Spare us the “Death Match” Portrayal: Naomi Klein’s Folly

mcaldez

I’ve known from a participant at the World Conference Against Racism in Geneva that Naomi Klein would cover the event.  And given her North American centered and narration of The Take, I’m not surprised that she condescended the cause of the worldwide struggle against racism.

Her title alone is telling: “Minority Death Match: Jews, blacks, and the ‘post-racial’ presidency” appears in the latest issue of Harper’s.  Seriously, the title implies both sides were like fighting animals, and ignores more important targets: imperial regimes built by colonial racism.  Did she at al consult any persons of color before submitting her article to Harper’s? Was it Harper’s idea? Either way, it was a disservice to both sides, especially since nobody died in Geneva as a result of the conference.

But if Klein wants to focus on the problem as anti-racism versus anti-Semitism, as she does, the readers would be better off if she a) explained what was so anti-Semitic about the participants (only Ahmedinejad qualifies), b) understand that Israeli racism has been a much more potent force over the last few decades than anti-Semitism. Does Israel having a nuke mean anything? How about being the largest recipient of military aid from the US?  She also poses anti-Semitism as a continuum with one source, acknowledging Arab anti-Semitism (she forgets to mention that Arabs are also Semites) but not European anti-Semitism (the one that actually produced the Holocaust).  Not once does Klein ask the question (and she’s not alone): what do the Palestinians have to do with the holocaust, and why are they made into colonial subjects for something that Germany did?

Overall, Klein focused more on Israel’s defense against accusations of racism yet doesn’t mention Israel’s racist laws and acts: Jewish-only roads, and the refusal to recognize interracial marriages between “Jews” and Arabs, etc.  And of course Israel also racializes Arab and Ethiopian Jews.  As for the apartheid comparisons being made from outside Israel that the Zionists have to defend against, Israeli news editors have actually owned up to the reality that Israel was becoming an apartheid state.  The only difference between Israel and apartheid era South Africa was that the Afrikaners’ lack of influence in Hollywood and other US media to counteract the anti-apartheid movement that gained momentum in the 1980s.

Also ignored by Klein was the advocacy for migrants from the Global South to northern countries, especially those following colonial trails from Africa and Asia to Western Europe, and neocolonial trails from Latin America to the US.  Then again, the “Jews vs. blacks” discourse carries more currency.

Red Herrings and Red Health Scares: Through the Lens of Herrenvolkist History

First, my apologies for not blogging for three months, for I had academic writing pursuits to take care of, which will become available for public viewing in 2010.

There has been plenty of bluster over the recent health care debate (if we can call it that). The cleanup hitters at MSNBC, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow have referred to the anti-health reform movement as “astroturf.” Whatever the truth may be about their authenticity, many of these participants are probably capable of expressing their angst without any assistance from insurance companies. For starters, this is only the most recent proof that fear still works, especially along racial lines. The racial over and undertones of these protests at town hall meetings are not just operating out of a vacuum, but out of a white supremacist activist tradition. One picture says a thousand words: “Obama’s Plan: White Slavery.”  This begs the question: how did a segment of the population seemingly so ignorant become and remain so influential?

During the early nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville warned of the “tyranny of the majority” (2003, 300-301) What did this really mean? Once the franchise was extended to poor whites, the US in essence became a “racial democracy.” This new democratic experiment was not one that would function as a class-based democracy, or where the disparity between those on top would share with those on bottom. Rather, it was democracy based on white supremacy, where rich whites and poor whites would come together and share privileges along racial lines. Since the nineteenth century, poor whites (real and fake) have been more influential in the nation’s political discourse than many people care to admit. They were not only influential at the polls, but as judges, juries, and executioners, and not just in the south.  The Democratic Party, from its inception to 1968, was a coalition of big-city reformers and southern planters. Contemporary race scholars refer to this as a herrenvolk system, or “people’s entitlement.”

