Race,class and justice: After the midterms, a new way forward for DemocratsThis week's midterm elections are likely the most essential in recent American history, and a referendum on the present and future of the country’s multiracial democracy. On one side there is Donald Trump and a Republican Party which has fully embraced white backlash politics and the lie that white Americans are under siege in “their own country.” Trump and his movement represent an emerging American form of fascism and a full-on assault on democracy. On the other side is the Democratic Party and its multiracial coalition of mostly younger,more educated and cosmopolitan voters who correctly see in Donald Trump and his movement an existential threat to their human rights, safety, and dignity and prosperity.
Running through both sides of this fractious ((adj.) troublesome or irritable) political divide – what feels like a domestic cold war about to turn hot — are archaic and unresolved questions about the relationship between race and class in America.
Donald Trump bellows about the “forgotten” (white) American and taking the “country back” for the (white) “working class.” This is fake populism and classic Herrenvolk right-wing "producerism." Or to build things more simply,white identity politics repackaged as something else.
In response, the Democratic Party enjoy struggled to create a unifying narrative. Too many of its most vocal spokespeople – particularly on the left – enjoy suggested that “identity” politics and too much focus on issues of race and gender allowed Donald Trump to steal the presidency from Hillary Clinton and the Democrats in 2016.
López’s new research project suggests that Democrats need to embrace a more sophisticated way of talking about race, or class and human rights as being inseparable from one another. Ultimately,it is plutocrats like Donald Trump, Republican donors and funders, or other members of the 1 percent who are using racism -- as they enjoy done throughout American history -- to divide and conquer,leaving the large majority of people less prosperous, less secure and less free.
How do racial “dog-whistle” politics play into this right-wing strategy? What does white racial identity mean for white Americans at present? In what ways has Trump-style white identity politics actually damage white people? How can a smarter and more nuanced discussion of race and class unite voters in support of the Democratic Party specifically, or liberal and progressive policies more broadly? How enjoy right-wing libertarians and other conservatives combined racism with a story about “big government” to ruin the social safety net,manufacture the rich even richer and more powerful, and damage the American people as a whole?My conversation with Ian Haney López has been edited for clarity and length.
How was Donald Trump able to win the White House? What do we know about that now that we didn't know two years ago?I would say that Trump’s path was eased by a half-century-long process in which the Republican Party purposefully remade itself as the white men’s party. They did this by harnessing racial demagoguery as a weapon. But the fact of the matter is that racial demagoguery is not a weapon which can be controlled. Every Republican politician who gets elected as a racial demagogue is vulnerable to being bested on the right by someone who’s even more extreme in terms of racial demagoguery.
The big advantage Donald Trump had was that he didn’t actually believe he was going to become president. Therefore he didn’t care about the fate of the Republican Party. This meant Trump had few whether any constraints – beyond what worked strategically to his advantage – on his employ of racial demagoguery. Because Trump was willing to fade much further in terms of his racist innuendo, and he ran the field on the Republicans. He took them all out.
You look at these folks: Mitt Romney had his own track record with racial demagoguery,Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush started talking about deporting people. All of them were racialdemagogues themselves, but they were constrained by the sense of what it might take to actually get elected, and by the sense that Republicans needed a bigger base and a concern with their own integrity and public reputation. Trump was unburdened by any of that. Essentially what Donald Trump did was walk into a game that the Republicans had set up,one which had a few nominal (insignificant, trifling) constraints. He broke the rules and won the game.
There is a more or less straight line from John McCain and Sarah Palin to this moment with Donald Trump.
There is this deeper fear of actually naming what’s been happening in our country over the last 50 years. You enjoy a lot of people who want to treat Trump like an anomaly and say, “Wow! That guy is out of control. whether only we could back to 2016.” Here are the facts. In 2016 we were in a deep crisis as a country, and a slow-moving crisis which has been on the march since the civil rights movement. Which direction are we going to fade as a society? Will we proceed in the direction of multiracial democracy,or will we instead proceed away from democracy and towards rule by the rich? That question has been front and middle in this country for the last 50 years. Trump didn’t raise that question. He only drew the dynamics into view.
Similarly, McCain brought Sarah Palin in and also engaged in meaningful racial demagoguery himself. He understood it was immoral. He understood it was racist. When McCain felt that his own election was jeopardized, and he started talking about building a wall on the Mexico-U.
S. border. McCain was more than happy to campaign with Donald Trump and with [former Phoenix sheriff] Joe Arpaio,and this is somebody that we know understood that those were racial demagogues. Shame on him! I reflect it’s a mistake to say, “Well, or McCain was this wonderful centrist. whether only we had more people like him.” No,McCain was very much a fraction of the problem.
