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Monday, August 31, 2015

What's It Going to Take for Voters to Understand How Dumb Republicans Are?


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Tough talk from Trump, Christie and Jeb seems to fool an awful lot of people.

For some reason, it took Hurricane Katrina to expose the utter incompetence and disgusting lack of any semblance of humanity or leadership in the Bush Administration. Paul Krugman wonders in Monday's column what it will take for Republican voters to see these same features in their favorite tough guys today, like Trump, Christie and Jeb Bush.
Among the lessons that Krugman says should have been learned from Katrina, but clearly wasn't is "the huge gap between image and reality. Ever since 9/11, former President George W. Bush had been posing as a strong, effective leader keeping America safe. He wasn’t. But as long as he was talking tough about terrorists, it was hard for the public to see what a lousy job he was doing. It took a domestic disaster, which made his administration’s cronyism and incompetence obvious to anyone with a TV set, to burst his bubble."
Now, we have a Republican field chock full of tough talking "political poseurs," who are easily exposed by a modicum of digging into their actual record. Of course, Trump is the obvious example, but Chris Christie and Jeb Bush spring to Krugman's mind as well. On Christie:
Not that long ago he was regarded as a strong contender for the presidency, in part because for a while his tough-guy act played so well with the people of New Jersey. But he has, in fact, been a terrible governor, who has presided over repeated credit downgrades, and who compromised New Jersey’s economic future by killing a much-needed rail tunnel project.
Now that Christie seems pathetic, it is not that he has actually changed, it's just that the public has seen what he truly is. 
Then there's Jeb, "once hailed on the right as 'the best governor in America,'" Krugman writes, "when in fact all he did was have the good luck to hold office during a huge housing bubble. Many people now seem baffled by Mr. Bush’s inability to come up with coherent policy proposals, or any good rationale for his campaign. What happened to Jeb the smart, effective leader? He never existed.
Krugman attempts to be even-handed, to find similar examples on the Democratic side, but comes up short. "In modern America, cults of personality built around undeserving politicians seem to be a Republican thing," he writes.
Obama may not have turned out to be all that "starry-eyed liberals" had hoped he'd be, but he's not utterly incompetent. Clinton's e-mail scandal, ridiculous.
Then there's Trump, whose rise everyone, except perhaps Krugman, seems to find shocking.
Both the Republican establishment and the punditocracy have been shocked by Mr. Trump’s continuing appeal to the party’s base. He’s a ludicrous figure, they complain. His policy proposals, such as they are, are unworkable, and anyway, don’t people realize the difference between actual leadership and being a star on reality TV?
But Mr. Trump isn’t alone in talking policy nonsense. Trying to deport all 11 million illegal immigrants would be a logistical and human rights nightmare, but might conceivably be possible; doubling America’s rate of economic growth, as Jeb Bush has promised he would, is a complete fantasy.
And while Mr. Trump doesn’t exude presidential dignity, he’s seeking the nomination of a party that once considered it a great idea to put George W. Bush in a flight suit and have him land on an aircraft carrier.
Conclusion: Don't expect America to recognize this Emperor has no clothes for a long time.

The Depressing Secret Behind Donald Trump's Appeal: America's Love of Narcissists


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ELECTION 2016
Pundits looking for political explanations are missing it.
Nobody needs a psychology degree to know the 2016 presidential campaign trail is filled with genuine narcissists—exceptionally vain men and women who see themselves as deserving attention and power. And then, in a class by himself, is Donald Trump.

Remarkably, the chord that Trump has struck with voters is growing, to the dismay of the Republican establishment and to the glee of Democrats and progressives—who feel they are watching a spectacle that’s better than The West Wing. Who could have imagined this script, where the GOP is being destroyed from within—and Trump, leading in all recent national polls for the nomination, is fighting with Fox News?

“Something is going on,” Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan wroteFriday, then describing two acquaintences who wouldn’t normally vote for Republicans but are wildly cheering Trump. First is a women from Georgia in her late 60s, living on Social Security, who voted for Obama in 2008, but can’t stop texting her family—“middle-class, white, independent-minded.” And Cesar, from her local deli, who said, “He’s the man,” adding legal immigrants are angry at illegals and Latinos don’t vote in blocks anymore.

Americans are in a very anti-Establishment mood, Noonan said, offering her explanation, and comparing Trump’s appeal to “a rock being thrown through a showroom window.” She doesn’t mention that a big part of Bernie Sanders’ appeal also is based on shaking up the system. But what Noonan and many mainstream media commentators will not parse is the psychology of Trump’s appeal, or why narcissists have populist allure.

But there are a few seasoned observers who know the “incredible pros and inevitable cons” of narcissistic leaders in politics or business, as the title of a famous Harvard Business Review article by Michael Maccoby states. Their insights explain the Trump phenomenon, while also raising disturbing questions about where it might be going.

