Tag Archives: race

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Zach accuses me of “starting a blog war.” Nah – but I’ll finish it. This would perhaps be the place to warn Zach that we at LWB “will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail.” Or somesuch.

Zach takes me on for my suggestion that Limbaugh’s drug scandal, and the response from the media and the organized right, lend credence to the suggestion by certain ex-conservatives that the social agenda of the right operates primarily as a cover to advance its economic agenda. He argues that my argument is “mechanist,” and that it minimalizes the distinctive oppression of sexual and ethnic minorities and the stake of the right in that oppression by rendering it merely a by-product of an economic project. Perhaps unfortunately for those reading this site and Zach’s (you know who you are), again I don’t think my disagreement with Zach is as wide as it might appear. I argued yesterday not that social conservatism is merely a convenient superstructure over a material class war, but that conservatives lend credence to those who do think so when they take fundamentally libertarian stances on the failures of their fellow travelers to live by their social values. I would argue that the Right (capital “R”) of the past years is increasingly a libertarian one, and that there’s a great deal of deft politics and crass hypocrisy at work which makes it possible to draw on the libertarians at the Cato Institute as the brain trust of your movement and the Christian Coalition as your grassroots arm. Zach argues that Bob Barr’s suggestion that his daughter’s abortion is a private matter doesn’t detract from his work to make “the state apparatus to control people’s bodies in a fascistic linking of gender and power, of sexual reproduction and social reproduction.” Certainly, it doesn’t make it any less dangerous or any less real to those who suffer as a result. What it does detract from, however, is the integrity of the argument and the credibility of the stance. To argue that the right’s real relationship to its social values is soaked in classism does not, as I see it, suggest that sexism, heteronormativity, or racism are derivatives of classism. I would also argue, as I think Zach would as well, that the classism of segments of the right has a foundation of sexual and racial prejudice. The Wall Street Journal ran a long staff editorial a decade or so ago called “No Guardrails,” blaming the crime of a violent anti-abortion activist on the society that the left had fashioned for him to grow up in (strained already, yes, but it gets better). The basic thesis of the piece was that all things being equal, the elite might be able to dabble in drugs, sex, and pornography, but everyone should abstain because the lower classes don’t have the same reserves of strength so as not to be fully corrupted. This is to me a vital dramatization of the intersections of prejudice. All that said, I stand by my contention that the lifestyles and even personal beliefs of significant parts of the right elite are far less closely in line with their professed politics than are, say, their personal economic practices with their economics and that the right response to those who transgress its social agenda is often motivated by its economic agenda. I also strongly affirm Zach’s reminder that all oppressions are not the same and that economic determinism runs the risk of marginalizing both the nature and the victims of other types of oppression.

I should also note, perhaps, that I was not born with a copy of the Nation in my hand.

Zach ends with a call “to look more deeply at how racism, sexism, heteronormativity, and capitalism are both intertwined and sometimes contradictory as subjectivities from below struggle to reshape and have reshaped the social relations of capitalism.” Sounds good to me. But Zach, you’re gonna have to start that one off. Much respect to you as well.

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The subcontracting company Yale’s been using got a surprise this morning when they showed up to the lot in Orange CT where they bus workers over to the University and a dozen of the replacement workers donned “On strike” signs and started picketing. They tried to get the police to push everybody out of the lot, with little success, and ended up going back to home base to choose a new location for Monday. The new strikers are out on the Green now meeting the old strikers; they’ll have a press conference there are 10:30 AM. Once again, New Haven has refused to let Yale’s leadership divide it.

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Yet again, behind the rhetoric of partnership Yale’s leadership demonstrates a vision of crass division and stable inequality:

A group of ministers accused Yale University on Tuesday of bringing Latino workers to the campus as strikebreakers to cause racial dissension among picketing maintenance workers.

Two area cleaning firms delivered 40 to 50 Latinos to the Old Campus on Monday, and “paraded” them through a picket line of mainly African-American strikers in Local 35, according to the Rev. Emilio Hernandez.

Hernandez said less than 5 percent of Yale’s workers are Latino, even though they make up 20 percent of the New Haven population. He said the ministers want to increase the presence of Latinos at Yale, but not as strikebreakers, and he accused Yale of trying to arouse racial confrontation.

The ministers said several clergy tried to talk to the workers on Monday, but were asked by police to leave.

Dan Smokler of the Connecticut Center for a New Economy, which works closely with the strikers, said Tuesday members followed buses with workers from a company in West Haven to a parking lot in the city’s Fair Haven section, where they were transferred to Yale vans and brought to several of Yale’s residential colleges under security escort. He said the workers were told not to talk with the center’s volunteers or they would lose their jobs…

Julie Gonzales, a junior at Yale’s Silliman College, said she was particularly offended by the hirings. “To see my university use these kinds of divisive tactics is like a kick in the stomach. A university that is committed to diversity should bring people together, rather than trying to break a strike,” Gonzales said.