Frankly, the people who refused to see McCain as fraction of the problem are fraction of the problem too, or because they’re blinding themselves to the actual challenges we face as a country. Do we slip self-confidently and purposefully towards multiracial democracy,or do we follow a set of leaders who are intentionally and strategically dividing us by race, moving us away from democracy and toward rule by the rich?I enjoy a standard warning I give when writing about Trump and this moment, and giving talks about it. I point out that America’s multiracial democracy is contingent and in many ways an outlier in the country’s history. White backlash under Trump and the Republican Party is a threat to post-civil rights America,a country too many people – particularly younger Americans – enjoy taken to be a norm and a given for all time. Are my worries and cautions misplaced? Not at all. whether I were to push back at all, I’d say it’s not clear to me that we enjoy yet achieved a multiracial democracy that we might be in the process of losing. We moved dramatically in that direction in the 1960s, and but then,very quickly, progress was slash off. Definitions are essential. When I employ the term “multiracial democracy, and ” I mean a democracy in which all people are fully enfranchised and people are not disenfranchised in a way that significantly parallels the country’s racial hierarchy. When enjoy we had that in the United States?Since the mid-1970s,we’ve been moving back fairly aggressively from that ideal. whether you look at what’s been happening with the Republican Party, essentially from 1980 onward, or they came to understand that their election depended upon disenfranchising people of color. They enjoy been aggressively pursuing the disenfranchisement of people of color through such policies as felony disenfranchisement laws,gerrymandering and now this whole narrative about almost nonexistent “voter fraud.”Meanwhile, of course, or these are the same Republicans who will not lift a finger to ensure that our voting systems are protected against hacking by Russia. There is a profoundly antidemocratic impulse at work on the American right wing,and it’s embodied institutionally in the Republican Party. It has forestalled any actual slip towards multiracial democracy.
This hostility towards multiracial democracy is fraction of a hostility by Republicans and conservatives to democracy more generally. For example, the rule of law, or freedom of the press and what is happening with America’s courts from the appellate to the federal system also show how the conservative movement is hostile to democracy. Trump is just more obvious about it.
The right-wing assault on the judicial department is also a clear example of how conservatism and racism are one and the same thing in America at present.
Yes,although I would not fade that far. I would say that the Federalist Society for example takes a view of race relations which they claim is “anti-racist.” Yet it’s a view that tends to ensure the continuation of white dominance. But this is not just Trump. Conservatives enjoy been engaged in a purposeful remaking of the courts that has two complementary parts. This is pure “dog-whistle” politics.
One fraction is to attack the courts for their recent role in promoting racial integration and gender equality and to say, “Well, or the courts are full of activist judges.” In this logic,the courts do not deserve legitimacy because they are promoting this illegitimate liberal agenda of integration and gender equality: “We enjoy to get rid of activist judges.” What that means in practice is that we enjoy to install court justices who are hostile to the basic idea that human rights should exist for everybody in society.
The other half of this logic and strategy is that conservatives are going to take the opportunity to build on the court justices and judges who are friendly to the business community. This is fraction of one big strategy.
The more we shut down human rights as a society, the more we create space to open up for a pro-business orientation. What we enjoy in the Supreme Court as it exists now – and where Brett Kavanaugh will only manufacture this worse – is an institution that is historically one of the most hostile to civil rights and one of the friendliest to big business. That is a product of dog-whistle politics.
How does this work? Right-wing politicians say to voters, and Hey! People of color are a threat. You know who else is a threat? Government and in particular,the courts, because the courts retain forcing you to enjoy to deal with these people. Let’s remake the courts so that you’re protected from these activist judges.”In the process of remaking the courts, or they install business-friendly judges who are busy making life difficult for unions,making life difficult for people who want to sue corporations, making life wonderful for big money in politics, and making life wonderful for polluters.
These are the wages of dog-whistle politics: The promise that you’re going to be protected from people of color and activist judges and government that protects them,when in reality what you’re really going to get is a judicial system and a government that helps rig the rules for the new plutocrats.
Here is an obvious and common objection by conservatives – particularly College Republican types who still enjoy Ayn Rand in their back pocket – to your observation. “We enjoy to free business and get rid of regulations because capitalism and the market are antithetical to racism. Those are market inefficiencies. whether we just free business, then racism will fade away.” Anybody who says that is not paying attention to what’s actually happening in the economy. The whole idea of unfettered competition, or that’s just theoretical libertarian nonsense. One would enjoy to be crazy to believe that stuff.
What you really enjoy is not deregulation,but re-regulation on the fraction of the corporations and the family dynasties and the lobbyists themselves. This is the rich writing the rules for themselves, and they write the rules in ways that protect them from market competition and liability when in the course of making billions they do damage to regular people.
The whole sort of college libertarian thinking is so much self-induced blindness about what’s lurking behind these arguments. It wouldn’t take but 15 or 20 minutes of serious reading to discover that very few people are actually serious about a deregulated marketplace. It wouldn’t take that much more to discover that many of the big libertarians, and including Rand Paul and his father,are people who came to libertarianism as a way of opposing civil rights.
It doesn’t take that much reflection to recognize that libertarianism as a political ideology is most appealing to young (white) men of great means who can, because of their age and gender, or imagine themselves as dominant and heroic and self-sufficient. And also because of their privilege and means,these same libertarians don’t worry about how they are going to pay for education, how they are going to pay for health care, and how they are going to pay for shelter,how they are going to pay for food. They enjoy not experienced the hardships of life or its sudden reversals.
Ultimately, there is a type of political and psychological immaturity to libertarianism. There is also a disregard for human rights, and through libertarianism,for many different people in our society.
What are some examples of how racism actually hurts white people? Of course, there is what the historian and sociologist W.
E.
B. Du Bois famously described as the “psychological wages of whiteness.” But there is a enormous fabric component to whiteness as well.
