… Race Matters [was] written by Cornel West back in 1993. West’s analysis of the state of American politics was so spot-on that it still applies today, go figure. I’m going to disregard how discouraging I find the fact that liberals and conservatives are still making the same arguments twenty years later. West spends his first chapter addressing another issue that also persists today.

West’s first chapter is entitled “Nihilism in Black America,” and it covers precisely that. To put it succinctly, blacks have had to deal with nihilism since first arriving in the New World and are as in danger of succumbing to it now as ever before, if not moreso.

I’m aware of the feeling of black hopelessness; it has persistantly creeped around the periphery of my life. In my immediate family, hope is strong. Hope got my parents a brick home and their son into college. Hope, hopefully, will land me a job straight out of college. But at the same time, my grandparents’ neighborhood has steadily declined since my mother lived there, affecting the young family members still raised there. Politicians still avoid talking about these issues. Enough has remained the same that growing up in the 90s and into the new millenium, I still heard the sentiment that the white man doesn’t want the black man to have anything.

What West does is provide a reason for this hopelessness. Yes, “racism” still exists, but in a more abstract way. When blacks complain about being harassed by cops or overlooked by taxi drivers, whites respond by bringing up all the whites that don’t exhibit such behavior, as if this somehow erases the racism that was still present in the initial experience. Blaming the white man was easier when racism was not only systematic, but explicit; it was written in textbooks, preached in churches, and displayed on street corners. Now, when even conservatives emphasize the adoption of colorblind professional and educational practices, pinpointing the problem is more elusive. Blacks still see it, but it’s much more difficult to articulate it, and even more difficult to organize against it.

The social bonds that have held together black communities are losing strength. When blacks had no where else they could turn, they could rely on the church as an escape from the social hierarchy forced upon their daily lives. Now, blacks have other outlets. With white kids all over the country immitating Jay-Z and idolizing Michael Jordan while their parents elect Barack Obama, blacks have come to expect a cetain degree of racial tolerance in most places that they go. The problem comes in talking about the places that they can’t. They still exist, but now that the places black people can’t go are outnumbered by the places that they can, there lacks a single institution that can reach and organize black people, and there isn’t a clear institution to organize them against. The movement for civil rights has become diluted ever since equal rights became something that most white Americans hold in high esteem. Whites defined what equality meant to them, and the country has been moving towards that ever since.

Yet despite how similar the definition of equality may be, the experience remains different. The problem is, how? And after that, why?

This is where West’s analysis comes in. He describes the way capitalism has altered American values and values within the black community. As social bonds have weakened, they have been replaced by an increasingly relentless wave of marketing. But the values of love, patience, and caring are not values pushed in the marketplace. Conservatives are right in pointing out a deficit of values in parts of the black community. Where they drop the ball is that they refuse to acknowledge why. Liberals are at least right in wanting to provide the economic programs and incentives necessary to begin to alleviate the problem, but they, too, skirt around the root cause.

Black America isn’t suffering solely because it is disproportionately poor or adversely affected by prison, drugs, and discrimination. Black America is losing hope because it exists within a country that thinks its eyes are wide open and refuses to open its eyes wider. Broader America refuses to see that it still makes blacks feel not that they are afflicted by problems, but that they remain the problem. America still has yet to view all Americans as Americans and to help one another as such.

- The Thought Painter

This piece has been edited for timeliness since its original posting. The piece can be read in its entirety by following the link.

I have a friend who identifies as a strong conservative. Yesterday, in defense against something I said, he claimed that he does not and will not feel white guilt. His primary lines of defense were that he has done nothing wrong and that his ancestors, the Irish, were treated worse than slaves.

I will address the latter first, since it can be addressed relatively succinctly. Part of American political and social discourse has been over acknowledging how bad blacks have been treated and holding up false dichotomy where whites have been spoiled throughout history and blacks have always found themselves at the bottom of the totem pole. History is never that simple. As my friend recalled, there were jobs that Irish immigrants were asked to do because the work was considered too dangerous for slave labor, which was expensive to sustain and replace. However, this does not amount of worse treatment than slaves, because while the jobs may have been awful, the Irish were not stripped of their status of being “free” men. Their English peers may have portrayed the them as ape-like and assaulted their social character, but they did not codify this difference into law.

