Category Archives: race

The Debt-Race Nexus

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It’s worth revisiting this: debt is a system of social disciplinary control at national and international level. This system operates a means of deflecting opposition to itself, namely the amplification of resentment against “others,” which in the developed world manifests as increased racism. This interface is in high gear at present.

Greece is perhaps the most direct example of this interaction. This week, the all-powerful ratings agency Moodys raised Greece’s outlook to B-. This “promotion” is in fact an indication that austerity measures have been sufficiently implemented and that opposition to them has been contained. It is an index for the international bond market and a huge win for the vulture capital funds that bought Greek debt at intense discount. Expect a Michael Lewis book about vulture funds next year.

In the meantime, as the social protest against austerity has been blocked by the Troika, the rise of Greek fascism continues. Golden Dawn direct people’s anger at the impoverished but visibly different African migrants, who arrive in Greece at least in part because the rest of Europe makes such strenuous efforts to keep them out. No matter that the late Martin Bernal showed in his three volume work Black Athena that ancient Greek civilization learned extensively from Egypt (and Semitic Middle Eastern cultures), so that what we call “Greece” was always already a hybrid.

It’s a finely tuned gamble by the E.U. that Golden Dawn provide a sufficient safety valve for social unrest but do not succeed to the extent of gaining access to state power, in the manner of the French National Front. Or perhaps the bankers are sufficiently cynical that bond repayments is all that matters.

Indeed, there has been a similar rise in public racism cross Europe from Britain to Italy and Russia, especially at football (soccer) matches. It might seem that this represents a return to working-class racism as seen in the 1970s but sport is now so expensive that, almost by definition, people attending games live would have to be considered middle-class. Perhaps the very visibility of money in sport serves as a means to focus social resentment into racist forms?

British footballers Anton Ferdinand and John Terry confront each other over hate speech from Terry

British footballers Anton Ferdinand and John Terry confront each other over hate speech from Terry

More bizarrely still, despite all the protocol trainings by soccer authorities, the players themselves are now acting out this racism on the pitch. John Terry’s racist remarks to Anton Ferdinand (above) were discovered via a fan’s cellphone video posted to YouTube. When I was young, racism was endemic at football but I thought that the very substantial numbers of both black British and African players, not to mention the increased diversity of the UK, would have changed that. And in the boom era of “Cool Britannia,” it seemed that it had. With recession comes racism.

In Russia, fans of a team called Zenit have issued a statement saying they want no black or gay players. Italian team Lazio, based in Rome, have long been associated with fascism (literally, Mussolini). But every weekend there’s something hateful said on or off the pitch, or some physical violence from fans to players or each other.

Let’s not get superior. Last week, when President Obama gave a speech at Newtown CT in honor of the victims of white male rage (whether technically sane or unbalanced), a rash of obscene tweets broke out because his speech replaced some American football game on TV. The N-word was very extensively used.

As austerity continues as a form of social control, in defiance of the recommendations of central bankers in the UK and common sense everywhere, so too has a calibrated targeting of others. Dog whistles, subtle and not so subtle, have been blowing for months, if not years.

The fact that African-Americans and Latin@s in the US have been hardest hit by the 2008 crash has had no effect on this discourse. In fact, it seems to reinforce the narrative in which “sub-prime” borrowers (meaning people of color) were to blame. As if the people lending them the money were just good Samaritans and not making as much money from interest rates and derivatives as they could.

All that said, I don’t think that the connections between the debt crisis and the revival of racism are fully understood yet and it’s going to be an important topic of research and activism going forward.

Temperature Check: Needs Work

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At a Strike Debt meeting yesterday, we discussed the joint call for action on O13. One person looked askance and commented: “We better not just get 25 people wandering around New York.” In other words, the tens of thousands that routinely turn out for Europe’s anti-austerity demonstrations are likely to be matched on a scale of one in a hundred at best in the U. S. Why are we still so marginalized?

It’s certainly true that the Eurozone disaster is extraordinary. And of course, Occupy is no more than a year old. In a broadside published today, Rebecca Solnit isn’t having any of it. She firmly blames the left for its own divisiveness and celebration of failure. Having begun to think about hope, she writes,

I eventually began to refer to my project as “snatching the teddy bear of despair from the loving arms of the left.” All that complaining is a form of defeatism, a premature surrender, or an excuse for not really doing much. Despair is also a form of dismissiveness, a way of saying that you already know what will happen and nothing can be done, or that the differences don’t matter, or that nothing but the impossibly perfect is acceptable.

This tendency to not only see defeat looming but revel in it is a familiar figure. The great heroes of the left from the Commune to the Spanish Civil War and so on all lost. It was the second edition of the first ever punk fanzine Sniffin’ Glue that declared punk dead back in 1977.