John Dean was White House counsel under President Richard Nixon, until he resigned during the Watergate scandal. Dean has made a career in recent decades warning about the dangers of authoritarian politicians. As he recentlywrote, Trump is “a near perfect authoritarian leader.” As a personality type, “these people are usually initimidating and bullying, faintly hedonistic, vengeful, pitliess, exploitive, manipulative, dishonest, cheat to win, highly prejudiced, mean-spirited, militant, nationalistic, tell others what they want to hear, take advantage of ‘suckers,’ specialize in creating false images to sell self, may or may not be religious, are are usually politically and economically conservative and Republican.”
Dean’s summation leads to a bigger question, how far can such a leader go in America? It’s a question worth returning to—but not until we get an explanation of why Trump, if he is a tyrant-in-waiting, is gaining in popularity. Maccoby, the octogenarian expert on the psychology of leadership “who has advised, taught, and studied leaders of companies, unions, governments, healthcare organizations, and universities in 36 countries,” as his Harvard Business Journal blog states, has that answer.

As Maccoby wrote this week, people like to follow narcissists, in both business and politics—even if there frequently is a dark side to their leadership.
“What do his followers like about Trump?” he began. “The answer may have as much to do with Trump’s achievements as his proposed policies. Unlike his rivals, he has made a fortune by his own efforts; he can convincingly claim he is his own man while his rivals are puppets, indebted to the big money donors his followers distrust.

“But his appeal may have even more to do with his personality. No one pushes Trump around, and no insult goes unanswered. He fights back. He is not cautious or fearful of offending a critic or any of America’s adversaries. In this, Trump has a personality type that’s common to the charismatic leaders who emerge in times of turmoil and uncertainty, when people are ready to follow a strong leader who promises to lead them to greatness. Sigmund Freud called people with this personality type “normal narcissists” and he described them as independent and not vulnerable to intimidation, also noting that they have a large amount of aggressive energy and a bias for action. Freud included himself in this group and saw these narcissists as driven to lead and to change the world. Such narcissists can be very charming, and indeed, research has shown most of us like to follow narcissists.”

As University College London business psychology professor Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic said in a 2014 Harvard Business Review article, “Why We Love Narcissists,” they are masterful impression managers, manipulate credit and blame in their favor, and fit the stereotype expected form leaders: overconfident, charismatic and selfish.

Recall Noonan’s examples of the Georgia retiree cheering for Trump like she cheered for Obama, or her Latino friend who said, “He’s the man.” It’s not just that “both sides, elites and the non-elites, sense that things are stuck,” as Noonan opined. Rather, Americans,  including those drawn to Sanders’ class-centric critique and his redistribute-the-spoils remedies, viscerally feel these men have a vision and can lead. You could call that the poetry of the campaign trail, versus the prose—or reality—of governing. And that’s where Maccoby says where “productive narcissists” can go off the rails.
“I have done much additional study of leaders such as these, whom I call productive narcissists,” he wrote this week. “The results of this research were first published in my Harvard Business Review article of 2000, “Narcissistic Leaders: The Incredible Pros, the Inevitable Cons” (which was later expanded into a book). I wrote that productive narcissists like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison were exploiting new technologies to create great companies, just as Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford did over a century ago. However, I also illustrated that people with this personality type, however brilliant, have potential weaknesses that can do them in.”
To succeed in business and politics, leaders like these either need able assistants who can rein in their excesses, or “they should pretend to learn to be humble." He continued, “I’ve seen CEOs who were productive narcissists who have become so inflated with their success and the adulation of followers that they rejected the sidekicks who held them back from rash action. The same is true of national leaders. When Napoleon fired his adviser, Talleyrand, there was no one to dissuade him from his disastrous invasion of Russia.”

Maccoby has similar cautionary words for their followers, who “must also take a step back to attain perspective. People who become entranced by charsimatic narcissists—whether in the business or political realm—often fail to sufficiently evaluate the leader’s policies and their ability to execute them. Are their policies realistic? How will they be implemented? What results will they produce in the long run? Do the leaders in question have trusted advisors to keep them from taking rash actions?”

That last point is especially poignant when it comes to Trump. His political advisor, until Trump started going after Fox News’ Megyn Kelly, and was fired—or agreed to go—was Roger Stone, who sat with folded arms in a white linen suit in a full-page photo spread atop the most recent ThursdayStyle section of The New York Times. Stone told him to stop attacking Kelly, the Times said.

Stone has been an extraordinarily sleazy political operator for years. As the man who has Nixon’s face tattooed on his back told The New Yorker in a 2008profile, he mostly lives in Florida—“a sunny place for shady people. I fit right in.” Stone has worked with the most notorious GOP political hit men for decades. His recent resume includes being the man who helped bring down ex-New York Democratic Gov. Eliot Spitzer; he was at a Miami strip club when a prostitute told him that she almost had a date with Spitzer.

