Ellen, I really encourage you to read the work of Reva Siegel and Ira Katznelson on these issues. I think that will help to provide you with the empirical depth and theoretical sophistication that can't be readily translated through sound bites.

Posted at April 5, 2008 12:39 AM in response to Why Obama's Critics on the Left are Sputtering

Ellen, I really encourage you to read the work of Reva Siegel and Ira Katznelson. I think that will help to explain in much more historical depth and theoretical sophistication the dynamics that are difficult to compress into digestible sound bites for you.

Posted at April 5, 2008 12:37 AM in response to Why Obama's Critics on the Left are Sputtering

So, Ellen, should we take it that you are completely fine with the current levels of segregation in public schools based on race and class? Right, thought so.

Here's a thought. Let's take all of those good old Northeast cities ringed by suburbs and exurbs, consolidate the school districts, and redraw the lines. No need for long commutes by bus, no need for firing teachers, just redraw the lines so that they cut across the classed/racialized gulfs. Here's another thought. Let's get rid of funding individual local school districts with property taxes. Lots of other nations manage to educate their children competently and effectively without having the degree of local control -- and funding variations -- that exists across most of the United States. A mostly white, mostly wealthy school district should not be a property right that we respect in a "post racial" world.

Posted at April 4, 2008 8:25 AM in response to The End of Demonization?

The tired backlash narrative ignores the complex but very real and continuous reconstruction of racial rhetoric that took place among racial conservatives (in the very strict sense of the word, as they were seeking to conserve racial hierarchies) over the entire twentieth century. Racial conservatives established Jim Crow and transformed it over time to try to maintain it as it became increasingly less viable politically -- for instance, this brought poll tax reform in the 40s and 50s, though major extensions of voting rights for blacks would not come until the Voting Rights Act. When the federal government, through a united executive, legislative, and judicial agenda, made it clear that de jure segregation would no longer be tolerated, tactics shifted. And this happened -- quite demonstrably -- before the late 1960s and early 1970s.

To claim that "the" contemporary left in the US's analysis of the relationship between class and race is reducible to the street slogan of capitalism=racism is disingenuous. Several left scholars have, in different ways, done extensive and careful work to show how late capitalist practices developed in dialogue with structural racial subordination. And as I have said before, class and race are not irreducible and are entwined developmentally. Can a capitalism not intertwined with racial subordination exist? Sure. But that's not what we have in the United States right now in 2008, because of the way that our contemporary institutions have developed in the context of racial subordination. Every major institution in the US is marked by race in some way, and to acknowledge this should not frighten us.

Either political development has consequences or it doesn't.

Posted at April 4, 2008 8:17 AM in response to Why Obama's Critics on the Left are Sputtering

It seems to me that part of what distinguishes what we think of as great political discourse is that it does not accept the discursive frames as givens, seeking rather to generate new ways of thinking and talking about long-standing problems. This needn't be the sole province of liberal transformative efforts -- Ronald Reagan was a master. But I must disagree with the idea that elected officials cannot also be critical theorists.

Perhaps it is not Obama's aim to push the discourse this far himself. But his willingness to open the conversation may build some space in which we can move beyond a narrow and binary debate between standard liberal viewpoints on race and the prevalent conservative mode of colorblindness. And Obama, as Joel Olson points out, accomplishes something not just by speaking, but by listening.

But I wonder about the sense I get from some of the discussion that it is somehow much easier and less controversial to tackle the political and power-laden implications of poverty than race. This doesn't resonate with my understanding of American history, even setting aside the complex relationship between class and race over time. I am all for a serious political agenda that addresses the growing gap between rich and poor in the United States. But if critical analysis of power relations based on class is to be interposed as a rhetorical device to 1) divert our attention from real and irreducible structural racial inequality and 2) ultimately to serve only as a diversion and not as the foundation of a policy agenda to address structural inequality based on wealth -- which is an agenda that has not received much serious attention over the course of US history -- then I want no part in it.

Posted at April 2, 2008 5:26 PM in response to Losing Our Innocence

Oleeb, while I agree that a much more meaningful commitment to an anti-poverty policy agenda is crucial, I am reading your post to suggest that 1) "winning" LBJ's "war on poverty" would also mostly eradicate racism and 2) we don't really need to worry about past history to figure this out. Surely, class and race are deeply intertwined in America, as social science research has shown. But race is simply not reducible to class.

If you want to win a "war on poverty," I think you have a better chance if you understand why previous efforts to ameliorate poverty have succeeded . . . and failed. To give just one example, there isn't nearly as much abject poverty among the elderly in America as there was in 1925. Yet poverty that is linked to race in complex (as well as simple) ways, like poverty among urban public housing dwellers and single mothers, persists. I don't see how you untangle this dynamic enough to intervene productively without considering the racialized history of anti-poverty (and other) policies in the US.

Posted at April 1, 2008 2:08 PM in response to Losing Our Innocence

Actually, if you look at the rhetoric being used in court cases and in other public venues in the early 1960s, what you will see is that colorblindness was not uniformly and exclusively used by those seeking to destroy segregation. In fact, segregationists as early as 1961 or so were enthusiastically calling for colorblindness to prevent proactive policies by the states and federal government to address the concrete policy-based legacies of decades of Jim Crow governance.

The source of the idea, at least in legal doctrine, goes back to the briefs in Plessy v. Ferguson, but the authors of those briefs were attacking policies precisely for their targeted and denigrating messages. Both they and John Harlan, the Supreme Court justice who brought the phrase into our lexicon, tied it to the demand that the state open its eyes to the insidious historical legacy of badges of slavery, not the prospective dream of a blind state.

But the larger question I have for folks who buy into dual claims of innocence and history's not mattering is the following: at what precise date and time do you identify the end of history? 1954 with Brown? 1965 with the Voting Rights Act? The Nixon Administration's embrace of affirmative action? Clinton's signing PRWORA in 1996?

Posted at April 1, 2008 12:44 PM in response to Losing Our Innocence