Now, however, there’s an added social media snarkiness to it all. All over ZuckerBook you can read dismissals of OWS, its publications and campaigns as being insufficiently anti-capitalist and otherwise deluded. As if posting to Facebook was anything other than  a way of making money for its shareholders.

All that said, there are real contradictions here. As a number of people have pointed out, and I am well aware myself, my explorations in militant research are a part of my privilege. I tend to think it a better use of that situation than simply perpetuating the status quo but nonetheless it is fair to ask whether it helps people in the New Academic Majority. My hope is that by acting and writing in the way that I would prefer to do, I make it possible for others to do the same and use my project as a model or reference. That said, you won’t hear much from me after 12/31/12 for a good long time.

For Occupy more broadly, the feminist-inspired culture of trust, process and love has been one of its great accomplishments. But when I hear, as you do from time to time, someone yelling at someone else that they are “bourgeois” or some other infraction, it’s always a male-identified person defining a female-identified one.

At the first GA I remember attending in Zuccotti, I was impressed by a young woman of color talking about the way the assembly did not yet look like New York City. Well, what’s left of that body still doesn’t resemble its parent metropolis, and there’s a renewed bout of questioning as to why. Some people are criticizing the topics we’ve highlighted recently, such as debt, as if debt did not affect the poorest and most discriminated against in our society. Can we do better? No question. But there’s a real issue out there. Here’s a visualization of payday loan stores in Bushwick. There are a lot in a small area.

Here’s the Upper East Side:

Exclude A and C which are bank branches and you have three such payday loan places from 59th St to 106th St on the entire East Side.

So why is OWS in general and Strike Debt in particular still lacking diversity? Part of it stems from the bulk of Solnit’s article about the election. African Americans are strong supporters of Obama, with over 90% in most polls saying they will vote for him. If anyone was in any doubt that Republican hatred for Obama was motivated in whole or in part by race, the rash of “chair lynchings” that followed Clint Eastwood’s speech should have settled the issue. If you’ve missed this, a set of chairs have been hanged in trees with American flags attached to them. Given Eastwood’s identification of an empty chair with Obama, the message is as clear as it is repellent. In the 1960s civil rights activists carried US flags to claim equal rights in contrast with the Confederate flag. The Vietnam War put paid to that association and the flag can now be meaningfully tagged with racist murder.

So while how to vote is almost a technical debate in New York or California, at least at Presidential level, it’s not hard to see why people of color, women, LBGTQI folks and many others don’t see it that way. As Solnit trenchantly puts it:

You don’t have to participate in this system, but you do have to describe it and its complexities and contradictions accurately, and you do have to understand that when you choose not to participate, it better be for reasons more interesting than the cultivation of your own moral superiority, which is so often also the cultivation of recreational bitterness.

The reduced numbers of active people in OWS need to heed such warnings and realize that we can’t turn things our way by hyperactive organizing alone. It turned out that the crisis was not of a brief duration and nor was there to be a revolutionary solution to it. Perhaps for a moment last October we glimpsed the mountaintop but we’ve slipped a long way down the slope since then. That’s OK. Instead of turning on each other, we need to turn outwards and start engaging with the constituencies we most want to be in dialog with.

Freedom, Justice and Privilege in NYC

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The intense last few days in New York City have reminded us of the interaction between the desire for freedom, the operations of legally-sanctioned justice, and the workings of privilege that constitute the moment. The social order functions, but it does so in ways that are palpably out of joint. In the cracks of capital, a desire for radical change has emerged that is not unmarked by these contradictions.

Late on S17, a group of us headed to 100 Center Street, where arraignments are held in Manhattan, to do jail support for some of our friends, who had been arrested for protesting in a bank. Note that this bank, which was one of the most culpable during the crisis, has not yet had any of its operatives arrested. We walked a surreal trail through winding walkways and a maze of buildings to a Rite-Aid under the Brooklyn Bridge, where, somehow, a police officer returned one arrestee’s personal possessions to her spouse. In our tired state it seemed for a moment that those arrested would emerge from the pharmacy as well. In fact, we had to return to Center Street, which turned out to be complicated because no-one could remember the way and none of the many police officers on duty knew. Once finally there, we discovered that none of our friends were on the docket for night court.

We returned the next day in greater numbers but it was not until 5pm that the OWS people were scheduled for arraignment. We entered the court and sat on the unforgiving wooden benches. A theater of the absurd played out at the front as lawyers muttered to the judge and their clients, while officers of the court walked this way and that with endless sheaves of paper. Thick files appeared for each person, visualizing the density of the carceral bureaucracy. People appeared for arraignment through a door, behind which bars and cells painted that depressing shade of official cream could clearly be seen.