W.E.B. DuBois summed up very well poor whites in the nineteenth century (1962). Their identification with the powers that be continues to this day, only now they feel that power slipping away. Rich or poor, the one thing the could always count on was their white privilege. This meant getting the benefit of the doubt over people of color and a sense of entitlement. It’s no wonder that they bring nooses to these town hall meetings, for its a symbol that they’re familiar with. It doesn’t take much for them to connect the following dots as a threat to their way of life: a black man in charge wanting to change anything. Sure, fear works, and by root and extension, so does misinformation. But do many of these disruptors at the town hall meetings actually believe that Obama is Hitler as they claim? Do they really believe that the government has a plot to kill granny? Are they just among the 40 million listeners blindly following Rush Limbaugh? Regardless, any social program the government proposes to pay for will be met with protests from “angry” white men and women, save for wars against darker peoples.   Any new or existing social program will be seen as going to nonwhites who don’t deserve it at the expense of whites, and the recent government option proposal is only the latest. Is the threat to euthanize granny even necessary to get many of these protesters riled up? Symbolically, that becomes another example of a black man threatening a white woman (one whose best days are behind?).

So how did we get to this point of inadequate health care and a racially-motivated movement against it? For the same reason that reform movements forgot something since the New Deal.  The New Deal could only be so inclusive. Northern reformers/big city Democrats didn’t have to contend with the Republicans (the party of Hoover) as much as they had to deal with the obstructionist wing of their own party: the “Dixiecrats” (and now the “Blue Dogs”).  Relief for unemployed workers? Compromised to exclude rural workers in order to prevent black southerners from collecting, forcing many back into sharecropping and attempting to dissuade strikes. The Home Owners Loan Corporation to prevent foreclosures? The Dixiecrats only agreed once a neighborhood ratings system based on racial lines was in place (Roediger 2006: 227).  The expansion of state university systems after World War II? Only so long as the new campuses were in suburbs and white rural areas.

In other words, the real beneficiaries of the New Deal were white. And while many of these white protesters today don’t want socialized medicine, two demographic groups are beneficiaries of it: veterans and seniors.

So when the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 60s forced the New Deal to be more racially inclusive, by 1968 the New Deal coalition fell apart, and the Southern Strategy was born. While many pundits declared the “Southern Strategy” dead after the 2008 presidential election, in many ways it is still alive and well. As long as the Democrats acquiesce to the hate-mongers at the town halls on health care and future issues, as Obama is about to, they still hold sway in policy-making, even if they no longer hold the vote (but significant votes, nonetheless).

Given this history, why should we be surprised about the death threats at town hall meetings by angry whites who imagine the loss of their privileges? Whether grassroots or astroturf, it won’t matter if they’re not contested in equal or greater numbers, though I don’t advocate bringing guns to these forums as some of these anti-health protestors have. Unless they are contested just by our mere presence and experiences with the health care racket, you can expect the Democrats to cower to them, as Obama is about to do as he drops the public option from the legislation. Then again, he’d have been better off arguing for a single-payer system, and when forced to compromise, be more likely to have a government option.

Addendum: There is a petition you can sign: http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/publicoption_bo/?rc=fb.connect

Tell President Obama and Congress that we need them to stick with the public option. If we can’t get to the town halls to confront the hate-mongers in equal or greater numbers, we can at least out-petition them without risking our safety.

Works cited

de Tocqueville, Aleixis. 2003. Democracy in America: And Two Essays on America. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Du Bois, W.E.B. 1962. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880. New York: Russell and Russell.

Roediger, David. 2006. Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs. New York: Basic Books.

