Battle of Cold Harbor, by Kurz & Allison, 1888. (Public Domain).
“There’s decent white folk, they still don’t know they’re racist. You got black folks, white folks who go to the doctor and say to their doctor, “If you find cancer, don’t tell me about it.” That’s what white folks do. They’re in a state of denial and don’t know it.” -Dick Gregory, August 7, 2016
“[T]he Civil War is still going on. It’s still to be fought. And regrettably it can still be lost.” –Barbara J. Fields, Historian, quoted in Ken Burns’ documentary The Civil War, 1990
“Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced,” –James Baldwin
I’m going to tell the story of the United States of America as a morality play in four paragraphs. By way of full disclosure, in the abbreviated tale below I am a partisan of Team Enlightenment. Here we go.
The American founding fathers were enamored of the bold modern moral and political ideas of their age–the Age of Enlightenment. Many of those ideas–republican government, religious tolerance, separation of church and state, liberty conceived as personal autonomy, equality and human rights conceived universally–are reflected in the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, and the United States Constitution. In a very real sense the United States of America is an artifact of the Enlightenment and a living experiment in putting its aspirational principles into practice.
These same founding fathers, however, were also wealthy, white, slave-owning, settler-colonists who, collectively speaking, weren’t about to sacrifice the advantages and privileges of their station for moral progress. So they incorporated these privileges and advantages into the Constitution as well. The resulting compromised document, ordained and established “in order to form a more perfect union,” resulted instead in a less than perfect union. If “all men are created equal,” and “endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights,” as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution made it clear that only white men would be recognized as ‘men’. Slaves of African ancestry, America’s indigenous peoples, and all women would be excluded from the club.
This imperfect union has thus been burdened from its inception with two conflicting and wholly incompatible visions of America, with partisans aligned behind each one. One vision, inspired by the Enlightenment, imagines a republic of free and equal citizens committed to championing universal human rights. The other vision, inspired by white supremacy, imagines a nation dedicated to defending the exclusive rights and interests of propertied white men.
One vision, inspired by the Enlightenment, imagines a republic of free and equal citizens committed to championing universal human rights. The other vision, inspired by white supremacy, imagines a nation dedicated to defending the exclusive rights and interests of propertied white men.
By their very nature these competing visions cannot peacefully co-exist. We sacrificed more than 600,000 American lives to the sausage grinder of Civil War in an attempt to resolve this incompatibility. And yet both of these conflicting visions of America persist to this day. For many years it appeared as though “the better angels of our nature” were slowly but surely winning. At this point, however, it’s anybody’s guess which vision will prevail in the end. This is a recent revelation to me, by the way. We’ll get to that in a moment. As Barbara J. Fields notes in the epigrammatic quote that opens this essay, the Civil is still going on, and regrettably it can still be lost.
Imagine for a moment that you are writing a screenplay that dramatizes the current status of the American morality play I’ve just described for a Hollywood blockbuster. Let’s assume also that you subscribe to the Steven Spielberg school of screenwriting. You apply symbolism heavy-handedly, bludgeoning your audience with your main points, because you deeply mistrust the average American audience’s ability to grasp subtlety and nuance. In this imagined screenwriting scenario you might choose to dramatize the battle for the very soul of America taking place between these two long-warring factions in a Sharks v. Jets style gang brawl. To really drive home your point, maybe you have this brawl take place under a statue of Thomas Jefferson, the slave-owning hero of the Enlightenment who, together with his fellow founding fathers, helped give rise to the conflict of vision in the first place: Well guess what? This actually happened. Not in a movie, but on the Campus of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville on August 11th, 2017.
Surely you recall the events of the white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally back in August (I wrote about it here). It was ostensibly organized as a protest against the removal of a Confederate memorial (a statue of General Robert E. Lee) from a Charlottesville city park. The “pre-game show,” which I allude to above, began on Friday night of August 11th on the campus of the University of Virginia when a small army of young, white, tiki torch-wielding, polo-and-khaki-clad, preppy-nazis brazenly chanted “blood and soil,” “Jews will not replace us,” and various other nazi slogans. As I’ve already noted, they capped off the evening with a brawl with counter-protesters under a statue of University of Virginia founder, Declaration of Independence author, and 3rd president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson.