As is common in such arraignments, the protestors appeared very late on the docket. As we sat in this bleak space, we witnessed a seemingly endless parade of people of color, mostly men, mostly African American. From the widely-available literature, everyone knows that the prison-industrial complex is a central component of the apparatus of racialized segregation. We know that 2.3 million people are currently behind bars and another 5 million or so under some form of correctional supervision. Seven times as many African Americans as “whites” are in the system.

Even knowing all this, it is something else to see it in action, to see shackled bodies, the bruises on one woman’s face that shocked her defense lawyer into taking photographs, a man with his hands bound behind his back in such a way that to sit caused an involuntary rictus of pain, still another hobbling up the aisle to the arraignment, barely able to walk.

From the DA’s office, a lawyer intoned the terms “the people” and “justice” with regularity. We were not so convinced. Does it serve the people to have a woman incarcerated for fifteen days for the alleged crime of stealing a bottle of shampoo? Would this have happened if she had been “white”? My soto-voce comments on all this caused me to be expelled from the courtroom for “talking,” as if it were a school assembly.

Of course, you may be thinking that it is a reflection of my own privilege that this sight was new to me. Yesterday at the Free University in Madison Square Park, which continues until Saturday, the subject of privilege was raised in a discussion hosted by Tidal. Facilitating the discussion, Rosa L., who happens to be a person of color, pointed out that OWS has its own privilege by virtue of being in New York City. As I have often recalled, Arundhati Roy made exactly this point when she visited. She also insisted that it was, paradoxically, all the more important that we continue to make visible the lack of consent, even at the very heart of neo-liberal capital.

Nonetheless, the intensity of the media attention to New York does mean that OWS receives more coverage and discussion than is equitable in relation to other Occupations and radical actions. The discussion explored how we might best make use of that attention by stressing global initiatives and other interfaces outside New York.

In the Strike Debt teach-in that I facilitated later on, I again felt this double-bind. The participants looked to New York for models, perhaps even for leadership, but there are inevitable tensions that follow from that. Is the way forward, then, to create the best movement we can in New York and see if and how it inspires others? This was the pattern set by the original occupation. Or should there be an attempt to create an organization that reaches outside New York? I tend to the former, others to the latter. It’s such tensions between how to claim freedom while recognizing privilege that create the need for new practice and new theory.

The Chair

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Today I went past a noisy and aggressive Tea Party roadside rally in Setauket, New York. The people were all white, all over 50 and all angry. In other words, they were the Clint Eastwood audience. As apparently crazy as that performance was, it articulated very clearly the vivid resentment middle-aged white people feel and direct towards the empty space they call “Obama.”

I refused to watch a moment of the Republican convention, just as I will ignore the Democrats. There was something about the stills of Eastwood’s performance that made me watch the video. Although it has suggested avant-garde performance art to some people, it was clearly designed to appeal to those with long memories. As a number of reporters have suggested, the whole chair routine was a steal from the circa-1950 comedy of Bob Newhart and Morey Amsterdam. There’s also a certain inherent period nastiness to “the chair,” evoking as it does the electric chair so favored as a method of execution in the Cold War era.

For this evocation of time and place was specifically designed to reinforce the aura of white privilege that surrounds Romney but to give it a more violent edge. Eastwood’s Gran Torino performance was remembered by the Republican audience for its initial racism not the feel-good “liberal” conclusion. Not once but twice, Eastwood ventriloquized Obama as saying “go fuck yourself” to roars of approval–clearly Obama’s refusal to play “angry person of color” nonetheless angers this kind of white person.

The moment in the video that resonated with the apparently all-white crowd was when Eastwood said

You own this country.

It’s a standard bit of political boiler-plate from a professional but from an actor associated with vigilantes and outlaw cops, it had a different affect. They heard it as saying “this is still a country for white Christians with guns as it has been since the arrival of Europeans.” So when the crowd chanted with Eastwood at the end

Go ahead, make my day

it was an enactment of an NRA fantasy moment.

The Democratic media have seen the affair as a joke. For Jon Stewart, this was the greatest gift since Dick Cheney shot a man in the face. But Stewart was not just being funny when he said

There’s a President Obama only Republicans can see

Obama serves as a screen for white people to register what they think about “race,” meaning the visible presence of any non-white person in public life. For 50s-nostalgic Republicans and reactionaries of all kinds, the proper place of the person of color is as what Ralph Ellison famously called “the invisible man.” This “Obama” knows his place, and can be put down at will if he gets “uppity.” Into his (baby) chair.

I am not particularly invested in the re-election of Obama, other than as being preferable to the alternative. The “Obama” that Eastwood and his acolytes see, however, is genuinely disturbing. It’s why Bloomberg gets away with stop-and-frisk. It’s why the economic crisis has wiped out a generation of wealth accumulation by African Americans and left them not only disadvantaged but being blamed for the crisis. It’s why police can use violence at will against Occupy and have no fear of reprisal. Oddly, we should perhaps thank Eastwood for making all this visible to us once again.