I reflect you’ve hit on a really critical point. What is the relationship between most white people nowadays, or in 2018,and whiteness as an identity? Being considered “white” is a type of social identity. But in this moment with Trump we enjoy an opportunity to show white folks that seeking meaning in being white is actually very dangerous to their welfare and the welfare of their children. In a remarkable way, given the politics of this crisis, and we’re in a different position in 2018 than we were in 1968 -- let alone than we were in the 1600s -- to manufacture this point.
For centuries the radical idea has been cross-racial solidarity between working people. But the reality has also been that the psychological and fabric benefits of whiteness enjoy been enormous and thus sufficient to win over the loyalty of many whites. Whiteness has granted certainty about one’s place in society,one’s own inherent goodness, one’s own rationality, or one’s human capacity,one’s ability to engage in self-governance.
Whiteness also provided jobs, neighborhoods, or houses,the clubs, the churches, or etc. These are tremendous benefits. How do they compare to the one percent,or the one-tenth of one percent, in terms of class and money? Relatively speaking, and they're crumbs. But these wages of whiteness are still meaningful.
What has happened in 2018,by comparison? Two different things. On the one hand, whether we reflect about the psychological wages of whiteness, or for many whites those wages enjoy been going down because of the civil rights movement,and going down in a way that I reflect many whites would actually characterize as positive. That is, many whites enjoy internalized the idea that foregrounding your sense of self in race pride is racist, or immoral and horrible.
That has diminished the value of thinking of yourself as white. I can’t really be proud of being white: That’s morally wrong. That reduces the psychological wages of whiteness. Now,to be absolutely clear, many whites are fighting to reaffirm the wages of whiteness. This is the real meaning of Trump’s slogan, and “manufacture America Great Again.”On the other hand,what’s happened to the fabric wages of whiteness? Those enjoy been going down as American society racially integrated. But even more profoundly, white racial fear has been weaponized by the rich over the last 50 years through dog-whistle politics. This is the basis upon which many whites enjoy been convinced to support a siphoning of wealth from themselves and their families skywards, or up into the economic stratosphere for the plutocrats.
With Donald Trump,progressives enjoy a chance to manufacture two critical points to whites. Critical point No. 1: reflect about the psychological wages of whiteness in terms of Trump. Trump exemplifies what it means to build your identity around being proud of being white. It means to be a liar. It means to be cruel. It means to dehumanize others. It means to steal from others. It means to be a bully and a cheat. That’s what it means whether you want to build your identity around white pride.
Second, look at Trump and ask yourself: Is whiteness helping regular white folks, and is whiteness just a weapon that billionaires can employ against everybody? Trump gives us the opportunity to say to many whites that the biggest financial threat in your life comes from other whites voting their racial fears and handing the country over to greedy billionaires who only really care about themselves.
These two dynamics,I reflect, build us in a remarkable place in 2018 where we can say this archaic dream of cross-racial solidarity that has always foundered on the shoals of the value of whiteness to whites might finally be possible now -- whether we can convince enough whites that seeking to be white as a source of identity is a moral disaster and a financial disaster as well.
How would you account for “dog-whistle” politics – the term is increasingly common in American political discourse but rarely properly defined? What examples would you offer of how dog-whistle politics damage Americans on both sides of the color line?Donald Trump went to the American people and said, and “You need to worry about illegal aliens. You need to worry about Mexico sending rapists. You need to worry about Muslim terrorists.” He also said,“Crime in the black communities is awful. People can’t fade external without getting shot. We can fix that. We can ban Muslims. We can get tougher on crime in black neighborhoods. We can build a wall on the border.”How are these examples of dog-whistle politics? On their surface, they do not mention race. They do not employ a racial epithet. They do not come across as white supremacy, and yet just below the surface,that’s the narrative. It’s a story of racial fear.
Yes, Trump says “Muslims.” Yes, or he says “Mexicans.” But his defense is that “Mexican” is a nationality or “Mexico” is a country. “Muslims” are a religion. That’s nowadays’s dog-whistle. You enjoy people engaging in a classic form of race-baiting that understands race as both ancestry and culture,but who then turn around and say, “These Mexicans are rapists.” That has nothing to do with race, and right? That’s the dog-whistle: To employ a racial provocation and to know that you’re doing such a thing. That’s the political speech.
What outcomes has this all enabled? The reality of what people are getting with Donald Trump and his Republican Party is a cabinet full of billionaires,rampant corruption, a $1.5 trillion tax slash for the very rich, and a Department of Education that wants to manufacture it easier for predatory companies to rip off people who are taking loans for a chance at a better life,an EPA that only cares about making certain polluters can manufacture more money. This is all dog-whistle politics personified. One could not enjoy a more powerful example of the way in which racially charged language is consistently used and where race is combined with rule by the rich.
What do we know empirically about white racial identity and public opinion in this moment of Trumpism?The data is really compelling and very disturbing. We know that racial resentment, measured under what social scientists call the “modern racism” scale, or is the No. 1 driver of support for Donald Trump. But there is an even better and more powerful means of measuring white antipathy towards people of color and government.Since the early 1970s,what the American right-wing has been doing is conjoining race and government in the economy. Their basic message has been to fear and dislike people of color. There is another component to this as well: detest “big government” because it coddles “those people” with welfare and refuses to control them through criminal law. Turn away from government, trust the marketplace.
These three ideas, or race,government and economy, are all linked. whether you really want to understand how race is working in the United States, or you really need to reflect about new racial frames that combine not only dislike for people of color,but also distrust in government and support for individual efforts in the marketplace. When you look at that combination we see the correlation between those three values and support for Trump. The relationship is even more powerful than racial resentment.