On Saturday events took a turn for the worse. We learned that hundreds of nazis, Ku Klux Klansman, and other white supremacist elements had crawled out from under rocks all over the country to converge on Charlottesville in a grand show of white power. Add to this volatile cocktail several armed-to-the-teeth right-wing militias, reputedly there to use the second amendment to defend the free speech portion of the first, parading about like a third-world warlord’s private army readying itself to replace the local democratically elected government with a military junta in the event that things went sideways in a fashion not to their liking. It was an incredibly unsettling spectacle to watch unfold.
Unsurprisingly, this cacophony of American shame turned deadly violent, culminating in the murder of 32-year-old Heather Heyer who died after a 20-year-old aspiring nazi from Ohio rammed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters.
In our Hollywood blockbuster morality play scenario do you know what role I played? I was the dim American moviegoer that Spielberg mistrusts. Once I was bludgeoned over the head with the point it suddenly really began to sink in for me. It embarrasses me to admit this, but it’s true. I had the audacity to be shocked. And I know I’m not alone in experiencing this shock. In what follows I’m going to attempt to at least take the first steps towards attempting to understand how this was possible.
Invasion of the White Supremacists
This first flaming turd of a year since Donald Trump was elected president has provided a seemingly unending parade of racist horrors. To cite but a few examples: the Muslim travel ban, the promise to build a Mexican border wall, the appointment of a race-baiting Breitbart propagandist (Steve Bannon) to the cabinet together with his neo-nazi sidekick Stephen Miller, the racially charged presidential tweets, white supremacist ‘speakers’ race-baiting students on college campuses under the guise of “defending free speech”, and the various white nationalist rallies, marches, and protests that have occurred across the nation. At an even more fundamental level there is the simple fact that the infamous “birther” candidate ran on an openly white supremacist platform and was elected! Rather than unpack what all of that portends here and now, I instead refer you to (and strongly recommend that you read) Ta-Nahesi Coats’ brilliantly argued essay, The First White President.
The message is quite clear and obvious. There are nazis among us. American nazis. I know this. I see this. It’s even struck close to home for me personally. In May a violent white supremacist stabbed three men in the neck on a MAX train in Portland, Oregon, killing two of them. These men were defending two teenage girls, both of them black, one wearing hijab, who were being menaced by this white supremacist for not belonging here, for not being “Americans”. The murders happened 15 minutes prior to my afternoon commute on the route I ride to and from work five days a week. Yet even after this I watched the white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally unfold as though I were a character in the sci-fi horror film Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Are you familiar with Invasion of the Body Snatchers? It’s a 1956 American sci-fi horror film about a doctor in a small California town who uncovers a stealthy alien invasion. Extraterrestrial spores grow into large plant-like pods, each of which contains an identical replica of one the townsfolk. When each of the townsfolk fall asleep, their alien replica hatches out of a pod and ‘replaces’ them, body-for-body, and assumes their everyday life routine. A slow, quiet, alien invasion progresses in this fashion. More and more of the townsfolk are replaced by alien “pod people” with each passing night, and the remaining townsfolk are none the wiser because the “pod people” look and behave just like the townsfolk they’ve replaced–except that they’re cold, blank, and emotionless.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers is widely recognized as an exemplar of Cold War era “red scare” cinema. The slow, barely perceptible replacement of honest, decent, God-fearing Americans with cold, emotionless, zombiesque ‘pod people’ is a metaphor for communism slowly and secretly colonizing the hearts and minds of Americans.
