I cite

Uppity

Some people who write for the NYT must not read it. Or maybe they just don't read Maureen Dowd. Several weeks ago she made a point that I had been saying to Paul all week. I kicked myself for not having blogged it first (which is sort of a weird image, when you think about it, because physically it is really hard to do unless you are gymnast or have a cool sense of yourself as not strictly confined to what is held in by your skin, like, you recognize yourself in your prostheses--computer, notebooks, stuff, bionic leg, Second Life avatar, media image, that sort of thing).

Anyway, the point: some commentators are really puzzled by the fact that Obama gets stuck with the label "elitist" when more privileged and elite folks like the Clintons, Bushes, and John McCain escape it. This is not difficult, people. IT'S BECAUSE HE IS BLACK. "Elite" is a code word for "uppity" and everyone in the US over 10 years old knows exactly what word follows "uppity." Obama can be pegged as elite because of the racist supposition that he is out of place, that he has risen above himself.

Obama's Minister

Between painting eggs and attempting not to panic over the fact that I have nothing written of a paper I have to give next week, I've absorbed little bits of the fracas over Barack Obama's minister, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. I confess that this has most likely been via Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, with bits and pieces of NPR as I've taxied kids hither and yon.

What I don't get: why isn't the minister understood as speaking within a prophetic tradition? He sounds like an old testament prophet, condemning their people their sins and oppressions. He could be echoing a Puritan jeremiad, again invoking God's displeasure and wrath over the sins of the people.

It seems to me that criticisms of Revered Wright can only stick after the accuser has separated the minister from his religious context. It's as if the Revered has to be secularized or even stripped of his religious faith and calling. Calling this move hypocritical isn't enough: it's actually a performance of the kind of deep, divisive racism that the Revered condemns, proving his point and justifying his rage.

I wonder if this is deliberate: the more the crazed white media excludes the Reverend from the domain of faith, the more the rage and anger he invokes is clearly justified. And the more the anger is justified, the more fearful become some white people. And the more fearful they become, the worse Obama's chances for securing the nomination. Is it a surprise, then, that Hillary rose in the polls this week?

Paul adds: "Obama is running as black and not-black. His opponents are working to make him black." (I wonder if one could also say not not-black). The conservative media (and Clinton campaign) are trying to particularize Obama, to attach to him signifiers of blackness that some white people are "uncomfortable" with--affirmative action, specific religious practices, anger. Ferraro's salvos might be seen as some of the initiators of this phase of the battle. All these attempts to make Obama black involve something like enjoyment, something that seems somehow to particularize another.

Many liberals (Zizek's beloved liberal multiculturalists) like it this way. They are most comfortable talking about racism, not race. To notice race, in their way of thinking, is to be racist. Yet they notice when groups or photos are all white, again, noticing racism but not race. (The Daily Show did a good version of this problem in their first coverage of Obama's speech.) I didn't hear the whole speech. But my best guess is that Obama will have to find a way to jettison the stance of beyond race, the stance that race doesn't matter. The view, then, should not be that anyone can be president regardless of race. It should be that a black man should be president.

Race matters

The media surge around Geraldine Ferraro is idiotic (unlike most media surges?). Of course Obama's race has made a difference in his political career. Race plays a role in everyone's career in the U.S. It's a racist country that has tried to address its racist practices. It's not an accident that every president has been a white man. Had they not been white men, they would not have been president. Race was a factor. And so is gender, sexuality, religion, and class. Most of the time most of these are determining factors--that's why there have been countless critiques of rich, straight, white, men and the institutions that produce and privilege them. Part of Obama's appeal stems from a hope that many have of reducing the determining impact of privilege of whiteness. Part of Clinton's appeal stems from a hope that many have of reducing the determining impact of sex. Supporters for each feel a sense of liberation from the constraints of the past--maybe we can move beyond racism and sexism, maybe we are better than we have been.

This hope for being better than we have been is particularly strong now when the country is awash in shame because of our pointless aggressive war as wells as our unstable, destructive consumerist greed. Maybe if we can stop being racist, even for just a while, maybe we can move beyond our other unforgivable crimes.

