“Can a Democratic Community Maintain Open Borders?”

Here’s the April forum of “Ethical Issues in Our Times.”.  Feel free to share this with any people you think may be interested. 

“Can a Democratic Community Maintain Open Borders?”

There are many who claim that the United States should open its borders to all who wish to enter. Others say we should welcome those who are seeking to better their standard of living. Still others say we have a moral obligation only to those who are fleeing oppression? While there are those who insist that we should keep our borders closed until we have adequately addressed the needs of our current population. Then there are many who argue that we need more immigrants to sustain, or fuel, our economic growth, and avoid economic stagnation. And still others think that we already have enough people, with some even arguing that more people – especially if they aspire to a “decent standard of living” – will only further the destructive pressure on our environment. Join us in discussing this vital and pressing issue. 

Join us in discussing these pressing social issues, in a discussion led by Dr. David Sprintzen, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Long Island University. Please be advised: Because of recent unpleasant interruptions, our zoom will be closed at 7:10pm, and no one will be allowed to join thereafter.   

This is the April installment of “Ethical Issues in OurTimes”: a product of the Ethical Humanist Society of Long Island. 

Thursday, April 6th, from 7-9pm on zoom at:  https://us02web.zoom.us/j/896985586

The Abolition of ‘Women’?

A number of academics, uber-progressives, transgender activists, civil liberties organizations and medical organizations are working toward denying women their humanity, reducing them to a mix of body parts and gender stereotypes.

Even the word “women” has become verboten. Previously a commonly understood term for half the world’s population, the word had a specific meaning tied to genetics, biology, history, politics and culture. No longer. In its place are unwieldy terms like “pregnant people,” “menstruators” and “bodies with vaginas.”

Planned Parenthood, once a stalwart defender of women’s rights, omits the word “women” from its home page. NARAL Pro-Choice America has used “birthing people” in lieu of “women.” The American Civil Liberties Union, a longtime defender of women’s rights, last month tweeted its outrage over the possible overturning of Roe v. Wade as a threat to several groups: “Black, Indigenous and other people of color, the L.G.B.T.Q. community, immigrants, young people.” It left out those threatened most of all: women. Talk about a bitter way to mark the 50th anniversary of Title IX.

The noble intent behind omitting the word “women” is to make room for the relatively tiny number of transgender men and people identifying as nonbinary who retain aspects of female biological function and can conceive, give birth or breastfeed. But despite a spirit of inclusion, the result has been to shove women to the side.

Women, of course, have been accommodating. They’ve welcomed transgender women into their organizations. They’ve learned that to propose any space just for biological women in situations where the presence of males can be threatening or unfair — rape crisis centers, domestic abuse shelters, competitive sports — is currently viewed by some as exclusionary. If there are other marginalized people to fight for, it’s assumed women will be the ones to serve other people’s agendas rather than promote their own.

But, can you blame the sisterhood for feeling a little nervous? For wincing at the presumption of acquiescence? For worrying about the broader implications? For wondering what kind of message we are sending to young girls about feeling good in their bodies, pride in their sex and the prospects of womanhood? For essentially ceding to another backlash?

Women didn’t fight this long and this hard only to be told we couldn’t call ourselves women anymore. This isn’t just a semantic issue; it’s also a question of moral harm, an affront to our very sense of ourselves.

It wasn’t so long ago — and in some places the belief persists — that women were considered a mere rib to Adam’s whole. Seeing women as their own complete entities, not just a collection of derivative parts, was an important part of the struggle for sexual equality.

But here we go again, parsing women into organs. Last year the British medical journal The Lancet patted itself on the back for a cover article on menstruation. Yet instead of mentioning the human beings who get to enjoy this monthly biological activity, the cover referred to “bodies with vaginas.” It’s almost as if the other bits and bobs — uteruses, ovaries or even something relatively gender-neutral like brains — were inconsequential. That such things tend to be wrapped together in a human package with two X sex chromosomes is apparently unmentionable.

“What are we, chopped liver?” a woman might be tempted to joke, but in this organ-centric and largely humorless atmosphere, perhaps she would be wiser not to.

Those women who do publicly express mixed emotions or opposing views are often brutally denounced for asserting themselves. (Google the word “transgender” combined with the name Martina Navratilova, J.K. Rowling or Kathleen Stock to get a withering sense.) They risk their jobs and their personal safety. They are maligned as somehow transphobic or labeled TERFs, a pejorative that may be unfamiliar to those who don’t step onto this particular Twitter battlefield. Ostensibly shorthand for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist,” which originally referred to a subgroup of the British feminist movement, “TERF” has come to denote any woman, feminist or not, who persists in believing that while transgender women should be free to live their lives with dignity and respect, they are not identical to those who were born female and who have lived their entire lives as such, with all the biological trappings, societal and cultural expectations, economic realities and safety issues that involves.

But in a world of chosen gender identities, women as a biological category don’t exist. Some might even call this kind of thing erasure.

When not defining women by body parts, misogynists on both ideological poles seem determined to reduce women to rigid gender stereotypes. The formula on the right we know well: Women are maternal and domestic — the feelers and the givers and the “Don’t mind mes.” The unanticipated newcomers to such retrograde typecasting are the supposed progressives on the fringe left. In accordance with a newly embraced gender theory, they now propose that girls — gay or straight — who do not self-identify as feminine are somehow not fully girls. Gender identity workbooks created by transgender advocacy groups for use in schools offer children helpful diagrams suggesting that certain styles or behaviors are “masculine” and others “feminine.”

Didn’t we ditch those straitened categories in the ’70s?