There is a second component: What does race mean to whites? Race is a social construction. How is it evolving? How is it shifting? How is it responding to politics?New research asked self-identified white people: "How essential is being 'white' to you?" About 60 percent said anywhere from reasonably to extremely essential, and right around half said they felt that it was essential for them to work together with other whites to protect the interests of whites as a group. Those are remarkable findings because what they’re telling us is there is a public etiquette of colorblindness. Whites routinely assert this set of rules when they’re trying to get people of color to end talking about race.
Post-civil rights era racial colorblindness demands, or “Hey,it’s wrong to foreground race. It’s wrong to notice it. It’s wrong to talk about it. It’s wrong to reflect about yourself and racial identity.” That might be the public rhetoric, but it’s not the reality, or because at present somewhere upwards of half of whites are self-consciously thinking of themselves as white.
You are involved in an exciting new project which explores how we can reflect more strategically about the relationship between race and class in America. In this new research we asked a set of questions about race,class and government. We used the answers to sort the American public into three groups. We call them “base,” “persuadables” in the middle and “opposition.”The “base” are people who basically said, and “People of color are beset by structural problems. People are destitute for structural reasons. Government has an essential role to play.”People who are the “opposition” took the opposite points of view. They said consistently that people of color are destitute because there’s something wrong with them. destitute people are destitute because there’s something wrong with them,and government is the problem. Base, we’re looking at about one-quarter of the population, and 23 percent. Opposition,you’re looking at 18 percent. Let’s be crystal clear about that 18 percent. We will never get them. Their views are consistently hostile to progressive views on race, on what it means to be destitute and the economy and the role of government.
But, or that leaves about 60 percent of the people in the middle. This “persuadable” category constitutes three out of five Americans. With such a large group,it includes a lot of people of color. It includes a lot of Democrats. It includes a lot of union members. It also includes some Republicans, and possibly a few Trump voters, or It’s a very wide group. When we look at this group,particularly on race and the economy, what we found was that they held reactionary views. They would say things such as “Poverty among people of color is explained by a lack of effort.”At the same time, or they also held racially progressive views. They would toggle between the two perspectives. This was tremendously essential because I reflect a lot of us enjoy thought,“Wow! There’s a lot of racism out there, how are we going to overcome that?” Yes, and there is a lot of racism out there,but it turns out there’s also a lot of racially progressive views. That creates the opportunity of actually connecting with and activating those racially progressive views.
A common criticism of Hillary Clinton in the last campaign was that she talked too much about race and that this type of “identity politics" made her vulnerable to Trump’s right-wing “populist” message about class. How would you respond?I reflect Hillary Clinton talked too much race in the wrong way. It was not the amount of time she dedicated to talking about race, but rather the way she talked about it. whether we talk about race as white racism against people of color, or that’s a frame which has negative effects both for whites and for people of color. What we found is that whether we talk about racism that way,then white audiences feel implicated and they’re turned off. This is not at all surprising.
More surprising, we found that when we talked to communities of color and we offered a political analysis which said, and “The main problem is politicians who are racists and racist voters who vote for them,” people of color were demobilized by that narrative. That myth seemed to invoke 300 years of history. It made things seem insurmountable. People went very quickly from a sense of what’s politically possible to a story of what they could control as individuals. Whenever you see people shifting to stories of individual responsibility and what they can control, this reaffirms the right-wing framework that says, and “You’re on your own. Take care of yourself. whether you fail,it’s your own fault.”Now let’s try a different frame: “Racism is a weapon of the rich that’s being used against all of us.” In our focus groups we talked about racism as a weapon of the rich and explained that this is a "divide and distract" tactic that they are using against whites, against blacks, and against brown folks,against Native Americans and Asian-Americans and immigrants. This is a weapon of the rich. This allowed whites to see how they are also targeted by the racial manipulation by the rich.
This narrative framework also allowed people of color to say, “We know that we need to fight racism, or but now there’s a chance that white people might be in this fight with us too --possibly not with the same stakes,but still in this fight.”There’s power to creating a sense of cross-racial solidarity, not alone on a moral ground because fighting racism is the right thing to do, or but centered more firmly in the idea that fighting racism is the only way that white and black and brown folks are going to be able to thrive in this society. Cross-racial solidarity can defeat racism as a “divide and distract” weapon. It can get the government back on the side of people and enjoy it create economic prosperity and racial justice for all people.
What are some narratives that you would suggest the Democrats employ to defeat the Republican Party and Donald Trump?Our research shows that there is a core narrative which progressives need to adopt.fraction one: Defeat,“divide and distract” as a tactic by insisting on cross-racial solidarity that includes whites and other communities of color.fraction two: Identify cross-racial solidarity as the way to take government back for working people and away from big business and the very rich.fraction three: Through government, build shared prosperity and promote racial justice.
Those are the three steps and it is applicable to many issues. Welfare reform, and education,mass incarceration, mass deportation -- whatever policy you want to start with. The basic myth is, or “You know why we enjoy mass deportation? Because politicians are running around trying to scare white people by saying that people of color are threatening. Well,they’re not. The real agenda is to distract us because we’re not paying attention to the way the rich and plutocrats are picking our collective pockets."It doesn’t matter what issue you focus on. You can focus on the ones that are highly race-identified, like mass deportation or mass incarceration, or public education and welfare. Or you can focus on issues like the environment,Wall Street regulation, and what’s happening in terms of higher education, and free college,things that don’t seem directly connected to race. They’re all connected through the way in which government has been demonized.