My friend is able to recall his Irish heritage, which I can not do. Slavery was a process that ripped Africans from their homes, killed untold millions on the passage over (a degree of genocide that no other American immigrant group was forced to experience), replaced their language and religion, and deprived them of their ancestry. The idea of having and raising a family was not a given, but a form of resistance, and no matter how poorly any other immigrants were treated — and they were, undoubtably, treated pretty badly — they did not have to fight just to get their peers to acknowledge that they had families and their own family names. Only Native Americans have been more wrongfully treated than African Americans deliberately, consistently, and systematically over the course of American history.

This friend also raised the point that whites get all the credit for slavery, when the Africans were enslaving themselves. This is true, as slavery existed in most parts of the world in one form or another. Europeans generally did not hunt down Africans and rip them from their homes themselves. They offered African leaders clear incentive to do it for them. They flooded African societies with new technologies and economies that turned slavery from a result of war to an economic stimulant. Slavery was no longer a byproduct of war, but a primary tactic. A leader could reduce his enemies’ numbers while growing his own economy and better arming himself for future battles. Europeans turned a pre-existing system of slavery into substantially larger slave trade, one that took Africans from a culture they were familiar with to an entirely new world, if they were “fortunate” enough to survive the journey. This sytem was established long before Americans became involved, but we actively engaged in the system and partook in it after the British had lost their stomach for such things.

Okay, that was succint. Now to move on to the former point, that my friend has personally done nothing wrong. This is true, he never enslaved a black person, and judging by his treatment of me, he doesn’t view people of other racial backgrounds as inferior. This is good. Does this mean that he should not feel guilty for the sins of his fathers? Well, yes and no (as a humanities major, I’ve found that to be the answer to every question).

First, I clearly do not intend to incriminate him personally when I express any need for white guilt. He was not alive when slavery was practiced, nor does he live in a region that practiced slavery. Even if I don’t refer to his ancestry as white and focus on it primarily as Irish, the Irish do not escape from the race debate clean. They may have been demonized and caricatured in similar ways to Africans (to the point that before slavery became a hardened American institution, they were on comparable ground), but they did not view blacks as their equals. They despised blacks, with whom they had to compete with the same low level jobs. And as the Irish gradually became accepted as white, they did not fight to bring blacks up the social ladder with them. They were happy to beat down on blacks from their new higher vantage point.

Okay, so I’ve re-established that everyone that ever existed in American history was racist (that may be hyperbolic, but work with me here). Should my friend now feel guilt? Well, I think guilt is the wrong word, but it is a powerful force. Lets explore this.

I’m American. More specifically, I’m African American. For most of my country’s history, my ethnicity’s biggest threat came not from outside the country, but from within. While conservatives and liberals alike feared communists, Koreans feared the Japanese, Jews feared Germans — and later, Palestinians feared Jews, African Americans primarily feared their fellow Americans. Until modern times, African Americans had more to gain from an outside force toppling their white oppressors than maintaining the status quo (and yet they still fought in every major American war). When I look over a history book, for most of its pages, my enemy lies at home.

Still, I’m American, and on the international stage, I identify as such. Thus, I feel badly about how Americans treated Native Americans, the Mexicans during the Mexican American war, immigrants at home, the Japanese during World War II, Arabs in the Middle East, and, really, what feels just about every corner of the world. I feel this way, even though during most of these time periods, people of my race had no say in how any of this was done and generally saw these people as shared victims of the white man. I feel this way because as an American today, I want to strive to make this world a better place, to be aware of and to work to repair the damage our country has done in parts of the world, and the damage it continues to do. Some people may read this and think I’m just another apologetic liberal who refuses to acknowledge the good America does in the world, but that simply isn’t the case. In absolute dollars, America is the most generous nation in the world when it comes to foreign aid, and as our honorable soldiers have just recently displayed in their daring rescue of Iranians captured by pirates, we’re even willing to help those who nationally may be closer to enemies than allies. But America doesn’t need to be reminded of the good we do in the world, and we don’t make foreign policy blunders on account of our being too humble. We improve ourselves by remembering and acknowleding that we do make mistakes and how we’ve made them. Besides, focusing on American successes is irrelevant to my larger point in this post.