The women’s movement and the gay rights movement, after all, tried to free the sexes from the construct of gender, with its antiquated notions of masculinity and femininity, to accept all women for who they are, whether tomboy, girly girl or butch dyke. To undo all this is to lose hard-won ground for women — and for men, too.

Those on the right who are threatened by women’s equality have always fought fiercely to put women back in their place. What has been disheartening is that some on the fringe left have been equally dismissive, resorting to bullying, threats of violence, public shaming and other scare tactics when women try to reassert that right. The effect is to curtail discussion of women’s issues in the public sphere

But women are not the enemy here. Consider that in the real world, most violence against trans men and women is committed by men but, in the online world and in the academy, most of the ire at those who balk at this new gender ideology seems to be directed at women.

It’s heartbreaking. And it’s counterproductive.

excerpted from Pamela Paul’s article in NYT 7/3/22

“On Saving Our Democracy”

Here’s the youtube link to my 9/19/21 talk at the Ethical Humanist Society of Long Island on Saving Our Democracy. It includes a link to my article on “Race In America”.

 
https://youtu.be/XyZxZlewln4

“Reflections on Race in the United States”

1. From practically the inception of the European settlement of North America the emerging societies have been marked by racial oppression, first of the indigenous population, and then of the imported and enslaved Africans. For almost the entire history of the United States, this state of affairs was taken as normal, and quite acceptable. Only slowly, over time, did white voices begin to be raised, first against the institution of slavery, and then more basically against the treatment as second class citizens of both of these oppressed races. But never has there been official public acknowledgement of these pervasive crimes, and the appropriate assumption of collective national responsibility for them. It is certainly long past time for such action, and the reparations appropriate thereto. 
2. The challenge before us as a nation is, therefore, profound and historic. It is to build a public consciousness and consequent effective majoritarian movement for social and racial justice that will finally remedy these deep-seated and pervasive injustices.    
3. But if we are to successfully address these challenges, we need to build the widespread social support that any such profound movement of public opinion and official policy directed toward such collective national healing requires. I have been troubled by the tendency of many progressive groups to speak in simplistic and ideological terms, while creating a climate of group think in which sensitive and thoughtful discussion of values, policies, and programs are effectively suppressed. But it is vital that we think and speak with the sensitivity, care, and appropriate nuance about issues as emotionally charged as those of race, of its intimate connection to our personal and social identity as “Americans”, and of the place of each of us within the unfolding drama that is the history of the United States. It is in that spirit of mutual respect, cultural sensitivity, commitment to human dignity, appreciation of historical context and the complexities of social and institutional development, and our determined and abiding commitment to advancing that inclusive vision of social justice, that I offer the following remarks. 
4. It should be obvious that the US was founded for the most part by Europeans, primarily English, and then Scots-Irish, who effectively invaded North America – they didn’t “discover” it since it wasn’t lost, however new it was to them. They then proceeded to practically exterminate the indigenous population, and build a good part of their society on the enslaved labor of Blacks purchased from Africa. As they expanded across the continent, economic growth required a rapidly expanding population which widened the pool of primarily European Immigration, first from Great Britain and Northern Europe, then southern, and Eastern Europe. In addition, from the mid-19th Century on the US incorporated a significant number of Mexicans in the process of appropriating large areas of the now United States Southwest and Far West. Only in the later part of the 19th and early 20th centuries did the European transplanted civilization of the United States expand further to include significant numbers of people from Asia. 
5. Nothing that I have so far said is particularly controversial. It is thus quite clear that the United States (and to a large extent Canada, also), was founded, controlled, and developed primarily by Europeans. Thus it was a civilization essentially created by white people, who, in the process, imported and enslaved Africans and drove the native population into ghettos, euphemistically called reservations. It is thus understandable and completely non-surprising that, as the book White Fragility correctly asserts, the United States established “a society in which all key political, economic, social, and cultural institutions are overwhelmingly controlled by white people.” Throughout human history, the politically primary, culturally dominate, and majority population have always determined the structure of normality in the societies they controlled. Thus, there was nothing exceptional about this state of affairs, in which “white control of society became … ‘normal’ or ‘standard’” in the United States.  
6. What was probably exceptional, however, and certainly completely indefensible, was precisely the nature and extent to which the developing American society was built upon the systematic destruction of the culture of the indigenous population and the enslavement, systematic degradation and pervasive exploitation of its Black population. 
7. As Peter Nabokov comments, reviewing Jeffrey Ostler’s carefully researched study, Surviving Genocide, “For the new republic and its pioneering settlers to thrive, the aboriginal citizens had to be displaced, removed, extirpated, eliminated, exterminated….(thus) during the formative years of our republic and beyond, there was a mounting, merciless, uncoordinated but aggressively consistent crusade to eliminate the native residents of the United States from their homelands by any means necessary ….” (NYR, LXVII, #11, p. 52, “The Intent Was Genocide”, Peter Nabokov). 
8. A couple of illuminating examples of this attitude are provided by the notorious comments of two celebrated Northern Civil War Generals. Philip Sheridan’s statement that, “The only good Indians I know are dead,” was far from an unusual expression of prevailing sentiment. And similarly with General William Tecumseh Sherman’s directive that “his troops must confront the enemy Sioux ‘even to their extermination, men, women, and children.’” In short, the European invasion, conquest, and settlement of the North American continent involved the more or less explicit destruction of the civilization, and most of the people, that were native to the land. 
9. Further, white political domination produced, once again in the words of White Fragility, “centuries of history during which people of color (especially black people) were systematically enslaved, expropriated, disenfranchised, segregated, and marginalized.” While the nature of that degradation in the pre-Civil War period could vary from the gang labor plantations of South Carolina to the possibilities of domestic servitude in some northern communities, it became increasingly clear that legally, in the words of the infamous Dred Scott Decision of 1857, the Negro “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Blacks were to be treated as legal non-persons, chattel property, whose owners could do with them as they wished. And, of course, that is precisely what they all too often did. 
10. Then, after the Civil War, in spite of the legal abolition of slavery, and the constitutional guarantee of full voting citizenship for Blacks, racist attitudes continued to prevail, North and South, finding increasingly innovative and violent ways to institutionalize that racism, with Blacks treated, at best, as second-class citizens, when not further subjugated, exploited, oppressed, and even lynched. 