The fact that Stone was Trump’s advisor until weeks ago is revealing—given his rocky past relationship with Trump. As The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobinnoted, Trump flirted with running for president in 2000 and hired and fired Stone then. “Roger is a stone-cold loser,” Trump told Toobin. “He always tries taking credit for things he never did.” Later in the article, Trump tells Toobin that the New York State GOP fired him after learning Stone made anonymous calls threatening Spitzer’s elderly father. “They caught Roger red-handed lying,” Trump said. “What he did was ridiculous and stupid.”

Toobin points out that Stone loves whatever-it-takes success and turning the world into his stage. No wonder he and Trump have an ongoing relationship of mutual convenience, regardless of its dark undercurrents. As Trump parades across the landscape that is the 2016 campaign, it is easy to understand why a billionaire narcissist with a ruthless streak has genuine popular appeal—as Maccoby explains. But should the Trump phenomenon translate into the possibility of winning the nomination, it raises very serious questions, as Dean points out, about “how far a truly authoritarian leader can go in America.”

Maccoby distinguishes between constructive and destructive narcissists. “Narcissistic leaders can create companies like Apple or those like Enron. Like Lincoln and Nelson Mandela they can change the world for the better, or like Napoleon and Hitler they can lead their followers to disaster. In the final accounting, a large part of the credit for their successes, or blame for their failures, belongs to the people who followed them.”

Will enough people keep following Trump to make him the GOP nominee? There’s no telling. But the fact that millions of Americans are currently flocking to arguably the biggest narcissist in the country is a very sobering thought.   


Steven Rosenfeld covers national political issues for AlterNet, including America's retirement crisis, democracy and voting rights, and campaigns and elections. He is the author of "Count My Vote: A Citizen's Guide to Voting" (AlterNet Books, 2008).

Tuesday, August 25, 2015

The Racial Divide is a Construction: A Brief History of How Some People Became White


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Let's take a look at what "white" actually means -- it might surprise you.

