No One Who Puts His Hand to the Plow and Looks Back Is Fit to Serve in the Obama Campaign

There's been a fair amount of reaction to Melissa Harris-Perry's accusation that white liberals are "abandoning" Obama because they're racist. She admits that she's talking about "a more insidious form of racism," though, since she names no specific culprits nor any specific examples of racist practice or discourse. What her complaint boils down to that Obama has suffered

a swift and steep decline in support among white Americans—from 61 percent in 2009 to 33 percent now. I believe much of that decline can be attributed to their disappointment that choosing a black man for president did not prove to be salvific for them or the nation. His record is, at the very least, comparable to that of President Clinton, who was enthusiastically re-elected.

David Sirota took Harris-Perry down on that last point:

President Clinton was not "enthusiastically re-elected," as Harris-Perry well knows. When Clinton triangulated against his liberal base with NAFTA, welfare reform and "don't ask, don't tell" (among other issues), he faced just as vociferous liberal criticism as Obama does today, and in the very journals like the Nation for which Harris-Perry now writes.

As a result, America saw the opposite of "enthusiasm" in 1996 -- that presidential election, in fact, saw unprecedentedly low turnout. Additionally, Clinton -- after dissing his base -- won a meager 49 percent of the vote in that election, despite running against one of the weakest, least charismatic Republican presidential nominees in recent memory. In short, just as many white liberals were dissatisfied with a white president for abandoning the Democratic Party's base back in 1996, so too are many now dissatisfied with a black president for doing the same -- or, in many cases, worse.

(For the record, in 1996 I voted for Nader. But then, I'm not a liberal or a Democrat.)

Sirota shows how Harris-Perry ignores numerous important differences between Clinton and Obama, unemployment and a staggering economy not least among them. It doesn't help that Obama's approval rates among African-Americans have also taken a nosedive, which I suppose is also because of racism. Or maybe it's because, as Obama himself claimed during his repellent performance before the Congressional Black Caucus, blacks are lazy and demand everything handed to them on a platter: "Take off your bedroom slippers, put on your marching shoes. Stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying." (This is not a new theme in the Obama show, of course.) I seem to remember another distinguished African-American leader saying essentially the same thing a few years ago: "Bitch, bitch, bitch, moan and moan, whine and whine." He also claimed that he was picked on because of his race, and suffered a "high-tech lynching" which climaxed in his elevation to the highest court in the land.

Harris-Perry exhibits behavior we've seen before, by Republicans during the Bush years: she's just regurgitating White House talking points, from her touting all those lovely laws that were passed under Obama - quantity trumps quality, you see -- to claiming that his critics are "disappointed" because he didn't save the world in forty-eight hours. (The writer Pearl Cleage posted a status with the same basic content today.) From his lips to her keyboard! Especially so soon after the debt-ceiling debacle, you wouldn't think an Obama loyalist would want to remind her readers about her leader's record, but let her have her will. We're going to see a lot more of the same as the campaign drags on.

I went back to C. P. Snow's response to personal attacks in The Two Cultures, a good all-purpose approach.

However, the problem of behaviour in these circumstances is very easily solved. Let us imagine that I am called, in print, a kleptomaniac necrophilist (I have selected with some care two allegations which have not, so far as I know, been made). I have exactly two courses of action. The first, and the one which in general I should choose to follow, is to do precisely nothing. The second is, if the nuisance becomes intolerable, to sue. There is one course of action which no one can expect of a sane man: that is, solemnly to argue the points, to produce certificates from Saks and Harrods to say he has never, to the best of their belief, stolen a single article, to obtain testimonials signed by sixteen Fellows of the Royal Society, the Head of the Civil Service, a Lord Justice of Appeal and the Secretary of the M.C.C., testifying that they have known him for half a lifetime, and that even after a convivial evening they have not once seen him lurking in the vicinity of a tomb.

Such a reply is not on. It puts one in the same psychological compartment as one’s traducer. That is a condition from which one has a right to be excused.

One reason why accusations of racism can be so effective is that the United States is a racist country: no one can honestly claim that his or her opinions are utterly free of it. But just for that reason, unless you can point to specifically racist elements of someone's practice or talk, saying that an American is racist is like saying that they're breathing. One could just as accurately claim that white liberal supporters of Obama are racist, and continue supporting him because they're trying to overcompensate for their prejudice. Either move is a distraction from the issues, though of course that's normal in a political campaign. Obama's going to need a shitload of distraction to throw in the voters' eyes during the coming thirteen months, though his Republican would-be opponents are doing their best to make it easy for him.

Meanwhile, Obama should be challenged when he demands support for harmful policies, which is what he was doing with the Congressional Black Caucus. If they resist voting for bills that will harm their constituency, they're doing their job, not shirking it.

And what an irony: one similarity between Clinton and Obama that Harris-Perry overlooks (not too surprisingly) is that they both lost control of Congress in midterm elections because their right-wing policies alienated their base. This undermines her case, because she depends on a postulated "double standard" that let a white (but still America's first black) president get away with things a black president can't.

No One Who Puts His Hand to the Plow and Looks Back Is Fit to Serve in the Obama Campaign

There's been a fair amount of reaction to Melissa Harris-Perry's accusation that white liberals are "abandoning" Obama because they're racist. She admits that she's talking about "a more insidious form of racism," though, since she names no specific culprits nor any specific examples of racist practice or discourse. What her complaint boils down to that Obama has suffered

a swift and steep decline in support among white Americans—from 61 percent in 2009 to 33 percent now. I believe much of that decline can be attributed to their disappointment that choosing a black man for president did not prove to be salvific for them or the nation. His record is, at the very least, comparable to that of President Clinton, who was enthusiastically re-elected.

David Sirota took Harris-Perry down on that last point:

President Clinton was not "enthusiastically re-elected," as Harris-Perry well knows. When Clinton triangulated against his liberal base with NAFTA, welfare reform and "don't ask, don't tell" (among other issues), he faced just as vociferous liberal criticism as Obama does today, and in the very journals like the Nation for which Harris-Perry now writes.

As a result, America saw the opposite of "enthusiasm" in 1996 -- that presidential election, in fact, saw unprecedentedly low turnout. Additionally, Clinton -- after dissing his base -- won a meager 49 percent of the vote in that election, despite running against one of the weakest, least charismatic Republican presidential nominees in recent memory. In short, just as many white liberals were dissatisfied with a white president for abandoning the Democratic Party's base back in 1996, so too are many now dissatisfied with a black president for doing the same -- or, in many cases, worse.

(For the record, in 1996 I voted for Nader. But then, I'm not a liberal or a Democrat.)

Sirota shows how Harris-Perry ignores numerous important differences between Clinton and Obama, unemployment and a staggering economy not least among them. It doesn't help that Obama's approval rates among African-Americans have also taken a nosedive, which I suppose is also because of racism. Or maybe it's because, as Obama himself claimed during his repellent performance before the Congressional Black Caucus, blacks are lazy and demand everything handed to them on a platter: "Take off your bedroom slippers, put on your marching shoes. Stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying." (This is not a new theme in the Obama show, of course.) I seem to remember another distinguished African-American leader saying essentially the same thing a few years ago: "Bitch, bitch, bitch, moan and moan, whine and whine." He also claimed that he was picked on because of his race, and suffered a "high-tech lynching" which climaxed in his elevation to the highest court in the land.

Harris-Perry exhibits behavior we've seen before, by Republicans during the Bush years: she's just regurgitating White House talking points, from her touting all those lovely laws that were passed under Obama - quantity trumps quality, you see -- to claiming that his critics are "disappointed" because he didn't save the world in forty-eight hours. (The writer Pearl Cleage posted a status with the same basic content today.) From his lips to her keyboard! Especially so soon after the debt-ceiling debacle, you wouldn't think an Obama loyalist would want to remind her readers about her leader's record, but let her have her will. We're going to see a lot more of the same as the campaign drags on.

