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.

Empire means never having to say you're sorry

The debate over the treatment of detainees will now bump up another notch in fury. US Attorney General Eric Holder has announced the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate allegations that CIA personnel and contractors abused detainees in a variety of ways not covered by law, not even by the infamous Justice Department torture memos that delineated in painstaking detail what could be done to detainees--from placing the detainee in a confinement box together with an insect to waterboarding (some of these memos can be found here; and for a summary of the "litany of C.I.A. tactics," see the NY Times article here).

Republicans predictably oppose this investigation--for a variety of reasons. There's the hyperbolic claim that the administration is walking the fine line between incompetence and treason, with all our lives at stake. According to the Drudge Report, House Republican Peter King exclaimed:

"It’s bulls***. It’s disgraceful. You wonder which side they’re on," he said of the attorney general's move, which he described as a "declaration of war against the CIA, and against common sense."

And

"They’ve declared war on the CIA. We should resist and fight back as hard as we can," he said. "It should be a scorched earth policy. ... This isn't just another policy. This goes to the heart of our national defense. We should do whatever we have to do."

A calmer Peter Hoekstra, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, says it will distract from "the CIA's current counterinsurgency efforts." Or, according to nine Republican Senators in a letter to Attorney General Holder, such an investigation would "chill intelligence activities" and subject it to the "political winds" of the day. One of these nine, Kit Bond, considered the investigation a presidential "power grab" according to a CBS source, a bizarre attack on one of administration's own senior appointees, CIA Director Leon Panetta.

Senator Bond's complaint is curious. Evidently he and others can't understand an administration which doesn't staff its intelligence and justice agencies with abject loyalists. Bond also seems to forget all the power the Bush-Cheney administration grabbed in the realms of domestic and foreign security.

The nine GOP Senators are correct in seeing the "political winds" at work in intelligence activities--but that's what elections are about in democracy. They are supposed to lead to substantive changes in policy, even foreign policy, if that's indeed what electoral winners had promised in their campaigns. The GOP lost big-time in '06 and '08. Now some of its members think it's somehow wrong that their minority status means they don't get to dictate policy? And do these particular Republicans really want more European style foreign and intelligence services well-insulated from the public eye, from partisan influence?

As for the contention that this investigation will hamper counterinsurgency efforts--well, that is a stronger claim, but one that rests on contested evidence that torture and all the other extra-legal tactics do mean increased security for the US. It also ignores evidence that there are other effective methods of getting information, not to mention alternatives to a "scorched earth" policy in protecting the US. Nor do the defenders of torture seem to contemplate its costs, such as the diminished standing of the US in world opinion (what some call "soft power"), blowback, the risk to our captured soldiers, as well as the viral creep of organizational practices--if we can do this, maybe we can do that. . . .People, and nations, don't go to hell in one fell swoop, they go there step by step.

The problem is that we have a prosperous democracy, but we are also an empire. That is, we are a state (a country or national government in the US lexicon) that has increased its relative power and wealth in part by subordinating peoples outside our territorial borders. And subordination inevitably means resistance, and ergo violence. As Max Weber tells us, all states depend on monopolizing the legitimate means of violence (though some are more successful than others). Empires are states that dominate people outside their borders because of their preponderant power--rarely a monopoly, though, and even more rarely, legitimate.

But not for want of trying. In his excellent book, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and its Predecessors, Charles Maier notes the importance to imperialists of constructing a rationale for their rule or dominance, whether direct or indirect. The recurring resistance and violence on imperial frontiers require some sort of logic beyond naked national self-interest to convince people at home that empire is worth the cost, and convince subjects in the frontier that empire is really better for them than complete sovereignty (so stop fighting us!). This rationale is usually very principled. Empire brings the peace (Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, Pax Americana). Empire brings modernity. Empire brings democracy. "Imperial ideology," Maier says, "must always be an exercise in lofty denial" (Harvard University Press, 2006, p. 61). Especially in a liberal democracy, we could add.

Liberal imperialists will always deplore killing and beating, imprisoning and humiliating civilians, burning their homes, and torturing suspects as aberrant and counterproductive. But if empire is to be maintained, the soldiers assigned the dirty work know that it is sometimes necessary even at the price of their later disavowal and disgrace. Ultimately a mix of secrecy or "deniability" must be developed if leaders are not prepared to renounce the imperial project. Hypocrisy is the tribute imperialism pays to democracy (p. 64).

