And that, in turn, connects with Victor Davis Hanson's interpretation of Obamism:
It works like this: The ghetto resident, the denizen of the barrio, the abandoned and divorced waitress with three young children, can all chart their poverty and unhappiness not to accident, fate, bad luck, bad decisions, poor judgment, illegality or drug use, or simple tragedy, but rather exclusively to a system that is rigged to ensure oppression on the basis of race, class, and gender—often insidious and unfathomable except to the sensitive and gifted academic or community organizer.
So Obama combines the age-old belief that the state is there to level the playing field (rather than protect the rights of the individual and secure the safety of the people from foreign threats), with the postmodern notion that government must recompensate those by fiat on the basis on their race or class or gender. Remember all that, and everything from the Professor Gates incident, to the dutiful attendance at the foot of Rev. Wright to Van Jones become logical rather than aberrant. Michelle Obama could make $300,000 and she will always be more a victim than the Appalachian coal miner who earns $30,000, by virtue of her race and gender.
The problem, as Matt Yglesias pointed out, is that this doesn't jive with any of Obama's actual policy initiatives -- virtually all of which would advantage Mr. Coal Miner over Mrs. Obama. The Obama administration's domestic policy agenda has been singular in its lack of focus on issues of race and racial division (or even, really, racial harmony). It has studiously ducked the issue.
But it doesn't matter, because it never was about what the country (or what Black people) did or didn't do. To a significant swath of the country, all Black political action is presumed to be partisan racial gerrymandering, and all political action geared towards the poor is also presumed to be race-based wealth redistribution. Combine the two prejudices together, and you have a powerful political hurricane.
UPDATE: Also.
It's of a piece with what I heard from conservatives during the Gates episode itself. None of them had any familiarity whatsoever with Gates's actual work -- they had no interest in his literary criticism, an encyclopedia about Africa, a TV documentary about African Americans' ancestors -- but they assumed they knew everything there was to know about Gates. He must be an Angry Black Man, a Race Huckster, an Al Sharpton who just happened to have white-guilted Harvard into giving him a tenured position.
ReplyDeleteI was re-reading Gates's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man" collection recently, which is self-deprecating but not obnoxiously so, and it reminded me of the extent to which conservatives assume any black liberal must be full of rage toward white people. A white conservative friend commented, "I guess Gates doesn't think that one way is to look at him is like he might be breaking in."
I said, "It's a quote from Wallace Stevens."
"Oh," said the friend, "one of those Harlem poets."
"No, I think he was from the Midwest." I added for emphasis, "A white guy."
Yes, a guy with a PhD in English literature might be familiar with non-black poets. A guy who is president of, and seeks to be reelected by, a country that is 70% white might be formulating policy to work on behalf of the whole country and not just the African Americans and Latinos. Crazy, but possible!
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ReplyDeleteConservative intellectuals, surprisingly enough, are too sophisticated to believe Obama will put all the white people in camps so this is their fallback for chain emails and workplace gossip.
ReplyDeleteI love it:
ReplyDelete"But it doesn't matter, because it never was about what the country (or what Black people) did or didn't do. To a significant swath of the country, all Black political action is presumed to be partisan racial gerrymandering, and all political action geared towards the poor is also presumed to be race-based wealth redistribution. Combine the two prejudices together, and you have a powerful political hurricane."
Great paragraph I'm an economist at a prominent private university in the southeast and I often argue to my colleagues a similar point. What I like to call the "racialization of poverty" has been the great inhibitor of beneficial public policy for poor whites. Poverty researchers rarely focus on the white poor except when they concentrate on a Appalachia. And it works in two ways for political officials: (1) they effectively hinder relief efforts (even those they support) by explicitly stoking prejudice by suggesting such a policy would be good for a minority group (especially blacks) or (2) in cases where against, invoke some racial/ethnic stereotype of a minority gaming the system. Either often helps destroys the momentum for any policy aimed at helping working class and poor households, in general. There is such resentment towards blacks in this country that people are willing to take food out of their child's mouth to avoid giving somebody something they don't deserve. As a result, I often cringe when "black or minorities" comes up when discussing health care reform, will generally reduce support.