The White Privilege Party, Part 3

This essay is a follow-up to Dinner and Drinks at the White Privilege Party and The White Privilege Party, Part 2.

Woody Guthrie

If the fash hate one thing, it’s being called fash. Or even told they’ve done something fashy. Even when faced with their overwhelming fascism, or with subject experts like Timothy Snyder or Jason Stanley demonstrating their fashy tendencies, they become angry and defensive. President Taco’s claim to be “the least racist person there is” has become the tragicomic emblem fascists’ need to be seen as nevertheless good.

Returning this series to where it began, the question remains of whether protestors should use confrontational chants while challenging the current administration. Specifically, whether they should use Woody Guthrie-type songs to call fascists “fascist” to their faces. In conservative, semi-rural, and racially homogenous places, such boldness will precipitate conflicts, which discourages White protestors from getting involved.

“Fascism” is a notoriously slippery concept, since it adapts itself to local conditions. Snyder and Stanley have useful, but often inconsistent, definitions. For our purposes, let’s define fascism as the hardened and intolerant extreme of the hierarchy I described last time. Fascism not only requires some people to remain powerless for others to have powerful, and divides power racially, but enforces this mandatory division through arbitrary violence.

The history of hierarchical violence reveals something remarkable. As theologian James Cone writes, Jim Crow racial violence didn’t happen to kill the targets. It happened to remind survivors that the perpetrators would face no consequences, because they owned the system. Likewise, the Roman church didn’t burn witches and heretics to force conversions in early Christendom. It only burned nonconformists in the Renaissance, once its political power was unquestionable.

Put briefly, hierarchical violence happens when perpetrators know they’ll face no meaningful punishment. In my lifetime, Kyle Rittenhouse, George Zimmerman, and Bernard Goetz knew or suspected that the racially slanted justice system wouldn’t hold them accountable for shooting Black people or their White sympathizers. So they strapped on guns and went hunting on American streets.

We’ve watched “red states” legalize driving cars into protestors. We’ve watched them refuse to prosecute bullies attacking children. We’ve watched the current administration target harmless dissidents on camera, knowing they won’t be prosecuted, or even meaningfully reprimanded. The deferral of each consequence basically ensures that the next street-level fash will feel authorized to attack, maybe even to kill.

Equally importantly, perpetrators don’t see themselves as villains in this arrangement. Fashy narratives reinforce the belief that hierarchies are necessary, and therefore equality is oppressive. Any attempt to fix unfairness is innately unfair to those who benefit, or think they do. Therefore those protected by the status quo, even the poor and forgotten, are too likely to violently defend what dwindling privilege they have.

The term “extinction burst” has become modish recently. Once you remove reinforcement from previously rewarded behavior, the behavior becomes more extreme and calcified before it disappears. Recent discussions spotlight violence specifically, as America’s overall culture no longer rewards racism, homophobia, and other bigotry as openly as before. But that exact change puts protestors in conservative areas at greater risk.

Please don’t misunderstand, I know these forces are contradictory. People are violent because they know nobody will hold them accountable, but they know nobody will hold them accountable in the exact places where their dying ideology still matters. Florida, which legalized driving cars into protests, has one of America’s oldest median resident ages. Nebraska, where prosecutors won’t charge men who attack kids, remains substantially isolated from the larger economy.

This paradox underlies Critical Race Theory. CRT founder Derrick Bell claimed, with evidence, that racism has proven infinitely elastic as its successive justifications become obsolete. Violent economic necessity justified slavery, but morphed into organized bigotry under Jim Crow. Once the state withdrew support, bigotry became disorganized, like background noise. With each morph, the system excommunicates its former defenders.

The three vigilantes I named—Rittenhouse, Zimmerman, and Goetz—all retreated into anonymity after their acquittals, and became parodies of their prior selves, because their persons didn’t matter. They claimed “self-defense,” but their selves were an afterthought. Their supporters abandoned them because once they bolstered the narrative that White (or White-adjacent) people owned the system, that system no longer needed them.

White progressives fear angering the fash by calling them fashy to their faces, not only because fashies are violent, but because they’re as much displaced by the cultural shifts happening around them as the conservatives are. They’ll hang onto their illusions that they can persuade the fash, because the alternative is plunging headlong into uncertainty. The old system is dying, and to those accustomed to winning, that’s terrifying.