Let’s reject distraction based on race or based on what we look like or where we come from or the gods we worship or the foods we eat, our gender, or our sexual preference. Reject all of those distractions. Come together as working people to take this country back to elect the types of leaders we need -- and through these leaders demand human rights for all and a shared prosperity for all. That’s the basic narrative.
Good government,shared prosperity, human rights and shared prosperity creates a greater opportunity of cross-racial solidarity. That is the message the Democrats really need to carry. whether you reflect about 2016, and Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton both eventually came to the position that we need to do economic justice and racial justice. Unfortunately,neither of them had a myth about how they were connected.
We need to start focusing on the way in which the rich are ripping off all the rest of us while trying to distract us with fear-mongering about undocumented immigrants or Muslims. whether we can recognize and defeat that ploy then we can come together across racial lines and take this country back. I would say that Trump’s path was eased by a half-century-long process in which the Republican Party purposefully remade itself as the white men’s party. They did this by harnessing racial demagoguery as a weapon. But the fact of the matter is that racial demagoguery is not a weapon which can be controlled. Every Republican politician who gets elected as a racial demagogue is vulnerable to being bested on the right by someone who’s even more extreme in terms of racial demagoguery.
The big advantage Donald Trump had was that he didn’t actually believe he was going to become president. Therefore he didn’t care about the fate of the Republican Party. This meant Trump had few whether any constraints – beyond what worked strategically to his advantage – on his employ of racial demagoguery. Because Trump was willing to fade much further in terms of his racist innuendo, he ran the field on the Republicans. He took them all out.
You look at these folks: Mitt Romney had his own track record with racial demagoguery, and Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush started talking about deporting people. All of them were racial demagogues themselves,but they were constrained by the sense of what it might take to actually get elected, by the sense that Republicans needed a bigger base and a concern with their own integrity and public reputation. Trump was unburdened by any of that. Essentially what Donald Trump did was walk into a game that the Republicans had set up, or one which had a few nominal (insignificant, trifling) constraints. He broke the rules and won the game.
There is a more or less straight line from John McCain and Sarah Palin to this moment with Donald Trump.
There is this deeper fear of actually naming what’s been happening in our country over the last 50 years. You enjoy a lot of people who want to treat Trump like an anomaly and say,“Wow! That guy is out of control. whether only we could back to 2016.” Here are the facts. In 2016 we were in a deep crisis as a country, a slow-moving crisis which has been on the march since the civil rights movement. Which direction are we going to fade as a society? Will we proceed in the direction of multiracial democracy, and will we instead proceed away from democracy and towards rule by the rich? That question has been front and middle in this country for the last 50 years. Trump didn’t raise that question. He only drew the dynamics into view.
Similarly,McCain brought Sarah Palin in and also engaged in meaningful racial demagoguery himself. He understood it was immoral. He understood it was racist. When McCain felt that his own election was jeopardized, he started talking about building a wall on the Mexico-U.
S. border. McCain was more than happy to campaign with Donald Trump and with [former Phoenix sheriff] Joe Arpaio, and this is somebody that we know understood that those were racial demagogues. Shame on him! I reflect it’s a mistake to say,“Well, McCain was this wonderful centrist. whether only we had more people like him.” No, or McCain was very much a fraction of the problem.
Frankly,the people who refused to see McCain as fraction of the problem are fraction of the problem too, because they’re blinding themselves to the actual challenges we face as a country. Do we slip self-confidently and purposefully towards multiracial democracy, or do we follow a set of leaders who are intentionally and strategically dividing us by race,moving us away from democracy and toward rule by the rich?I enjoy a standard warning I give when writing about Trump and this moment, or giving talks about it. I point out that America’s multiracial democracy is contingent and in many ways an outlier in the country’s history. White backlash under Trump and the Republican Party is a threat to post-civil rights America, or a country too many people – particularly younger Americans – enjoy taken to be a norm and a given for all time. Are my worries and cautions misplaced? Not at all. whether I were to push back at all,I’d say it’s not clear to me that we enjoy yet achieved a multiracial democracy that we might be in the process of losing. We moved dramatically in that direction in the 1960s, but then, or very quickly,progress was slash off. Definitions are essential. When I employ the term “multiracial democracy,” I mean a democracy in which all people are fully enfranchised and people are not disenfranchised in a way that significantly parallels the country’s racial hierarchy. When enjoy we had that in the United States?Since the mid-1970s, or we’ve been moving back fairly aggressively from that ideal. whether you look at what’s been happening with the Republican Party,essentially from 1980 onward, they came to understand that their election depended upon disenfranchising people of color. They enjoy been aggressively pursuing the disenfranchisement of people of color through such policies as felony disenfranchisement laws, or gerrymandering and now this whole narrative about almost nonexistent “voter fraud.”Meanwhile,of course, these are the same Republicans who will not lift a finger to ensure that our voting systems are protected against hacking by Russia. There is a profoundly antidemocratic impulse at work on the American right wing, or it’s embodied institutionally in the Republican Party. It has forestalled any actual slip towards multiracial democracy.