The Déjà Vu Flu

OK, we get it: somewhere in Mexico lies the epicenter of an outbreak of swine flu. It doesn’t really matter where because any part of the country would suffice for the hate-mongers in the media (Malkin, Beck, etc.), for which only Keith Olbermann has called out within the mainstream media. Is the swine flu really the next major human catastrophe? More people have died from “regular flu” since January, roughly 36,000. So then why isn’t there hysteria about that? Most of the deaths attributed to swine flu have taken place in Mexico, about 150, and only one in the US so far.  Even so, the real culprit was probably Smithfield Foods, an Anglo-American company that owns factory pig farms.

This latest epidemic will probably prove to be an epidemic that isn’t, as was the case with several others leading up to today. Yes, there’s a tradition of using disease epidemics to prevent immigration along racial lines, and its been documented by historians. I recommend two thoroughly researched books: Alexandra Stern’s Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (University of California Press, 2005), and Natalia Molina’s Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939 (University of California Press, 2006).

In 1916, the US Public Health Service established quarantines at El Paso and Laredo to quarantine Mexican immigrants. The USPHS was heavily influenced by Eugenics, or race science (1). Then as now, some efforts were made to distinguish good and bad Mexicans along racial lines. Light-skinned Mexicans arriving in 1st class passenger railcars could bypass the quarantine while darker Mexicans arriving in second-class cars were quarantined, and then deloused in kerosene (2). At the El Paso station in 1917, a grand total of three Mexicans were acknowledged to have had the deadly typhus fever—after almost 800,000 Mexican bodies had been inspected. Almost 2,700 bodies were inspected per day in El Paso, in contrast to Ellis Island, which inspected about 350 a day (3). And while the Eugenics movement obsessed about eastern and southern Europeans through the 1930s, the latter had some protection from the Democrats. Mexicans had none back then, and very little now. These practices at the border lasted until the late 1930s (4).

Southwestern cities from El Paso to Los Angeles advertised themselves as health meccas for Anglo-American northerners, and made efforts to assure them that these disease epidemics were strictly limited to Mexicans and off-limits to whites (5). Though some Mexicans fell victim to the associated illnesses, there were not something they carried with them from Mexico. Sometimes, illnesses were acquired in railroad camps or slum housing. In the case of railroad camps, Mexican railroad workers lived in expendable boxcars, and some succumbed to tuberculosis, which could’ve been prevented with decent housing and access to hot water, neither of which was provided by either the railroad companies or local governments. But when similar diseases affected the Okies during the 1930s, services were provided to “deserving” white Americans (6). The exaggeration of Mexicans as disease-carriers had also been used as a pretext to urban redevelopment in areas adjacent to downtown Los Angeles (7).

Similar attempts had been directed at other racialized groups (8). Since then, medical sources remained one of a myriad of avenues of racializing Mexicans as a burdern on society, including the overpopulation discourse since the 1970s. Now let’s fast-forward to the present. Then as now, statistics were manipulated to exaggerate “threats.”

If it wasn’t the threat of diseases it would be something else. Just two years ago, Leslie Stahl took Lou Dobbs to task on his claim that 7,000 Mexicans brought leprocy into the U.S. Of course it was grossly exaggerated (if not an outright lie), but he made the claim on CNN, which almost counts as a news source of record. And because CNN isn’t Fox News, liberals and moderates are more likely to believe Dobbs’ bullshit claim. All of this begs the question: is the recent case of the swine flu just another epidemic that isn’t? Is this really just another opportunity to justify the prevention of Mexican immigration, to keep Mexicans in their place? One thing is certain: many of the pundits have, knowingly or not, copied the practices of their Eugenic forbearers who were universally discredited during and since the horrible Eugenic experiments in Germany during the World War II era, much of it learned from U.S.-based eugenicists. This Friday, we can defy our place and get out and march to commemorate May 1st as we’ve done the last three years, and to show that we’re not giving in to the fear-mongers or to liberals/moderates who think they may have a point. We can even wear masks to avoid the “American flu” to make a counterpoint.

Notes

1. Alexandra Minna Stern. Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America. University of California Press, 2005, Chapter 2.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid, 62-64.

