- 28 Aug 2018 12:25
#14942845
A hostage situation has emerged on the left. And progressive policies like “Medicare for All,” a $15 minimum wage, free public education, a “Green New Deal,” and even net neutrality, are the captives.
The captors? Bad faith claims of bigotry.
According to an increasingly popular narrative among the center-left, a dispiriting plurality of progressives are “class reductionists” — people who believe that economic equality is a cure-all for societal ills, and who, as a result, would neglect policy prescriptions which seek to remedy identity-based disparities.
[...]
If you’re #online, like I am, you’re probably already familiar with the main argument. It goes something like this: If a policy doesn’t resolve racism “first,” it’s at worst racist, and at best not worth pursuing.
[...]
a house of cards first constructed by Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential primary campaign: “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow,” she famously asked, “would that end racism? Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community? Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?”
It was a daring and adroit deception: Ignore this structural salve that would upset the status quo, she implied, because it won’t resolve that more personal, more visceral issue which goes straight to the heart of your identity.
Notice that this trick is aimed at policies which would threaten significant corporate or entrenched interests: The insurance industry, the banking industry, the energy sector, lenders. As the University of California, Berkeley, law professor and leading scholar on race Ian Haney-López observed as we discussed the motives behind this framing, mainstream Democrats, like Republicans, “are funded by large donors. Of course they’re concerned about the interests of the top 1 percent.” It’s almost as if the real agenda here isn’t ending racism, but deterring well-meaning liberals from policies that would upset the Democratic Party’s financial base.
[...]
The cruel irony is that as much as it wouldn’t have ended racism, breaking up the banks, and properly regulating them, would have a positive effect on the economic, and consequently, the social status of black and Hispanic Americans. Banks, left to their own devices, systematically give blacks worse loans with higher interest rates than whites with worse credit histories. Yet there was little talk of those racial impacts when, this spring, 33 Democrats (including 9 Congressional Black Caucus members) joined with Republicans to roll back protections contained in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act.
African-Americans are disproportionately victimized by predatory lending, and as a result, we were among the worst affected by the 2008 housing crisis (from which the bottom still hasn’t recovered). Of course, the goal of breaking up banks was to avoid a repeat of the collapse which wiped out 40 percent of black wealth — hardly an incidental issue to African Americans, who rank the economy, jobs, health care and poverty above race relations when asked to rate our chief political concerns.
[...]
Our Revolution President and former Bernie Sanders surrogate Nina Turner described race reductionism as “ludicrous.” “Identity can be used in a positive way to say, ‘Hey: we must recognize that there’s an undergirding concern across all issues in this country,’” for which race is a “major variable,” she told me. “But it is entirely another different story to say we’re going to use some of the most progressive ideas and advancements in this country and say we can’t do them because they hurt [marginalized people]. To me it’s just asinine.”
She’s right.
[...]
Just look at presumed 2020 hopeful Sen. Kamala Harris’s recent defense of identity politics at the Netroots conference earlier this month.
Seeming to either misunderstand or ignore the critique of identity politics from the left, she argued that the term “identity politics” is used to “divide and it is used to distract. Its purpose is to minimize and marginalize issues that impact all of us.” “It is used to try to shut us up,” she said.
[...]
But the left’s critique of identity politics is not really a critique of identity politics at all, but of the cynical weaponization of identity for political ends. By conflating the two, Harris managed to delegitimize the left’s critique, and strengthen the Democratic Party’s ability to continue to weaponize identity with impunity — whether or not that was her intent.
Harris averred that she wouldn’t be dissuaded from talking about immigrant rights, women’s rights, equal justice, or other concerns relating to marginalized groups. Nor should she. But I suspect that this shoring up of identity politics is not just a defense against attacks on substantive equality from the right. It’s preparation for a war against leftist candidates sure to enter the ring in 2020.
[...]
“We think that race, in particular, is a purely social issue and not connected to economics or reproductive justice or criminal justice,” said Gunn-Wright, arguing that, in fact, both class and race are always part of the equation. “I think identities are incredibly important and shape the way we move throughout the world, and they shape the way that people treat us and the way our government treats us. . . It’s just been deployed in this way that shuts down progress instead of embracing it, and also assumes in a very strange way that black people wouldn’t want this sort of progress, or wouldn’t benefit from it.”