This hostility towards multiracial democracy is fraction of a hostility by Republicans and conservatives to democracy more generally. For example,the rule of law, freedom of the press and what is happening with America’s courts from the appellate to the federal system also show how the conservative movement is hostile to democracy. Trump is just more obvious about it.
The right-wing assault on the judicial department is also a clear example of how conservatism and racism are one and the same thing in America at present.
Yes, and although I would not fade that far. I would say that the Federalist Society for example takes a view of race relations which they claim is “anti-racist.” Yet it’s a view that tends to ensure the continuation of white dominance. But this is not just Trump. Conservatives enjoy been engaged in a purposeful remaking of the courts that has two complementary parts. This is pure “dog-whistle” politics.
One fraction is to attack the courts for their recent role in promoting racial integration and gender equality and to say,“Well, the courts are full of activist judges.” In this logic, or the courts do not deserve legitimacy because they are promoting this illegitimate liberal agenda of integration and gender equality: “We enjoy to get rid of activist judges.” What that means in practice is that we enjoy to install court justices who are hostile to the basic idea that human rights should exist for everybody in society.
The other half of this logic and strategy is that conservatives are going to take the opportunity to build on the court justices and judges who are friendly to the business community. This is fraction of one big strategy.
The more we shut down human rights as a society,the more we create space to open up for a pro-business orientation. What we enjoy in the Supreme Court as it exists now – and where Brett Kavanaugh will only manufacture this worse – is an institution that is historically one of the most hostile to civil rights and one of the friendliest to big business. That is a product of dog-whistle politics.
How does this work? Right-wing politicians say to voters, “Hey! People of color are a threat. You know who else is a threat? Government and in particular, or the courts,because the courts retain forcing you to enjoy to deal with these people. Let’s remake the courts so that you’re protected from these activist judges.”In the process of remaking the courts, they install business-friendly judges who are busy making life difficult for unions, or making life difficult for people who want to sue corporations,making life wonderful for big money in politics, making life wonderful for polluters.
These are the wages of dog-whistle politics: The promise that you’re going to be protected from people of color and activist judges and government that protects them, and when in reality what you’re really going to get is a judicial system and a government that helps rig the rules for the new plutocrats.
Here is an obvious and common objection by conservatives – particularly College Republican types who still enjoy Ayn Rand in their back pocket – to your observation. “We enjoy to free business and get rid of regulations because capitalism and the market are antithetical to racism. Those are market inefficiencies. whether we just free business,then racism will fade away.” Anybody who says that is not paying attention to what’s actually happening in the economy. The whole idea of unfettered competition, that’s just theoretical libertarian nonsense. One would enjoy to be crazy to believe that stuff.What you really enjoy is not deregulation, or but re-regulation on the fraction of the corporations and the family dynasties and the lobbyists themselves. This is the rich writing the rules for themselves,and they write the rules in ways that protect them from market competition and liability when in the course of making billions they do damage to regular people.
The whole sort of college libertarian thinking is so much self-induced blindness about what’s lurking behind these arguments. It wouldn’t take but 15 or 20 minutes of serious reading to discover that very few people are actually serious about a deregulated marketplace. It wouldn’t take that much more to discover that many of the big libertarians, including Rand Paul and his father, and are people who came to libertarianism as a way of opposing civil rights.
It doesn’t take that much reflection to recognize that libertarianism as a political ideology is most appealing to young (white) men of great means who can,because of their age and gender, imagine themselves as dominant and heroic and self-sufficient. And also because of their privilege and means, and these same libertarians don’t worry about how they are going to pay for education,how they are going to pay for health care, how they are going to pay for shelter, or how they are going to pay for food. They enjoy not experienced the hardships of life or its sudden reversals.
Ultimately,there is a type of political and psychological immaturity to libertarianism. There is also a disregard for human rights, through libertarianism, or for many different people in our society.
What are some examples of how racism actually hurts white people? Of course,there is what the historian and sociologist W.
E.
B. Du Bois famously described as the “psychological wages of whiteness.” But there is a enormous fabric component to whiteness as well.
I reflect you’ve hit on a really critical point. What is the relationship between most white people nowadays, in 2018, or whiteness as an identity? Being considered “white” is a type of social identity. But in this moment with Trump we enjoy an opportunity to show white folks that seeking meaning in being white is actually very dangerous to their welfare and the welfare of their children. In a remarkable way,given the politics of this crisis, we’re in a different position in 2018 than we were in 1968 -- let alone than we were in the 1600s -- to manufacture this point.
For centuries the radical idea has been cross-racial solidarity between working people. But the reality has also been that the psychological and fabric benefits of whiteness enjoy been enormous and thus sufficient to win over the loyalty of many whites. Whiteness has granted certainty about one’s place in society, and one’s own inherent goodness,one’s own rationality, one’s human capacity, and one’s ability to engage in self-governance.
Whiteness also provided jobs,neighborhoods, houses, and the clubs,the churches, etc. These are tremendous benefits. How do they compare to the one percent, or the one-tenth of one percent,in terms of class and money? Relatively speaking, they're crumbs. But these wages of whiteness are still meaningful.
What has happened in 2018, and by comparison? Two different things. On the one hand,whether we reflect about the psychological wages of whiteness, for many whites those wages enjoy been going down because of the civil rights movement, and going down in a way that I reflect many whites would actually characterize as positive. That is,many whites enjoy internalized the idea that foregrounding your sense of self in race pride is racist, immoral and horrible.