This is the same strategy ONHSA ally Boise Kimber used in telling Ward 6 voters that Delores Colon represented the Latino threat to Blacks in New Haven. She won that race yesterday.

This is the same thinking that convinced Bartlett Giamatti in the early 80’s that Yale’s predominately Black male service and maintenance workers and Yale’s predominately White female clerical and technical workers would never go on strike together.

This is the grand strategy that Yale has been depending on to crush the unions in this fight – the conviction that once the situation got intense, a coaltion of thousands of clerical, technical, maintenance, and service workers, teaching assistants and researchers, students, faculty, clergy, and community members would fracture quickly. So far, looks like Yale’s leadership has a lot to learn.

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus is releasing a letter to President Levin condemning Yale’s behavior today.

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Faced with Bustamante’s edge over libertarian wonder boy Schwarzenegger, Bustamante’s potential to mobilize Latino voters as the first Latino to lead the nation’s largest state, and the nagging problem of Arnold’s coziness with Nazis, some on the right have been grasping for their reverse Kurt Waldheim scandal. What they’ve come up with is Bustamante’s membership as a college student in MEChA, Movimiento Estudantil Chicana/o de Aztlan. And they’ve had the audacity to suggest that membership in the national Latino student organization occupies the same moral space as close friendship with Nazis, and that the media only displays more concern about the latter than about the former because of – you guessed it – liberal bias. This argument rests on an idea that the right has spent significant effort trying to infiltrate into the American consciousness: that the nationalism and solidarity of the oppressed and the minority is morally equivalent to the nationalism and solidarity of the oppressor and the majority. This idea is a keystone of the far (and not so far) right and far left argument that identification with an in-group is always an obstacle to identification with a larger group and never a path towards it. I think I stand with the majority of Americans in maintaining unequivocally and without contradiction both that blind nationalism, uncompromising sectarianism, and subtle racism pose and have historically been dangerous threats to the construction of a human community and that identification with a small group – be it a neighborhood or one of Anderson’s “Imagined Communities” – can serve both the advancement of marginalized groups and the building of human empathy. But an intentionally divisive fringe, with much of the mainstream media in tow, is steadilly working to build in the minds of Americans a conception of the NAACP as the KKK. This, ironically, echoes the apologia of the hate groups themselves: ” has their organizations looking out for their interests, so shouldn’t have one looking out for ours?”

Michelle Malkin, in her attack on MEChA, quotes an early document of the organization from several decades ago, which reads in part:

“We do not recognize capricious frontiers on the bronze continent. Brotherhood unites us, and love for our brothers makes us a people whose time has come and who struggles against the foreigner ‘gabacho’ who exploits our riches and destroys our culture. With our heart in our hands and our hands in the soil, we declare the independence of our mestizo nation. We are a bronze people with a bronze culture.”

In other words, Latinos have been oppressed and persecuted by an illegitimate campaign of white violence, and should work together to beat back a continuing assault on the opportunities, communities, and culture of Latinos. And the homeland of Latinos belongs to them, and not to the United States that used war to occupy it.

Malkin says of the piece she quotes:

Substitute “Aryan” for “mestizo” and “white” for “bronze.” Not much difference between the nutty philosophy of Bustamante’s MEChA and Papa Schwarzenegger’s evil Nazi Party.

One difference would be that to be Aryan is to be racially “pure,” whereas to be mestizo is, by definition, to share a mixed heritage. The other major difference would be that the Nazi party engaged in a campaign of systematic genocide against oppressed minorities on the grounds that ensuring the purity of the Aryan nation by eliminating the groups secretly responsible for the decline of Germany was a historical imperative. MEChA engages in political and educational work directed towards improving the role of an oppressed minority within a dominant society that incorporated it through violence. That’s the difference.

Nathan Newman explores the issue here:

So what this statement says is that celebration of race mixing is the same as racial purity. Yes, Orwell rides high in the saddle when the rightwing guns for MEChA.

Well, what about the “bronze nation” nationalism? What a shock– an exploited group talking about its ethnic solidarity. The Irish never engaged in such rhetoric or engaged in political cronyism based on ethnic ties — or if they did, they were all Nazis? The Jews never speak of international solidarity with other Jews in say a small country in the Middle East?

The only difference between MEChA-style ethnic nationalism and most historic white ethnic groups, is that the latinos have a clearer grievance by historical standards. It was racist white nationalism that fueled “Manifest Destiny” to take over the whole southwest in a series of wars. Sorry– the only thing that looks like Nazism is the “white mans burden” conceit of America backed by military invasion that allowed it to attack Mexico and annex its land to the United States.

David Neiwert debunks the associations made between Bustamante and a few real racists who are also connected to MEChA here.