I don’t want whites to walk around feeling like they owe all other racial or ethnic groups a persistent apology. But just as America can improve its image abroad by remembering and acknowledging what it’s done, so too can white people improve their image domestically (something every other group in America can also do, but stay focused here). Racial affirmative action isn’t reverse racism, it’s an attempt to right a past wrong. Still, it isn’t perfect, but a better way to fix it is to try economic affirmative action, rather than strip affirmative action altogether. To pretend we’re all on the same playing field spits in the face of the reality that just 30 - 40 years ago, we could not even attend the same schools. It ignores the reality that there is no way that in just 30 - 40 years, our country has overcome centuries of systematic discrimination, oppression, and repression. It masks just how many whites also stand to fall between the cracks and how no one stands to gain by letting those who always had the resources to continue to invest the resources in their future generations, while those without have to struggle to catch up.

Our country has to tackle many complex issues in the days and years ahead, issues that encompass economic, social, political, geographical, and, yes, racial factors. To forget the effect any of these factors has makes tackling those complex issues all the more difficult.

And as to my friend, this post was not meant to demonize him in anyway (I am referring to him as my friend, after all — but then again, so do politicians, but that’s besides the point). I enjoy my conversations with him, because they stir this degree of thought within me. There was much that I did not find the words to say as I was talking to him yesterday, and I think it would be a waste not to articulate them somehow. This is less about wanting to change what he believes and more about making sure that I know what I believe.

So with that said, is there a place for white guilt? Yes and no. And I’m sure my professors would be absolutely proud.

- The Thought Painter

Today, a good friend of mine and fellow member of the tribe wrote a blog post (http://blogs.wm.edu/2012/02/10/the-evolution-of-democracy/) commenting on Fukuyama’s assertion that, in 1989, liberal democracy had reigned supreme over communism and that there would no longer be a need for new innovative political thought. Teshima asks whether democracy really is the pinnacle of human political thought and whether we will continue to innovate governance, which he suggests that we should. I agree, only I disagree with his primary assumption, that the United States and other liberal democracies are already representative of what democracy can and/or should be.

Teshima asserts that American politicians are guilty of putting their parties over their constituencies. The problem goes deeper than that. When Congress bailed out the banks, it was acting in its constituents’ best interests. After all, many people and the economy would have suffered greatly had the banks that were too big to fail actually failed. Admittedly, they rush to the aid of banks much faster than they help underwater homeowners, whom they don’t know how to help without “rewarding failure,” and whom lack the money to have the political influence that banks have (if they did, they wouldn’t be underwater in the first place, but that’s by the by). Regardless, Congress recently formed a settlement with a handful of major banks that is intended to help homeowners over the next few years (even though the banks still come out of this agreement better than homeowners do). Neither party likes to the banks (in public, anyway), but they have worked with them in attempts to best benefit their constituents.

Thanks to consistent and shameful gerrymandering, representatives in the House have to choose less and less between representing their constituents and their parties, because they have so hand-selected their constituents that their re-elections are guaranteed, for their districts are drawn to include the most partisan assortment of voters possibe.

So what we have here is a situation not where Congress blatantly ignores its constituents (after all, voters tend to approve of their representatives even while disapproving of Congress as a whole). Instead, we have a situation where Congress disproportionately represents the interests of those with the most money (hence the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement) and districts drawn in such a way that politicians are encouraged to be as partisan as possible to get re-elected. The problem goes beyond politicians; we have a political climate so toxic that moderate governance is punished. Think back to 2010, when moderate Republicans were tripped at the ankles so that candidates with “purer” ideologies could take their place. We filled the House with politicians we knew would not compromise, and as a result, we have even worse gridlock than there was before. We are experiencing one of the primary problems of representative government; we find ourselves with exacty the kind of governance we deserve.