11. No adequate discussion of the history of the United States can fail to address these profound injustices. And no comprehensive current political programs should be developed that do not seriously attempt to address their on-going consequences. 
12. This sad history, nevertheless, should be seen as the United States’ unique development of slavery’s long history in the West. Even more, slavery is practically universal throughout all human history. It was certainly pervasive and accepted as normal in Africa long before the Europeans arrived. However, even though it is clearly approved of in both the Judeo-Christian Bible and the Islamic Koran, its racialization in early modern Europe is, to my mind, without historical precedent. With the possible exception of earlier suggestions in the development of Christian anti-Semitism, this racialization involved the claim that Africans were, somehow by nature, not only inherently inferior to whites, but not really fully human. Often, they were even identified with monkeys or orangutans, while the indigenous population of North America came to be viewed as nothing more than savages. Once you designate a group as less than, or even, non-human, it is not surprising that they can be considered as having no rights that humans need respect. Then you can feel free to treat them however you will. 
13. American racism emerged out of this historic development in early modern Christian Europe, that had its initial roots in large part in the Spanish Inquisition’s concern to insure the purity of blood of true Christians. Racial slavery and the Atlantic slave trade followed in its wake, growing with European overseas expansion, and fueling early European capitalist development, particularly with the wealth generated by the fantastically profitable sugar plantations, initially in the Caribbean, but then migrating to include rice, tobacco, and cotton plantations in North America.   
14. Here is not the place for an extensive discussion of the history of slavery and racial oppression. Rather, my concern is to understand the scope of the United States’ continuing struggle with racism, and its institutional operation, and to place it in its appropriate cultural context so that we may more adequately address its continuing significance. It is vitally important in discussions of race that we avoid falling into the trap of thinking that one race is inherently good, and another race is inherently bad. We must avoid viewing the world like the ancient Manichaeans, for whom the world was divided between the Forces of Light and the Forces of Darkness. A racialized Manichaeism of the good race and the bad race, endowing one race with intrinsic goodness or innocence, and another with intrinsic badness or evil, is just a reversed modern version of deplorable racist thinking. Such an either/or perspective is neither adequate nor constructive, but rather quite socially harmful, and in the long run politically self-defeating.
15. Perhaps nothing makes this clearer than considering some key facts concerning the early history of the Atlantic slave trade itself. As historians have now well documented, “European[s] and [the] white Americans who succeeded them did not capture and enslave people themselves. Instead they purchased slaves from African traders . . . . 
16. Sometimes African armies enslaved the inhabitants of conquered towns and villages. At other times, raiding parties captured isolated families or kidnapped individuals. As warfare spread to the interior, captives had to march for hundreds of miles to the coast where European traders awaited them. The raiders tied the captives together with rope or secured them with wooden yokes around their necks. It was a shocking experience, and many captives died from hunger, exhaustion, and exposure during the journey. Others killed themselves rather than submit to their fate, and the captors killed those who resisted….” (Hine, Hine, & Harold, The African-American Odyssey, 2ed., vol. 1, Prentice Hall, 2005, pp.27, 30)
17. African rulers “restricted the Europeans to a few points on the coast, while the kingdoms raided the interior to supply the Europeans with slaves . . . . Tribe stalked tribe, and eventually more than 20 million Africans would be kidnapped in their own homeland….” (Drescher and Engerman, Historical Guide to World Slavery, pp. 370-375) 
18. Historians estimate that ten million of these abducted Africans “‘never even made it to the slave ships. Most died on the march to the sea’—still chained, yoked, and shackled by their African captors—before they ever laid eyes on a white slave trader.” (Johnson, et al., Africans in America, pp. 69-70)   “The survivors were either purchased by European slave dealers or ‘instantly beheaded’ by the African traders ‘in sight of the [slave ship’s] captain’ if they could not be sold.” (Drescher and Engerman, p. 34)
19. In sum, “the idea of European responsibility for disrupting an Eden-like continent” rests on promoting “the false impressions that Europeans had themselves gone ashore to kidnap Africa’s people . . . . Africans had themselves captured and sold nearly all the people that Europeans had bought as slaves along the coast.” (Finkelman and Miller, Ed’s., MacMillan Encyclopedia of World Slavery, vol. 1, 1998, p. 34) Thus virtually all Africans brought forcibly to the Western Hemisphere in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had been enslaved long before they left Africa. 
20. Let me reiterate, however, so that there is absolutely no misunderstanding. I do not report these facts in order to justify the role of Europeans involved in the slave trade. Nothing can justify their actions, which are outrageous, and completely morally indefensible. I only wish to underline the complicity of many communities, and particularly in this context, of the contribution of African tribes in order to make quite clear how indefensible and unjustifiable is the use of racialized categories and simple “black and white” Manichaean thinking for understanding and addressing the issues of race in America. 
21. In sum, as expert historical analysis makes quite clear, the history of the slave trade proves that everyone participated and everyone profited—whites and blacks; Christians, Muslims, and Jews; Europeans, Africans, Americans, and Latin Americans. Once we recognize the shared responsibility for sustaining and profiting from the Atlantic slave trade, we can turn our attention to what we must do together today to eradicate its corrosive legacy.
22. While it is obviously true, therefore, that it was a white European society that essentially built its American empire in significant part through the enslavement of black Africans, there is nothing in European whiteness that by nature predisposes them to oppress and subjugate, any more than there is anything that by nature predisposes black Africans to be enslaved. Clearly, there were numerous theoretical and pseudoscientific efforts developed, particularly in the West in the 19th Century, to provide a moral justification of such enslavement. Modern scientific research has, however, quite convincingly, and I believe definitively, refuted all aspects of such racialized “science.” The human race is one race, tracing its evolutionary origin to the east Africa of some two million years ago. And there are no biologically fundamental differences among humans across the globe today.
23. Nevertheless, in so far as racist attitudes continue to have a grasp on the minds and sentiments of far too many people, there remains a large receptive audience for such racialized propaganda. We have even seen it appear in the US in recent years in pseudoscientific studies of IQ and academic performance, to be used to justify racist policies. 
24. Perhaps not surprisingly, but unfortunately, there have also been counter-movements, even spurred by humanitarian sentiments, that have tended to demonize all white people as racists and oppressors, while often romanticizing oppressed blacks and native Americans. Some quite recent examples of such Manichaean “reverse racism” can be seen in such popular books as White Fragility, How To Be An Anti-Racist, and Journeys of Race, Color, & Culture. Consider a brief example – which could be in essence replicated in the others – from the latter book, which speaks of “the sin of Whiteness,” claiming that all “White People” are inescapably racist; that all have a common nature and a common way of thinking, while people of color similarly have a singular opposed narrative. But whiteness and blackness are not essential characteristics that define the natures of two distinct races, as if they were distinct species. It is neither correct nor constructive to promote such black and white racialization, however well-meaning may be the intent. 