I went back to C. P. Snow's response to personal attacks in The Two Cultures, a good all-purpose approach.

However, the problem of behaviour in these circumstances is very easily solved. Let us imagine that I am called, in print, a kleptomaniac necrophilist (I have selected with some care two allegations which have not, so far as I know, been made). I have exactly two courses of action. The first, and the one which in general I should choose to follow, is to do precisely nothing. The second is, if the nuisance becomes intolerable, to sue. There is one course of action which no one can expect of a sane man: that is, solemnly to argue the points, to produce certificates from Saks and Harrods to say he has never, to the best of their belief, stolen a single article, to obtain testimonials signed by sixteen Fellows of the Royal Society, the Head of the Civil Service, a Lord Justice of Appeal and the Secretary of the M.C.C., testifying that they have known him for half a lifetime, and that even after a convivial evening they have not once seen him lurking in the vicinity of a tomb.

Such a reply is not on. It puts one in the same psychological compartment as one’s traducer. That is a condition from which one has a right to be excused.

One reason why accusations of racism can be so effective is that the United States is a racist country: no one can honestly claim that his or her opinions are utterly free of it. But just for that reason, unless you can point to specifically racist elements of someone's practice or talk, saying that an American is racist is like saying that they're breathing. One could just as accurately claim that white liberal supporters of Obama are racist, and continue supporting him because they're trying to overcompensate for their prejudice. Either move is a distraction from the issues, though of course that's normal in a political campaign. Obama's going to need a shitload of distraction to throw in the voters' eyes during the coming thirteen months, though his Republican would-be opponents are doing their best to make it easy for him.

Meanwhile, Obama should be challenged when he demands support for harmful policies, which is what he was doing with the Congressional Black Caucus. If they resist voting for bills that will harm their constituency, they're doing their job, not shirking it.

And what an irony: one similarity between Clinton and Obama that Harris-Perry overlooks (not too surprisingly) is that they both lost control of Congress in midterm elections because their right-wing policies alienated their base. This undermines her case, because she depends on a postulated "double standard" that let a white (but still America's first black) president get away with things a black president can't.

The Trouble with Separatism

The other issue I meant to write about yesterday was racial (and other) separatism, but I figured that post was long enough already.

One major item on the Nation of Islam's wishlist was a black-only state, possibly a state within the US to be handed over exclusively to the Black Man. As this idea recurred in Marable's account, I began wondering what it would have helped. In a racist country -- as the United States is, and was even more in the early days of the Nation -- a black-only state would have been isolated economically from outside. Would the Interstate Highway System have included the black state? I didn't quite figure out whether Elijah Muhammad had in mind an independent, sovereign nation, which would have been even more isolated. Even if the new black nation wasn't landlocked, its larger, richer, vastly more powerful white neighbor would have kept it under strict surveillance.

White racists would have been quite happy with such a situation. While black self-sufficiency was also a plank of the Nation's platform, self-sufficiency is largely an illusion. I imagine at least some traffic in "guest workers" from the black nation to the white, to maintain a basement for white workers' wages and working conditions. (Sound familiar?) It would also bring some income to the black nation. If we're talking about simply a black state within the Union, the permeability of the border would be even greater. No doubt there would also be frequent "incidents" at the frontier, blamed by each side on the other.

One of the selling points of this vision was that blacks would treat one another well in their own state or nation, and be able to live proudly by contrast to their lives in a white supremacist state. By comparison, maybe so. But Elijah Muhammad doesn't seem to have had much interest in democracy for blacks. He ran the Nation of Islam as his own personal fief, from the top down. Discipline was maintained by the paramilitary Fruit of Islam, with corporal punishment the norm. But I suppose it's less bothersome to be thrown down the stairs or beaten within an inch of your life by Your Own. No doubt the Bonus Marchers, white World War I veterans trampled by police horses and shot down in the streets by white soldiers, would have agreed.

Leave aside the question of intraracial conflict and oppression, though. I kept wondering about travel to and from the black state or nation. Would blacks be under an outright ban everywhere else in the US under this arrangement, and would whites be utterly excluded from the black state? (And what about people of "mixed race"? Malcolm X himself was light-skinned, and harped in his Autobiography on the blood of the "devil" he carried. Should he have been allowed into the Promised Land?) Would having a black state justify the other forty-nine's being all white? That wouldn't have been the result in any case: if all African-Americans magically disappeared overnight, the growing Latino minority would still be giving white racists the megrims, along with Asians and the traditional Irish, Italians, and Jews. One of the notable things about these kinds of exclusions is that they are ultimately a game of Musical Chairs: get rid of the blacks, and the remainder would still be divided against itself, as it had been throughout American history. It would then be necessary to expel one more group after another, until the Anglo-Saxons were driven back across the ocean. But in that case, shouldn't the entire human species return to Africa?

This is why the quest for separation makes no sense to me. The Nation of Islam, as far as I could tell, agreed that it was legitimate for people to reject those whom they defined as different from themselves, and to try to drive them out. Certainly this was a very American sentiment. But if one accepts the necessity of racially uniform states, it's longer valid to condemn whites for their racism: on this construction they are simply conforming to human nature, black no less than white. Yet no society, no country, is really uniform, and every society manages to deal with some differences. It's not clear to me what determines the threshold at which difference starts to matter; it varies within the same society from time to time under different conditions.

The same consideration applies to Israel, many of whose apologists postulate the universality and inevitability of anti-Semitism and claim that Jews, no less than Christians, are entitled to their own homeland, But Christians don't have their own homeland, and aren't entitled to one. The history of Christianity is marked by the same infighting between sects: Which Christianity? Were Catholics right to try to purge Protestants, Lutherans to burn Anabaptists, Anglicans to disenfranchise Quakers, Methodists, Baptists and other dissenters? Aren't Christians entitled to a homeland free of heretics? The Zionist claim only makes sense on the assumption that they are; but remove the Jews and Christians will be at each other's throats, and in their new homeland Jews will be divided among themselves. If Zionists want to argue that religious or racial uniformity is legitimate, then anti-Semitism (along with every other form of bigotry) ceases to be illegitimate. It's striking that Zionism should have borrowed the assumptions of racism and religious bigotry as justifications for its own national project. At a time in history when bigotry was under attack and pluralism became a desirable principle, Zionism came down on the side of the racists. (See, for example, Paul Breines's Tough Jews.) The black nationalism of the Nation of Islam seems to have come from the same sources.

The evolution of gay identity politics has exhibited the same contradictions. The mainstream of gay politics in the US has adopted a quasi-ethnic model, sometimes merely from expediency but also from conviction. This connects to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's universalizing vs. minoritizing schema: are homosexuals a discrete, even racially distinct human subgroup, or are we more like a religion, a potential for conversion that exists in every person? The minoritizing, quasi-ethnic model would seem to imply that we are cuckoos in the heterosexual nest, who must come out and rejoin our original group; yet the minoritizing gay movement also is assimilationist, embracing reactionary notions of family and social acceptability. The anti-assimilationists often share the biological model of homosexuality as a genetic difference, but (maybe more consistently) stress that it makes us different, invoking Jungian mysticism and notions of inherent gay culture. Given Jung's racial and racist mysticism, we come full circle. Harry Hay reportedly used to say that gay boys "smell wrong" to our fathers, which is why they reject us. Well, if we're biologically different, and if it's natural to shut out what is different, why shouldn't they reject us? Again, the differences between the assimilationists and the anti-assimilationists look less important to me than their similarity.

I don't really have a conclusion here. I wanted to highlight the contradictions that make it impossible, in my view, to follow these theories of racial / religious / erotic difference to any logical end. But as a Darwinian, I don't assume that underneath it all, human beings must have evolved to be able to come together despite our differences. There's no reason to believe so. It may be that we are driven by powerful, conflicting impulses towards inclusion and exclusion that can't be resolved. But it seems clear to me that these impulses produce division in any human group, no matter how uniform it may seem at first. For that reason, separatism won't work. We have two main choices: either to privilege separation, which ends in smaller and smaller warring communities, or to work toward connection and inclusion -- not to believe we're all the same, but to recognize what we have in common. I think it is possible through education and conscious social engagement to get people to embrace difference and incorporate more of it in any group, but it will always be a dynamic, ongoing process, never to be finally settled. Still, I'd rather proceed on the presumption that it can be managed, and that engagement with difference is both workable and satisfying.