Dr. Touré Reed, professor of 20th Century U.S. and African American History at Illinois State University, observed that the presumption that black Americans aren’t equally or more invested in economic interventions as white Americans is “pregnant, of course, with class presumptions” which work well for the black and Latinx professional middle class — many of whom play a significant role in defining public narratives via their work in politics or media. Since “the principal beneficiaries of universal policies would be poor and working class people who would disproportionately be black and brown,” he told me, “dismissing such policies on the grounds that they aren’t addressing systemic racism is a sleight of hand of sorts.”
[...]
“There is a tendency to reduce issues that have quite a bit to do with the economic opportunities available to all Americans, African Americans among them, and in some instances overrepresented among them, to matters of race,” explained Dr. Reed, who is currently writing a book on the conservative implications of race reductionism. He pointed to the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, as well as the mass incarceration crisis, as examples. “In both those instances, Flint and the criminal justice system, whites are 40 percent, or near 40 percent, of the victims,” he said. And that’s an awfully high number for collateral damage.” He went on: “There’s something systemic at play. But it can’t be reduced, be reducible, to race.”
[...]
About a month ago, in anticipation of writing this, I asked Twitter to remind me of any tweets or articles that had unfairly framed progressive policies as negative because they would not end bigotry. I expected maybe a dozen responses. But that thread is now at over 200 posts, and has been retweeted over 2,000 times. The scale of this is unnerving.
Sally Albright, a Democratic Party communications consultant, argues often that free college is “racist” because mostly white people go to college and it reinforces the status quo.
Senior Legal Analyst at Rewire News and popular Twitter personality Imani Gandy suggested to her 124,000 followers that caring about Wall Street is evidence of white privilege, writing: “I would love to wake up in the morning and have my first thought be ‘I hate Wall Street.’ That’s the whitest thing I’ve ever heard.”
In a similar vein, Deray McKesson, popular podcastor, charter school advocate, and Black Lives Matter icon, retweeted a tweet which read: “Wall Street didn’t nominate a Sec of Education that believed guns and bibles have more place in schools than LGBT and disabled students,” implying that because Wall Street isn’t to blame for anti-LGBT policies, the financial industry doesn’t merit critique from black and/or LGBT Americans at all.
When someone pointed out that New York Times columnist Charles Blow shouldn’t be uncomfortable with a 50-plus percent tax rate for rich because taxes were even higher in the New Deal era, Blow tweeted back: “You can feel free to return to the 30s. Wasn’t so great for my folks” — as though a high tax rate necessitates a return to Jim Crow terrorism.
An anonymous, but popular, Twitter personality disparaged a job guarantee program because black people “had 100% employment for 250 years,” meaning slavery, and it “didn’t help” racism.
In a Vice article, Monica Potts claims to support single-payer health care while cautioning against Sanders’s plan on the basis that it would destroy jobs worked by low income women — never mind that it would provide those women with health care they disproportionately lack. (Her point that any job-eliminating programs would cause less harm if a strong social safety net were in place is a sound one, but it ignores that Sanders’s plan is being proposed in conjunction with exactly the types of social safety net fortifications she seeks.)
Terrell Jermaine Starr, a journalist at The Root with a history of writing articles on the theme of Sanders’s alleged black problem, wrote a begrudging acknowledgment of the Senator’s new bill addressing the inequities of cash bail in a piece ungenerously titled: “Bernie Sanders Takes on Unjust Cash Bail System, but Still Doesn’t Make Direct Connection to Institutional Racism.”
Sally Albright distilled the essence of this dominant strain of criticism when she tweeted: “Sorry kids, no way around it, if you say a policy ‘helps all Americans equally,’ that policy is racist. Structural racism must be addressed.”
Some of the worst of these interlocutors aren’t mainstream, thank goodness, even though they have significant influence on Twitter. The anonymous Twitter user who argued that we have to maintain capitalism because “Ending capitalism WILL displace people of color. Money is what keeps us in the game,” or Sally Albright’s tweet that “Income inequality’ is only a priority for cis white men,” ultimately don’t matter. But I’m concerned that the growing popularity of this framing will make it that much easier for politicians to exploit the left’s good faith concern about identity-based disparities in order to disperse enthusiasm for policies that seek to transform the economic status quo.
Ending racism is a necessary, critical goal. But that goal should be pursued in tandem with efforts to address the effects of racism. The wage gap, the health care gap, the education gap, the debt gap — all these disparities would be narrowed by progressive, intersectional economic programs. As popular opinion coalesces around these policies, it’s crucial that we not let our best impulses be weaponized against our interests, any more than conservatives weaponize the worst impulses of their constituents against theirs.
https://theintercept.com/2018/08/26/bew ... uctionist/
@ 55:00
The captors? Bad faith claims of bigotry.