Sure Ferraro spoke in clumsy ways. But it's not just about not using the proper words. Poor word choice gives the commentariat an opportunity, but that's all. For something to stick, enjoyment has to be present. And here it looks like more than the enjoyment of a political gaffe. It's the pleasure-in pain of confronting race and racism, maybe even of admitting something like a truth we want to deny--race matters.

Fantasies of cleaner work

A month or so ago, the wife of an assistant professor in Chinese was killed. She was hit by a truck as she crossed the street on the way to work. She worked as a cleaner at the college where I teach, where her husband is a tenure-track faculty member. I was surprised to learn that she worked as a cleaner, and somehow uncomfortable with this. It seemed to cross a divide between different kinds of work, a divide necessary for the fantasy structure of academia.

The wife of one of the professors I met in a Peru worked as a cleaner while they lived in England and he worked on his graduate degree. This also surprised and troubled me. It's easier not to think about why I find it troubling. It could have something to do with anxieties around North and South, First and Third. But I suspect that it has more to do with exposing the underlying class assumptions of academia for what we know they are, a privilege. And, perhaps more, they expose distance from dirt, shit, mess, the detritus of everyday life as central to this academic privilege. We don't touch other people's shit, not to mention our own; we just interpret it.

The daughter-in-law of one of my close faculty friends worked as a cleaner while she was in between jobs and finishing a degree. She worked for me a couple of times. This wasn't awkward, maybe because I knew that she also worked for my friend and that this was very temporary. And I wonder: most graduate students would be pretty happy with part time work that paid twenty dollars an hour. Yet, some work, work as a cleaner, seems unbecoming, unacceptable, stained, and dirty. Is it somehow more acceptable, more in keeping with academic fantasy, to employ students as cleaners, or baby-sitters, because we know that for them this is transitional work? Because really, we aren't getting bogged down in the shit and the dirt, really we are on our way up out of the cave.

Another woman who cleaned to me had quit her office job. She wanted more independence and flexibility in making her own schedule, less boring work, something that would give her a feeling of accomplishment, something that would let her have more take home pay for fewer hours.

Once, at a small dinner gathering, one faculty member mentioned that she was against the sort of hierarchical relation necessarily part of having someone work for pay in her home. Another faculty member said that her mother had worked as a cleaner her whole life and that it was decent pay off the books--what's wrong with that?

Someone recently called me to task for paying someone to clean my house. Why? If I had a wife to do it for me, would that be a problem? Or if my mother lived here? If the labor were free and ostensibly given out of care and love? It seems to me that there is a highly gendered supposition at work in the criticism of paid domestic labor, namely, that this work is done by women out of love. Women are supposed to handle the shit because they love us; it's what mothers do. When this work is treated as paid labor, we have to confront the fact that it is a burden, that no one really loves to do it. And we are then exposed to our own relationship to shit and to dirt and to our dependence for comfort on the work of others, when really we want to retain the fantasy that they love us.

When my kids are older and can share more in household labor, should I fire my housekeeper? Should she be denied of an extra 200 dollars a month so that I can acquire some kind of politically pure position?

Split subjects

Since I had an extra day in Lima, my host, Gonzalo, took me to to old colonial Lima. We visited some churches, had a private tour of monastary (complete with a saint's grave), and went to the National Musuem of Art. It seemed to me that there is a strong narrative in Peru of lack of unity as a traumatic problem, as the barrier to success, as the central explanation for failure (in contrast with, say, a narrative the appears very strong in the Czech Republic--one that involves the failure of others to keep a promise, typically, a promise of assistance or foreign aid; oddly, this is accompanied by the repetition of defenestration (throwing people through windows) in national history). Anyway, it seems that a failure of unity was part of Peru's experience in the anti-colonial struggle (Peruvians on both the royalist and the anti-royalist side) and in the lost war against Chile in the 1870s.  This combines with a myth of racial unity, a becoming white and becoming modern, as well as a unity among difference as symbolized in a national story of Saint Martin, who miraculously has a mouse, a cat, and a dog eat together from the same dish.

And, so what are responses to myths of unity, particularly in the face of weak states that compensate via authoritarianism and corruption? Cynicism is one response, a selling out to the market, a self-commodification and turning of every aspect of society into a commodity, something to be sold. Even authenticity can be sold, commodified.