The Trouble with Separatism

The other issue I meant to write about yesterday was racial (and other) separatism, but I figured that post was long enough already.

One major item on the Nation of Islam's wishlist was a black-only state, possibly a state within the US to be handed over exclusively to the Black Man. As this idea recurred in Marable's account, I began wondering what it would have helped. In a racist country -- as the United States is, and was even more in the early days of the Nation -- a black-only state would have been isolated economically from outside. Would the Interstate Highway System have included the black state? I didn't quite figure out whether Elijah Muhammad had in mind an independent, sovereign nation, which would have been even more isolated. Even if the new black nation wasn't landlocked, its larger, richer, vastly more powerful white neighbor would have kept it under strict surveillance.

White racists would have been quite happy with such a situation. While black self-sufficiency was also a plank of the Nation's platform, self-sufficiency is largely an illusion. I imagine at least some traffic in "guest workers" from the black nation to the white, to maintain a basement for white workers' wages and working conditions. (Sound familiar?) It would also bring some income to the black nation. If we're talking about simply a black state within the Union, the permeability of the border would be even greater. No doubt there would also be frequent "incidents" at the frontier, blamed by each side on the other.

One of the selling points of this vision was that blacks would treat one another well in their own state or nation, and be able to live proudly by contrast to their lives in a white supremacist state. By comparison, maybe so. But Elijah Muhammad doesn't seem to have had much interest in democracy for blacks. He ran the Nation of Islam as his own personal fief, from the top down. Discipline was maintained by the paramilitary Fruit of Islam, with corporal punishment the norm. But I suppose it's less bothersome to be thrown down the stairs or beaten within an inch of your life by Your Own. No doubt the Bonus Marchers, white World War I veterans trampled by police horses and shot down in the streets by white soldiers, would have agreed.

Leave aside the question of intraracial conflict and oppression, though. I kept wondering about travel to and from the black state or nation. Would blacks be under an outright ban everywhere else in the US under this arrangement, and would whites be utterly excluded from the black state? (And what about people of "mixed race"? Malcolm X himself was light-skinned, and harped in his Autobiography on the blood of the "devil" he carried. Should he have been allowed into the Promised Land?) Would having a black state justify the other forty-nine's being all white? That wouldn't have been the result in any case: if all African-Americans magically disappeared overnight, the growing Latino minority would still be giving white racists the megrims, along with Asians and the traditional Irish, Italians, and Jews. One of the notable things about these kinds of exclusions is that they are ultimately a game of Musical Chairs: get rid of the blacks, and the remainder would still be divided against itself, as it had been throughout American history. It would then be necessary to expel one more group after another, until the Anglo-Saxons were driven back across the ocean. But in that case, shouldn't the entire human species return to Africa?

This is why the quest for separation makes no sense to me. The Nation of Islam, as far as I could tell, agreed that it was legitimate for people to reject those whom they defined as different from themselves, and to try to drive them out. Certainly this was a very American sentiment. But if one accepts the necessity of racially uniform states, it's longer valid to condemn whites for their racism: on this construction they are simply conforming to human nature, black no less than white. Yet no society, no country, is really uniform, and every society manages to deal with some differences. It's not clear to me what determines the threshold at which difference starts to matter; it varies within the same society from time to time under different conditions.

The same consideration applies to Israel, many of whose apologists postulate the universality and inevitability of anti-Semitism and claim that Jews, no less than Christians, are entitled to their own homeland, But Christians don't have their own homeland, and aren't entitled to one. The history of Christianity is marked by the same infighting between sects: Which Christianity? Were Catholics right to try to purge Protestants, Lutherans to burn Anabaptists, Anglicans to disenfranchise Quakers, Methodists, Baptists and other dissenters? Aren't Christians entitled to a homeland free of heretics? The Zionist claim only makes sense on the assumption that they are; but remove the Jews and Christians will be at each other's throats, and in their new homeland Jews will be divided among themselves. If Zionists want to argue that religious or racial uniformity is legitimate, then anti-Semitism (along with every other form of bigotry) ceases to be illegitimate. It's striking that Zionism should have borrowed the assumptions of racism and religious bigotry as justifications for its own national project. At a time in history when bigotry was under attack and pluralism became a desirable principle, Zionism came down on the side of the racists. (See, for example, Paul Breines's Tough Jews.) The black nationalism of the Nation of Islam seems to have come from the same sources.

The evolution of gay identity politics has exhibited the same contradictions. The mainstream of gay politics in the US has adopted a quasi-ethnic model, sometimes merely from expediency but also from conviction. This connects to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's universalizing vs. minoritizing schema: are homosexuals a discrete, even racially distinct human subgroup, or are we more like a religion, a potential for conversion that exists in every person? The minoritizing, quasi-ethnic model would seem to imply that we are cuckoos in the heterosexual nest, who must come out and rejoin our original group; yet the minoritizing gay movement also is assimilationist, embracing reactionary notions of family and social acceptability. The anti-assimilationists often share the biological model of homosexuality as a genetic difference, but (maybe more consistently) stress that it makes us different, invoking Jungian mysticism and notions of inherent gay culture. Given Jung's racial and racist mysticism, we come full circle. Harry Hay reportedly used to say that gay boys "smell wrong" to our fathers, which is why they reject us. Well, if we're biologically different, and if it's natural to shut out what is different, why shouldn't they reject us? Again, the differences between the assimilationists and the anti-assimilationists look less important to me than their similarity.

I don't really have a conclusion here. I wanted to highlight the contradictions that make it impossible, in my view, to follow these theories of racial / religious / erotic difference to any logical end. But as a Darwinian, I don't assume that underneath it all, human beings must have evolved to be able to come together despite our differences. There's no reason to believe so. It may be that we are driven by powerful, conflicting impulses towards inclusion and exclusion that can't be resolved. But it seems clear to me that these impulses produce division in any human group, no matter how uniform it may seem at first. For that reason, separatism won't work. We have two main choices: either to privilege separation, which ends in smaller and smaller warring communities, or to work toward connection and inclusion -- not to believe we're all the same, but to recognize what we have in common. I think it is possible through education and conscious social engagement to get people to embrace difference and incorporate more of it in any group, but it will always be a dynamic, ongoing process, never to be finally settled. Still, I'd rather proceed on the presumption that it can be managed, and that engagement with difference is both workable and satisfying.

Extremists to the Left of Me, Moderates to the Right of Me!

I'm in the final fifty pages of Manning Marable's biography of Malcolm X, and I've been troubled by some of its political and social judgments. In fairness, though, many of the participants and observers of the Civil Rights Movement in the 50s and 60s came to similar conclusions; what troubles me is that forty years later, so many people are still trapped in the mistakes of the period.

Probably the main issues I'm thinking of are violence and racial separation. I've long challenged other whites who said that Malcolm and the Nation of Islam advocated and even practiced violence against whites. Even in the 1960s, while I was still a kid, I could see that Malcolm (the Nation's most visible spokesman at the time) was talking primarily about self-defense against white violence both official and freelance. True, many whites publicly and officially deplored the freelance violence by vigilantes, but most of them never did much about it. This was partly because white terrorism, especially in the South, could target dissident whites as well as uppity blacks, as shown by the murders of white civil rights workers in Mississippi and elsewhere in the 60s. That the killers were able to evade capture and conviction for decades was the result of white solidarity, though intimidation was no doubt also involved. Maybe the US government should have responded to white terrorism in the South the way it responded, say, to peasant resistance in South Vietnam: by leveling white communities, burning them to the ground and moving the survivors to "strategic hamlets" until the troublemakers had been smoked out and eliminated, or at least until southern whites, without exception, had embraced non-violence. In my bleaker moods I've sometimes thought so.