25. Further, if we are to successfully address and redress this sad history of oppression, we need to maintain an historical perspective, one that does not simply demonize Western civilization, but also appreciates its accomplishments, particularly its continually expanding efforts on behalf of human rights and social justice. For example, it remains true, in spite of, and to some extent even because of, the indefensible exploitation of oppressed minorities, (even including at different times and places, Hispanics, Asians, and diverse Europeans) which I have described, that American society has been able to produce one of the wealthiest, most powerful societies, with one of the highest standards of living the world has ever seen. And that is true for practically all of its citizens, however unequally those benefits have been distributed. Using only one measure of that success, average life expectancy has essentially doubled since the founding of the United States. Currently that life expectancy, even for its generally and often systematically disadvantaged African-Americans, is significantly greater than that for the vast majority of people in today’s “Third World,” including sub-Saharan Africans. And I have said nothing of the effective institutions of representative government and official commitment to human rights, however flawed both of those are in their actual execution. I have further said nothing about the advances contributed by Eurasian civilization to: the scientific revolution, technological advances made possible by the quantum revolution in the natural sciences, as in communication and transportation, advances in industrial and food production, modern medicine, public health, and in the creative arts.
26. In short, Eurasian civilization, and particularly its “American” offshoot, has contributed unprecedented and truly astounding advances in the quality of life of the human species. And yes, this has been primarily the work of “privileged white people.” Unfortunately, however, this development has a tortured legacy, as I have clearly said and continually underscored, involving completely indefensible subjugation and exploitation, most particularly of many non-European peoples, and non more heinous than the indefensible enslavement and oppression of the ancestors of our current African-American citizens. The consequences of that legacy are, of course, still with us, in both personal and institutional forms. Those unacceptable consequences are the legitimate target of today’s mass protests, on behalf of Black lives, the rights of indigenous peoples, on behalf of gender diversity, and in numerous, diverse, and contested efforts to insure the effective implementation of equal and fair treatment for all people, regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, or gender identification. 
27. But it is important to note, however, that these struggles are undertaken in the effort to realize ideals and values which are themselves, for the most part, the product of that very same Eurasian civilization that gave birth to this United States in the first place. Those ideals were the product of centuries of political, social, economic, religious, and philosophical struggles. Struggles pursued by people of many nationalities, ethnicities, races, and religions, but who for the vast majority were also white people. However painful be our civilization’s legacy of indefensible historical oppression, its legacy of internal struggles against all forms of human enslavement, and for these higher ideals of human rights and equal justice before the law is truly unprecedented in the human history of all peoples. In what other civilization do you have such material advances in the quality of human life joined with such sustained and increasingly effective campaigns on behalf of the human rights and dignity of people of all races, religions, and ethnicities? 
28. One of the greatest of all Americans, and a particular hero of mine, was Frederick Douglass. I will not repeat his astounding career, a self-educated escaped slave who became a brilliant advocate for American blacks. I know of no more brilliant and chilling indictment of American racism than Douglass’ 1852 address “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” And yet, through all his years of struggle, he never lost his faith in that promise of America, of its ideals, of what he called in an 1883 address “making the nation’s life consistent with the nation’s creed.” And he maintained his faith and trust in, and commitment to, the numerous forces and people in the US working with him for social justice to the end of his life. 
29. We, residents of the US who were born in the late 20th or early 21st Centuries, are the inheritors of that complex and scarred tradition. We are responsible neither for its successes nor its failures, no more than are we responsible for who our parents were, nor for their economic and social position, nor for our genetic endowment, including the color of our skin. But as we mature, we do become increasingly responsible for what we do with the particular historical condition into which we find ourselves to have been “thrown,” to use the suggestive Existentialist expression. 
30. Being so born, we are all among the truly privileged, in comparison with most all people that have ever lived, as well as with the vast majority of those alive today. And that is basically true for the vast majority of people living in the United States today, regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, or system of belief. But, of course, those privileges are not shared equally – far from it!! And that leaves much for all of us to do: to address and correct those continuing injustices, and to make real and significant progress toward the equitable realization of those ennobling American ideals. 
31. But let me take a moment to talk about this notion of privilege, and particularly the increasingly popular discussions of “white privilege,” and the related notions of “white fragility” and “white supremacy.” Privilege means unearned benefit. Is there only one kind of unearned benefit in the world? Or many? For example, I feel blessed that I do not suffer from any debilitating inherited disease, from which many others unfortunately do suffer. There is nothing I did to earn that benefit, that privilege? What about you? Are you similarly privileged? Or are you one of the unfortunate in this matter? And if you are healthy, and black, are we entitled to say you are similarly privileged?
32. But, of course, one can benefit from many privileges, and also many disadvantages at the same time. For example, I had the misfortune to have a father who died when I was six years old, a mother who was certified paranoid-schizophrenic, and ultimately institutionalized. I had no significant supportive extended family, and, around the age of ten, experienced being evicted from the house, and displaced from the community, in which I had grown up. In these matters, I was clearly disadvantaged, to say the least. But certainly, there are many, even in the US, who have had it far worse. And certainly many, of all races, who were more fortunate. I do not mention these events to bemoan my fate, but only to point out that privileges and disadvantages come in many forms, and are not simply aligned in accord with the color of one’s skin, however significant that certainly is in many contexts. 