What's worse: really believing or cynicism? the prophet, the visionary or the seller of snake oil?

Returning to Jim Crow, one step at a time

Below, an excerpt from an editorial in the NYT. I have been remiss at marking recent events in national politics. I think about it, but then want to just turn away in disgust. Often, it doesn't seem that there is anything left to say: the Supreme Court has turned to the extreme right--this is not a surprise, we knew it would happen with the last two appointments; Cheney is a scheming, lying thief--not a surprise; he has never been able to mask his contempt for the rule of law, for the press, for the Constitution (although his new effort to claim that the VP is not in the executive branch really is breath-taking in its gall, in its totally venial awareness that Americans will do absolutely nothing about it and that he can really do whatever he wants without limit; the limiting on free speech--please, unless we live in a theocracy, there is no reason not to permit high school students to make signs announcing 'bong hits for Jesus;' I wonder if 'bong hits for Mohammed' would have been ok; the war continues to be a fiasco--again, no surprises here. 

Perhaps wrongly, I actually think that we might be getting a little glimmer of a break on the stampede to the right. The disintegration of the conservative coalition, new Michael Moore movie, Elizabeth Edwards confrontation with Ann Coulter, scandals and corruption in the White House, attention to the situation in Iraq indicate that the right is crumbling, people are sick of the conservatives, and some kind of liberalism (at the very least) looks attractive again. The challenge will be for voices on the left to use this opportunity. There should be no compromise with neoliberals just because their neoconservative and conservative former allies are self-destructing. Rather, the opposite is the case--it's an opportunity to force them to the left, to attend to health care, the conditions of the cities, the out of control corporations, the need to restore capital gains taxes and eliminate the highly regressive tax structure.

Link: Resegregation Now - New York Times.

There should be no mistaking just how radical this decision is. In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens said it was his “firm conviction that no Member of the Court that I joined in 1975 would have agreed with today’s decision.” He also noted the “cruel irony” of the court relying on Brown v. Board of Education while robbing that landmark ruling of much of its force and spirit. The citizens of Louisville and Seattle, and the rest of the nation, can ponder the majority’s kind words about Brown as they get to work today making their schools, and their cities, more segregated.

Confederate States of America

Rent CSA: Confederate States of America. It's a terrific mocumentary of a British documentary of the history of the CSA (so, alternative history of the US if the South had won the civil war). It relies on real history-for example, the racist ads are from products sold in the US and around the world up through the 1980s (many of them, a few stopped earlier). A nice touch: how awful confederate pop culture would be, particularly after a hundred years of excluding blacks. The film considers the radical impact of Canadian abolitionist culture, especially after all black intellectuals and artists moved there. Also, there is a fake commercial for a television show. I think the name is something like "Runaway" and the theme song is like a hillbilly version of "bad boys, bad boys, watcha gonna do" (remember,  no music made by black people in popular culture). Every clip looks exactly like Cops--no difference. Except here the men being chased, thrown down on the ground, hand-cuffed, and dragged off are slaves.

Long Sunday: It is rude to wear a full-face veil at work. - By Anne Applebaum - Slate Magazine

Over at Long Sunday I critique an article by Anne Applebaum in Slate. Applebaum argues against the niqab because she thinks it's rude, bad manners.

I think Applebaum is wrong. And, I think she's wrong because her argument for rudeness relies on an analogy between tourism and citizenship.

We might structure the opposition in the following way: the tourist is not at home, but away; the tourist visits, but does not participate in a collective way of life. The tourist will leave; the citizen stays. The tourist is not one of us, and does not expect to be. Thus, the tourist adopts a practice momentarily, as a way of passing through the life of others. The citizen, on the other hand, adopts practices that are shared by those living together. These are not temporary acts of courtesy, but practices of everyday life.