I'm not ignoring or minimizing the history of white racist terror in the north. As Marable recounts, the Nation of Islam never did much in the south; Malcolm's constituency was poor urban blacks, who faced racism in the north and knew it. (The passage I quoted from Malcolm X in a previous post came from a major section dealing with anti-racist struggle in the north during the 1930s and 1940s.) And this continued down to the present day; northern whites responded in large numbers to Richard Nixon's incitement and encouragement of their racism.

What bothers me is the notion advanced by the Nation of Islam and by Malcolm X as its spokesman, and accepted by Marable and many other self-styled moderates, that Martin Luther King Jr. and other Civil Rights leaders who rejected violence even in self-defense, were not "radicals" or "extremists." Malcolm liked to declare that "[Whites] should say thank you for Martin Luther King, because Martin Luther King has held Negroes in check until recently" (414). This was absurd on two counts. First, when Malcolm was invited to visit Selma, Alabama, in 1964,

... Malcolm could not refuse. The beauty of the Selma struggle was its brutal simplicity: hundreds of local blacks lined up at Selma's Dallas County building daily demanding the right to register to vote; white county and city police beat and harassed them. By the first week in February thirty-four hundred people had been jailed, including Dr. King. Under cover of darkness, terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan harassed civil rights workers, black families, and households. On February 4, Malcolm addressed an audience of three hundred at the Brown's Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Significantly, while the event had been arranged through SNCC, after some negotiations it was formally cosponsored by King's SCLC. Malcolm's sermon praised King's dedication to nonviolence, but he advised that should white America refuse to accept the nonviolent model of social change, his own example of armed "self-defense" was an alternative [411-412].

Notice that whites, in and outside of the South, did not see nonviolent action as 'holding Negroes in check' -- quite the opposite. Local authorities tried to check it themselves, with violence, and allowed white terrorist groups to harass, assault, and kill Civil Rights Workers. Look at this excerpt from King's "Letter from the Birmingham City Jail," addressed to white "moderate" ministers in 1963:

You spoke of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of the extremist. I started thinking about the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency made up of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, have been so completely drained of self-respect and a sense of "somebodiness" that they have adjusted to segregation, and, of a few Negroes in the middle class who, because of a degree of academic and economic security, and because at points they profit by segregation, have unconsciously become insensitive to the problems of the masses. The other force is one of bitterness and hatred, and comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up over the nation, the largest and best known being Elijah Muhammad's Muslim movement.... I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need not follow the "do-nothingism" of the complacent or the hatred and despair of the black nationalist. There is the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest....

But as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a bit of satisfaction from being considered an extremist. Was not Jesus an extremist in love -- "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you." Was not Amos an extremist for justice ... Was not Paul an extremist for the gospel of Jesus Christ ... So the question is not whether we will be extremists but what kind of extremist will we be. Will we be extremists for hate or will be extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice --or will we be extremists for the cause of justice? ...

I had hoped that the white moderate would see this. Maybe I was too optimistic.

Somehow I'd thought of this as a document of the 1950s; that it comes from 1963, after several years more of struggle as King and the nonviolent wing of the Civil Rights Movement had become ever more militant, is even more telling. Notice too that King began by playing the classic Golden Mean game, with himself the reasonable moderate between total quietism at one extreme, and the other extreme, represented by Elijah Muhammad, that "comes perilously close to advocating violence" -- but then he recognized (if only rhetorically, at first) that in the eyes of white America he was an extremist. If this be extremism, make the most of it!

The mistake here is the common belief that "moderation" in rhetoric equals "moderation" in policy, that black people especially are obliged to keep their voices low and evenly modulated, their rhetoric pacific and polite. That this is a mistake is shown by the fact that during his lifetime, King was always seen by whites as a dangerous radical. After all, one of his books was entitled Why We Can't Wait, with the epigraph "Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed." Wait a minute, doesn't that sound more like the demagogic rhetoric of a Malcolm X?

Malcolm's move from the Nation of Islam led him into engagement with "mainstream" civil rights groups and even a tentative alliance with whites -- but the Civil Rights movement hadn't stood still either, and as Marable admits, Malcolm and the Movement met more or less in the middle as more and more activists rejected King's supposedly conciliatory stance in favor of more militance, and less nonviolence. While King adhered to nonviolence, he too became more militant, and he'd never really been conciliatory. He became less conciliatory as time went on. It's a pity Malcolm didn't live to see it.

But the bigger irony is that if anyone was 'holding the Negro in check' it was Elijah Muhammad, who counseled blacks to refrain from political action of any kind, including voting. (In this he was like white religious leaders such as Jerry Falwell, who in the same era counseled his flock to avoid such worldly activity.) One reason Malcolm came into conflict with his mentor, on Marable's account, was that he kept straining at the leash, unable to refrain from building connections with black groups working actively against racism in the north and elsewhere. And despite the Nation's rhetorical appeal to violence, when it came down to brass tacks Muhammad had no stomach for it. (Not unreasonably, since blacks were outgunned by the white state.) When white police in Los Angeles murdered an unarmed Muslim named Ronald Stokes while raiding a mosque in 1962, Muhammad ordered his followers to "stand down" (208), to Malcolm's shock.

The time had come for action, and surely Muhammad would see the necessity in summoning the Nation's strength for the battle. But the Messenger denied him. "Brother, you don't go to war over a provocation," he told Malcolm. "They could kill a few of my followers, but I'm not going to go out and do something silly" [208].

On the other hand, Muhammad could stomach Muslim violence against his own. The Fruit of Islam (FOI), the Nation's paramilitary wing, regularly beat and terrorized members who misbehaved or dissented, culminating in the execution of Malcolm himself. The police tended to unconcern about these peccadilloes, as about black-on-black violence generally, and Marable says there is evidence that some FOI higher-ups -- including, possibly, one of the assassins -- were police informants.

In the end, Marable can't make up his own mind. On the same page, he writes first that "To Malcolm, armed self-defense was never equated with violence for its own sake" (485); two paragraphs later, that Malcolm "had also come to reject violence for its own sake, but he never abandoned the nationalists' ideal of 'self-determination" (485-6). And:

Given the election of Barack Obama, it now raises the question of whether blacks have a separate political destiny from their white fellow citizens. If legal racial segregation was permanently in America's past, Malcolm's vision today would have to radically define self-determination and the meaning of black power in a political environment that appeared to many to be "post-racial" [486].

Even in the 1960s, the existence of de facto, as opposed to de jure (that is, legal) racial segregation was recognized. The notion that the mere removal of Jim Crow laws automatically eradicated racism in America is beloved of many whites -- "You've got your rights, so what more do you want from us?" -- but most blacks know better. I don't think the current political environment is "post-racial" by any stretch of the imagination; the election of Barack Obama certainly doesn't make it so. "Many" would agree with me.

Extremists to the Left of Me, Moderates to the Right of Me!

I'm in the final fifty pages of Manning Marable's biography of Malcolm X, and I've been troubled by some of its political and social judgments. In fairness, though, many of the participants and observers of the Civil Rights Movement in the 50s and 60s came to similar conclusions; what troubles me is that forty years later, so many people are still trapped in the mistakes of the period.

Probably the main issues I'm thinking of are violence and racial separation. I've long challenged other whites who said that Malcolm and the Nation of Islam advocated and even practiced violence against whites. Even in the 1960s, while I was still a kid, I could see that Malcolm (the Nation's most visible spokesman at the time) was talking primarily about self-defense against white violence both official and freelance. True, many whites publicly and officially deplored the freelance violence by vigilantes, but most of them never did much about it. This was partly because white terrorism, especially in the South, could target dissident whites as well as uppity blacks, as shown by the murders of white civil rights workers in Mississippi and elsewhere in the 60s. That the killers were able to evade capture and conviction for decades was the result of white solidarity, though intimidation was no doubt also involved. Maybe the US government should have responded to white terrorism in the South the way it responded, say, to peasant resistance in South Vietnam: by leveling white communities, burning them to the ground and moving the survivors to "strategic hamlets" until the troublemakers had been smoked out and eliminated, or at least until southern whites, without exception, had embraced non-violence. In my bleaker moods I've sometimes thought so.