And I don’t think Colorado Luis is off the mark when he suggests that

…in a significant way, white Democrats are the target audience for these attacks. Not necessarily just to make them think twice about voting for Bustamante on the recall, but in the longer term, to promote the fear that when Democrats run minority candidates, they will lose…Meanwhile, Republicans gear up to run their own candidates of color — Condi Rice for California governor is a popular one I’ve seen mentioned. Republicans would love it if Democrats were too afraid to nominate people of color for important jobs, while Republicans go ahead and do it. So it is important for the GOP not only that Bustamante lose, but that white Democrats see race as part of the reason for his defeat. That’s why we’re seeing the MEChA smear instead of, oh, say, an examination of Bustamante’s voting record in the California legislature.

The most important site to check out, however, for anyone interested in making a thoughtful informed evaluation of MEChA, is its own website – funny how none of the conservative bloggers I’ve run across touting this counter-Waldheim discovery have bothered to link there (I would be dangerously remiss if I didn’t also link here to MECha de Yale). As MEChA’s current philosophy reads:

The Chicano and Chicana student movement has been plagued by opportunists that have sought to rechannel the energies of our people and divert us from our struggle for self-determination. The educational plight of Chicana and Chicano students continues to be ignored by insensitive administrators. Overall, Chicano and Chicana junior high, high school and college push-out rates have risen since 1969, forcing many Chicanos and Chicanas to a life of poverty. These factors along with a growing right wing trend in the nation are combing to work greater hardships on Chicanos and Chicanas. New repressive and racist immigration laws are continuously directed at our Gente. The Federal government is campaigning to pacify and assimilate our Gente by labeling us “Hispanic.” The term “Hispanic” seeks to anglicize and deny our indigenous heritage by ignoring our unique socioeconomic and historical aspect of our Gente. These factors have made it necessary for Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán to affirm our philosophy of liberation (i.e. educational, socioeconomic, and political empowerment) for our Chicano and Chicana nation.
Joining with other community-based Chicano and Chicana nationalist organizations, M.E.Ch.A. is committed to ending the cultural tyranny suffered at the hands of institutional and systematic discrimination that holds our Gente captive. We seek an end to oppression and exploitation of the Chicano and Chicana Community

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Laying the groundwork for the unveiling of his new new tax plan, Bush has trotted out the tired accusation of “class warfare” to fend off criticism. “Class warfare,” when used by Republicans or DLC-leaning Democrats, labels comparison of, say, a tax cut’s impact on the rich and the poor in this country, or the level of economic stratification in the US and Norway, as an attempt to pit one class against another. The vitality of the term seems directly linked to its efficacy and its elegance – it removes the need to enter the fray and address the gaping inequalities in this country, it reframes cooperation as the agreement of all people to grin at the gains of the privileged few, and it does so with just the appropriate hint of red-baiting to scare off opponents without seeming, say, “partisan.” The Civil Rights Movement of the ’60s, with equal logic, could be described as “race warfare,” insofar as it addressed injustice in racial terms. Today’s Republicans, however, are all too eager to take credit for that one – in part because it gives them the chance to portray opposition to Affirmative Action as a logical continuation of the same process. The extreme of the conservative stance on race today, in fact, is epitomized by Ward Connerly’s recent description of race as a “cancer,” we must “consign to the ash heap of history” – thus his campaign in California to forbid the government to track whether, say, Black drivers are stopped more often than White drivers, or White women on welfare are sent to vocational training programs, while Black women are sent to “dress for success” classes – solve racial injustice while ignoring it. Conservatives cannot as easily demand that the government not keep track of family income (not that none will try), but they can try to sweet-talk voters into turning away the “anachronistic,” “partisan,” “divisive” politics of “class warfare.” Only such a choice will give them a free pass to bring back that pizza napkin creation “trickle-down economics,” one of many 80’s ideas (like slap bracelets) that some just aren’t ready to give up. Public jobs are socialism, we’re told – the best way to create jobs is to flood the top with enough money that a little bit can’t help but slip on down. Never mind, for example, the role of consumer demand, rather than management budget, in determining hiring and firing… If you look left or right at what conservative-style capitalism has wrought, you won’t be looking up to notice the windfall trickling down… Bush, keep in mind, is a “compassionate conservative,” “a uniter, not a divider.” Look for a long-overdue extension of unemployment benefits and economic bail-outs for the state governments whose economic crises are most embarrassing as the proverbial canaries in the magician’s hand to distract us from the proverbial elephant behind him – generous tax breaks for the usual suspects. Welfare rolls are climbing, unemployment is climbing, and the Bush solution is…tax cuts on stock dividends. But don’t worry – Bush “understand[s] the politics of economic stimulus.” Decades ago, the Rev. King declared, “To end humiliation was a start, but to end poverty is a bigger task.” Accusations of class warfare should be rejected for what they are – baseless tarring of those of us who think solving problems tends to start with addressing them.