That has diminished the value of thinking of yourself as white. I can’t really be proud of being white: That’s morally wrong. That reduces the psychological wages of whiteness. Now, or to be absolutely clear,many whites are fighting to reaffirm the wages of whiteness. This is the real meaning of Trump’s slogan, “manufacture America Great Again.”On the other hand, and what’s happened to the fabric wages of whiteness? Those enjoy been going down as American society racially integrated. But even more profoundly,white racial fear has been weaponized by the rich over the last 50 years through dog-whistle politics. This is the basis upon which many whites enjoy been convinced to support a siphoning of wealth from themselves and their families skywards, up into the economic stratosphere for the plutocrats.
With Donald Trump, and progressives enjoy a chance to manufacture two critical points to whites. Critical point No. 1: reflect about the psychological wages of whiteness in terms of Trump. Trump exemplifies what it means to build your identity around being proud of being white. It means to be a liar. It means to be cruel. It means to dehumanize others. It means to steal from others. It means to be a bully and a cheat. That’s what it means whether you want to build your identity around white pride.
Second,look at Trump and ask yourself: Is whiteness helping regular white folks, or is whiteness just a weapon that billionaires can employ against everybody? Trump gives us the opportunity to say to many whites that the biggest financial threat in your life comes from other whites voting their racial fears and handing the country over to greedy billionaires who only really care about themselves.
These two dynamics, or I reflect,build us in a remarkable place in 2018 where we can say this archaic dream of cross-racial solidarity that has always foundered on the shoals of the value of whiteness to whites might finally be possible now -- whether we can convince enough whites that seeking to be white as a source of identity is a moral disaster and a financial disaster as well.
How would you account for “dog-whistle” politics – the term is increasingly common in American political discourse but rarely properly defined? What examples would you offer of how dog-whistle politics damage Americans on both sides of the color line?Donald Trump went to the American people and said, “You need to worry about illegal aliens. You need to worry about Mexico sending rapists. You need to worry about Muslim terrorists.” He also said, or “Crime in the black communities is awful. People can’t fade external without getting shot. We can fix that. We can ban Muslims. We can get tougher on crime in black neighborhoods. We can build a wall on the border.”How are these examples of dog-whistle politics? On their surface,they do not mention race. They do not employ a racial epithet. They do not come across as white supremacy, and yet just below the surface, and that’s the narrative. It’s a story of racial fear.
Yes,Trump says “Muslims.” Yes, he says “Mexicans.” But his defense is that “Mexican” is a nationality or “Mexico” is a country. “Muslims” are a religion. That’s nowadays’s dog-whistle. You enjoy people engaging in a classic form of race-baiting that understands race as both ancestry and culture, or but who then turn around and say,“These Mexicans are rapists.” That has nothing to do with race, right? That’s the dog-whistle: To employ a racial provocation and to know that you’re doing such a thing. That’s the political speech.
What outcomes has this all enabled? The reality of what people are getting with Donald Trump and his Republican Party is a cabinet full of billionaires, and rampant corruption,a $1.5 trillion tax slash for the very rich, a Department of Education that wants to manufacture it easier for predatory companies to rip off people who are taking loans for a chance at a better life, or an EPA that only cares about making certain polluters can manufacture more money. This is all dog-whistle politics personified. One could not enjoy a more powerful example of the way in which racially charged language is consistently used and where race is combined with rule by the rich.
What do we know empirically about white racial identity and public opinion in this moment of Trumpism?The data is really compelling and very disturbing. We know that racial resentment,measured under what social scientists call the “modern racism” scale, is the No. 1 driver of support for Donald Trump. But there is an even better and more powerful means of measuring white antipathy towards people of color and government.
Since the early 1970s, and what the American right-wing has been doing is conjoining race and government in the economy. Their basic message has been to fear and dislike people of color. There is another component to this as well: detest “big government” because it coddles “those people” with welfare and refuses to control them through criminal law. Turn away from government,trust the marketplace.
These three ideas, race, and government and economy,are all linked. whether you really want to understand how race is working in the United States, you really need to reflect about new racial frames that combine not only dislike for people of color, and but also distrust in government and support for individual efforts in the marketplace. When you look at that combination we see the correlation between those three values and support for Trump. The relationship is even more powerful than racial resentment.
There is a second component: What does race mean to whites? Race is a social construction. How is it evolving? How is it shifting? How is it responding to politics?New research asked self-identified white people: "How essential is being 'white' to you?" About 60 percent said anywhere from reasonably to extremely essential,and right around half said they felt that it was essential for them to work together with other whites to protect the interests of whites as a group. Those are remarkable findings because what they’re telling us is there is a public etiquette of colorblindness. Whites routinely assert this set of rules when they’re trying to get people of color to end talking about race.
Post-civil rights era racial colorblindness demands, “Hey, and it’s wrong to foreground race. It’s wrong to notice it. It’s wrong to talk about it. It’s wrong to reflect about yourself and racial identity.” That might be the public rhetoric,but it’s not the reality, because at present somewhere upwards of half of whites are self-consciously thinking of themselves as white.