I'm not ignoring or minimizing the history of white racist terror in the north. As Marable recounts, the Nation of Islam never did much in the south; Malcolm's constituency was poor urban blacks, who faced racism in the north and knew it. (The passage I quoted from Malcolm X in a previous post came from a major section dealing with anti-racist struggle in the north during the 1930s and 1940s.) And this continued down to the present day; northern whites responded in large numbers to Richard Nixon's incitement and encouragement of their racism.

What bothers me is the notion advanced by the Nation of Islam and by Malcolm X as its spokesman, and accepted by Marable and many other self-styled moderates, that Martin Luther King Jr. and other Civil Rights leaders who rejected violence even in self-defense, were not "radicals" or "extremists." Malcolm liked to declare that "[Whites] should say thank you for Martin Luther King, because Martin Luther King has held Negroes in check until recently" (414). This was absurd on two counts. First, when Malcolm was invited to visit Selma, Alabama, in 1964,

... Malcolm could not refuse. The beauty of the Selma struggle was its brutal simplicity: hundreds of local blacks lined up at Selma's Dallas County building daily demanding the right to register to vote; white county and city police beat and harassed them. By the first week in February thirty-four hundred people had been jailed, including Dr. King. Under cover of darkness, terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan harassed civil rights workers, black families, and households. On February 4, Malcolm addressed an audience of three hundred at the Brown's Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Significantly, while the event had been arranged through SNCC, after some negotiations it was formally cosponsored by King's SCLC. Malcolm's sermon praised King's dedication to nonviolence, but he advised that should white America refuse to accept the nonviolent model of social change, his own example of armed "self-defense" was an alternative [411-412].

Notice that whites, in and outside of the South, did not see nonviolent action as 'holding Negroes in check' -- quite the opposite. Local authorities tried to check it themselves, with violence, and allowed white terrorist groups to harass, assault, and kill Civil Rights Workers. Look at this excerpt from King's "Letter from the Birmingham City Jail," addressed to white "moderate" ministers in 1963:

You spoke of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of the extremist. I started thinking about the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency made up of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, have been so completely drained of self-respect and a sense of "somebodiness" that they have adjusted to segregation, and, of a few Negroes in the middle class who, because of a degree of academic and economic security, and because at points they profit by segregation, have unconsciously become insensitive to the problems of the masses. The other force is one of bitterness and hatred, and comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up over the nation, the largest and best known being Elijah Muhammad's Muslim movement.... I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need not follow the "do-nothingism" of the complacent or the hatred and despair of the black nationalist. There is the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest....

But as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a bit of satisfaction from being considered an extremist. Was not Jesus an extremist in love -- "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you." Was not Amos an extremist for justice ... Was not Paul an extremist for the gospel of Jesus Christ ... So the question is not whether we will be extremists but what kind of extremist will we be. Will we be extremists for hate or will be extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice --or will we be extremists for the cause of justice? ...

I had hoped that the white moderate would see this. Maybe I was too optimistic.

Somehow I'd thought of this as a document of the 1950s; that it comes from 1963, after several years more of struggle as King and the nonviolent wing of the Civil Rights Movement had become ever more militant, is even more telling. Notice too that King began by playing the classic Golden Mean game, with himself the reasonable moderate between total quietism at one extreme, and the other extreme, represented by Elijah Muhammad, that "comes perilously close to advocating violence" -- but then he recognized (if only rhetorically, at first) that in the eyes of white America he was an extremist. If this be extremism, make the most of it!

The mistake here is the common belief that "moderation" in rhetoric equals "moderation" in policy, that black people especially are obliged to keep their voices low and evenly modulated, their rhetoric pacific and polite. That this is a mistake is shown by the fact that during his lifetime, King was always seen by whites as a dangerous radical. After all, one of his books was entitled Why We Can't Wait, with the epigraph "Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed." Wait a minute, doesn't that sound more like the demagogic rhetoric of a Malcolm X?

Malcolm's move from the Nation of Islam led him into engagement with "mainstream" civil rights groups and even a tentative alliance with whites -- but the Civil Rights movement hadn't stood still either, and as Marable admits, Malcolm and the Movement met more or less in the middle as more and more activists rejected King's supposedly conciliatory stance in favor of more militance, and less nonviolence. While King adhered to nonviolence, he too became more militant, and he'd never really been conciliatory. He became less conciliatory as time went on. It's a pity Malcolm didn't live to see it.

But the bigger irony is that if anyone was 'holding the Negro in check' it was Elijah Muhammad, who counseled blacks to refrain from political action of any kind, including voting. (In this he was like white religious leaders such as Jerry Falwell, who in the same era counseled his flock to avoid such worldly activity.) One reason Malcolm came into conflict with his mentor, on Marable's account, was that he kept straining at the leash, unable to refrain from building connections with black groups working actively against racism in the north and elsewhere. And despite the Nation's rhetorical appeal to violence, when it came down to brass tacks Muhammad had no stomach for it. (Not unreasonably, since blacks were outgunned by the white state.) When white police in Los Angeles murdered an unarmed Muslim named Ronald Stokes while raiding a mosque in 1962, Muhammad ordered his followers to "stand down" (208), to Malcolm's shock.

The time had come for action, and surely Muhammad would see the necessity in summoning the Nation's strength for the battle. But the Messenger denied him. "Brother, you don't go to war over a provocation," he told Malcolm. "They could kill a few of my followers, but I'm not going to go out and do something silly" [208].

On the other hand, Muhammad could stomach Muslim violence against his own. The Fruit of Islam (FOI), the Nation's paramilitary wing, regularly beat and terrorized members who misbehaved or dissented, culminating in the execution of Malcolm himself. The police tended to unconcern about these peccadilloes, as about black-on-black violence generally, and Marable says there is evidence that some FOI higher-ups -- including, possibly, one of the assassins -- were police informants.

In the end, Marable can't make up his own mind. On the same page, he writes first that "To Malcolm, armed self-defense was never equated with violence for its own sake" (485); two paragraphs later, that Malcolm "had also come to reject violence for its own sake, but he never abandoned the nationalists' ideal of 'self-determination" (485-6). And:

Given the election of Barack Obama, it now raises the question of whether blacks have a separate political destiny from their white fellow citizens. If legal racial segregation was permanently in America's past, Malcolm's vision today would have to radically define self-determination and the meaning of black power in a political environment that appeared to many to be "post-racial" [486].

Even in the 1960s, the existence of de facto, as opposed to de jure (that is, legal) racial segregation was recognized. The notion that the mere removal of Jim Crow laws automatically eradicated racism in America is beloved of many whites -- "You've got your rights, so what more do you want from us?" -- but most blacks know better. I don't think the current political environment is "post-racial" by any stretch of the imagination; the election of Barack Obama certainly doesn't make it so. "Many" would agree with me.

England's Green and Pleasant Land

I drove down to Kentucky this weekend for a relative's birthday, so I heard a lot more corporate-media news on the radio than I usually do. There were several references to the London riots, of course, and I was struck (though not surprised) by the spin that the newscasters usually took: the rioters were just a bunch of bored kids who'd had too long a summer. Not a word about the ongoing police violence that killed 333 people between 1998 and 2010 without a single police officer being convicted, or about the peaceful protests about this and other issues that were ignored. Richard Seymour linked to a photo of the gun that killed Mark Duggan, and as he said, "That gun is a beast. It's designed to decimate flesh. Police use these weapons on citizens. The idea that they haven't got enough weapons or powers is fueled by a juvenile revenge fantasy, not reality."