33. For example, is an unskilled white worker born and raised in an economically devastated former coal mining town in West Virginia, living amid the ruins of abandoned hills of coal slag, suffering the “deaths of despair” ravaging his community, privileged in comparison with an educated middle class black professional living in New York City? Does it make sense and is it humanely sensitive and personally respectful to claim that he benefits from “white privilege”? Of course, in most circumstances, all things being equal, even less qualified whites are likely to be treated better than more qualified blacks. That has certainly been true, even to this day, for example, in purchasing a house, in encountering the police, in dealing with the criminal justice system, in applying for a job – except perhaps in those few situations in which affirmative action requirements are at work. And all such examples of systemic racism must be brought to light and effectively remedied. But such wide spread and indefensible injustices do not exhaust, or simply define, American society. There are important counter movements, multi-racial and multi-ethnic, committed to rectify these injustices, and many social situations and groups in which all people are treated with respect and dignity.  
34. Let me offer a simple – and possibly trivial – thought experiment on privilege in America, if only to suggest the diversity of its manifestations. Who is more privileged, a black Christian or a white Atheist? Of course, it may depend where in America you live, and who your neighbors are. But, can you imagine the Supreme Court upholding the right of Atheists to deny service to a religious Christian? Or, can you imagine America electing a white atheist as President? Or even a black Christian? But wait a minute, didn’t they just do that? What should we make of that? Who even thought a few years ago that that might be possible?
35. As for the more recent views of White Fragility, they are still more dubious, making completely unsubstantiated claims about what all “white people believe.” The author claims “White people, … derive enormous material and psychological advantages from this racist organization of society—whether they believe they do or not.” I’ll leave you to apply this claim to the unemployed ex-coal miner possibly suffering from black lung disease, that I have described above. But the author further claims that “White beliefs in objectivity are closely related to the myth of individualism. Because white people believe that they are unique individuals unshaped by history or society, they also come to believe that their views of the world are entirely objective.” That claim is not only an example of that simplistic racialized thinking of which I have spoken, but actually reveals remarkable ignorance of some of the most obvious facts of American intellectual history. To quite briefly explain: 1) By all accounts, the premier philosophical movement in America is Pragmatism, and the foremost exponents of that movement, particularly C.S.Peirce, John Dewey and G.H.Mead, directed the brunt of their critical analyses against that very doctrine of Individualism. More to the current point, in a book I published more than a decade ago, I devoted an entire chapter to a critique of Individualism. No, all white people are not devotees to Individualism. 2) Concerning her claim that “objectivity” is the ideology of white “individualists,” we can observe that numerous complex and subtle inquiries have been undertaken over the last several hundred years to understand the possibilities and limitations of the intellectual ideal or goal of scientific objectivity. Increasingly, more and more thinkers (regardless of race) have come to understand the perspectival limitations built into every inquiry, while valuing objectivity as an ideal to pursue in the service of truth. Does the author of White Fragility, when she claims that objectivity is simply a white man’s ideal, not mean us to understand that what she is saying is objectively true because it describes the real situation of white people, or should we see it as simply her partisan perspective and personal racial stigmatization? Thus, 3) To claim that she knows what all “White People” believe, and that they have to believe what she says they do because they are “White People,” is to attribute to each and every “White Person” a fixed nature and a label, regardless of what they say or do. How does that differ in principle from what the Nazis said about Jewish nature, or what Racists or Eugenicists said about Black nature? No, it is pure and simple racism, even if coming from the ‘other side” of the political debate, and meant to be sympathetic to the condition of oppressed minorities. And no less faulty, and socially reprehensible for that. 
36. The incoherence of the Manichaean reasoning of White Fragility was nicely pointed out by Carlos Lozada, the Washington Post’s nonfiction book critic, who noted that with Robin DiAngelo’s circular reasoning “any alternative perspective or counterargument is defeated by the concept itself. Either white people admit their inherent and unending racism and vow to work on their white fragility, in which case DiAngelo was correct in her assessment, or they resist such categorizations or question the interpretation of a particular incident, in which case they are only proving her point.”
37. Then there’s the issue of “white supremacy.” Clearly there are racists who actively subscribe to that belief. And many who have joined in organized movements to promote their beliefs, and, if possible, to impose them on American society. But there are also many Americans, hopefully, including a significant majority of white people, who do not share those beliefs. Many of them are even deeply and personally offended by such beliefs, and have actively organized and mobilized in opposition to all forms of white supremacy. In fact, I personally know many individuals and organizations that are continuing to devote much time, effort, and emotion to this struggle. So it is both incorrect, even offensive, and certainly not politically effective, to claim that “white supremacy” defines American society. Further, it is wrong and self-destructive to say that white supremacy is in “the DNA” of America. DNA refers to the inherited nature of a person, or people. It would be racist to claim that that is the essential nature of all white Americans. But I think it is clear from what I have said, that such a description of an essential “white” human nature is false, and further, that we can, and many have been struggling for many years effectively to, change the prevailing patterns of race relations in America. The problem is not in our supposed DNA – where science has well established the essential biological unity of the human species – rather, the problem, and the possibilities for constructive change, are in our confrontation with our historic practice in the light of our historic ideals.  
38. Turning, finally, to more practical political concerns. We have heard quite recently many claim that the 99% of Americans have been victimized by the 1%, that “Main Street” is being taken advantage of by “Wall Street.” That suggests a stark class divide in the US, in which a small quite wealthy few individuals and corporations have been “calling the shots” at the expense of the vast majority. That majority is quite diverse, racially, ethnically, religiously, even regionally and culturally. Clearly some are more privileged than others in many different ways. Yet all are seriously disadvantaged compared to the 1%, not to speak of the 1/10th of 1%. If the 99% are to effectively correct this situation, it will require the effective unification and mobilization of a significant majority of the 99%, not their racial division.
39. There is no question that as a nation we have serious and often systematic injustices that have lasted far too long, and it is well past time for sustained efforts to rectify them. They must be recognized, publicly acknowledged, and wide public support generated on behalf of movements for systemic change. But we must, at the same time, not unnecessarily alienate and offend the broad public whose support is vital if our efforts are to succeed. We should appreciate and treasure those hard fought historic accomplishments and noble ideals that have made possible the profound enhancements of human living that have also been the result of European, and particularly of American, civilization. If we are to build that movement for deep and sustained progressive social change, we need to avoid all forms of racist, Manichaean, black and white thinking, and the denigration of people of any race, so many of whom can be, if they are not already, actually committed to working on behalf of the equitable enhancement of human living for everyone.   