Invariably, around February of each year, coinciding with Black History Month, you’ll hear people asking, “Why isn’t there a white history month?”
Do these people mean we should condense all the American history centering around white people to just one month and devote the other 11 to people of color? Of course not.
It’s readily accepted that white history is taught, year-round, to the exclusion of minority histories. But the literal history of whiteness — how and when and why what it means to be white was formulated — is always neglected. The construction of the white identity is a brilliant piece of social engineering. Its origins and heritage should be examined in order to add a critical layer of complexity to a national conversation sorely lacking in nuance.
I’m guessing that’s not what they mean, either.
In conversations about race, I’ve frequently tried and failed to express the idea that whiteness is a social construct. So, here, in plain fact, is what I mean:
The very notion of whiteness is relatively recent in our human history, linked to the rise of European colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade in the 17th century as a way to distinguish the master from the slave. From its inception, “white” was not simply a separate race, but the superior race. “White people,” in opposition to non-whites or “colored” people, have constituted a meaningful social category for only a few hundred years, and the conception of who is included in that category has changed repeatedly. If you went back to even just the beginning of the last century, you’d witness a completely different racial configuration of whites and non-whites. The original white Americans — those from England, certain areas of Western Europe, and the Nordic States — excluded other European immigrants from that category to deny them jobs, social standing, and legal privileges. It’s not widely known in the U.S. that several ethnic groups, such as Germans, Italians, Russians and the Irish, were excluded from whiteness and considered non-white as recently as the early 20th century.
Members of these groups sometimes sued the state in order to be legally recognized as white, so they could access a variety of rights available only to whites — specifically American citizenship, which was then limited, by the U.S. Naturalization Law of 1790, to “free white persons” of “good character.” Attorney John Tehranian writes in the Yale Law Journal that petitioners could present a case based not on skin color, but on “religious practices, culture, education, intermarriage and [their] community’s role,” to try to secure their admission to this elite social group and its accompanying advantages.
More than color, it was class that defined race. For whiteness to maintain its superiority, membership had to be strictly controlled. The “gift” of whiteness was bestowed on those who could afford it, or when it was politically expedient. In his book “How the Irish Became White,” Noel Ignatiev argues that Irish immigrants were incorporated into whiteness in order to suppress the economic competitiveness of free black workers and undermine efforts to unite low-wage black and Irish Americans into an economic bloc bent on unionizing labor. The aspiration to whiteness was exploited to politically and socially divide groups that had more similarities than differences. It was an apple dangled in front of working-class immigrant groups, often as a reward for subjugating other groups.
A lack of awareness of these facts has lent credence to the erroneous belief that whiteness is inherent and has always existed, either as an actual biological difference or as a cohesive social grouping. Some still claim it is natural for whites to gravitate to their own and that humans are tribal and predisposed to congregate with their kind. It’s easy, simple and natural: White people have always been white people. Thinking about racial identity is for those other people.
Those who identify as white should start thinking about their inheritance of this identity and understand its implications. When what counts as your “own kind” changes so frequently and is so susceptible to contemporaneous political schemes, it becomes impossible to argue an innate explanation for white exclusion. Whiteness was never about skin color or a natural inclination to stand with one’s own; it was designed to racialize power and conveniently dehumanize outsiders and the enslaved. It has always been a calculated game with very real economic motivations and benefits.
This revelation should not function as an excuse for those in groups recently accepted as white to claim to understand racism, to absolve themselves of white privilege or to deny that their forefathers, while not considered white, were still, in the hierarchy created by whites, responsible in turn for oppressing those “lower” on the racial scale. During the Civil War, Irish immigrants were responsible for some of the most violent attacks against freedmen in the North, such as the wave of lynchings during the 1863 Draft Riots, in which “the majority of participants were Irish,” according to Eric Foner’s book“Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877” and various other sources.  According to historian Dominic Pacyga, Polish Americans groups in Chicago and Detroit “worked to prevent the integration of blacks into their communities by implementing rigid housing segregation” out of a fear that black people would “leap over them into a higher social status position.”
Behind every racial conversation is a complex history that extends to present-day interactions and policies, and we get nowhere fast if large swaths of our population have a limited frame of reference. An understanding of whiteness might have prevented the utter incapability of some Americans to realize that “Hispanic” is not a race — that white Hispanics do exist, George Zimmerman among them. This knowledge might have lessened the cries that Trayvon Martin’s murder could not have been racially motivated and might have led to, if not a just verdict, a less painfully ignorant response from many white Americans.
This comprehension of whiteness could also dissuade many white people of such detrimental and pervasive racial notions, such as, “Why is black pride OK but white pride is racist?” If students are taught that whiteness is based on a history of exclusion, they might easily see that there is nothing in the designation as “white” to be proud of. Being proud of being white doesn’t mean finding your pale skin pretty or your Swedish history fascinating. It means being proud of the violent disenfranchisement of those barred from this category. Being proud of being black means being proud of surviving this ostracism. Be proud to be Scottish, Norwegian or French, but not white.
Above all, such an education might help answer the question of whose problem modern racism really is. The current divide is a white construction, and it is up to white people to do the necessary work to dismantle the system borne from the slave trade, instead of ignoring it or telling people of color to “get over” its extant legacy. Critics of white studies have claimed that this kind of inquiry leads only to self-hatred and guilt. Leaving aside that avoiding self-reflection out of fear of bad feelings is the direct enemy of personal and intellectual growth, I agree that such an outcome should be resisted, because guilt is an unproductive emotion, and merely feeling guilty is satisfying enough for some. My hope in writing this is that white Americans will discover how it is they came to be set apart from non-whites and decide what they plan to do about it.
So, yes, for one month, let’s hear about white history, educating ourselves and others. Let’s expose whiteness as a fraudulent schema imposed as a means to justify economic and physical bondage. Let’s try to uncover the centuries-old machinations that inform current race relations and bind us in a stalemate of misunderstanding. Then let’s smash this whole thing to pieces.
This piece is the latest in a series by feminists of color, curated by Roxane Gay. To submit to the series, email rgay@salon.com.

Here’s why right-wing Christians think they’re the most persecuted group in America

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Here’s why right-wing Christians think they’re the most persecuted group in America