According to an increasingly popular narrative among the center-left, a dispiriting plurality of progressives are “class reductionists” — people who believe that economic equality is a cure-all for societal ills, and who, as a result, would neglect policy prescriptions which seek to remedy identity-based disparities.
[...]
If you’re #online, like I am, you’re probably already familiar with the main argument. It goes something like this: If a policy doesn’t resolve racism “first,” it’s at worst racist, and at best not worth pursuing.
[...]
a house of cards first constructed by Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential primary campaign: “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow,” she famously asked, “would that end racism? Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community? Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?”
It was a daring and adroit deception: Ignore this structural salve that would upset the status quo, she implied, because it won’t resolve that more personal, more visceral issue which goes straight to the heart of your identity.
Notice that this trick is aimed at policies which would threaten significant corporate or entrenched interests: The insurance industry, the banking industry, the energy sector, lenders. As the University of California, Berkeley, law professor and leading scholar on race Ian Haney-López observed as we discussed the motives behind this framing, mainstream Democrats, like Republicans, “are funded by large donors. Of course they’re concerned about the interests of the top 1 percent.” It’s almost as if the real agenda here isn’t ending racism, but deterring well-meaning liberals from policies that would upset the Democratic Party’s financial base.
[...]
The cruel irony is that as much as it wouldn’t have ended racism, breaking up the banks, and properly regulating them, would have a positive effect on the economic, and consequently, the social status of black and Hispanic Americans. Banks, left to their own devices, systematically give blacks worse loans with higher interest rates than whites with worse credit histories. Yet there was little talk of those racial impacts when, this spring, 33 Democrats (including 9 Congressional Black Caucus members) joined with Republicans to roll back protections contained in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act.
African-Americans are disproportionately victimized by predatory lending, and as a result, we were among the worst affected by the 2008 housing crisis (from which the bottom still hasn’t recovered). Of course, the goal of breaking up banks was to avoid a repeat of the collapse which wiped out 40 percent of black wealth — hardly an incidental issue to African Americans, who rank the economy, jobs, health care and poverty above race relations when asked to rate our chief political concerns.
[...]
Our Revolution President and former Bernie Sanders surrogate Nina Turner described race reductionism as “ludicrous.” “Identity can be used in a positive way to say, ‘Hey: we must recognize that there’s an undergirding concern across all issues in this country,’” for which race is a “major variable,” she told me. “But it is entirely another different story to say we’re going to use some of the most progressive ideas and advancements in this country and say we can’t do them because they hurt [marginalized people]. To me it’s just asinine.”
She’s right.
[...]
Just look at presumed 2020 hopeful Sen. Kamala Harris’s recent defense of identity politics at the Netroots conference earlier this month.
Seeming to either misunderstand or ignore the critique of identity politics from the left, she argued that the term “identity politics” is used to “divide and it is used to distract. Its purpose is to minimize and marginalize issues that impact all of us.” “It is used to try to shut us up,” she said.
[...]
But the left’s critique of identity politics is not really a critique of identity politics at all, but of the cynical weaponization of identity for political ends. By conflating the two, Harris managed to delegitimize the left’s critique, and strengthen the Democratic Party’s ability to continue to weaponize identity with impunity — whether or not that was her intent.
Harris averred that she wouldn’t be dissuaded from talking about immigrant rights, women’s rights, equal justice, or other concerns relating to marginalized groups. Nor should she. But I suspect that this shoring up of identity politics is not just a defense against attacks on substantive equality from the right. It’s preparation for a war against leftist candidates sure to enter the ring in 2020.
[...]
“We think that race, in particular, is a purely social issue and not connected to economics or reproductive justice or criminal justice,” said Gunn-Wright, arguing that, in fact, both class and race are always part of the equation. “I think identities are incredibly important and shape the way we move throughout the world, and they shape the way that people treat us and the way our government treats us. . . It’s just been deployed in this way that shuts down progress instead of embracing it, and also assumes in a very strange way that black people wouldn’t want this sort of progress, or wouldn’t benefit from it.”
Dr. Touré Reed, professor of 20th Century U.S. and African American History at Illinois State University, observed that the presumption that black Americans aren’t equally or more invested in economic interventions as white Americans is “pregnant, of course, with class presumptions” which work well for the black and Latinx professional middle class — many of whom play a significant role in defining public narratives via their work in politics or media. Since “the principal beneficiaries of universal policies would be poor and working class people who would disproportionately be black and brown,” he told me, “dismissing such policies on the grounds that they aren’t addressing systemic racism is a sleight of hand of sorts.”