Promoting a Progressive Strategy in the Presidential Campaign

Promoting a Progressive Strategy in the Presidential Campaign

With his incompetent response to the virus and its disastrous economic consequences finally undermining important segments of his previously impregnable political base, Trump is becoming increasingly desperate facing what seems to be a looming electoral disaster. Further, he has shown absolutely no appreciation for, or sympathy with, the growing protests against racial oppression that has so powerfully emerged in the aftermath of the video showing the police murder of George Floyd.

Rather, his response has increasingly been to focus his election strategy on seeking to mobilize fear of growing social lawlessness purportedly driven by radical leftists. His particular target has become suburban whites, who are to be made fearful of increasingly violent protests, purportedly led by inner city black and brown people.

These protests are themselves the long overdue efforts, initiated by the Black Lives Matter movement, to mobilize America to finally come to terms with its history of racial oppression. They have been particularly remarkable by their cultural and geographical reach, their multi—racial constitution, and their remarkably non-violent character.

Trump has, of course, no sympathy for efforts to address racial injustice, to counter its institutional forms, and to address its human consequences. Rather he sees these protests as offering him an opportunity to re-focus his floundering campaign, by stoking any and all forms of latent white racial resentments. To do this he needs to create a violent reality that can be used as public propaganda in support of the fear mongering political narrative that is to drive his campaign.

To do this he is sending official militarized personnel into Democratically-run urban centers, under the claim of protecting federal property and preserving law and order. These Trumpian troopers then provoke the protesters (perhaps even seeding these protests with a handful of right-wing provocateurs). The aim is to create the violent conditions that play into his political narrative, in order to retrospectively justify the claim that Democratically-led urban centers are out of control, having been taken over by dangerous and violent radical mobs.

This being Trump’s key electoral strategy, it is vital that protestors themselves, mostly youth-led and multi-racial, not play into this Trumpian Trap. This is a truly remarkable moment in American history, with great possibilities for beginning to seriously address a profound historical injustice. For the first time there are real signs of a truly national awakening to the nature, extent, and ongoing consequences of America’s racial history. And there is remarkable wide-spread popular support for this national movement.

Such popular support further undermines Trump’s policies, programs, and narrow political base. It thus constitutes a significant additional impediment to his re-election. If he is to regain the political momentum, he needs to undermine this popular support, while mobilizing white resentment, and turning public attention away from the disasters of his economy and his response to the virus. For it is clearly far too late for him to constructively address the virus before the election. And without a real solution to the virus, there is little hope for any real economic improvement. Hence, mobilizing racism may well be his only electoral hope.

It is thus vital that the “movement for Black lives,” and the on-going and necessary nation-wide protests not fall into the Trumpian Trap by engaging in, approving of, or failing to inhibit violent confrontations with Trump’s occupying forces. It should be clear by now that Trump is only sending these troops into Democratically-run urban centers in order precisely to instigate the violent unrest that his campaign so desperately needs to seem to be quelling in order to regain the political momentum. Protesters must not lend any credence to this Trumpian narrative. Rather, strict adherence to, and active and public promotion of, non-violent confrontation must be the order of the day.

