Different Shades of White Privilege

Two stories this week have made me think about the different shades of white privilege.  On one hand, the recent Old Navy ad, built around the evidently amusing scenario of a white policewoman (played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus) pulling over a carful of millennials, of mixed races, seemingly for no reason at all, shows how clueless white privilege can make young ad-writers and marketing executives and corporate retailers.  Could everyone involved in green-lighting this ad have been unaware that we are in the middle of a national conversation about racial profiling, police tactics, and the tragedies that result from violent escalations resulting from random traffic stops?   For the whizz-kids who designed the Old Navy campaign, wrapped in the insulating comfort of their 5- and 6-figure salaries, the sad fates of Sandra Bland, Samuel DuBose, and Water Scott never happened.  It's just funny to portray a poorly-trained officer, bumbling through a traffic stop, recklessly accusing the car's passengers of undocumented crimes, the entire confrontation ending in an inexplicable impulsive act (in this case, the officer hopping in her patrol car to race off to Old Navy to grab up some bargains).  Maybe when your business is selling cheap casual clothes to white suburban moms, you don't have to worry too much about black lives.

The other story is the reporting around the new study by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, which identified a spike in mortality among white, middle aged men.  The jump is connected with suicide, liver disease associated with alcoholism, and drug abuse.  Middle class black men still have higher mortality rates, but that's not a story David Brooks cares about.  Shielded behind his gated community of privilege, Brooks recently became unnerved by Case and Deaton's research, and the connection between these lives and the decline of the post-war economy that once generated financial security for millions of working class families.  This decline has been the defining economic narrative of the country for a generation, yet it seemed like news to Brooks.  Detroit's tumble into an abyss, like Cleveland's, and Youngstown's and Flint's and Gary's, and the vast human toll that the collapse of the industrial midwest brought with it, evidently escaped Brooks' notice.  But scientific evidence that white people pay some of that cost made Brooks philosophical, wringing his hands over "social dysfunction." Like other media voices, the idea that a decades-long improvement in American life expectancy has been derailed by the consequences of income inequality, joblessness and underemployment, and the collapse of American manufacturing was brought into stark relief by the discovery that even white people, with all of their perceived cultural strengths, couldn't escape the grim reality of America's neo-feudal present. Without being fully aware of what he was doing, Brooks (and Case and Deaton's research) has directed our attention to the fact that things are so dismal in America, that not even white people can escape injury.  

What much of the media, and Republican politicians, and Tea Party voters can't grasp is that we need to point out that Black Lives Matter.  Because Old Navy doesn't think they do.  And commentators like Brooks doesn't think they do.  If he did he would have noticed the "social dysfunction" associated with the decimation of broad sectors of Black America, all the miserable schools, and health disparities, and joblessness, and global-leading rates of incarceration, and hand gun violence.  Those 16 year olds gunned down in Chicago's streets are as much a product of "social dysfunction," as the graying white men drinking themselves to death in Case and Deaton's study, but Brooks can't be moved to worry about them.  We don't need to say White Lives Matter, Brooks is ready to tell us they do.

Tea Party Hangover

The collapse of the Tea Party-led GOP strategy to shut down the government and default on America's obligations, all to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, is all but complete.  We'll be right back where we are now in January or February, depending on the contours of the agreement that sends federal workers back to work.  But, let's call it a win.

Yet, what I predicted 3 years ago seems to have come true.  The Frankenstein monster the Republican Party created is now running amok across the countryside.  It has turned on its maker, and is tearing everything apart.  Here is a slight reformulation of what I said 3 years ago:

The GOP's goal is to create a populist wave, driven by ethnocultural frenzy, to sweep aside everyone who threatens wealth and privilege. But here are two essential truths: 1) Elite-led projects are always designed to create a logic for political order, allowing the architects of the movement to push aside competitors so they can hold on to the nation's wealth. 2) Populist movements have always been guided by a different logic, emphasizing the vernacular over the cultured, viewing the elite as corrupt, contaminated, alienated from and disdainful of popular or folk culture. Populism seeks to sweep away elites. If I were the party strategists mapping this out, I would worry that their creation – as always happens in sci-fi films – will turn on its maker. Or, in the words of Eric Hobsbawm, where populist sentiments are not created by those who employ them, but only borrowed, those doing the borrowing "become a kind of sorcerer's apprentice," and they are deluded to imagine they can entirely control the forces they unleash.