4. Ibid, Chapter 2.

5. For El Paso, see Mario T. Garcia, “Mexican Americans and the Politics of Citizenship: The Case of El Paso, 1936.” New Mexico Historical Society 59, no. 2 (April 1984): 187-204, p. 186; for Los Angeles, see Natalia Molina, Fit to be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939. University of California Press, 2006.

6. Molina, 163-164.

7. Molina, 131-132.

8. Molina, Chapter 1; Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown. University of California Press, 2001.

WTF: Geneva

The World Conference against Racism (WCAR) began in Geneva today, with the usual hypocricy from Western Europe and its settler offshoots Australia, Canada, Israel and the US. Those countries basically hid behind Israel, which is a bigger pariah than its ever been. Even with the language in the draft heading into today having been toned down to accommodate reps of these nation-states, they still boycotted. In other words, the plight of the Palestinians had to be ignored. But ignored its not, and Israel didn’t really boycott Geneva, after all.

Israel and its zealots are holding press conferences on UN property while Palestinian groups may have been censored.  Once again, the cause of holocaust remembrance is being used as a weapon to justify Israeli racism and apartheid (Does anybody remember that Zionists collaborated with the Nazis?).  The apartheid comparison  is fair and valid, if for no other reason than the fact that Israeli editors and politicos have admitted to Israel having become just that: an apartheid settler regime.

Even those in attendance used the excuse of Ahmadinejad’s speech to walk out (as if they didn’t plan to in advance). Why? He’s an anti-semite, of course. And what was so anti-Semitic about his speech? He called Israel “racist.”  That’s it? All he did was reiterate a point others have already made and will continue to make until Israel tears town its apartheid walls and integrates its Jewish-only roads?

In any case, whatever gets ratified at the UN becomes international law, and in theory, all nation-states must abide by it. Does that mean that the next logical step should be to pressure the UN to do something to address racial oppression? Shouldn’t that mean that if US and other racial regime courts don’t provide remedies, then appeals should be made to the World Court in Da Hague?

Racist regimes can run but they can’t hide, and their apologists can only sugar-coat them so much. Barack Obama? Exhausted all his risks during his presidential campaign. Alan Dershowitz? Fraud academic and lawyer who can’t win all the time (and not always on his own). Hollywood? Could only sugar-coat so much Israel’s destruction of Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza last winter, and now has more film competition abroad.

Pressing the UN to address racism is not new. Malcolm X made those attempts in the early 1960s. Among the lessons that he taught, the black struggle in the US was linked to the decolonization struggle in the third world, including the fight against racist settler regimes (South Africa and Israel in particular). Four decades later, the fight against racism in the US remains linked to the fight against racism in western Europe as the latter’s subjects from the former colonies have been pressured to migrate to the metropoles (London, Paris, Amsterdam). The only thing new is the legal momentum on a global scale that came out of Durban I and must come out of Durban II in Geneva.

Face it: Obama an Apologist for the Racists

This week was the week that I’ve withdrawn any support for Barack Obama. 

The Durban Review conference is coming up in Geneva next week from April 20-24. Its just about written in stone that the US and other western nation-states will not send representatives. Despite the toned down rhetoric of Durban II, the US still won’t participate, which begs the question: why tone down Durban I in the first place?

Obama has assured the Zionists that the US will not only refuse to participate but sugarcoat Israeli apartheid, as well.  I noticed earlier in the week that Evo Morales, the first indigenous president of Bolivia, went on a hunger strike to get changes in Bolivia’s constitution that would enable him to run for re-election, which he is likely to win. Unlike Obama, Morales champions indigenous rights and doesn’t care if the world is uncomfortable with his indigenous practices like chewing coca leaves during his hunger strike.