We get whiffs of that hypocrisy in the jargon we use for torture, such as the phrase "refined interrogation techniques,' or in the legal hair-splitting in the torture memos that makes waterboarding okay but fracturing a cranium perhaps not.

But not all our leaders have been liberals, of course, nor are they worried about apologies. Hence the argument that whatever you call torture, it works, even if morally dubious. Former Vice-President Cheney is of course convinced that it does, like he's convinced that all of his decisions were necessary in pushing the country to invade Iraq, and in centralizing authority within the Executive, particularly his office--though he criticizes the Obama administration for doing so:

. . .President Obama’s decision to allow the Justice Department to investigate and possibly prosecute CIA personnel, and his decision to remove authority for interrogation from the CIA to the White House, serves as a reminder, if any were needed, of why so many Americans have doubts about this Administration’s ability to be responsible for our nation’s security.

Along with this bit of hypocrisy, there's another in that Cheney has rested his reputation on an ends-justifies-the-means sort of argument that one would think is inimical to the party of "family values." Together with these situational ethics, there's the familar drumbeat of fear that worked so well for the Bush-Cheney-Rove team until the 2006 elections. "They" will get us unless we resort to brutal methods that contradict domestic and international law, as well as belie our principles.

And the way we can reconcile these contradictions, counteract these hypocrisies, is to hold on to the assertion that what we do in the world is right, because the United States can do nothing but. Go to Townhall.com and you'll see a cute blonde woman selling T-shirts with the logo "I'd rather be waterboarding." What a brave, bold statement! And clearly no embarrassment about selling a thing by mixing sex and violence. That's the attitude needed to get us over all this hand-wringing over nasty things we've done to terrorists, well, suspected terrorists usually, but who cares when 24 Hours TV scenarios are unfolding about us, or even within our borders. In our case, Might is Right, and there's no need to say we're sorry.

Well, I've descended into sarcasm now, a big weakness of mine when I'm upset. I should temper all this that I don't buy the notion that everything the US has done in the world, even as empire, is evil. It's intellectually lazy to turn to this sort Manichean dualism. It's the kind of thing a cynical leader does trying to stir up the crowd. It's the narrative the Bush administration employed, as has Al Qaeda.

I love my country, places (the Oregon coast, the White Mountains, the New York Public Library), people (my family and friends, of course, but also the icons like Madison, Lincoln, and Martin Luther King), and things like NPR, or Scorcese and Coen Brothers films, or the Lutheran church I grew up in, or its tremendous diversity and pluralism, and I'm grateful that the US government created programs such as the Peace Corps and Fulbright fellowships (not to mention Pell Grants) that gave me opportunities to experience a much larger world than the one in which I was born. The US to me is like that person we've all known who is lovable and loving, who is inspirational, with remarkable accomplishments, and who turns out to have some pretty horrific character flaws.

Nor do I romanticize those who resist our empire on its frontiers. I'm no fan of those among the Islamic fundamentalists who yearn for our destruction, who desire to spread regimes inimical to pluralism, who resort to indiscriminate violence to achieve their ends.

Yet I criticize. I criticize because I think we can do better than this. Not because of some crude Calvinistic notion that our great power and wealth prove we know how to do what's best for the world. Not because of some rosy-eyed vision of the past that makes history equal progress. It is this little kernel of hope--we can do better--that has been behind what we now look back on as a good change--expanding suffrage beyond property owners, ending slavery, extending (if not always enforcing) equal political rights to blacks, women, and other marginalized people, signing on to international human rights accords, and so on. These momentous changes also required a great deal of struggle, some of it dramatic, much of it the daily nitty-gritty that comes with organizing collective action. But the hope of doing better mattered throughout.

Wouldn't it be something if the President called on Americans to dedicate their energies to coming up with new ways of life that didn't depend on extending and defending the picket lines of empire? Could we give up on empire without being forced to by defeat, or overreach, or implosion--as has been the fate of past ones? Could we infuse our political system, and our foreign relations, with the axiom that Might inevitably subverts Right, and act with due caution when it comes to the use of violence?