We see two things happening now, I think.  Sympathetic voters, those distrustful of government, but not the fervent true-believers that make up the Tea Party ranks in the House of Representatives, look around and see government blocked from doing the things even they accept it should be entrusted to do.   Like ranchers in South Dakota, faced with financial losses and the massive work of clearing away 20,000 cattle killed by a freak October blizzard, unable to get help from FEMA because the government is shut down.  One rancher told the New York Times:

If this event had happened to one rancher, if he had lost everything that he owned, you would not hear one word from us.  We would pull together and make him whole. But how do you do that when you’re all in the same boat?

And that, in short, is as clear an argument as anyone could make for why we have government safety nets.  And by hating government - all government, and everything it does -  Tea Partiers go beyond the sentiments of most Republican voters.  Red state voters may have a different view than blue state voters about how much government is enough government, but nearly everyone wants the government to step in when natural disasters sweep away communities.  We saw it in New Jersey after Sandy, we see it in Florida after hurricanes and in Missouri after tornadoes, and now we are seeing it in South Dakota.  

Second, we see Wall Street, in a panic, calling off their populist allies.  The point was made today in a Wall Street Journal editorial.  The official newspaper of the investment class said:  "It's time to wrap up this comedy of political errors." Another conservative paper, the Houston Chronicle, the voice of big oil in the way the Wall Street Journal is the voice of Wall Street, expressed buyer's remorse, regretting its endorsement of Tea Party conspirator Ted Cruz.  The paper waxes nostalgic for Kay Bailey Hutchison, a skillful advocate for the energy industry.  Cruz, the paper now seems to realize, is a self-involved politically ambitious lout, unconcerned about what is best for Texans, unwilling to work toward politically necessary compromises.  

So rank-and-file voters and the economic elites that have long used the Republican Party to preserve their wealth and privilege are dismayed by the Tea Partiers in the House and Senate.  They can't say I didn't warn them.

Update: For a similar view to mine - that the Tea Party is another effort by the elite to construct a vehicle for the preservation of their own wealth and influence - see the new essay by Michael Lind on Salon.  His view is a little different - he uses data to show that Tea Party activists are more likely to be drawn from the better-off than the white working class.  That seems true, and is unsurprising, but I think that it is also a little beside the point.  I think the goal of the Tea Party, like the earlier efforts by the Republican party to appeal to southern racists during the Nixon era, and evangelicals from Reagan through Bush, is to pump out rhetoric that changes the focus of the political conversation, and gets racists and the religious and the agitated to the polls to vote for Republican candidates who historically have had no intention whatsoever to deliver on the promises they made to these groups.  The hiccup for the party this time: some of these Tea Party candidates actually believe this stuff.  So, when they get to Congress, they actually try to pull the plug on the money machine.  The Republican Party doesn't want to shut off the flow of government money, they just want to redirect it to corporations and the well-off. 

The Price of our Delusions

As we struggle with our confusion over what to do in Syria, doesn't it make sense to think about how we got here?

The distinction that some make between a realist, national security focused foreign policy, and a principled foreign policy built around protecting human rights is a false distinction. So many crises arise from authoritarian rulers - who have abused their citizens for years - amplifying their horror to hold on to power. Isn't that what we see in Syria?  Wouldn't global security be better served by a more consistent defense of human rights, accompanied by international organizations with the power to enforce sanctions? Without doubt, our hope that Bashar al-Assad was a reformer - less brutal, less totalitarian than his father - was a convenient delusion.  But now that Syrian citizens are paying a price for our delusion, and we are debating airstrikes that will certainly inflict more pain on civilians, we have to wonder, how convenient?

Maureen Dowd's column today raises a compelling question, reopening a conversation we seem to revisit over and over again.  How badly did the Bush years damage our country?  The key quote: "Once more, we see the magnitude of the tragedy of Iraq because the decision on Syria is so colored by the fact that an American president and vice president took us to war in the Middle East on false pretenses and juiced up intelligence, dragging the country into an emotionally and financially exhausting decade of war." Our foreign policy choices in the present are shaped by our choices in the past. Our humiliation in Somalia made Bill Clinton unwilling to lend aid in Rwanda.  Our exhausting war in Iraq makes us unwilling to feel out a role in shaping the chaos of the Arab Spring.  The lesson we learned in Iraq: we can't shape the outcome of events in the Arab world.  But surely that was the wrong lesson.  Earlier I have argued that America's role in the world after the Arab Spring should be a closer engagement with unfolding events.  Our response should be an international aid campaign, designed to build new political institutions, civility, and new expectations about what politics should aim to achieve.  Is this as much a delusion as our fantasy that Bashar al-Assad was an enlightened leader, laying a path forward for his people?  Perhaps.  It won't be easy.  But it is morally defensible.  