Jesus illustration gst / Shutterstock.com
recent Pew study found that white American Evangelical Christians think they experience more discrimination than Blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, Atheists or Jews.
Really?!
Christianity is the majority religion in the U.S. and many kinds of legally ensconced religious privilege are on the rise including the right to woo converts in public grade schools, speculate in real estate tax-free, repair religious facilities with public dollars, or opt out of civil rights laws and civic responsibilities that otherwise apply to all. By contrast atheists are less electable than even philanderers, weed smokers or gays; Hispanics and Muslims are being told to leave; Jews get accused of everything from secret economic cabals to destroying America’s military; and unarmed Black youth continue to die at the hands of vigilantes.
Given the reality of other people’s lives, a widespread Evangelical perception of their group as mass victims reveals a lack of empathy that should give thoughtful believers reason to cringe. And indeed, Alan Nobel, managing editor of Christ and Pop Culture, and a professor at Oklahoma Baptist University, wrote a thoughtful, pained analysisthis summer of what he called Evangelical persecution complex. Nobel contrasted the privileged position of American Christians with the real and serious persecution Christian minorities experience under ISIS, for example, and he examined the ways in which victimization can become a part of Christian identity and culture to the detriment of Christians and outsiders alike. What he neglected to spell out clearly was the extent to which the Bible itself sets up this problem.
Christianity, born in harsh the desert cultures of the Middle East, got its start by defining itself in opposition to both Judaism and the surrounding pagan religions of the Roman empire. Consequently, from the get-go teachings emerged that helped believers deal with the inevitable conflict, by both predicting and glorifying suffering at the hands of outsiders. Indeed, persecution was framed as making believers more righteous, more like their suffering savior. Long before the Catholic Church made saints out of martyrs, a myriad of texts encouraged believers to embrace suffering or persecution, or even to bring it on.
This sample from a much longer list of New Testament verses about persecution (over 100), gives a sense of how endemic persecution is to the biblical world view.
  • I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves. Be on your guard; you will be handed over to the local councils and be flogged in the synagogues. . . Matthew 10:16-17
  • Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child; children will rebel against their parents and have them put to death. You will be hated by everyone because of me, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved. When you are persecuted in one place, flee to another. Matthew 10:21-23
  • You must be on your guard. You will be handed over to the local councils and flogged in the synagogues. Mark 13:9
  • Blessed are you when people hate you, when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil, because of the Son of Man. Luke 6:22
  • If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you. Remember what I told you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. John 15:19-20
  • Indeed Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed.Acts 4:27
  • Then the high priest and all his associates, who were members of the party of the Sadducees, were filled with jealousy. They arrested the apostles and put them in the public jail. . . . They called the apostles in and had them flogged. Then they ordered them not to speak in the name of Jesus, and let them go. Acts 5:17-18,40
  • On that day a great persecution broke out against the church in Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria. Godly men buried Stephen and mourned deeply for him. But Saul began to destroy the church. Going from house to house, he dragged off both men and women and put them in prison. Acts 8:1
  • Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? Romans 8:35
  • That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong. 2 Corinthians 12:10
  • For it has been granted to you on behalf of Christ not only to believe in him, but also to suffer for him. Philippians 1:29
  • Now I rejoice in what I am suffering for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church.Colossians 1:24
  • For you, brothers and sisters, became imitators of God’s churches in Judea, which are in Christ Jesus: You suffered from your own people the same things those churches suffered from the Jews who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets and also drove us out. They displease God and are hostile to everyone. 1 Thessalonians 2:14-15
  • In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, while evildoers and impostors will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived. 2 Timothy 3:12
  • Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart. Hebrews 12:3
  • But even if you should suffer for what is right, you are blessed. “Do not fear their threats; do not be frightened.” 1 Peter 3:14
  • Dear friends, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that has come on you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice inasmuch as you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed. If you are insulted because of the name of Christ, you are blessed, for the Spirit of glory and of God rests on you. 1 Peter 4:12-14
  • Do not be surprised, my brothers and sisters, if the world hates you. 1 John 3:13
  • Do not be afraid of what you are about to suffer. I tell you, the devil will put some of you in prison to test you, and you will suffer persecution for ten days. Be faithful, even to the point of death, and I will give you life as your victor’s crown. Revelation 2:10
  • I saw thrones on which were seated those who had been given authority to judge. And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony about Jesus and because of the word of God. They had not worshiped the beast or its image and had not received its mark on their foreheads or their hands. They came to life and reigned with Christ a thousand years. Revelation 20:4
As any squabbling pair of siblings can tell you, claiming to be a victim is powerful stuff, even if you actually struck first. He started it! yells one kid. No, she started it! yells the other. Parental resolve waivers in the face of uncertainty, and both kids get an exasperated lecture.
When I was in college, I had a friend who grew up in a rough low income neighborhood. One day we got started talking about car accidents and he said, “My father told me that if you ever get in an accident, you should immediately get out and start yelling at the other driver. Even if it was your fault, it will put them on the defensive and keep them from making wild claims. And maybe the police will believe you.” Amoral, perhaps but brilliant.
If claiming to be a victim is powerful, believing you are a victim is far more so, again regardless of the actual facts—which, at any rate, we all are prone to interpret through a self-serving lens. Have you ever noticed that when your friends tell you about conflict with co-workers or lovers, you almost always feel like they got wronged? What are the odds, really? Seeing ourselves and our tribe as innocent victims draws sympathy and support, and it protects self- esteem.
But at a price:
When we cultivate the sense that we have been wronged, we can’t see the wrong that we ourselves are doing. We also give up our power to make things better. If people keep being mean to us through no fault of our own, then we’re helpless as well as victims, at least in our own minds. You can’t fix what you can’t see.
In the case of Christianity, the theology of persecution serves to give the faithful hope. It inspires persistence in the face of hardship, including the many hardships that life brings on all of us through no fault of our own. But it has also blinded generations of believers to the possibility that sometimes the hardships they face are due not to their faith or evildoers hating Jesus, but to the fact that they hit first. And sometimes the bewildering hostility they perceive may simply be something that the theology of persecution set them up to expect, whether it is there or not. 
Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington. She is the author ofTrusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light and Deas and Other Imaginings, and the founder of www.WisdomCommons.org. Subscribe to her articles at Awaypoint.Wordpress.com

American Racism in the ‘White Frame’


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The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.


