Posted on 05/27/2015 7:19:52 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Black freedom & opportunity in America has always required the very federal intervention the right wants to destroy
The continuing decline of public sector jobs at local, state, and federal levels is having an abysmal economic impact on African Americans, for whom steady, stable government employment opportunities have provided a sure path into the middle class. The New York Times reported yesterday that “roughly one in five black adults works for the government, teaching school, delivering mail, driving buses, processing criminal justice and managing large staffs.” Because Black people hold a disproportionate number of government jobs, cutbacks that affect everyone hit Black communities even harder.
In many ways that goes without saying. When America sneezes, Black America gets the flu. But I want to suggest that something even more sinister animates this swift pivot in the country away from an investment in public goods and services. It is not simply that Black people are victims of a numbers game. Rather, there has been a wholesale P.R. campaign on the part of those on the right to associate all public goods and services, from public schools to public assistance, with the bodies of undeserving people of color, particularly Blacks and Latinos.
Any discussion of welfare or public assistance in this country is rife with dog whistles from the right toward the lower elements of their base, who in Pavlovian fashion, respond to code words about welfare and public assistance by conjuring images of the undeserving Black and Brown poor. In his new book “How Propaganda Works,” Yale philosopher Jason Stanley argues that while a “liberal democratic culture… does not tolerate explicit degradation of its citizens,” there are “apparently innocent words that have the feature of slurs, namely that whenever the words occur in a sentence, they convey the problematic content. The word welfare …conveys a problematic social meaning.” I am suggesting that the word “public” in our political discourse is becoming just such a tool of political propaganda as well.
While we don’t explicitly degrade public institutions, those institutions are, in practice, seen as less valuable, worthy, rigorous, and prestigious. In places as disparate as New York City and Tuscaloosa, Alabama, the problem of severe segregation in public schools has been well-documented. When economic means permit, white families tend not to educate their children in racially diverse schools. Public schools are viewed as cauldrons of poor learning and social dysfunction; and white people, whenever possible, exercise the prerogative to keep their children out of these environments. That seems reasonable, but it is unreasonable to except that other people’s children should have to learn in these kinds of environments either. The current circus that is the education reform debate in this country demonstrates a point that Stanley makes: “The usurpation of liberal democratic language to disguise an antidemocratic managerial society is at the basis of the American public school system as it was restructured between 1910 and 1920.” In other words, we have a publicly stated belief in the importance of good public education to our democracy, but this masks a variety of ways in which public schools become tools of social control; and, in this moment in particular, that perpetuates the creation of a Black and Brown underclass.
The tough reality about integration is white bodies are tethered to economic resources. Schools that have large populations of white children are not failing schools. When white gentrifiers move into urban areas, they seemingly bring nice restaurants, better policing, and better schools with them. The narrative attached to Black bodies is the opposite. The presence of Black bodies are seen as a drain on resources, particularly since the presence of Black people in neighborhoods tends to make those neighborhoods less desirable, driving down property values. One recent expose about racist housing practices in Brooklyn demonstrated that white people routinely ask not to live in places with too many Black people.
To the extent that our Civil Rights-era narrations of the racial divide persist, it seems that neither Black people nor white people ever invested fully in the idea of integration. Black communities in some respects fared better under segregation, because there were Black-owned business, students taught by Black teachers who believed in their inherent capability to learn, and more class integration within Black neighborhoods. Still, this was an inherently limited universe for many Black people. Thus, they aspired to white institutions and to racial integration in some ways as a means of access to a fairer redistribution of resources. Separate, Civil Rights era activists concluded, was inherently unequal.
Meanwhile, white people both then and now never fully bought into the idea of racial integration either. Beyond sentiment and rhetoric, we have only to look at the idea of racial integration in practice. If schooling, housing, and worship practices in the 21st century are any indicator, we are as segregated as ever, and that has everything to do with a continuing practice among white Americans to segregate where they live, raise families and send their children to school. While many young white gentrifiers tell themselves they are chasing culture and diversity, in many ways, they are simply re-segregating neighborhoods, by shifting the color of who lives there from Brown to white. What gentrifiers seem not to have figured out is that they are being eaten alive by their own system, because their white bodies drive up property values and then price them out of the very neighborhoods they want to live in.
Moreover, white people continue to suggest that it is Black people who are self-segregating. They ask, “Why are all the Black kids sitting together in the cafeteria?” Or as one severely misguided senior professor at Duke University recently suggested, Black people’s choice of ethnic names is evidence of a lack of desire to fully integrate or assimilate into the mainstream of American society.
I am pointing to these practices in this larger argument about the way the notion of “public” has become a tool of propaganda in order to suggest a couple of things: One, racialized practices and racism still occur even when there is no identifiable racial discourse being deployed. And, two, these examples suggests that racialized bodies are tethered to material resources. So when the right argues that we privatize each and every facet of American life, this is at base about an attempt to segregate resources. But it is not accounted for by a purely Marxist analysis, which would suggest that this was about class and not race. In this country, our class structure is tethered to a racialized hierarchy, in which Black people in particular exist as a perpetual underclass.