Update:  From a new essay in the New York Times magazine: An article on Paul Kagame, the Rwandan President, offers a fascinating glimpse into the problem we have disentangling "progress" and "reform" from the authoritarian politics they are embedded in.  The framing of the article - that we might prefer a dictator over the chaos and genocide of Rwanda's past - is right on target.  That his story begins with his role leading the forces that ended the Rwandan genocide gives Kagame credibility as a reformer. That he has brought objective improvements in the quality of life in Rwanda - improved health, reduced mortality, economic growth - makes it easier to look away from troubling evidence that he is building an authoritarian apparatus designed to keep him in power and silence opponents.   Maybe, we think, this is what Rwanda needs right now.  This is a policy choice we make all the time, and I suspect we made it in the case of Syria.  We prefer order over chaos, even if that order is bought at the price of genuine political reform.  I call it the Samuel Huntington calculation - that political order in changing societies is so important that we should be able to accept a little authoritarianism along the way.  But isn't that part of the delusion that brought us where we are with Syria?

The Myth of Black Misleadership and the Great White Hope

Returning to a topic I have been preoccupied with, a recent article in In These Times maps out a compelling narrative about Detroit's decline, and with impressive historical data, positions the story of the city's fall into darkness as something other than a familiar account of failed black politicians.

The right - and truthfully, a broad swath of the media - has been churning out stories tracing Detroit's sad fate to the corruption and misguided politics of Mayor Coleman Young, Detroit's first African American mayor.  But in truth, Detroit's problems began long before Young took office in 1974.  The origin of Detroit's harrowing slide can be traced to a steep decline in auto-industry jobs between the end of World War 2 and the 1967 riots that, for some, mark a turning point in Detroit's fate.  Between 1947 and 1967 Detroit lost 130,000 auto jobs.  This occurred even while America's automobile manufacturers were still investing, inspired by the broad national prosperity that characterized the post-war years.  Between '47 and 1960, the big three auto companies built 25 new factories, but none of them in Detroit.  Many things explain this.  New technologies - the desire to build vast, automated, horizontal assembly plants, which offered improved efficiencies compared to the aging, multi-story plants in Detroit - drew the automakers to suburbs and farmland in Ohio, Indiana and Canada.  And auto executives also moved work to the union-free South.

By 1961, the city already had its first budget deficit.  And the slide accelerated, as the relocation of manufacturing jobs drew workers to suburban plants, and inner-city neighborhoods, located alongside shuttered plants, saw houses abandoned and businesses close.  Home buyers were often unable to secure mortgages to purchase homes in struggling neighborhoods, because the loans were seen as too risky.  A self-reinforcing cycle was established: struggling neighborhoods were denied the one thing that could arrest their decline, new home owners.  The city was unable to afford clearing abandoned homes, and Detroit's reputation as a vast urban ghost town grew.

Not all workers could follow the jobs.  The Fair Housing Act wasn't passed until 1968, and by then, greater Detroit's racial makeup was already mapped out - with sprawling white suburbs and the overwhelmingly African American central city.  And the stage was set for the story the right now likes to tell, about a hopelessly destitute black city, betrayed by African American leaders.

But this isn't the only way race is portrayed in the media's handling of Detroit's fiscal crisis.  Blacks may have destroyed one of America's great cities, but white artists and chefs and IT entrepreneurs are moving in to begin the revival.  Story after story feature feisty young men and women, creative types who see Detroit as their canvas.  And gallery by gallery, cafe by cafe, they'll bring the city back.  And don't forget the urban farmers, poised to put 4,700 of Detroit's 80,000 unemployed workers back on the job.  Or stories focus on investors, like Quicken Loans' chairman Dan Gilbert, ready to pour thousands of his millions into creating a tech sector in the Motor City. Over and over again, as photos accompanying these stories suggest, young white professionals - the thing Detroit needs more than anything - are moving in.  Look at the picture at the top of this post, which came from a New York Times piece on Detroit's path back.  With people like these - so hip, so accomplished, eager to sip wine at roof top parties - can recovery be far behind?

But as much as the idea that black politicians killed Detroit is a fantasy, so is the idea that these modest efforts can reverse the city's decline.  Setting aside the media's disturbing racial positioning of the story, a few cafes, a handful of tiny web start-ups, can't save Detroit. The average family in the city has a household income below the poverty line.  The city is staggering under a vast debt, which, like many American cities, includes an enormous unfunded pension obligation. The city's dire finances makes delivering public services - like razing abandoned buildings, supplying adequate police protection and public education, building a 21st century transit system - impossible.  And this is the stark truth that this black and white media narrative refuses to focus on: Detroit's problems require public intervention, government-led solutions. Bakeries and artist studios can't do the job.