[...]
“There is a tendency to reduce issues that have quite a bit to do with the economic opportunities available to all Americans, African Americans among them, and in some instances overrepresented among them, to matters of race,” explained Dr. Reed, who is currently writing a book on the conservative implications of race reductionism. He pointed to the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, as well as the mass incarceration crisis, as examples. “In both those instances, Flint and the criminal justice system, whites are 40 percent, or near 40 percent, of the victims,” he said. And that’s an awfully high number for collateral damage.” He went on: “There’s something systemic at play. But it can’t be reduced, be reducible, to race.”
[...]
About a month ago, in anticipation of writing this, I asked Twitter to remind me of any tweets or articles that had unfairly framed progressive policies as negative because they would not end bigotry. I expected maybe a dozen responses. But that thread is now at over 200 posts, and has been retweeted over 2,000 times. The scale of this is unnerving.
Sally Albright, a Democratic Party communications consultant, argues often that free college is “racist” because mostly white people go to college and it reinforces the status quo.
Senior Legal Analyst at Rewire News and popular Twitter personality Imani Gandy suggested to her 124,000 followers that caring about Wall Street is evidence of white privilege, writing: “I would love to wake up in the morning and have my first thought be ‘I hate Wall Street.’ That’s the whitest thing I’ve ever heard.”
In a similar vein, Deray McKesson, popular podcastor, charter school advocate, and Black Lives Matter icon, retweeted a tweet which read: “Wall Street didn’t nominate a Sec of Education that believed guns and bibles have more place in schools than LGBT and disabled students,” implying that because Wall Street isn’t to blame for anti-LGBT policies, the financial industry doesn’t merit critique from black and/or LGBT Americans at all.
When someone pointed out that New York Times columnist Charles Blow shouldn’t be uncomfortable with a 50-plus percent tax rate for rich because taxes were even higher in the New Deal era, Blow tweeted back: “You can feel free to return to the 30s. Wasn’t so great for my folks” — as though a high tax rate necessitates a return to Jim Crow terrorism.
An anonymous, but popular, Twitter personality disparaged a job guarantee program because black people “had 100% employment for 250 years,” meaning slavery, and it “didn’t help” racism.
In a Vice article, Monica Potts claims to support single-payer health care while cautioning against Sanders’s plan on the basis that it would destroy jobs worked by low income women — never mind that it would provide those women with health care they disproportionately lack. (Her point that any job-eliminating programs would cause less harm if a strong social safety net were in place is a sound one, but it ignores that Sanders’s plan is being proposed in conjunction with exactly the types of social safety net fortifications she seeks.)
Terrell Jermaine Starr, a journalist at The Root with a history of writing articles on the theme of Sanders’s alleged black problem, wrote a begrudging acknowledgment of the Senator’s new bill addressing the inequities of cash bail in a piece ungenerously titled: “Bernie Sanders Takes on Unjust Cash Bail System, but Still Doesn’t Make Direct Connection to Institutional Racism.”
Sally Albright distilled the essence of this dominant strain of criticism when she tweeted: “Sorry kids, no way around it, if you say a policy ‘helps all Americans equally,’ that policy is racist. Structural racism must be addressed.”
Some of the worst of these interlocutors aren’t mainstream, thank goodness, even though they have significant influence on Twitter. The anonymous Twitter user who argued that we have to maintain capitalism because “Ending capitalism WILL displace people of color. Money is what keeps us in the game,” or Sally Albright’s tweet that “Income inequality’ is only a priority for cis white men,” ultimately don’t matter. But I’m concerned that the growing popularity of this framing will make it that much easier for politicians to exploit the left’s good faith concern about identity-based disparities in order to disperse enthusiasm for policies that seek to transform the economic status quo.
Ending racism is a necessary, critical goal. But that goal should be pursued in tandem with efforts to address the effects of racism. The wage gap, the health care gap, the education gap, the debt gap — all these disparities would be narrowed by progressive, intersectional economic programs. As popular opinion coalesces around these policies, it’s crucial that we not let our best impulses be weaponized against our interests, any more than conservatives weaponize the worst impulses of their constituents against theirs.
https://theintercept.com/2018/08/26/bew ... uctionist/
@ 55:00
Socialism without freedom is fascism.
Was I the only one who thought it was funny that Hilary the WASP managed to label Sanders the Jew as too White. The thing is the strategy worked.
- By ingliz
- By KurtFF8
- By Doug64