There is also another problem with representative governance: far too often, only the winners get represented. Republicans can disregard the desires and opinions of LGBT voters, because they know they have already forfeited the LGBT vote to the Democrats. The same can be said for the black vote and, increasingly, the immigration vote. If a candidate can get into office without their support, then those groups aren’t their constituents, so they could care less if their interests aren’t represented. This is a process that actually increases the closer to a pure democracy a country becomes. There is a reason the United States isn’t a pure democracy: The minority need protection from the majority.

Neither the United States nor any other liberal democracy is purely democratic. The United States is a republic, with institutions such as the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the Electoral College designed to be non-democratic by nature. Many states still use caucuses to nominate candidates, a non-democratic process that discriminates against voters who can’t take enough time away from work or children to attend a caucus. In a pure democracy, George W. Bush would not have been president. Before we can gauge whether democracy is as far as human governance can go, we must first see if we will ever get that far. Or at least close.

Perhaps that point has already come and gone. In engaging the question, we shine light on democracy’s best kept secret — it was never perfect to begin with. We known for a long time now that democracy is not the pinnacle of human governance, and we’re spent hundreds of years trying to improve on what the world increasingly agrees was a solid foundation.

So let the innovating continue.

- The Thought Painter

I just finished reading The Spirit Level by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, and I won’t hesitate to call it one of the best books I have ever read. I deeply believe that its message about how greater equality improves most of society is one that everyone should be exposed to.

After reading the book, there are several priorities that I never want to forget. First and foremost, money and material possessions are not the most important things in life. If I don’t end up owning a large house with multiple vehicles and expensive clothing, I should not see myself as a failure. It’s easy to qualify this statement by saying, “If I don’t have these things, but I have a loving family and a job that I enjoy, then I will have done fine with my life,” but that’s not going far enough. There is no need for me to qualify it, I should not live my life feeling that how much I make or how much I buy have any impact on how well I’ve done in life. Yes, making money makes other achieving goals easier, but I never want to forget that money is only a means to an end, not an end in itself.

Furthermore, my actions need to reflect what I believe. On a personal level, I shouldn’t let my financial situation stress me out when my day to day life is going quite well. I get by just fine with or without the amount of money I hoped to have available, and I have friends and family willing to help if I need it. These social relationships are more important than material wealth.

On a broader level, I shouldn’t sit around wishing that our society was one built upon fair trade, small businesses, and employee-owned companies when there are businesses of this type or size already in existance that I could support. I can’t put all of my money into the hands of greedy corporations and then wonder why our economy is so dictated by profit driven, loophole pursuing, exploitative, and harmful corporate policies.

I can bluntly say that I love capitalism. I love to shop, and I make no apologies for that. In wanting to reduce my carbon footprint, shopping is not something I want to compromise on. I love the feeling of acquiring new things, supporting those who make things I like available, and giving to others things I no longer want. I love touchscreens, instant communication, and fast CPUs. I love Android, Wiimotes, and Netflix. I love the ever-changing landscape of video games that market forces influence, and as an independent author, I love the possibility of someday making a living from my own imagination.

But these passions do not mean that I must accept the market as it is. CEOs do not need to make hundred times more than their employees to inspire innovation and bring goods to market. Good people in third world countries need not be exploited so that I can save a few dollars shopping at one store over another. Pollutants need not be released into the air while companies ship goods between countries in order to best avoid and manipulate tax policies. My love of shopping and participating in the marketplace does not mean I must accept these abuses. They are not inherently part of the system, and I can do something about it.

The best way for me to impact society is not (solely) by how I vote or what I profess, but by how I live my life, and I can live it in a way that supports the kind of future I want to see. I may not be able to change the world, but I can change my world. I can make it one where I do my best to be fair to others and to support those who are trying their best to do the same.

- The Thought Painter