RWA1, of course, rose to the occasion with rants about the decline of the social contract and a link to this Wall Street Journal op-ed piece by Theodore Dalrymple:

The youth of Britain have long placed a de facto curfew on the old, who in most places would no more think of venturing forth after dark than would peasants in Bram Stoker's Transylvania. Indeed, well before the riots last week, respectable persons would not venture into the centers of most British cities or towns on Friday and Saturday nights, for fear—and in the certainty—of encountering drunken and aggressive youngsters.

And so on. This is disturbing, all right, and indicates serious problems with English society. But I can't help wondering how to square Dalrymple's account with the facts of 333 people killed in police custody. (One hundred of that number were killed between April 2004 and March 2005. Which, I suppose, is the tip of the iceberg, with more people beaten or otherwise injured by the police but who didn't die. And then there are the times when the police are the rioters.) Dalrymple doesn't even mention Mark Duggan; nor does he mention that the police initially lied about the circumstances, claiming falsely that Duggan shot first (the bullet they produced as evidence turned out to be a police bullet). There can be numerous explanations for this situation -- maybe the police prefer to dodge the mobs of hooligans and only assault isolated individuals they can safely gang up on. But anyone who wants to explain or understand what has happened in England in the past weeks is going to have to take the whole picture into account, instead of playing the old geezer chasing the kids off his lawn. The social contract (for which the Right has no use anyway) in England was already shredded, by the Tories and New Labour, long before this summer's riots. Quoth Dalrymple:

The reason for this is clear: The young unemployed Britons not only have the wrong attitude to work, for example regarding fixed hours as a form of oppression, but they are also dramatically badly educated. Within six months of arrival in the country, the average young Pole speaks better, more cultivated English than they do.

The rest of the piece is more of the same. Maybe English education has always been terrible; obviously Dalrymple sees education as a process of domestication for youth, preparing them for "fixed hours" and other regimentation. That is certainly how conservatives in the US see it. But again, not a word about police violence or other forms of repression that have always been part of English life.



I also wonder how long English youth have been terrorizing the English old. Dalrymple claims it's "long," which might mean "since last week," or "since the Norman invasion," or any number of points between. Alexander Cockburn commented on this kind of nostalgia at Counterpunch over the weekend, quoting first from the writer Gavin Mortimer:

In October 1940 Winston Churchill ordered the arrest and conviction of six London firemen caught looting from a burned-out shop to be hushed up by Herbert Morrison, his Home Secretary. The Prime Minister feared that if the story was made public it would further dishearten Londoners struggling to cope with the daily bombardments…



The looting was often carried out by gangs of children organized by a Fagin figure; he would send them into bombed-out houses the morning after a raid with orders to target coins from gas meters and display cases containing First World War medals. In April 1941 Lambeth juvenile court dealt with 42 children in one day, from teenage girls caught stripping clothes from dead bodies to a seven-year-old boy who had stolen five shillings from the gas meter of a damaged house. In total, juvenile crime accounted for 48 per cent of all arrests in the nine months between September 1940 and May 1941 and there were 4,584 cases of looting.

So much for the romance of the Blitz. Cockburn goes on to point out that

The riots in London last week started in Tottenham in an area with the highest unemployment in London, in response to the police shooting a young black man, in a country where black people are 26 times more likely to stopped and searched by the cops than whites. Stop-and-searches are allowed under Section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, introduced to deal with football hooligans. It allows police to search anyone in a designated area without specific grounds for suspicion. Use of Section 60 has risen more than 300 per cent between 2005 and last year. In 1997/98 there were 7,970 stop-and-searches, increasing to 53,250 in 2007/08 and 149,955 in 2008/09. Between 2005/06 and 2008/09 the number of Section 60 searches of black people rose by more than 650 per cent.

Again, it's hard to square this with Dalyrmple's account of drunken, aggressive youth controlling the streets. The kindest thing I can say is that it must be oversimple. But maybe it's only white youth who are the problem?



The best commentary I've seen on the riots has been at Lenin's Tomb. He does his own satire of certain mainstream reactions:

I remember a time when a copper could clip a young fellow round the ear and send him on his way. I remember a time when the most violent thing in the charts was the Foxtrot, when nuns rode to morning service on bicycles, while mist rose from the countryside. And I remember when rioters had some respect, and some principles. Not like today's mob. ... The decent working class values of old - hard graft, family, community, and a good kick up the arse - have been replaced by the values of the Carphone Warehouse. 'Greed is good' is the slogan upon which these feral yobs have been raised. They are Thatcherites. That is why they should have their benefits taken away, and they should be reported to the police, conscripted, and deported. It never did me any harm... (Contd, p. 94, and ad infinitum).

His post on "The competing common senses of the riots" is worth a read, as is his comment on a Tory historian's attempt to clear space on the frontiers of old-fashioned English racism, and on reports of racist vigilantism in Enfield. (Brit racism in high places is nothing new, of course.)



I had some entertaining exchanges on Facebook under some linked articles about the riots, with people who accused anyone who disagreed with them of supporting riots and looting. I kept hammering back: I don't support rioting, but I don't support state violence either. They clearly are just fine with repressive reaction, I suppose because they don't imagine that the boot might ever come down on their necks. But that's not really the issue, is it? Part of ethics (it seems to me) is that you condemn wrongness even when it doesn't directly affect you. Too many people are just fine with police violence, even random execution-style slayings like the one that killed Mark Duggan.

England's Green and Pleasant Land

I drove down to Kentucky this weekend for a relative's birthday, so I heard a lot more corporate-media news on the radio than I usually do. There were several references to the London riots, of course, and I was struck (though not surprised) by the spin that the newscasters usually took: the rioters were just a bunch of bored kids who'd had too long a summer. Not a word about the ongoing police violence that killed 333 people between 1998 and 2010 without a single police officer being convicted, or about the peaceful protests about this and other issues that were ignored. Richard Seymour linked to a photo of the gun that killed Mark Duggan, and as he said, "That gun is a beast. It's designed to decimate flesh. Police use these weapons on citizens. The idea that they haven't got enough weapons or powers is fueled by a juvenile revenge fantasy, not reality."



RWA1, of course, rose to the occasion with rants about the decline of the social contract and a link to this Wall Street Journal op-ed piece by Theodore Dalrymple:

The youth of Britain have long placed a de facto curfew on the old, who in most places would no more think of venturing forth after dark than would peasants in Bram Stoker's Transylvania. Indeed, well before the riots last week, respectable persons would not venture into the centers of most British cities or towns on Friday and Saturday nights, for fear—and in the certainty—of encountering drunken and aggressive youngsters.

And so on. This is disturbing, all right, and indicates serious problems with English society. But I can't help wondering how to square Dalrymple's account with the facts of 333 people killed in police custody. (One hundred of that number were killed between April 2004 and March 2005. Which, I suppose, is the tip of the iceberg, with more people beaten or otherwise injured by the police but who didn't die. And then there are the times when the police are the rioters.) Dalrymple doesn't even mention Mark Duggan; nor does he mention that the police initially lied about the circumstances, claiming falsely that Duggan shot first (the bullet they produced as evidence turned out to be a police bullet). There can be numerous explanations for this situation -- maybe the police prefer to dodge the mobs of hooligans and only assault isolated individuals they can safely gang up on. But anyone who wants to explain or understand what has happened in England in the past weeks is going to have to take the whole picture into account, instead of playing the old geezer chasing the kids off his lawn. The social contract (for which the Right has no use anyway) in England was already shredded, by the Tories and New Labour, long before this summer's riots. Quoth Dalrymple:

The reason for this is clear: The young unemployed Britons not only have the wrong attitude to work, for example regarding fixed hours as a form of oppression, but they are also dramatically badly educated. Within six months of arrival in the country, the average young Pole speaks better, more cultivated English than they do.

The rest of the piece is more of the same. Maybe English education has always been terrible; obviously Dalrymple sees education as a process of domestication for youth, preparing them for "fixed hours" and other regimentation. That is certainly how conservatives in the US see it. But again, not a word about police violence or other forms of repression that have always been part of English life.