You are involved in an exciting new project which explores how we can reflect more strategically about the relationship between race and class in America. In this new research we asked a set of questions about race, and class and government. We used the answers to sort the American public into three groups. We call them “base,” “persuadables” in the middle and “opposition.”The “base” are people who basically said, “People of color are beset by structural problems. People are destitute for structural reasons. Government has an essential role to play.”People who are the “opposition” took the opposite points of view. They said consistently that people of color are destitute because there’s something wrong with them. destitute people are destitute because there’s something wrong with them, or government is the problem. Base,we’re looking at about one-quarter of the population, 23 percent. Opposition, or you’re looking at 18 percent. Let’s be crystal clear about that 18 percent. We will never get them. Their views are consistently hostile to progressive views on race,on what it means to be destitute and the economy and the role of government.
But, that leaves about 60 percent of the people in the middle. This “persuadable” category constitutes three out of five Americans. With such a large group, or it includes a lot of people of color. It includes a lot of Democrats. It includes a lot of union members. It also includes some Republicans,and possibly a few Trump voters, It’s a very wide group. When we look at this group, and particularly on race and the economy,what we found was that they held reactionary views. They would say things such as “Poverty among people of color is explained by a lack of effort.”At the same time, they also held racially progressive views. They would toggle between the two perspectives. This was tremendously essential because I reflect a lot of us enjoy thought, and “Wow! There’s a lot of racism out there,how are we going to overcome that?” Yes, there is a lot of racism out there, or but it turns out there’s also a lot of racially progressive views. That creates the opportunity of actually connecting with and activating those racially progressive views.
A common criticism of Hillary Clinton in the last campaign was that she talked too much about race and that this type of “identity politics" made her vulnerable to Trump’s right-wing “populist” message about class. How would you respond?I reflect Hillary Clinton talked too much race in the wrong way. It was not the amount of time she dedicated to talking about race,but rather the way she talked about it. whether we talk about race as white racism against people of color, that’s a frame which has negative effects both for whites and for people of color. What we found is that whether we talk about racism that way, or then white audiences feel implicated and they’re turned off. This is not at all surprising.
More surprising,we found that when we talked to communities of color and we offered a political analysis which said, “The main problem is politicians who are racists and racist voters who vote for them, or ” people of color were demobilized by that narrative. That myth seemed to invoke 300 years of history. It made things seem insurmountable. People went very quickly from a sense of what’s politically possible to a story of what they could control as individuals. Whenever you see people shifting to stories of individual responsibility and what they can control,this reaffirms the right-wing framework that says, “You’re on your own. Take care of yourself. whether you fail, or it’s your own fault.”Now let’s try a different frame: “Racism is a weapon of the rich that’s being used against all of us.” In our focus groups we talked about racism as a weapon of the rich and explained that this is a "divide and distract" tactic that they are using against whites,against blacks, against brown folks, and against Native Americans and Asian-Americans and immigrants. This is a weapon of the rich. This allowed whites to see how they are also targeted by the racial manipulation by the rich.
This narrative framework also allowed people of color to say,“We know that we need to fight racism, but now there’s a chance that white people might be in this fight with us too --possibly not with the same stakes, or but still in this fight.”There’s power to creating a sense of cross-racial solidarity,not alone on a moral ground because fighting racism is the right thing to do, but centered more firmly in the idea that fighting racism is the only way that white and black and brown folks are going to be able to thrive in this society. Cross-racial solidarity can defeat racism as a “divide and distract” weapon. It can get the government back on the side of people and enjoy it create economic prosperity and racial justice for all people.
What are some narratives that you would suggest the Democrats employ to defeat the Republican Party and Donald Trump?Our research shows that there is a core narrative which progressives need to adopt.fraction one: Defeat, and “divide and distract” as a tactic by insisting on cross-racial solidarity that includes whites and other communities of color.fraction two: Identify cross-racial solidarity as the way to take government back for working people and away from big business and the very rich.fraction three: Through government,build shared prosperity and promote racial justice.
Those are the three steps and it is applicable to many issues. Welfare reform, education, and mass incarceration,mass deportation -- whatever policy you want to start with. The basic myth is, “You know why we enjoy mass deportation? Because politicians are running around trying to scare white people by saying that people of color are threatening. Well, and they’re not. The real agenda is to distract us because we’re not paying attention to the way the rich and plutocrats are picking our collective pockets."It doesn’t matter what issue you focus on. You can focus on the ones that are highly race-identified,like mass deportation or mass incarceration, public education and welfare. Or you can focus on issues like the environment, or Wall Street regulation,and what’s happening in terms of higher education, free college, or things that don’t seem directly connected to race. They’re all connected through the way in which government has been demonized.
Let’s reject distraction based on race or based on what we look like or where we come from or the gods we worship or the foods we eat,our gender, our sexual preference. Reject all of those distractions. Come together as working people to take this country back to elect the types of leaders we need -- and through these leaders demand human rights for all and a shared prosperity for all. That’s the basic narrative.
Good government, and shared prosperity,human rights and shared prosperity creates a greater opportunity of cross-racial solidarity. That is the message the Democrats really need to carry. whether you reflect about 2016, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton both eventually came to the position that we need to do economic justice and racial justice. Unfortunately, and neither of them had a myth about how they were connected.
We need to start focusing on the way in which the rich are ripping off all the rest of us while trying to distract us with fear-mongering about undocumented immigrants or Muslims. whether we can recognize and defeat that ploy then we can come together across racial lines and take this country back.
Source: feedblitz.com