American Racism in the ‘White Frame’




This is the next installment in a series of interviews on race that I am conducting for The Stone. This week’s conversation is with Joe Feagin, a sociologist, and a leading researcher of racism in the United States for more than 40 years. He teaches at Texas A & M University and is the author of more than 60 books, including the forthcoming “How Blacks Built America: Labor, Culture, Freedom, and Democracy.”
George Yancy: To what extent does your work as a sociologist overlap or pertain to what we might concern ourselves with as philosophers?

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Joe Feagin: I have been deeply concerned with issues of social and moral philosophy since college. I majored in philosophy as an undergraduate and then went to Harvard Divinity School, where I worked with philosopher-theologians in social ethics, European theology and comparative religions. I studied with Paul Tillich, Richard R. Niebuhr, Arthur Darby Nock and others. When I switched to doctoral work in sociology at Harvard, I studied with the theoreticians Talcott Parsons, George Homans, Robert Bellah, Charles Tilly and Gordon Allport. Allport and his young colleague Tom Pettigrew got me seriously interested in studying racial-ethnic theory in social science as well as the empirical reality of racism in the United States. During this decade (the 1960s) I was also greatly influenced by major African-American social analysts of racism, like W.E.B. Du Bois, Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton. More recently, my work has been used by philosophers of race including Lewis Gordon, Charles Mills, Linda Alcoff, Tommy Curry — and yourself.
To understand well the realities of American racism, one must adopt an analytical perspective focused on the systemic white racism that is central and foundational to this society.
G. Y.: In your book “The White Racial Frame,” you argue for a new paradigm that will help to explain the nature of racism. What is that new paradigm and what does it reveal about race in America?
J.F.: To understand well the realities of American racism, one must adopt an analytical perspective focused on the what, why and who of the systemic white racism that is central and foundational to this society. Most mainstream social scientists dealing with racism issues have relied heavily on inadequate analytical concepts like prejudice, bias, stereotyping and intolerance. Such concepts are often useful, but were long ago crafted by white social scientists focusing on individual racial and ethnic issues, not on society’s systemic racism. To fully understand racism in the United States, one has to go to the centuries-old counter-system tradition of African-American analysts and other analysts of color who have done the most sustained and penetrating analyses of institutional and systemic racism.
G.Y.: So, are you suggesting that racial prejudices are only half the story? Does the question of the systemic nature of racism make white people complicit regardless of racial prejudices?
J.F.: Prejudice is much less than half the story. Because prejudice is only one part of the larger white racial frame that is central to rationalizing and maintaining systemic racism, one can be less racially prejudiced and still operate out of many other aspects of that dominant frame. That white racial frame includes not only racist prejudices and stereotypes of conventional analyses, but also racist ideologies, narratives, images and emotions, as well as individual and group inclinations to discriminate shaped by the other features. Additionally, all whites, no matter what their racial prejudices and other racial framings entail, benefit from many racial privileges routinely granted by this country’s major institutions to whites.
G.Y.: The N.A.A.C.P. called the murder of nine African-Americans in the historic Emanuel A.M.E. Baptist Church in Charleston, S.C., an “act of racial terrorism”? Do you think that definition is correct?
J.F.: According to media reports, the alleged murderer Dylann Roof has aggressively expressed numerous ideas, narratives, symbols and emotions from an openly white supremacist version of that old white racial frame. The N.A.A.C.P. terminology is justified, given that the oldest terrorist group still active on the planet is the Ku Klux Klan. We must also emphasize the larger societal context of recurring white supremacist actions, which implicates white Americans more generally. Mainstream media commentators and politicians have mostly missed the critical point that much serious anti-black and pro-white framing proclaimed by supremacist groups is still shared, publicly or privately, by many other whites. The latter include many whites horrified at what these white terrorist groups have recently done.
G.Y.: I realize that this question would take more space than we have here, but what specific insights about race can you share after four decades of research?
J.F.: Let me mention just two. First, I have learned much about how this country’s racial oppression became well institutionalized and thoroughly systemic over many generations, including how it has been rationalized and maintained for centuries by the broad white racist framing just mentioned. Another key insight is about how long this country’s timeline of racial oppression actually is. Most whites, and many others, do not understand that about 80 percent of this country’s four centuries have involved extreme racialized slavery and extreme Jim Crow legal segregation.
As a result, major racial inequalities have been deeply institutionalized over about 20 generations. One key feature of systemic racism is how it has been socially reproduced by individuals, groups and institutions for generations. Most whites think racial inequalities reflect differences they see as real — superior work ethic, greater intelligence, or other meritorious abilities of whites. Social science research is clear that white-black inequalities today are substantially the result of a majority of whites socially inheriting unjust enrichments (money, land, home equities, social capital, etc.) from numerous previous white generations — the majority of whom benefited from the racialized slavery system and/or the de jure (Jim Crow) and de facto overt racial oppression that followed slavery for nearly a century, indeed until the late 1960s.