A comprehensive strategy for progressives

The attached summary of an excellent recently published book, Merge Left, contains what I have been arguing for several years ought to be the strategy for progressives. It’s worth careful attention. Unfortunately, too many on the “Left” have lost sight in recent years of the comprehensive vision of a unified progressive strategy that is required if we are to be successful in the long run.

MERGE LEFT
Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America
By Ian Haney López
“With great clarity and thoughtfulness, Ian F. Haney López shows why the path to a truly just society lies in a multi-racial coalition of poor, working and middle-class Americans. . . . Powerful, urgent, and timely.”
—Robert B. Reich
From presidential hopefuls to engaged voters to journalists to activists, people across the country are grappling with how to think and talk about racism in American politics. Ian Haney López, a distinguished UC Berkeley professor and the acclaimed author of Dog Whistle Politics, offers clear insights and a way forward in his highly anticipated new book. Endorsed by Robert Reich, Van Jones, Jane Fonda, and the leaders of the AFL-CIO, SEIU, Voto Latino, Color of Change, Equal Justice Society, ROC United, and more, MERGE LEFT: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America (October 1, 2019; $26.99) offers a powerful, truly original, and even hopeful new strategy for defeating the Right’s racial fearmongering and achieving bold progressive goals.
In 2014, Haney López in Dog Whistle Politics named and explained the coded racial appeals exploited by right-wing politicians over the last half century—and thereby anticipated the 2016 presidential election. Now, the country is heading into one of the most consequential elections ever, with the Right gearing up to again exploit racial fearmongering to divide and distract. Meanwhile, the Left is splintered. Some want to confront the Right’s racism head-on; others insist that a race-silent emphasis on class avoids alienating white voters. Can either approach—challenging white racism or going colorblind—build the progressive supermajorities necessary to break political gridlock and fundamentally change the country’s direction?
After the 2016 election, Haney López co-founded the Race-Class Narrative Research Project. With the Right utilizing focus groups, polling, and careful message testing to hone their dog whistles, Haney López and his collaborators—including union activists, racial justice leaders, pollsters, and communications specialists—set out to use the same tools against them. Based on conversations, interviews, and surveys with thousands of people all over the country, the team found a way forward. By reframing racism as a weapon of the rich, the race-class approach shifts people’s conception regarding whom to view as their allies and enemies—and thereby builds greater enthusiasm for racial justice, economic populism, and the cross-racial solidarity needed to win elections.

Here’s what their research brought to light:
• Most white people hold contradictory views about race
Against the prevalent assumptions of many progressives, they found that most whites hold egalitarian views on race—although they also swing back and forth to deeply internalized racist beliefs. This is relatively good news, Haney López says, because it means that the Left does not need to tear down a mountain of white racism. Instead, the task is to help the majority of whites connect their economic self-interest to the antiracist values most already hold.
• Voters of color also accept messages about “undeserving” people Again contra the conventional wisdom, the majority of Black and Latinx voters find large parts of the Right’s coded rhetoric convincing—the use of terms like “criminals” and “welfare cheats” resonates powerfully within communities of color. This means that neutralizing the Right’s narratives of racial fear and resentment is key when addressing white voters and communities of color.
• The political “middle” toggles between progressive and reactionary The Left’s base, roughly one-fifth of all voters, embrace racial equality, believe circumstances more than individual effort explain wealth inequalities, and want government to regulate the market. Opposite them and just slightly fewer in number, the Right’s core supporters resent people of color, credit hard work for economic success, and want government out of the way. That leaves three-fifths of Americans—including a majority of people of color—in between. They agree with and bounce between both progressive and reactionary views, largely without noticing the tensions between them.
• The persuadable majority gives more credence to messages of racial fear than to color-blind language or to challenges to white racism
The persuadable middle finds messages promoting economic populism that ignore racial issues less convincing than the Right’s racial fear message. And the other main progressive response—calling for racial justice in ways that implicitly condemn white racism—is even less popular, including with people of color. In other words: With the crucial persuadable middle, neither of the Left’s two principal responses defeats Trump’s racial fearmongering.
• Retelling the story of America in terms of class war waged through racial division is more convincing than racial fear messages
The good news is that the Right’s racial fear message loses decisively to a narrative condemning fearmongering by greedy elites and calling for cross-racial unity. Explicitly urging voters to distrust economic elites sowing racial division and to join together across racial lines to demand that government promote racial and economic justice beats dog whistling. This race-class message consistently proved more convincing—to whites as well as people of color—than the Right’s racial fear story.