The Black Metropolis

Tied up with much of the coverage of Detroit's bankruptcy is an unmistakable race angle: that poor political leadership, the product of a generation of African American mayors, betrayed one of America's great cities.  The story, as told by these writers, is that corruption and racialized political favoritism produced a political process that narrowly rewarded a black elite, while punishing whites.  Great civic goals - and any hope of reviving the city - were pushed aside, left in the dust as black leaders picked through the ashes of a dying Detroit, keeping what they found there.  Andrew O'Hehir published a piece on Salon recently that made the sweeping claim that the right has relished the collapse of Detroit and New Orleans as evidence that African Americans are poorly-suited to lead.  What evidence does O'Hehir have to support this?

In fact, history shows O'Hehir is on target.  Carl Stokes, who, as mayor of Cleveland, was the first African American to lead a large American city, was dismissed by white councilmen and state politicians in Columbus as a radical black nationalist, interested in dismantling the city's politics and rebuilding it to benefit blacks.  It wasn't true, Stokes was a pragmatist, interested in arresting the city's decline by harnessing the aspirations of the city's struggling poor and its middle class, who saw the floor dropping out from under them as industrial jobs left town.  But white political leaders committed themselves to isolating Stokes, withholding aid, refusing to cooperate, rejecting compromise.  O'Hehir gets something unmistakably right - as cities decline, politicians fight over the shrinking treasure, and political deals are harder to make.  For Cleveland's white political elite in 1967, compromising meant giving up not just power, but control over contracts and payoffs and the city's shrinking financial resources.  And the same logic shapes choices made by black politicians in collapsing cities.  It is a pathology related to urban decline.  Race gets entangled in this when the fight over resources also challenges white privilege.  And, unmistakably, partisan politics is part of the shameful mess we see unfolding in Detroit.  Michigan's emergency manager law has been used exclusively to push aside Democratic mayors - in predominately black municipalities, putting key decisions in the hands of managers appointed by Michigan's Republican governor.  In other Michigan cities, the job managers have done - ripping up contracts, repurposing public funds - hasn't changed the trajectories of failing municipalities.  As one former emergency manager said, with remarkable frankness:

I do not believe [emergency managers] can be successful—they abrogate the civic structure of the community for a period of years then return it virtually dismantled for the community to attempt to somehow make a go of it. The program provides no structure for long term recovery, and that is why most communities slide back into trouble, if they experience any relief at all—a vicious cycle.

So we can see Detroit's fate - its few remaining assets will be dismantled and sold off, and then the city will be returned to voters, worse off than before. African American leaders will be blamed for this, or African American voters, as a narrative is laid out that the state did all it could but, in the end, there is only so much you can expect from a black metropolis.

Another thing that this focus on failed black leadership does is allow conservatives to absolve corporations of any role in Detroit's fate.   As I discussed elsewhere, the contemporary American business class has come to view the accumulation of wealth, as an end in itself, as a sacred objective.  No expectation exists that their efforts should benefit anyone other than the investor class.  Adam Smith, who modern businessmen would view as a liberal do-gooder, believed the aim of the capitalist should be to increase the wealth of the nation; it is the effect of our use of capital in improving the overall well-being of society that matters. Without question, Detroit's decline can be seen as a failure of American automakers to map out a strategy to compete in a global market. But it can also be seen as a failure of Smith's vision: unconcerned with the effect on their communities, automakers closed plants in Detroit to move production overseas, or to the union-free promised land of the sunbelt, all in a desire to improve profits, regardless of the social cost.   

Summarizing Detroit's decline as a failure of black leadership also serves another central concern of modern day conservatives - discrediting the Presidency of Barack Obama.  Conservatives have, since he began his campaign in 2007, worked hard to position Obama as the President of black America, exclusively concerned with rewarding his African American supporters.  Romney pouted about this after he lost in 2012.  It was inconceivable to the man who thought the White House was his birthright to imagine that voters just believed that Obama was a better choice as the nation's chief executive.  Over and over again, Republicans have portrayed Obama, who by any objective view is cautious in his employment of race-based rhetoric, as a "divider", as a champion of black America, as a vehicle for expressing African Americans' misplaced anger against white America.  How convenient for this cause that they can hold up Detroit as an example of what happens when you let blacks run things. 