G.Y.: What then are we to make of the concept of American meritocracy and the Horatio Alger narrative — the rags to riches narrative?
J.F.: These are often just convenient social fictions, not societal realities. For centuries they have been circulated to justify why whites as a group have superior socioeconomic and power positions in American society. In the white frame’s pro-white subframe whites are said to be the hardest-working and most meritorious group. Yet the sociologist Nancy DiTomaso has found in many interviews with whites that a substantial majority have used networks of white acquaintances, friends and family to find most jobs over their lifetimes. They have mostly avoided real market competition and secured good jobs using racially segregated networks, not just on their “merit.” Not one interviewee [out of approximately 150 to 200] expressed seeing anything wrong with their use of this widespread system of white favoritism, which involves “social capital” passed along numerous white generations.
G.Y.: Can we talk about race in America without inevitably talking about racism?
J.F.: No, we cannot. In its modern racialized sense the term “race” was created by white American and European analysts in the 17th and 18th centuries in order to explain how they, as “good Christians,” could so extensively and brutally oppress, initially, indigenous and African Americans. There was no well-developed American hierarchy of “races,” a key feature of systemic racism, before white Europeans and white Americans made that the societal reality in the Americas by means of the Atlantic slave trade and the genocidal theft of indigenous peoples’ lands. Whites were soon framed as the virtuous and “superior race,” while those oppressed were dehumanized as the “inferior races.”
G.Y.: There are some who argue that slavery existed in Africa before the arrival of Europeans. Assuming that this is true, was it different or similar to forms of slavery in the Americas?
J.F.: Many white analysts, and some analysts of color operating out of the white frame, like to immediately bring up this subject of slavery somewhere else when U.S. slavery should be at issue. In such cases, it is usually an argument designed to avoid dealing forthrightly with the subject of this country’s economic and political foundation on one of the worst types of slavery systems ever created in any society.
My answer is this: Let us first fully confront and understand the horrific reality of two-plus centuries of our extreme enslavement system, its great immorality and its many horrific legacies persisting through the Jim Crow era and still operative in the present day, and then we can deal with the issue of comparative slavery systems. By no means have we as scholars and citizens accomplished this first and far more important task. Indeed, relatively few whites today know or care about the terrible legacies of our slavery and Jim Crow systems, including the fact that we still live under an undemocratic Constitution undemocratically made, and early implemented, by leading white slaveholders.
G.Y.: What implications does the white racial frame have for blacks, Asians, Latinos and those from the Middle East in our contemporary moment?
J.F.: That white frame is made up of two key types of subframes: The most-noted and most-researched are those negatively targeting people of color. In addition, the most central subframe, often the hardest to “see,” especially by whites, is that reinforcing the idea of white virtuousness in myriad ways, including superior white values and institutions, the white work ethic, and white intelligence. This white-virtue framing is so strong that it affects the thinking not only of whites, but also of many people of color here and overseas. Good examples are the dominant American culture’s standard of “female beauty,” and the attempts of many people of color to look, speak, or act as “white” as they can so as to do better in our white-dominated institutions.
G.Y.: In your book “The First R: How Children Learn Race and Racism” (co-authored with Debra Van Ausdale), there is a section on children and how they learn about race and racism, and examples of children exhibiting explicit racist behavior at very young ages. What did you learn about how young children learn ways of racial framing?
J.F.: One major discovery from nearly a year of field observations that Debra did in that multiracial day care center was that white children learn major elements of the dominant white racial frame at an earlier age than many previous researchers had recognized. Backed up now by much other social science research, we know that many white children as young as 2- to 4-years-old have already learned and used key features of the white racist frame. Our research shows that these children have learned not only elements of the anti-others subframes, but also the strong white-virtue subframe.
One example of this latter subframe involved a white child confronting an Asian child who was starting to pull a school wagon. She put her hands on her hips and arrogantly made the assertion that “only white Americans can pull this wagon.” In these field observations we also found that young children of all backgrounds gain knowledge of racial framing from peers in classrooms and play settings, not just from relatives in home settings. Moreover, in everyday interactions they frequently did much more than imitate what they had heard or seen from others. They regularly acted on their racist framing in their own creative ways.
G.Y.: You’ve mentioned images and emotions and how they are linked to the racial frame. There have been studies that demonstrate a strong relationship between ape images of black people that are emotion-laden for those who project such images. Say a bit about these findings.