Drug Busts=Jim Crow or why the South is so white and so conservative

Ira Glasser has a terrific article in the July 10 issue of the Nation (Download drugs_and_jim_crow.pdf). After describing the racist application of drug laws combined with the denial of the right to vote to convicted felons, Glasser notes the likely differences in outcomes in various elections: of course, Gore would have won in Florida. But, John Tower and John Warner would probably have never made it to the Senate. Twisting the knife he just stuck in, Glasser writes:

The kicker for all this is that all these black citizens who were disproportionately targeted for arrest and incarceration and then barred from voting are nonetheless counted as citizens for the purposes of determining how many Congressional seats and how many electoral votes states have. During slavery, three fifths the number of slaves were similarly counted by the slave states, even though slaves were not in any way members of the civil polity.This is worse. In the states of the Deep South, thirty percent of all black men are barred from voting because of felony convictions, but all of them are counted to determine Congressional representation and Electoral College votes. If one wants to wonder why the South is so solidly white, Republican, and arch-conservative, one need look no further.

Political Correctness

The business section of yesterday's NYT ran an article on American Idol and Simon Cowell. Here is a paragraph from it:

The whole Fox network operation impressed Mr. Cowell because there was never a hint of an attempt to censor him or to turn him into a sweetheart of a guy. Fox seemed to him to be bravely acknowledging that the American audience, like the British audience, was ready to rebel against what Mr. Cowell called "the terrible political correctness that invaded America and England."

Here is another paragraph from the article:

"Pop Idol" made Mr. Cowell one of the most talked-about cultural figures in Britain in the winter of 2002. He was a tabloid newspaper's dream: seen by millions every week on television, saying something outrageously quotable ("You're a disaster"), doing something unconscionably cruel (several young women left the auditions convulsed in tears after hearing his corrosive assessments of their talents) and tirelessly promoting his program (by doing every sort of interview in print and on television and radio).

What's interesting to me is the meaning of political correctness in this context. In the first paragraph, political correctness is linked to censorship and politeness (good manners). The Fox Network is not politically correct. And, this means that it neither censors nor attempts to make people be nice to others. It tells the truth, no matter how harsh or ugly. In fact, it is brave in doing so. It's lack of manners, in other words, is justified, grounded in, truth. In the second paragraph (which comes about a page before the one I cite first here), Cowell's behavior is described in excessive terms: outrageous, unconscionable, and cruel. So, does this mean that to be politically incorrect is to be outrageous, unconscionable, and cruel? Does it mean that one promotes (another word used to describe Cowell's actions) or tolerates cruelty? Does it mean that the truth is itself cruel, a harsh outrage which we must acknowledge?

If left or liberal critics attack Fox for its cruelty, are we not simply stating the obvious? In fact, is it not the case that, if articles such as this one are not off base, Fox does not claim to be otherwise, precisely insofar as it prides itself on not giving in to political correctness? Indeed, when we criticize Fox for being incorrect, we support their claims to bravery, their sense of themselves as righteous defenders of truth (and the best commenter on this is clearly Stephen Colbert).

What is missing from this line of thinking is of course politics: the equation of political correctness with lies and with manners. The element of manners is the easiest to deal with: anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia are not about being nice; they are about equality. This can perhaps get blurred (by idiots) when terms such as equal consideration are used (which suggests as well the limits of liberal concepts). But struggles for equality, particularly in equality of distribution, cannot be reduced to being nice.

But what about truth? I think this is more complicated because we can speak of truth in various ways: we could say that the politically incorrect speak the truth of and from their partisan position. So of course it will be diametrically opposed to ours. We can say that we speak from a truth that we are bringing into being. And we can say that we speak from a truth of the past and of history that cannot and will not be erased. These cases indicate the struggle over truth at the heart of political correctness.

So, it's interesting here that the second paragraph includes these outrageous elements, the excesses part of any struggle. On on hand, the paragraph (like the show) performs and naturalizes (in an innocuous space) the excisions and eliminations constitutive of neoliberal markets--there are losers. Deal with it. Only the weak, the nice, the self-deceived think otherwise and require such a gloss of manners. Only those who actively seek their own degradation, who readily participate in rituals of humilation, need the superficial shield of politeness. On the other, it can do so because it effaces the possibility of politics, that is, of actual resistance, contestation, refusal. It does so because it has turned the weapon of political correctness into mere manners, mere politeness.

What, then, would it be like if a real and terrible political correctness invaded England and America? All should tremble in its wake.