Yep, I'm that oxymoron--a hopeless idealist.

Gatesgate

I recently talked with my friend, Lori, about the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the black Harvard professor, the arrest that President Obama in his prime time press conference called stupid, followed later by a kind of an apology to the Cambridge police and the arresting officer. Obama said he could have "calibrated" his words better, a calibration that I'm sure has his critics hooting.

Anyway, she said that we shouldn't waste our time talking about the incident, and I said I disagreed. I said, not fully believing myself, that it might lead to some useful conversation about race and class. With her permission, here's her email response (with some minor editing):

Ok, here's a real response to Gatesgate (it's only a matter of time, right?).

First, everyone who knows or knows of Skip Gates has said, "serves him right." This guy is typical of BigHouse Academics--coasting on a reputation and the work of grad students. He hasn't had an original thought since the late 20th century and is besotted by his own celebrity. His documentary about Africa was atrocious (reportedly, for I saw only a few minutes.) His public personae is unctuous and unworthy of scholarly attention. Oprah's DNA. Please.

But those are the rewards of life in America--if you become a celebrity in anything you get to leave all the mundane stuff behind. You don't have to teach, really (just come in and "profess"); you go on TV, you become Famous. So most of us are just thinking, "Good. You probably deserve a little jail time, you f______ twit."

But there's a real issue here which is, why do the police feel free to arrest, harass or otherwise not give the benefit of the doubt to someone who is black and male and standing on his own front lawn. If he were drunk, fine. If he had pulled a gun or brandished a weapon, there's a case. But he was YELLING. He called the cop a racist and, after a few weeks in China (where he was, ostensibly, doing some other

celebrity documentary on a subject not of his own expertise) and a long flight he was probably more than a bit cranky. A white guy in the same predicament (a white upper class guy--there aren't any poor white people living in Cambridge) would have been cut a much larger slice of slack. They would have patted him on the head and sent him inside. But to ARREST the guy? Preposterous. And Obamarama was right the first time--STUPID! Do NOT arrest celebrity intellectuals who have a platform over which you have no control. Now we will have the specter of Gates proclaiming his solidarity with all the brothas who are doing time. Now he will have street cred because he spent, what, an hour in the Cambridge lock up. Oh, boy. Is your sphincter twitching? Did you become someone's bitch, Dr. Gates? How horrible for you.

What I dislike most about this is that Black people like Gates (and me--I do not disavow my own privilege) exist between the scylla of race and the Charybdis of class. Not dammed if we do or don't, but rather--what's at work here? Clearly, as the "phantom negro" pointed out [found here], Gates forgot where he was from He's lived most of his life within the protective shell of academic privilege. That doesn't mean he doesn't get funny looks in the grocery store. My father was a well-paid, well-known surgeon for his entire life in Indianapolis but it didn't stop clerks from not wanting to cash his checks or making sure that what he was buying was EXPENSIVE. (He was once buying pistachio nuts for my mother - a pound I think. The girl at the counter said, 'you know those are $3.00 a pound" or whatever they were. And he said, 'Yep. I'll take two." Better to have a sense of humor about this sh__.) Anyway, Gates always wants to seem as if he is "down" as if he is just that poor black kid from West Virginia. But he's not anymore. He hasn't been that for a long time. He has come to expect to be treated with a certain deference that comes with academic status. I think about this all the time--I'm walking up the stairs and a horde of clueless cellphone-humping 18 year olds are standing between me and my job and I think "can I have a little deference here? Anyone? I'm the f______ teacher, you sh__heads. Get out of my way." But, alas, no. The waters do not part. They treat me like the help I am. SO be it.

So, it's complicated. Skip Gates is an asshole and some of us are glad he was publicly humiliated. But his being an asshole doesn't mean he deserves to be treated like a criminal on his lawn. Will this do anything to advance the conversation about "race"? No, because Americans do not WANT to have a conversation about race. Americans do not want to think intelligently about class and discrimination and respect and privilege. The fact that the guy who arrested him was their diversity trainer says a lot. Here is a man who can't see far enough into the near future to think "hmmm... maybe I shouldn't arrest Professor Gates because it might look as if I'm harassing a well-respected Black man and that might echo centuries of racial oppression. Maybe I'll just walk away." THIS is the guy who trains OTHER cops about racial profiling. Good.