A hallmark of American democracy has been an investment in a robust form of public life, good public schools, sufficient public services, active participation in our democracy. But we are a country where a significant segment of our citizenry has always been perfectly willing to erode long-held democratic principles in service of maintaining a racial hierarchy. The Civil War is only the most extreme example.
As those on the right bellyache about the cultures of poverty that cause Black folks to rely too heavily on government, no one ever seems to admit that there has never been any possibility of Black freedom or equal opportunity in this country without strong federal government intervention. Black people have a long history of working in government because the federal government was the first place to call for mass desegregation of employment opportunities. In fact, the first March on Washington Movement, begun in 1941 by Pullman Porter A. Philip Randolph, was designed to force Franklin D. Roosevelt to desegregate federal employment in all federal agencies and among those who had federal contracts. In 1942, FDR obliged Randolph rather than risk a march on Washington, by creating the Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC).
Combatting racial segregation, and the racialized segregation of resources, has only happened in this country with strong federal intervention. So when the right continues to weaken federal government on all matters related to the social safety net, they deliberately rollback the pathways by which African Americans have procured access to middle class.
In 2013, the median net wealth for a white family was $142,000. The median net wealth for a Black family was $11,000. Black families have lost more than half their collective net wealth since 2008. As we are continually confronted with the stark and continuing reality of a rapidly disappearing Black middle class, while politicians continue to speak in “efficient” terms about the need to shrink government, it’s hard not to conclude that this was the goal all along.
This racist values socialist government control, over freedom and opportunity.
This kind of thinking insults blacks.
The howls from the elite are getting louder and the headlines are getting ever more off the wall crazy.
FR thread on the NYT's piece she's using as her jumping off point.
And about integration and the Left and the Right and the Black and the White -- and the Hispanic and the Asian, I suggest this article: San Francisco gives parents a say in where their children go to school — and that is leading to less diversity
The Nazis never went away. We just call them large government collectivists now.
Seriously, why do we post Salon articles?
She admits right up front that the government has become a make-work project.
Democrats - the party of slavery
Democrats - the party of the KKK
Democrats - the party of Jim Crow laws
Democrats - the party of filibustering civil right legislation for decades
Democrats - the party of aborting 40% of all black babies
Democrats - the party of locking black children into failing schools
So who is responsible?
White republican/conservatives...
ah, OK, let’s boil this down -
without a big imposing centralized government,
we’d all be diskiminatin’ against blacks.
I don’t follow the “logic”, but that’s liberal “thinking” for you.
I read the headline and the source and stopped. Salon posted an article accusing conservatives of being racists. What a surprise.
In other news, the sun comes up in the morning.
It has ALWAYS been the Democrats who were the segregationists. KKK, separate but equal schools in the south, black and white drinking fountains, waiting rooms and “sit in the back of the bus please” were all popular when the Democrats controlled the southern states. It was those nasty white Republicans that changed all that. Winston Smith is a master at his job.
Twist and shout! The progressive mantra.
Diversity is a self-destructive concept. The more we force people together, the more they borrow from one another’s culture, until it eventually becomes one giant homogeneous mish-mash with no remaining individual identities.
Case in point: post-WWII Japan.
And why would anyone be caught in the same room as this person who ‘teaches Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers?’
The Victimology Triple Crown!
Blacks are far more segregationist than whites. The reverse used to be true, but not any more......
IOW
The KKK never went away, we just call them republicans now.
Seriously, why do we post Salon articles?
__________________________________________
It helps expose the brain damaged thinking that is out there. Besides being an easy target of laughter and ridicule, these deranged and sick individuals must be singled out and exposed as the liars they are.
I saw Salon and stopped reading.
No matter what you do, you're still a racist.
Also...
When blacks move in, it's Diversity. I.E. Good!
When whites move in, it's gentrification. I.E. Bad!
There's a reason why white people don't want to live in black areas and it has nothing to do with white racism and everything to do with black racism and violence.
Brittney Cooper
Image
Brittney Cooper is an Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies from the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory University in 2009. She also has an M.A. from Emory (2007) and bachelors degrees in English and Political Science from Howard University (2002). Professor Cooper is currently completing her first book Race Women: Gender and the Making of a Black Public Intellectual Tradition, 1892-Present. Her work focuses extensively in the area of Black women’s intellectual history, Black feminist thought, and race and gender politics in hip hop and popular culture. She has two forthcoming articles about hip hop feminism in Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society and African American Review. Professor Cooper has also published book chapters on Black women’s history in fraternal orders and the Janet Jackson Superbowl incident. She is co-founder of the Crunk Feminist Collective blog, which was named a top feminist blog by New York Magazine in 2011 and a top race blog by TheRoot.com in 2012. She writes for the CFC as “crunktastic.”
http://africanastudies.rutgers.edu/faculty-mainmenu-134/core-faculty/140-brittney-cooper
“The continuing decline of public sector jobs at local, state, and federal levels is having an abysmal economic impact on African Americans, for whom steady, stable government employment opportunities have provided a sure path into the middle class.”
Awwwwwww. So we need more public drones or else it’s racism?
Do these people not realize how condescending this sounds to blacks?
There's nothing like starting a racist rant with a bald-faced lie, is there?
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