J.F.: That commonplace ape framing involves vicious stereotyping, narratives and emotion-laden imagery. That complexity is why we need a broader white racial frame concept. Only a little research and theorizing have been done on the emotions of that white frame, but in my research they clearly include at least white anger, hostility, disgust, fear, envy and greed. There is research linking ape imagery to white reactions to black faces and white attributions of black criminality. For more than two centuries that blacks-as-apes imagery has been part of the dehumanizing process enabling whites, who see themselves as “good people,” to engage in extensive racial oppression. Our most famous white “founder,” Thomas Jefferson, in his major book, “Notes on the State of Virginia,” even suggested that Africans had sex with apes.
G.Y.: Has there been similar research that shows racist images that are emotion-laden when it comes to images of Asian-Americans, Latinos, and others?
J.F.: Much research on Asian-Americans, Latinos, and other groups shows there are numerous racist images of these groups as well, although the white-racist emotions that are unmistakably attached to them have again been little studied. One good example of this emotionally laden framing that has some research is the extraordinarily racist sexualization that white men often direct at Asian women, Asian-American women, and U.S. and other Latinas, such as on the Internet websites exoticizing these women for white male sexual and related purposes.
G.Y.: Has research revealed that black people also have such racist images and value-laden frames when it comes to their perception of white people?
J.F.: The research explicitly on such black framing of whites is less extensive, but the substantial research interviewing of black Americans that my colleagues and I have done over recent decades strongly suggests that black framing of whites is usually different and generally more direct-experience-related. There are very few generic jokes stereotyping whites in our interviews with blacks, and what pained joking there is, is mostly about the actual discrimination black interviewees have experienced from whites.
Analyzing white and black college student diaries about racial events in everyday life, Leslie Houts Picca and I found that the white students mostly described racist conversations and other racist actions of white acquaintances, friends and relatives that targeted people of color, such as whites telling N-word jokes or racially taunting black people in public settings. In significant contrast, most black and other student-of-color diaries from students at these same colleges recorded white racist actions targeting the diarists themselves or acquaintances and relatives. Black understandings of whites are typically based on much negative and discriminatory experience with whites. The reverse rarely seems to be the case in our extensive field interviewing.
G.Y.:   Briefly distinguish between what you call backstage racism and front-stage racism. What does backstage racism tell us about the insidious nature of racism?
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J.F.: The in-depth data my colleagues and I have collected over the last few decades strongly indicate that the anti-black and pro-white framing of most whites has changed much less than is often asserted, including by researchers depending on brief attitudinal measures and opinion polls. The appearance of major change in white racist framing is created by the fact that many whites have learned to suppress a front-stage expression of some or much of their overtly racist framing — such as in public settings where there are people present who are unknown to them. However, data such as that noted previously for white college students reveal that a great many whites still assert and perform a blatantly racist framing of people of color in backstage settings — that is, where only whites such as friends and relatives are present.
G.Y.: Given your emphasis upon racial frames, in what ways can people begin to undo those racial frames?
J.F.: That is the difficult question for the social health and democratic future of this country. We have a modest research literature dealing with successful deframing and reframing of people’s racist views, one much smaller than that measuring racial stereotyping and prejudice. One reason is that we have been handicapped by the narrow and individualistic concepts of stereotyping and prejudice, and few researchers have adopted a perspective problematizing a broader and dominant white racial framing. Getting rid of a few racial stereotypes is hard enough, and there has been some success at that, but when they are connected to hundreds of other “bits” of racist stereotyping, ideology, imagery, emotions and narratives of that white racial frame, it is even harder to begin a successful process of substantial deframing and reframing toward an authentic liberty-and-justice framing. Such reframing takes great effort and a long period of time in my experience. Nonetheless, some social science research is encouraging in regard to changing at least limited aspects of that dominant white frame.
G.Y.: Lastly, what does social science have to teach philosophers when it comes to thinking about the reality of race and racism?
J.F.: We all have a lot to learn from the best social science dealing empirically and theoretically with the centuries-old reality of this country’s white racism, especially that revealing well its systemic and foundational character and how it has been routinely reproduced over 20 generations. Also, in my view the best philosophers on such white racism matters, among them you and my colleague Tommy Curry, are ahead of most social scientists on such critical societal issues. So, social scientists, indeed all of us, have much to learn from the best philosophical analysts as well!
This interview was conducted by email and edited. Previous interviews in this series (with Linda Martin Alcoff, Judith Butler, Noam Chomsky, Charles Mills, Falguni A. Sheth, Peter Singer and others) can be foundhere.
George Yancy is a professor of philosophy at Emory University. He has written, edited and co-edited numerous books, including “Black Bodies, White Gazes,” “Look, a White!” and “Pursuing Trayvon Martin,” co-edited with Janine Jones.
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