This is how I experienced Charlottesville. “Holy shit!” I thought, “the whole country is crawling with fucking nazis!” Crawling with nazis, like some alien invasion, like they’d suddenly materialized out of thin air, like someone or some thing had replaced average, mainstream American white people with replicas that look exactly like average, mainstream American white people, except that they’re nazis. It sounds incredibly stupid in retrospect.
“Holy shit!” I thought, “the whole country is crawling with fucking nazis!”
There is something that distinguishes the Unite the Right rally from many of the other disturbingly racist occurrences of the past year–something I think that this Invasion of the Body Snatchers analogy sheds a bit of light on. It’s not surprising to me that Donald Trump is a white supremacist, or Steve Bannon, or Stephen Miller. It’s not surprising to me that there are right wing politicians who support racist political agendas. But the Unite the Right rally wasn’t a ‘government event’. These weren’t the actions of politicians in Washington DC. These were American citizens. Moreover, particularly on Friday night many of these Americans didn’t exactly look the part of your garden variety redneck Klansmen or swastika-tattooed neo-Nazi extremists (although that ilk showed up in number the next day). They looked like clean cut, middle class college students on their way to a fraternity party. They looked like nice boys (mostly boys)–except that they were nazis. This is, I think, where much of the shock lies. It lies in the realization that white supremacy is quite mainstream.
Donald Trump didn’t conjure all of these white supremacists out of thin air. They’ve obviously been here all along, like a massive terrorist sleeper cell lying in wait in the American heartland, suddenly emboldened by their racist daddy president to show themselves for who they really are. And as for me? I clearly don’t understand white America, despite the fact I was born and raised in it. And clearly I’m not the only one.
Oh My God! I Think America is Racist!
One of the ways I know that I am not alone in experiencing this naive shock about white supremacist America is because a very similar mass-phenomenon had occurred nine months earlier on the night of November 8th, 2016. I’m of course referring to the night we all learned that Donald Trump was elected president. Millions of us were positively gobsmacked. I’m speaking here especially about white liberals. I spent election night at a party with friends. We’d all gathered together to eat and drink and celebrate the election of the first woman president, which polling statistic Wunderkind Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight fame had reassuringly predicted would be a landslide victory so large that it would likely destroy the Republican party for a generation. I don’t have to tell you how that party ended. Many of you were at the same party.
Shortly after the election Saturday Night Live did a parody sketch about that party, featuring guest appearances by Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock. The conceit of that sketch is that all of the liberal white people at the party are utterly stunned by Trump’s victory, but the two African American men at the party (Chappell and Rock) aren’t surprised in the least.
In one of the highlights of that sketch, when it occurs to her that Trump is going to win, a liberal white character played by Cecily Strong, in a moment of epiphany, blurts out the painfully obvious: “Oh my God! I think America is racist!” Adopting a tone of mock surprise, Dave Chappelle sarcastically retorts: “Oh my God! You know, I remember my great grandfather told me something like that. But you know, he was like a slave or something. So I don’t know.”
Just prior to this revelation, Cecily Strong’s character asks in frustration, “Why are women even voting for [Trump]?” And Chris Rock replies, “I don’t get you ladies. I mean the country’s 55% women. I mean, if the country was 55% black? Well we’d have tons of black presidents. Flavor Flav would be president!” The sting behind this joke, of course, is the fact that rather than supporting the election of the first woman president, 53% of white women voted for Donald Trump–a man who ran openly as a white nationalist candidate.
I mean the country’s 55% women. I mean, if the country was 55% black? Well we’d have tons of black presidents.
We all laugh at this sketch, not because it’s funny, but because it reveals an outrageous truth. We laugh in the sense that, as Søren Kierkegaard one described, laughter is sometimes another form of crying. The white liberals are blind and deluded about something that African Americans can see quite clearly.
Ignorance as Privilege
We’ve all heard plenty of stories (especially this year) about people suddenly getting woke–like they took The Matrix’s red pill and suddenly understand what’s really going on. But why were they asleep to begin with?