At least more folks around the world like us now. . .

In my last post, I groused about President Obama's continuation of imperial ambitions.  I suppose an anti-imperialist position in the heartland of empire is hopelessly idealistic, or foolish (though there are pragmatic considerations related to the costs of managing empire, and of what Chalmers Johnson calls "blowback").  I suppose I should also recognize that anyone moving into the US executive necessarily takes the reins of empire, and I can't expect him (or her in the future) to drop them and let the horses run where they will.

And clearly Obama's no Bush, thank god.  He showed that last night in the press conference, where he was, as always, articulate and thoughtful, and clearly, he's just plain smart--it's a relief that many Americans appreciated such characteristics enough that they would put him into the presidency, and that the yahoos in this country who equate anti-intellectualism with virtue don't always win the day.

Obama's character, and his foreign policy endeavors, are apparently producing positive consequences abroad, according to a recent Pew study (found here).  In brief:

The image of the United States has improved markedly in most parts of the world, reflecting global confidence in Barack Obama. In many countries opinions of the United States are now about as positive as they were at the beginning of the decade before George W. Bush took office.

I still am heartily opposed to our ongoing efforts to turn Afghanistan and Iraq into stable, manageable outposts of US empire, especially in the name of democratization.  But I shouldn't evaluate the Obama administration on that one policy alone.

Innocent Americans

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.  That's basically Andrew Bacevich's message in his new essay in the recent edition of World Affairs (you can find an interview and a link to the essay here).  It's something William Appleman Williams--one of my professors at Oregon State, and a source for Bacevich's writings--argued 30 years ago.  "Empire as a way of life," was Williams' term for the US worldview in which Americans act like an empire, deny they are an empire, refuse to acknowledge the sins of empire, and foist the costs of empire onto the backs of their soldiers and their families, as well as peoples in other lands that we, with our innocent good intentions, are determined to save from themselves.

Bacevich's essay is a review of Graham Greene's marvelous book, The Quiet American. Published in 1955, it was one of the earliest accurate gauges of the style and consequences US involvement in Vietnam.  We apparently learned little from that bloody fiasco now memorialized on a simple, somber wall with the names of 58,195 dead.  I remember hearing some NSA analyst at a 2003 International Studies conference--as Bush pushed our country willy-nilly to war, with many Americans marching in lockstep--blithely arguing that we needed to win the "hearts and minds" of the Iraqis.  My god, I thought, what's next? Strategic hamlets?  In The Quiet American  Greene says "Innocence is a kind of insanity."  It can also be a kind of stupidity.

Bacevich argues that

Those who conceived the Iraq War, the cheerleaders who promoted it from the sidelines, and critics of that war who have now succeeded to positions of power share a common interest in wiping the slate clean, refurbishing the claim that the United States meant well because the United States always means well. No doubt mistakes were made.  Yet America's benign intentions expiate sins committed along the way--or allow those in authority to assign responsibility for any sins to soldiers who in doing Washington's bidding became sources of embarrassment.

It's not only expiation we seek.  We deny the costs of our imperial sins.  Guantánamo is a good example. President Obama made a campaign promise to shut down the prison there, a place chock-full of victims of the notion that good intentions trump egregious violations of our Constitution and international human rights law.  Yet he can't.  Americans and their state governments all refuse to have the prisoners resettled on their presumably innocent turf.  Congress has cut off funding for the closure (see story here).  All those Americans who backed the Bush Administration's war and other 'global war on terror' actions now don't want to pay for the consequences of those policies.  I guess that's the privilege of empire.

But it's not like President Obama is innocent of innocence.  As Bacevich suggests, the President's Afganistan-Pakistan gambit is evidence that his administration has learned little from the past, for all his allusions to Lincoln, FDR, and Kennedy.  While the tone and style differ dramatically from those of Bush, Obama shares Bush's fervor, or perhaps fever.  We can do this thing in Afghanistan, as if he's stumbled on to the magic warring-while-nation-building formula that no previous administration has ever been able to produce.  I guess that's another privilege of empire--the ability to say without a qualm that, this time, we'll get it right, we can "destroy a village in order to save it."