants, those papists, could not be real Americans. Late 19th century nativists regularly confused anarchists and socialists with non-Western European immigrants (who included more of those papists, along with Jews). And it's no accident that it's common for those today urging restrictionist immigration legislative, and punishment for undocumented immigrants, to equate immigrants with threats to America, and as incapable of being real Americans (Lou Dobbs, Patrick Buchanan, Tom Tancredo, among others). It bubbles up in different ways, but always this fear of the other, this fear of those who now have a seat at the table we Whites once controlled, and where our voice used to be the predominant one.

It's a mystery to me why, given our centuries-old legacy of racial inequality, and given the seemingly intractable ethnic and racial conflicts throughout the world, so many White Americans cannot accept the notion that we too just might still have hang-ups about race. We've made some great strides, to be sure, but, please, there are still tens of millions of Americans who can remember (maybe not acknowledge) when apartheid was sanctioned in the US. You think we've somehow gotten over this, just like that?

To recap, I'm not arguing that racism governs the criticism of the Obama administration, or that its critics are racist because he's Black. I am arguing that race lurks underneath the arguments that make the accusation that President Obama, or his policies, are anti- or un-American, coded in the terms socialist, communist, or marxist. And whatever the ultimate reason for resorting to Cold War terms to criticize a post-Cold War presidency, it’s regrettable. It gives name to a vague fear, but doesn’t offer helpful criticism. It paints a false picture of a policy debate in which there is zero-sum cosmic struggle between real Americans and un-Americans. This picture obscures the much more important matters of the array of goals, the kinds of challenges, and the range of solutions we must consider in a policy debate.

Thinking about the cartoon above, I'd like to think that Americans resort to lame redbaiting labels to make their case not because they’re stupid, but because most of us Whites are still messed up when it comes to race, and therefore not well-equipped to argue coherently with a Black president in an age when we've forsworn overt racial language in the public square.

Jump! A suggestion for teaching evolution at colleges teaching a "biblical worldview"

Inside Higher Education today reports a growing controversy over evolution at La Sierra University in California, a small Seventh-Day Adventist liberal arts institution. Evidently, biology professors rejected a student's final paper for their capstone course, on the grounds that it did not demonstrate sufficient knowledge of geological "data and mainstream theories." Instead it espoused some version of "creationism." The student's response was angry and disbelieving. Why be penalized for adhering to the religious doctrine that the university espouses?

That's quite a pickle. How do you teach sciences connected to the study of evolution in an institution that ultimately rejects scientific findings regarding evolution?

The Seventh Day Adventist authorities have a seemingly sensible solution. Sure, teach them evolution, but then teach them the God-centered account of creation:

I appeal to you that when you take your students out on the journey, you bring them safely back home before the day is over. And their home must always be in the world of faith.

One of the professors in question, Gary Bradley, doesn't seem to believe the scientific journey takes them from home, and deals with the issue by saying it shouldn't even be one:

It’s very, very clear that what I’m skeptical of is the absolute necessity of believing that the only way a creator God could do things is by speaking them into existence a few thousand years ago,” Bradley added. “That’s where my skepticism lies. That’s the religious philosophical basis for what I call the lunatic fringe. They do not represent the majority position in the Church, and yes I’m skeptical of that. But I want to say to kids it’s OK for you to believe that, but it’s not OK for you to be ignorant of the scientific data that’s out there.

My curricular solution is this: colleges trying to teach both evolution and creationism should require students to climb to the top of the tallest building on campus, hold hands, and then leap off the roof together. As they fall they should yell: "Gravity's just a theory!" This should drive home the lesson—for the last time, perhaps—about a key difference between a faith-driven science and one abiding by the rules of empirical inquiry. Explanatory models such as evolution are sets of testable propositions, governed by widely agreed upon rules of testing, and the model is open to amendment or refutation should the tests produce results contradicting the model. Creationism is a set of propositions that already excludes certain results as impossible because they contradict the Bible’s creation accounts. Creationists are correct in saying evolution is “just a theory.” It’s just that they don’t understand the term “theory,” and have set up a false opposition between spiritual and empirical inquiry. The findings of each must absolutely match, it seems, or they cancel each other out. Crudely put, if evolution, then no God. If no God, then evolution’s right (there are secular arguments out there guilty of this simplistic reasoning, too).

Liberal arts educators in evangelical or fundamentalist colleges and universities face a condundrum. To keep a religious denomination alive, to maintain an identity, its adherents need to be in accord with its doctrine, or at least not do things that undermine that doctrine. And for Christian biblical literalists, once you weaken one plank of the literalist interpretation, others might start to go too. Teach evolution and the next thing you know they'll be advocating gay marriage! Or worse. . . health care reform!

It seems to be me the deeper problem is that biblical literalists have built their house of faith on sand. Their faith really is rather weak, for it depends on the veracity of a particular reading of a text. Challenges to that reading, or the text, are threats to the house.

That’s not faith as a “hope in things unseen,” but rather a ‘certainty in things seen.’ Oddly, that is kind of empiricism, a common sense Baconian logic, but one that rests on questionable opening premises. The eye that sees can be so fickle. Good scientists know that. It’s unfortunate that some Christians don’t, for they end up living in a world even more fragile and frightening than it has to be.