I appreciate that people (myself included) in contemporary capitalist consumer culture are well conditioned by media, advertising, and (to borrow Fredric Jameson’s terminology) the cultural logic of late capitalism to narrow their sphere of concern to themselves and their immediate family and friends. According to this logic, my function in this world is to consume. In place of having a moral compass or broader humanitarian and communal concerns, I am supposed to assess everything in the world from the self-interested point of view of my personal needs and my unique customer experience. Broader social, political, and global issues that don’t immediately affect my narrow sphere of concern are quite literally not my concern.
If American consumer culture under conditions of late capitalism is also functionally a racist culture (as indeed it is), this would go some way towards explaining how the conceit of the SNL sketch I described above works. Because racism impacts the daily lived experience of African Americans and other people of color, they’re intimately aware of the fact that “America is racist.” For white people under the same conditions, racism often rarely penetrates their narrow sphere of concern. It’s only when something shocking enough to penetrate into their narrow world of concern–like the election of a white nationalist billionaire kleptocrat to the presidency of the United States–that they get a glimpse at the larger picture. This is, of course, one of the ways in which white privilege works.
We know that of the people who voted, a majority of white women (53%) and a majority of white men (63%) voted for Trump.
How to explain the terrible syllogism is still quite beyond me, and beyond the scope of the present essay. The syllogism I have in mind is this one:
- We know that of the people who voted, a majority of white women (53%) and a majority of white men (63%) voted for Trump.
- Given that Trump ran openly and unapologetically as a white supremacist, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to conclude that in order to vote for him you’d have to at least “be okay with” white supremacy.
- Therefore…what? You can draw the conclusion as easily as I can Most white voters are cool with white supremacy. Right?
If there is a flaw in this reasoning I’d certainly like to know.
American Apartheid
In the section above I described how we might explain ignorance of the pervasiveness of racism in America as an element of white privilege within a certain post-Marxian conceptual milieu (i.e., the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism). The idea here was that if we acknowledge that late capitalist culture is also a racist culture, certain things follow. But I think it’s an understatement to call American culture a “racist culture.” I want to suggest to you that it is not much of a stretch to say that the United States functions like a racist apartheid state. Granted, the analogy to the South African Apartheid state that existed between 1948 and 1991 certainly isn’t a perfect one. For example, whites are not a minority in the United States. There is nevertheless a strong family resemblance.
I intend to write about American Apartheid in a piece following this one. The reason I mention it now is because we can understand American blindness to racism as a functional by-product of apartheid. More to the point: ignorance about the harsh realities of racism in America is a privilege afforded to white people by America’s long standing system of racial segregation. This is, at any rate, the case that Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton make in their powerful 1993 book American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass.
“As in South Africa, residential segregation in the United States provides a firm basis for a broader system of racial injustice,” Massey and Denton write. “The geographic isolation of Africans within a narrowly circumscribed portion of the urban environment–whether African townships or American ghettos–forces blacks to live under extraordinarily harsh conditions and to endure a social world where poverty is endemic, infrastructure is inadequate, education is lacking, families are fragmented, and crime and violence are rampant. Moreover, segregation confines these unpleasant by-products of racial oppression to an isolated portion of the urban geography far removed from the experience of most whites.”
The New Jim Crow
Finally, in addition to consumerist tunnel visioning of concern and the ongoing legacy of segregated urban environments, the American system of mass incarceration also operates in a way that hides the harsh experiences of racism from America’s racialized white population. Some twenty years ago Angela Davis–herself a former political prisoner–was already noting how a racialized prison industrial complex was being employed to “disappear human beings in order to convey the illusion of solving social problems.” Building on this knowledge, in her 2010 book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander masterfully demonstrates the way in which the war on drugs functions as the New Jim Crow.
Since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 it is no longer permissible to discriminate against people on the basis of race. Since this time the United States has ostensibly become a post-racial, colorblind society. According to mainstream American sensibilities, racism is a thing of the past. We even elected an African American president to “prove” that America is now post-racial and colorblind.