The White Privilege Party, Part 2

This essay is a follow-up to Dinner and Drinks at the White Privilege Party.

Striking teachers in the West Virginia statehouse, 2018 (CNN photo)

Political commentators conventionally date the decline of American labor unions to President Reagan mass-firing the PATCO strikers in 1981. But I think the process started much sooner. After peaking in the 1950s, union membership has declined steadily. Though reliable statistics go back to only 1983 (everything prior is estimates and probabilities), union membership rates have halved in that time. This decline has correlated with another powerful social force.

Desegregation.

Ian Haney Lopèz dates union desegregation to 1973, and claims that the battles surrounded seniority. White laborers, Lopèz claims, would rather relinquish all union protections, than surrender the senior standing they achieved under racially biased rules. Tacit within this refusal, though, is the corollary that White workers refused to negotiate alongside Black workers. Too many White workers would rather suffer than see Black people share their protections.

I cannot verify this 1973 date; FDR desegregated defense contractors by executive order during World War II, while Truman desegregated the military in 1948. The American Federation of Labor recognized its first majority-Black union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, in 1925. Union desegregation seems more gradual than abrupt. The point remains, however, that the more inclusive unions became, the more White workers abandoned them.

I’ve begun this essay with labor unions because they’re quantifiable. And of course, correlation doesn’t equal causation; White workers might’ve decided they didn’t need union protection and also that they didn’t want to work alongside Black co-workers coincidentally. But the third prong of the trident, the election of softball racist Ronald Reagan, of “strapping young buck” fame, suggests that racism directed White workers’ economic choices, not vice versa.

This pattern recurs throughout American history. Critics have condemned Nikole Hannah-Jones and her 1619 Project for suggesting the Founding Fathers created America specifically to protect their racial hierarchy. But the fact remains that, after the American Revolution, nine of the thirteen original states, including New York and New Jersey, still practiced slavery. White Americans who talked up liberty and autonomy needed ninety years to fully stop enslaving Black Americans.

And then Jim Crow began.

Bull Connor looses the dogs on protesters in Birmingham, Alabama, on May 3rd, 1963

Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison wrote that American values have long valorized individualism and autonomy; but such values have weight only to the extent that they’re denied to some Americans. Me being unfettered only means something while someone else remains restrained. Morrison, a novelist, meant this specifically in literary terms, because in fiction, we can abstract such values to broad moral precepts. But the same principle applies to society writ large.

In today’s America, “peace” doesn’t mean the stability necessary to pursue our physical and spiritual well-being, it means the absence of war. “Wealth” doesn’t mean physical comfort and a full belly, it means the power necessary to employ other people to look after your stuff. “Law” doesn’t mean reliable systems of social order, it means violent crackdowns on nonconformists and the poor. We define our shared values oppositionally.

And, as Morrison writes, we often use race as mental shorthand for this opposition. Sure, sometimes we signify “the other” with other external signs, like hair or piercings. But if White punk rockers want acceptance from the squares, they can shave their Mohawks and remove their tongue studs. Black and Hispanic people can’t stop being Black and Hispanic, and therefore can’t stop being shorthanded as “less than.”

It’s easy, considering American public mythology, to forget that when Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis in 1969, he wasn’t there to mobilize for racial justice. He was there to help unionize the city’s sanitation workers. Sure, those sanitation workers were overwhelmingly Black, but Dr. King had recognized the inextricable bond between American racism and economic injustice. Poverty and Blackness occupy the same headspace in the American imagination.

Concisely put, America organizes itself into in-groups and out-groups, then racializes the groups to simplify remembering who belongs where. The same redlining practices that preserve segregated neighborhoods, have also segregated labor forces. The minute Black people wanted union protections, White workers began embracing myths of radical individualism, even as such individualism left them broke and powerless against billionaire business owners.

Better broke than Black, amirite?

We’re somewhat seeing this rolled back. Black deaths caught on camera have ignited a sense of justice in some White Americans, though not yet enough. But it’s carried its own pushback. Capitalists like Elon Musk and Larry Ellison have sought political power that would’ve made Cornelius Vanderbilt or Andrew Carnegie blush. But it all for the same goal: maintaining the hierarchy of haves and have-nots. Which is, usually, racial.

Concluded in The White Privilege Party, Part 3