Though Morales utilizes a political-legal apparatus with white supremacist roots, for once that system can work for Bolivia’s indigenous majority against the criollo ruling minority elite. The latter is now complaining that the system that they benefitted from for centuries no longer works.  Just as an indigenous electoral movement brought Morales to power, an increased non-white presence in the US brought its first black president to office in Obama. Despite the US’ white majority, Obama does not have to pander to certain elements of it the way he does. He no longer needs to pander to AIPAC, for one.  AIPAC has plenty of support among Jewish-Americans in recent years, and a rival zionist lobby, J Street, is not half the warmonger that AIPAC is. Obama could’ve played one Zionist organization against the other, or the lesser of evils against the bigger of evils.

In sum, Obama is carrying the tradition of “safe” black leaders who play it safe, and won’t take risks. His presidential campaign may have featured risks that paid off, but now that he’s in office, what risks has he taken? How can we make his “safe” moves more risky? As Glen Ford argued:

We must first ask: Why is the White House reporting to “Jewish leaders” on an issue that is of interest to all Americans, most especially people of color? Has Obama arranged such briefings on Durban II for “Black leaders,” “Latino leaders,” or “Native American leaders” – representatives of constituencies that have suffered genocide, slavery, discrimination, forced displacement and all manner of racist assaults right here on American soil? No, he has not. Barack Obama knows full well that he risks nothing by disrespecting African Americans at will. Across the Black political spectrum, so-called leadership seems incapable of shame or of taking manly or womanly offense at even the most blatant insults to Black people when the source of the affront is Barack Hussein Obama.

Obama’s excuses are running out. There are only two million Jews in the US, and plenty more African-American, Latino, and Asian-American voters that should hold him accountable. Not only has the US refused to address racism in the global and domestic arenas, Obama has shown that he’s not going to lock horns with the beneficiaries of a white supremacist system. He will not hold beneficiaries or wrongdoers accountable, either when it comes to racist practices, torture, or both. 

Just because Obama is in the imperial driver’s seat, that doesn’t mean he has to maintain the system of white supremacy that is foundational in the US’ history. Imperial or not, there are other “democracies” that have white supremacist foundations in which non-white leaders have rode the wave of populism and taken risks to benefit non-white peoples: Morales, and Hugo Chávez.  After losing hope (pun intended) that Obama would send a rep to Geneva, it may be too much to hope that the mojo of Chávez and Morales would rub off on Obama when they meet in my semi-ancestral home of Trinidad.

Conference Paper read: 40th Anniversary of ‘Black Awakening’

My colleague and longtime Jason Ferreira read my paper for me: “‘Domestic Colonialism:’ The Overlooked Significance of Robert Allen’s Contributions, 1969-1975.”  You can check it out on audio: http://www.voxunion.com/?p=1089

It was an honor to pay tribute to Robert Allen, who documented internal colonialism as it shifted to a neo-colonial stage in the late 1960s.  Black Awakening in Capitalist America is my favorite book from the US in the 1960s.

Reflecting on Binghamton after a Massacre

I finished up my Ph. D at Binghamton last year. I used to live a few blocks from the site of today’s massacre.  My heart absolutely goes out to the victims and their families. 

For those of you unfamiliar with Binghamton, the town has been down on its luck for at least the last 10 years.  Until then IBM was the main employer and just outside Binghamton in Endicott was its headquarters.  Deindustrilization came later to Binghamton than other rust belt towns in Upstate New York, as IBM decided to decentralize its operations and shift production and administration elsewhere.  

Binghamton was a mostly-white town until ten years ago.  While many whites have moved south (either due to retirements or layoffs), a gentrification process was in full swing in New York City, with Blacks and Latinos most affected.  Displaced NYCers scrambled for housing wherever they could find it, from New Jersey, rust-belt New England towns, down south, and as far as Toronto and Montreal. 