I also wonder how long English youth have been terrorizing the English old. Dalrymple claims it's "long," which might mean "since last week," or "since the Norman invasion," or any number of points between. Alexander Cockburn commented on this kind of nostalgia at Counterpunch over the weekend, quoting first from the writer Gavin Mortimer:

In October 1940 Winston Churchill ordered the arrest and conviction of six London firemen caught looting from a burned-out shop to be hushed up by Herbert Morrison, his Home Secretary. The Prime Minister feared that if the story was made public it would further dishearten Londoners struggling to cope with the daily bombardments…



The looting was often carried out by gangs of children organized by a Fagin figure; he would send them into bombed-out houses the morning after a raid with orders to target coins from gas meters and display cases containing First World War medals. In April 1941 Lambeth juvenile court dealt with 42 children in one day, from teenage girls caught stripping clothes from dead bodies to a seven-year-old boy who had stolen five shillings from the gas meter of a damaged house. In total, juvenile crime accounted for 48 per cent of all arrests in the nine months between September 1940 and May 1941 and there were 4,584 cases of looting.

So much for the romance of the Blitz. Cockburn goes on to point out that

The riots in London last week started in Tottenham in an area with the highest unemployment in London, in response to the police shooting a young black man, in a country where black people are 26 times more likely to stopped and searched by the cops than whites. Stop-and-searches are allowed under Section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, introduced to deal with football hooligans. It allows police to search anyone in a designated area without specific grounds for suspicion. Use of Section 60 has risen more than 300 per cent between 2005 and last year. In 1997/98 there were 7,970 stop-and-searches, increasing to 53,250 in 2007/08 and 149,955 in 2008/09. Between 2005/06 and 2008/09 the number of Section 60 searches of black people rose by more than 650 per cent.

Again, it's hard to square this with Dalyrmple's account of drunken, aggressive youth controlling the streets. The kindest thing I can say is that it must be oversimple. But maybe it's only white youth who are the problem?



The best commentary I've seen on the riots has been at Lenin's Tomb. He does his own satire of certain mainstream reactions:

I remember a time when a copper could clip a young fellow round the ear and send him on his way. I remember a time when the most violent thing in the charts was the Foxtrot, when nuns rode to morning service on bicycles, while mist rose from the countryside. And I remember when rioters had some respect, and some principles. Not like today's mob. ... The decent working class values of old - hard graft, family, community, and a good kick up the arse - have been replaced by the values of the Carphone Warehouse. 'Greed is good' is the slogan upon which these feral yobs have been raised. They are Thatcherites. That is why they should have their benefits taken away, and they should be reported to the police, conscripted, and deported. It never did me any harm... (Contd, p. 94, and ad infinitum).

His post on "The competing common senses of the riots" is worth a read, as is his comment on a Tory historian's attempt to clear space on the frontiers of old-fashioned English racism, and on reports of racist vigilantism in Enfield. (Brit racism in high places is nothing new, of course.)



I had some entertaining exchanges on Facebook under some linked articles about the riots, with people who accused anyone who disagreed with them of supporting riots and looting. I kept hammering back: I don't support rioting, but I don't support state violence either. They clearly are just fine with repressive reaction, I suppose because they don't imagine that the boot might ever come down on their necks. But that's not really the issue, is it? Part of ethics (it seems to me) is that you condemn wrongness even when it doesn't directly affect you. Too many people are just fine with police violence, even random execution-style slayings like the one that killed Mark Duggan.

Public Displays of Affection

Wounded (Graywolf Press, 1995) is the second novel I've read by Percival Everett; the first was Erasure (University Press of New England, 2001). Erasure had caught my eye in the library: it's about an African-American novelist who usually writes highly abstruse fiction, but after being offended by what he considers a stereotype-reinforcing novel of urban black life by a young woman whose exposure to such life consisted of a few days in Harlem, he writes a parody of the genre that becomes a best-seller and forces him to come to grapple with white American racism and African-American self-caricature. It was a good read but not enough to drive me to read more of Everett's work, until I heard somewhere that Wounded had a gay protagonist. The novelist in Erasure had a gay brother whom Everett treated fairly well, so my curiosity was whetted.



Maybe I misunderstood my source, because the protagonist of Wounded isn't gay. The protagonist is John Hunt, a widowed, fortyish black rancher and horse trainer who lives with his elderly uncle Gus in Arizona near the Red Desert. Hunt and his uncle are the only blacks in the area, but they've lived there a long time and the white community have apparently accepted them. But then a gay college student is murdered, the case gets national attention, some college students come to town to stage a protest about it, and a few local bigots begin flexing their muscles. There are threats against the Indians in the area, and various racial and gay-related epithets are tossed around.



Among the students who come for the rally are David, the son of Hunt's best friend from his college days at Berkeley, and his boyfriend Robert. Robert is scornful of the small town and has other issues as well; he's more defiant and even combative, and expresses it by small demonstrative gestures toward David -- pecks on the lips, holding hands -- that are interpreted by Hunt and some other characters as provocations. (I'll come back to that in a moment.) Meanwhile, Hunt becomes involved with Morgan, another horse-lover who had been a teacher but came home to care for her ailing mother. David decides to stay and go to work for Hunt, which leads to a confrontion with his father, Hunt's friend Howard, and Hunt sees a side of his friend that bothers him.



Now, I'm not sure that any of the characters who react negatively to Robert and David's public displays of affection represent the author's view of them. Duncan Camp, an old local friend of Hunt's, is one of them, and he turns out not to be quite the paragon of tolerance he thinks he is. John Hunt himself is bothered by the PDAs, but I think he begins to realize that his discomfort is related to, if not caused by, the cautious way he has learned to carry himself as a black man in a small Western town. Some might consider Hunt an oreo because of his Berkeley education in art history, to say nothing of his having attended Philips Exeter Academy before that, but he knows very well he's a black man in a white society, and when he comes up against racism he stands up to it. Despite the prominence of the gay strand in the story, Wounded is just as much about race.



It's the issue of affection between men in public that made me decide to write about Wounded here, though. I think that Everett's decision to make David's boyfriend Robert so unsympathetic generally loaded the dice. Same-sex couples must always calculate the risk they engage by doing what heterosexuals do freely: touch each other affectionately in public. Even many gays get their pants in a bunch over same-sex affection in public. As a result, those of us who do decide to hold hands or kiss lightly can't do such things thoughtlessly, unselfconsciously; we have to be alert to threats from the environment. Except in urban enclaves, even the most innocuous expression of affection is never pure: it's also an act of defiance. Because of this, heterosexuals are often easier about same-sex touching in public than most gays are able to be. It's the awareness of this fact that keeps me angry forty years after I came out -- not constantly, not disablingly, but ready to slap down bigotry whenever it rears its head around me. (There have been people who've accused me, more or less playfully, of going looking for bigotry. Believe me, I don't have to go looking for it -- it comes looking for me.)



I've avoided saying too much about what happens in Wounded -- it has a lot more going on than I've sketched here -- but I think that anyone who reads it with any care will agree that Percival Everett knew very well what he was doing. He writes about black characters who don't want to be confined by white America's assumptions about what black people should be like, and that's not capitulation to racism, it's resistance.

Public Displays of Affection

Wounded (Graywolf Press, 1995) is the second novel I've read by Percival Everett; the first was Erasure (University Press of New England, 2001). Erasure had caught my eye in the library: it's about an African-American novelist who usually writes highly abstruse fiction, but after being offended by what he considers a stereotype-reinforcing novel of urban black life by a young woman whose exposure to such life consisted of a few days in Harlem, he writes a parody of the genre that becomes a best-seller and forces him to come to grapple with white American racism and African-American self-caricature. It was a good read but not enough to drive me to read more of Everett's work, until I heard somewhere that Wounded had a gay protagonist. The novelist in Erasure had a gay brother whom Everett treated fairly well, so my curiosity was whetted.