We even elected an African American president to “prove” that America is now post-racial and colorblind.
It is, however, still culturally and politically permissible to discriminate against criminals and hold them morally blameworthy for their sinful life choices. This being the case, and as Alexander convincingly demonstrates, the war on drugs was invented as a way of perpetuating a “racial caste system” in America in a fashion that went unnoticed for years even among organizations dedicated to promoting social justice. You simply arrest young people of color–especially young African American males–and charge them with a drug crime to introduce them to the system of mass incarceration. This has a twofold effect. First, it makes it possible to “warehouse a population deemed disposable–unnecessary to the functioning of the new global economy.” Second, even after this system’s victims are released from prison, they are marked for life with the stigma of “criminal”, and fair game for a lifetime of discrimination in education, employment, housing, and political participation–just like Jim Crow.
Lest we attempt to argue that (to borrow a term coined by Katheryn Russell-Brown) the criminal black man has earned this lot in life, Michelle Alexander demonstrates statistically and quite irrefutably that “these stark racial disparities” in incarceration rates “cannot be explained by rates of drug crime,” that “people of all colors use and sell drugs at remarkably similar rates,” and that “whites, particularly white youth, are more likely to engage in drug crime than people of color.” Despite these statistics, Alexander notes, in some states black men have been admitted to prison for drug crimes at rates “twenty to fifty times greater than those of white men.” That’s systemic racism, my friends. Indeed, as the Prison Policy Initiative notes, according to 2010 census data while African Americans constitute 13% of the U.S. population, they account for 40% of the overall prison population. This simply cannot be accounted for by actual crime rates. This is statistically demonstrable racism.
And while it is true that a portion of poor whites also get victimized in this system, that’s all to the better. It provides “evidence” that the 500% increase in the incarceration rate in America over the last 40 years (the U.S. prison population is over 2.2 Million–more prisoners than any other country on earth) is not racially motivated.
The U.S. prison population is over 2.2 Million–more prisoners than any other country on earth.
We can see then that while we presumably discriminate against criminals but not people of color, because warehousing entire generations of people of color in prison hides the moral, political, and social costs of racism from view, and because we live in an ostensibly (but not really) post-racial, colorblind society, racialized white persons (like myself) might be shocked to discover that America is racist! And even then, only when a group of white people, engaging in their own brand of racist identity politics, begin complaining about what a raw deal they’re getting!
Knowing and Not-Knowing
We might leave it at that, I suppose, and conclude that the reason white people like myself were shocked by Charlottesville is because of our white privilege coupled with our consumer culture tunnel vision, the continuing effects of apartheid-like racial segregation, and the sneaky and underhanded way that our system of mass incarceration reproduces and masks a racial caste system. What’s instructive about this account, to my mind, is that it demonstrates that knowing and understanding are, in important ways, a function of lived experience. There are things I don’t witness or experience, that systemic racism even shields me from witnessing and experiencing, that clearly shape the way I understand the world. And that explanation might be fine and well if I were an otherwise naive or poorly informed person. However, I am not. I know enough to know better. Or so it would appear. To wit:
I know about the three-fifths compromise in the U.S. constitution. I know about the history of American slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil War, and the spectre of Jim Crow. I know about “separate but equal” racial segregation and “whites only” lunch counters, bathrooms, and drinking fountains. I know about Brown v. Board of Education, The Little Rock Nine, the March on Selma, the Watts riots, and MLK’s I Have a Dream speech. I’ve read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I know the War on Drugs disproportionately targets and imprisons people of color (and especially African American males). I know how stop and frisk policing works. I get why it is perilous to be caught “driving while black”. I’ve seen the video of Rodney King being beaten by the police. I saw what happened to Trayvon Martin’s killer. I saw what happened to Michael Brown, and Eric Garner, and Philando Castile. I know what the protests in Ferguson were about. I understand why insisting that Black Lives Matter is not the same thing as insisting that All Lives Matter. I understand why NFL players take the knee during the National Anthem.