Sliding into the Abyss

Growing up in Cleveland, and seeing the city collapse, like Detroit, and watching city services slashed, just like Detroit, I've seen this as a crucial public policy question: What does a municipal government owe its residents? And at what point does the elimination of these services accelerate the city's decline, making a rebound impossible? As cities like Cleveland shed jobs in the 1960s and 1970s, politicians gave tax breaks to companies in an effort to prevent employers from departing.  But the practice seldom worked, and cities gave away taxes that could have supported schools, and libraries, and infrastructure. It hastened the city's slide, as services declined, and families fled to the suburbs. The result: racial polarization and metropolitan sprawl. As whites moved out of Detroit and Cleveland, they stopped worrying about fighting for city services. From a recent article by Matthew O'Brien in the Atlantic: "Well-off whites who work in the city and live close by have an interest in paying for the kind of public goods, like mass transit, that benefit everybody. Well-off whites who live far away don't. Atlanta, of course, is the prototypical case here: going back to the 1970s, it's under-invested in public transit, because car-driving suburbanites haven't wanted to pay for something they think only poor blacks would use."  This is as true in Cleveland as in Atlanta.  Study after study shows housing being abandoned in Cleveland, and new homes, for the more affluent, built in distant suburbs.  Abandoned homes accelerate the decline of inner-city neighborhoods, the cost of demolishing them - estimated at more than $525 million - beyond the reach of a cash-strapped municipality.  Meanwhile, suburban families, who drive to work, lobby politicians to repurpose transportation spending to build and improve expressways, rather than support bus and rapid transit service in the city.

In an earlier post - one devoted to the music of Pere Ubu  - I said this about Cleveland:

In sociologist William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged, I find a compelling description of what happens when cities like Cleveland die.  Persistent joblessness, caused by the relocation of industry and the resulting collapse of retail businesses and enterprises that service the manufacturers and the employees who depend on the manufacturers for their paychecks, results in a cascade of social and organizational collapse. Families that can – those with breadwinners with better educations and more marketable and adaptable skills – flee the city, relocating to suburbs to work in new industrial parks or, in the case of Cleveland, moving to the sun belt to take jobs in Atlanta and Houston. As families leave, stability providing local institutions shut their doors, as churches and lodges and social clubs lose membership.

The result is a form of social isolation. The unemployed in the city’s inner‐city neighborhoods lose their connection with one another – a function churches and clubs once provided – and, perhaps more centrally to our story, the residents of the city, immersed in its decline, lose touch with any other possible narratives. This story – one of poverty and hopelessness, of irreversible decline – becomes the seemingly inescapable truth of their lives. 

Obama's address at Knox College, aimed at mapping out a middle class agenda, is too little, and comes too late for cities like Cleveland and Detroit and Youngstown.  I look at the parade of horrors coming out of Cleveland - the kidnapping and killing of young women, seemingly over and over again - and I see a social fabric so frayed, and police resources so stretched, that basic expectations of public safety are no longer guaranteed.  Photos of Detroit's spectacular decay have become a form of internet porn - the crumbling grandeur somehow stirs our emotions, reminding us of what we were.  Are the monsters who stalk Cleveland's streets and abandoned neighborhoods a truer glimpse at what happens when communities fall into the abyss and we no longer care what happens to our neighbors? That's the bottom line - we have become a society where individuals no longer care about one another.  

Vast income inequality, social distance, diverging trajectories, deepening racial distrust, have led us to a point where it is hard to imagine a path out of this discouraging fate.  And this is a fundamental problem.  The right loved to make fun of the Obama campaign's focus on Hope in 2008.  But they were wrong.  Obama said this during that campaign: 

Hope is not blind optimism. It's not ignoring the enormity of the task ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. It's not sitting on the sidelines or shirking from a fight. Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it, and to work for it, and to fight for it. Hope is the belief that destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by the men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be.

What's funny about that?  In what way is that inconsistent with a prevailing, deeply rooted American belief in progress?   But here's the problem: if we have lost faith in one another, if we no longer care about our neighbor, or more broadly about our common fate, if we believe we can only struggle on alone, what hope is there to solve shared problems?  

For a portion of our population, George Zimmerman is a hero.  In our stand-your-ground society, where our safety and security is only guaranteed by our hair-trigger decisions, and the use of our concealed weapon, shooting first and asking questions later makes sense.  Police won't be there for us.  Our neighbors won't be there for us.  Our safety is in our hands. In the form of our Kel-Tec PF-9 9mm pistol.  But that is a discouragingly dystopian view.  Government was engineered to provide for our common security, to permit us to achieve the things we could not accomplish alone.  As the right has shredded our faith in government, and as municipal services have been dismantled in our decaying cities, large portions of the American public have come to believe that they are utterly alone in a hostile world.