Maybe I misunderstood my source, because the protagonist of Wounded isn't gay. The protagonist is John Hunt, a widowed, fortyish black rancher and horse trainer who lives with his elderly uncle Gus in Arizona near the Red Desert. Hunt and his uncle are the only blacks in the area, but they've lived there a long time and the white community have apparently accepted them. But then a gay college student is murdered, the case gets national attention, some college students come to town to stage a protest about it, and a few local bigots begin flexing their muscles. There are threats against the Indians in the area, and various racial and gay-related epithets are tossed around.



Among the students who come for the rally are David, the son of Hunt's best friend from his college days at Berkeley, and his boyfriend Robert. Robert is scornful of the small town and has other issues as well; he's more defiant and even combative, and expresses it by small demonstrative gestures toward David -- pecks on the lips, holding hands -- that are interpreted by Hunt and some other characters as provocations. (I'll come back to that in a moment.) Meanwhile, Hunt becomes involved with Morgan, another horse-lover who had been a teacher but came home to care for her ailing mother. David decides to stay and go to work for Hunt, which leads to a confrontion with his father, Hunt's friend Howard, and Hunt sees a side of his friend that bothers him.



Now, I'm not sure that any of the characters who react negatively to Robert and David's public displays of affection represent the author's view of them. Duncan Camp, an old local friend of Hunt's, is one of them, and he turns out not to be quite the paragon of tolerance he thinks he is. John Hunt himself is bothered by the PDAs, but I think he begins to realize that his discomfort is related to, if not caused by, the cautious way he has learned to carry himself as a black man in a small Western town. Some might consider Hunt an oreo because of his Berkeley education in art history, to say nothing of his having attended Philips Exeter Academy before that, but he knows very well he's a black man in a white society, and when he comes up against racism he stands up to it. Despite the prominence of the gay strand in the story, Wounded is just as much about race.



It's the issue of affection between men in public that made me decide to write about Wounded here, though. I think that Everett's decision to make David's boyfriend Robert so unsympathetic generally loaded the dice. Same-sex couples must always calculate the risk they engage by doing what heterosexuals do freely: touch each other affectionately in public. Even many gays get their pants in a bunch over same-sex affection in public. As a result, those of us who do decide to hold hands or kiss lightly can't do such things thoughtlessly, unselfconsciously; we have to be alert to threats from the environment. Except in urban enclaves, even the most innocuous expression of affection is never pure: it's also an act of defiance. Because of this, heterosexuals are often easier about same-sex touching in public than most gays are able to be. It's the awareness of this fact that keeps me angry forty years after I came out -- not constantly, not disablingly, but ready to slap down bigotry whenever it rears its head around me. (There have been people who've accused me, more or less playfully, of going looking for bigotry. Believe me, I don't have to go looking for it -- it comes looking for me.)



I've avoided saying too much about what happens in Wounded -- it has a lot more going on than I've sketched here -- but I think that anyone who reads it with any care will agree that Percival Everett knew very well what he was doing. He writes about black characters who don't want to be confined by white America's assumptions about what black people should be like, and that's not capitulation to racism, it's resistance.

American Exceptionalism -- The More It Changes ...

I'm reading Bruce Cumings's The Korean War: A History (The Modern Library, 2010), and will probably have some more to say about it as I go along. (If I don't get even further behind in my writing than I am already, that is.)

For now, though, I'm struck by the enduring inability of many educated Americans -- not what my RWA1 calls the "yahoos," but, y'know, real people! -- to recognize that people in other countries have interests of their own, just like we do. Cumings quotes several appalling bits from "the respected military editor of The New York Times, Hanson Baldwin," writing during the war.

Somewhat uncomfortable with North Korean indignation about "women and children slain by American bombs," Baldwin went on to say that Koreans must understand that "we do not come merely to bring devastation." Americans must convince "these simple, primitive, and barbaric peoples ... that we -- not the Communists -- are their friends." Now hear the chief counsel for war crimes at the Nuremberg Trials, Telford Taylor:

The traditions and practices of warfare in the Orient are not identical with those that have developed in the Occident ... individual lives are not valued so highly in Eastern mores. And it is totally unrealistic of us to expect the individual Korean soldier ... to follow our most elevated precepts of warfare [26].

Bear in mind, first, that when Taylor wrote of "the individual Korean soldier", he meant the individual South Korean soldier more than the individual North soldier. I doubt he meant to exculpate the brutal Commies of their atrocities on the grounds that it was unrealistic to expect them to "follow our most elevated precepts of warfare."

Second, it was not the Koreans but the Americans who leveled the North at Douglas MacArthur's orders. "Soon George Barrett of The New York Times found 'a macabre tribute to the totality of modern war' in a village north of Anyang" [30], in a scene that echoes Pompeii, maybe intentionally:

The inhabitants through throughout the village and in the fields were caught and killed and kept the exact postures they held when the napalm struck -- a man about to get on his bicycle, fifty boys and girls playing in an orphanage, a housewife strangely unmarked, holding in her hand a page torn from a Sears-Roebuck catalogue crayoned at Mail Order No. 3,811,294 for a $2.98 "betwitching bed jacket -- coral."

"Secretary of State Dean Acheson wanted censorship authorities notified about this kind of 'sensationalist reporting,' so it could be stopped."

But you know, Americans consider life cheap, as long as it's not American life. Individual lives are not valued so highly in American mores. As a result we can hardly expect the individual American soldier to follow our most elevated precepts of warfare ... You could transpose so much of these stories into contemporary Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, and they'd fit all too well.

American Exceptionalism -- The More It Changes ...

I'm reading Bruce Cumings's The Korean War: A History (The Modern Library, 2010), and will probably have some more to say about it as I go along. (If I don't get even further behind in my writing than I am already, that is.)

For now, though, I'm struck by the enduring inability of many educated Americans -- not what my RWA1 calls the "yahoos," but, y'know, real people! -- to recognize that people in other countries have interests of their own, just like we do. Cumings quotes several appalling bits from "the respected military editor of The New York Times, Hanson Baldwin," writing during the war.

Somewhat uncomfortable with North Korean indignation about "women and children slain by American bombs," Baldwin went on to say that Koreans must understand that "we do not come merely to bring devastation." Americans must convince "these simple, primitive, and barbaric peoples ... that we -- not the Communists -- are their friends." Now hear the chief counsel for war crimes at the Nuremberg Trials, Telford Taylor:

The traditions and practices of warfare in the Orient are not identical with those that have developed in the Occident ... individual lives are not valued so highly in Eastern mores. And it is totally unrealistic of us to expect the individual Korean soldier ... to follow our most elevated precepts of warfare [26].

Bear in mind, first, that when Taylor wrote of "the individual Korean soldier", he meant the individual South Korean soldier more than the individual North soldier. I doubt he meant to exculpate the brutal Commies of their atrocities on the grounds that it was unrealistic to expect them to "follow our most elevated precepts of warfare."

Second, it was not the Koreans but the Americans who leveled the North at Douglas MacArthur's orders. "Soon George Barrett of The New York Times found 'a macabre tribute to the totality of modern war' in a village north of Anyang" [30], in a scene that echoes Pompeii, maybe intentionally:

The inhabitants through throughout the village and in the fields were caught and killed and kept the exact postures they held when the napalm struck -- a man about to get on his bicycle, fifty boys and girls playing in an orphanage, a housewife strangely unmarked, holding in her hand a page torn from a Sears-Roebuck catalogue crayoned at Mail Order No. 3,811,294 for a $2.98 "betwitching bed jacket -- coral."

"Secretary of State Dean Acheson wanted censorship authorities notified about this kind of 'sensationalist reporting,' so it could be stopped."

But you know, Americans consider life cheap, as long as it's not American life. Individual lives are not valued so highly in American mores. As a result we can hardly expect the individual American soldier to follow our most elevated precepts of warfare ... You could transpose so much of these stories into contemporary Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, and they'd fit all too well.