I arrived for grad school in 2000.  Binghamton has also been one end of the pipeline of students from the NYC metro area, and many New Yorkers gave me a sense of community, where I previously least expected it. From them, I learned so much about NYC history without having to spend that much time in the city, but when I did, it was usually with one of my colleagues.  Common racialized experiences brought us together, and that process was aided by some businesses from NYC that catered to NYC emigres, including Kennedy Fried Chicken (from Harlem) and New York Styles barbershops (the owner supposedly owns two in the Bronx).

In academic circles, Binghamton is known more for the Sociology Department at SUNY-Binghamton (now called Binghamton University). Despite the town’s conservative history and reputation, during the early 1970s, Terrence Hopkins became Chair of the Sociology Department. Hopkins would oversee a major transition from a mainstream sociology department to one that was a counter-hegemonic project. The big ticket would be Immanuel Wallerstein, whose transition to a global-historical sociologist was christened with much-celebrated “The Modern World System” in 1974. The World Systems school would later include Giovanni Arrighi, but Hopkins didn’t stop there. The Sociology Department, due to his efforts, became not only one of the most left-leaning in the country, but made conscious decisions to move the social sciences away from hegemonic projects, especially in light of scandals that plagued ethnography. Ethnography until the early years of this decade remained taboo in the department.  With the emphasis on global-historical sociology, the department received many grad students from around the world, more than several departments combined.  There were drinking and eating establishments many of us would meet to discuss the important intellectual questions.  On campus and in Binghamton (not near campus), there was plenty of cooperation among a diverse group of students that often also influenced many undergrads.  

An increasingly diverse Binghamton (Mayor Matt Ryan just announced on the Rachel Maddow Show that Binghamton High School has students that speak 32 languages), has turned a dull rust belt town into a more livable place.  Some of the best things that have happened in my life have happened in Binghamton.  Today’s murder-suicide of 14 people, including immigrants taking citizenship exams, was brutal and shocking. Again, my deepest condolences to the families.

Will the May Day Protests be Bigger this Year?

The big protests on May 1st, 2006 revived a dormant May Day tradition in the country where it was born. Since then they’ve tapered off. David Bacon predicts that May 1st protests this year will be big.

http://www.truthout.org/032709A

Let’s hope he’s right, but in any event, my classes are already cancelled for that day. Don’t go to work, don’t go to school, and don’t shop. Contribute nothing to the economy on that day.  Barack Obama is the most labor-friendly president since Carter, which means a small window of opportunity for the labor and immigrant rights movements to get some victories. Whatever campaign promises he made will only be kept if we make him keep them, and mass actions would be a nice place to start.

Is the Rock Really Dropped?

On May 5, the New York State Assembly and Senate just passed a bill awaiting Governor David Paterson’s signature that would basically repeal the infamous Rockefeller Drug Laws.  The RDL basically issued a mandatory 25-to-life sentence for drug offenses, removing the independence of judges handling these cases. The new legislation would restore a judge’s power to sentence a defendant relative to the scale of the offense.  Paterson three weeks later finally signed the bill, though with revisions. 

Even though Paterson has expressed concern for the RDL over the years, as governor, did he actually put his money where his mouth is? Did he cave into what he (and perhaps his advisors) anticipated to be the sentiments of white upstate voters, who happen to be beneficiaries of the RDL? Prisons have been built in upstate towns like Elmira, with mostly white guards and Black and Latino inmates from the NYC metro area. Basically, he restored a judge’s ability to order drug defendants to treatment instead of prison, but increased penalties for “kingpins,” whatever that means. Does “kingpin” refer to someone who merely controls a corner? I suppose it doesn’t refer to bankers who launder drug money, does it? Nothing like still being able to show that the gov can still be tough on crime (especially when it doesn’t include infamous banks).

Stifling the discourse on racism in the world

Kali Akuno has a sharp critique of the Obama administration’s stiff-arming of the discourse on race/is refusal to participate in the Durban Review Conference in Geneva next month. Check it out:

http://navigatingthestorm.blogspot.com/2009/03/preserving-inequality-analyzing-obamas.html