All of the ignorance afforded by privilege aside, I’m not so ignorant. Whence, then, this surprise at all of the white supremacists? I know they’re there. I’ve always known. And yet somehow I was shocked to learn that I didn’t know. I’m like some Schrödinger’s cat of American white supremacist awareness. I live in some paradoxical quantum state where I simultaneously understand and do not understand. How does this even make any sense? How does someone with a doctorate in political philosophy fail this badly at honoring the delphic maxim inscribed at the Temple of Apollo: Know Thyself?
States of Denial and Losing the Civil War
One of the epigrammatic quotes at the beginning of this piece is from social activist and comedian Dick Gregory. Gregory describes the fearful patient visiting the doctor who tells the doctor, “If you find cancer, don’t tell me.” He suggests that this is how even well intentioned white folks are where racism is concerned. In Gregory’s view. “They’re in a state of denial and they don’t know it.”
In his 2001 book States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering, criminologist Stanley Cohen describes the Schrödinger’s cat-like paradox of knowing and not knowing that I’ve identified above in the same manner that Dick Gregory does. That is to say, he views it as a species of denial.
“Denial may be neither a matter of telling the truth nor intentionally telling a lie,” Cohen writes. “There seem to be states of mind, or even whole cultures, in which we know and don’t know at the same time.”
Despite training in sociology, Cohen addresses the paradox of denial primarily in psychological terms, beginning with Freud’s fascination with our simultaneous acceptance and disavowal of awkward, unsettling, and disturbing facts of life. “They are too threatening to confront, but impossible to ignore. The compromise solution is to deny and acknowledge them at the same time.” Cohen concludes that far from being some sort of anomalous pathology, denial is human-all-too-human, and an essential coping mechanism of life. “Every personal life and every society,” Cohen writes, “is built on denial.”
“Every personal life and every society,” Cohen writes, “is built on denial.”
For all that, however, Cohen is far from willing to grant excuses–particularly in cases in which we lie to ourselves about something unsettling to preserve the sort of life we think we’re leading. The kinds of denial he addresses are wide ranging, spanning “Alcoholics who refuse to recognize their condition, people who brush aside suspicions of their partner’s infidelity, [and] the wife who doesn’t notice that her husband is abusing their daughter,” to holocaust deniers, and governments and whole cultures that deny genocide, torture, and political massacre.
And yet in the end States of Denial offers no easy or straightforward solutions. Instead, and with no guarantee of success, Cohen simply insists upon the importance for all of us, as individuals and as a society, to continually insist upon acknowledging the past, bearing witness, and dragging what we deny and what we don’t want to see into the light. In the face of atrocities and oppression, and as a check on political abuses and attempts at social control, it’s essential. And although there are no guarantees, Cohen notes that there are plenty of moments in history that “begin imperceptibly” at the individual psychological level and grow until almost like magic “a whole society ‘comes out’ and acknowledges the truth,” and suddenly finds itself ‘living outside the lie.’ While that’s not a lot to hang our hats on, it’s faith in this possibility that Cohen asks that we keep.
In this regard, if we were to place him as a partisan of one of the two visions of America that I described at the start of this essay, Stanley Cohen is clearly a partisan of Team Enlightenment. Indeed, at times he comes off as an Enlightenment modernist crank (after my own heart) railing against “deconstructionists,” the “cultural commodification” of moral relativism, and the postmodern denial of truth–all trends that exacerbate rather than ease our ability to address the paradox of denial. And while I agree wholeheartedly, I also know that if it were as simple as asking everyone to join Team Enlightenment, the Civil War would have been won long ago.
With this in mind I want to close by asking myself what sort of life I thought we were leading–we Americans? What vision of life did I think I was protecting by denying the horrible truth about how powerful and pervasive white supremacy is in America? The answer, it seems, is that I thought we were living a life as free and equal citizens of a democratic republic, committed to the Enlightenment’s principle of universal human rights. I thought we were winning the Civil War.