Haney López MERGE LEFT summary 3
HOW THE RACE-CLASS STRATEGY WORKS
The GOP shifts attention from economic to racial concerns
As early as 1963, Republicans recognized they could win votes by fashioning a new identity for themselves as the defenders of white America. There would be no open references to maintaining white dominance. They would use dog whistles. But even so, the GOP’s basic strategy would be to shift attention from class to race by encouraging voters to focus their social and economic resentments on nonwhite groups rather than on concentrated wealth. This con, writes Haney López, “fits Trump to a fake-gold T.”
Typical Democratic and progressive messages fail
With racial conflict as the core threat narrative promoted by the GOP and right-wing media, the two dominant progressive responses struggle. One, a race-silent emphasis on class, leaves messages of racial fear and fundamental racial division operating without challenge. The other, attacking Trump as a racist, actually helps him—it deepens the panic that the country is splintering into racial sides.
Fusing race to class shifts voters’ sense of the source of danger in their lives
The race-class approach transforms voters’ sense of the root conflict in society. Dog whistling implies the fundamental conflict pits whites against nonwhites. The race-class narrative says it those sowing division against the rest of us, whether we are Black, brown, or white, native or newcomer. The race-class approach shifts the conflict from whites versus nonwhites to a racially-divisive 1 percent against a race-conscious 99 percent. It specifically names whites as beneficiaries of cross-racial solidarity.
Economic inequality threatens everyone, but racial division is the key
The race-class strategy is not a “class more than race” frame. Yes, it says that class war threatens almost every family. But it insists that racial division is the principal weapon and must be directly addressed rather than pushed to the back burner. The race-class approach is not colorblind but instead race-forward.
Ending state violence against people of color requires cross-racial solidarity
The single greatest driver of state violence against nonwhite communities is dog whistle politics. When politicians campaign by demonizing “thugs,” “illegals,” and “terrorists,” they govern through mass incarceration, mass deportation, and mass surveillance. This makes cross-racial coalitions to defeat dog whistle politics an indispensable step toward racial justice.
Connecting race and class in our narratives and politics is a must
Many progressives understand that racial as well as class injustices should be addressed. The race-class approach makes clear that in fact “should” is “must.” The race-class strategy starts by recognizing that race and class in the United States are welded together by history as well as current politics. Haney López argues that the Left can prevail only by turning this fusion to progressive advantage. He maintains that the Left must not only pursue racial and economic justice simultaneously, but must consistently link the two in voters’ minds in order to make big gains on either front.

Haney López MERGE LEFT summary 4
THE RACE-CLASS STRATEGY AND TODAY’S POLITICS
MERGE LEFT places the findings of the race-class narrative project in a larger political and racial context, offering practical insights into the most troubling dilemmas and explosive elements of today’s politics, such as:
The evolution of dog whistling
• Attacks against Latinx and Muslim communities accelerated during the Obama era to become today’s most pervasive forms of racial fearmongering.
• Trump won through dog whistling and has NOT shifted to a bullhorn of white supremacy, at least as far as the vast majority of his supporters are concerned.
• Racial fearmongering has destroyed moderation within the Republican Party but they cannot walk away from it. Every GOP candidate knows that in the primaries the most racially reactionary candidate will have a leg up.
Flaws in the Democratic response to dog whistling
• Democratic party leaders for five decades and counting distance themselves from racial justice arguments, hoping dog whistling will fade on its own.
• The Clintons’ responded to dog whistling by imitating it in the 1990s, and it came back to bite Hillary in the 2016 election, even though she adopted strong racial justice positions in that campaign.
• Economic populists like Bernie Sanders and Robert Reich rely on impoverished accounts of race when they take a “class first” approach.
Centering and mobilizing communities of color
• Dog whistling is at the root of most state violence against communities of color.
• Among activists, there’s a strong demand that racism be directly challenged—but in the larger community many people struggle with concepts like pervasive white
supremacy and structural racism.
• A narrative of strategic racism resonates within communities of color: divide-
and-conquer is easier to understand than structural accounts, and also raises the prospect that whites have their own interests in fighting racial division.
Dangerous trends among whites
• Trump draws on and also accelerates dangerous new trends in white identity.
• The Left already competes effectively among white voters who are not evangelical
Christians, coming close with the working class and winning big among women.
• The Left must promote racial solidarity even among whites in the Democratic
base, because white liberals remain susceptible to racial fear.
• Moral suasion, while it can be genuine and galvanizing, by itself will not move
most white voters to actively support racial justice. They must also see that their
own interests are served by it.
• Explicitly naming whites as beneficiaries of cross-racial solidarity significantly
boosts support among both whites and people of color.

Haney López MERGE LEFT summary 5
EVERY PROGRESSIVE GOAL REQUIRES CROSS-RACIAL SOLIDARITY
Today, Haney López maintains, every bold progressive vision depends on building cross-racial solidarity first. This is obviously important to assembling broad support for racial justice initiatives like abolishing mass incarceration and creating a humane immigration system. But it is also pivotal to enacting progressive legislation seemingly distant from racial issues, such as publicly funded child and elder care, affordable and excellent healthcare, or a Green New Deal. Only a sense of linked fate across color lines will foster the supermajorities necessary to sweep away the politicians who dog whistle on behalf of rule by the rich. The best response to divide-and-conquer, Haney López says, is unite-and-build.
“Our fates have always been bound together,” Haney López writes. “For centuries, our greatest heroes—radicals like W. E. B. DuBois, Martin Luther King, Jr., and César Chávez—have insisted that American salvation requires cross-racial alliances. Repeatedly, this insight has been suppressed, forgotten, and abandoned. Today, some of the wealthiest, most powerful forces in this country bend their will and money toward driving us apart so they can tighten their grip on government and the economy. Yet the very wreckage they have created—and the president they helped elect—open up another opportunity to build a broad cross-racial movement with the will and the political power to promote racial reform and shared economic prosperity. This book explains the good evidence that cross-racial solidarity for racial and economic justice is possible, today.”
In this lively, provocative, and often surprising narrative, MERGE LEFT draws on important new research to explain where the Right’s racial strategy came from, how it works, and how it can be beaten in the coming election and beyond.

On Police Accountability

Below is my article On Police Accountability that was published by Newsday today. Below it is a constructive contribution by Paul Surovell that advances consideration of these issues.

The state grants the police the exceptional power of life and death for the purpose of providing for the safety and security of the community. Being granted this exceptional power, the police are responsible to the community for its exercise. They cannot clam immunity from responsible community oversight in the exercise of this power. But it has long been clear that the community’s elected political representatives are incapable of exercising the effective oversight needed to guarantee the fair, and impartial exercise of police power. That is in large part due to the power of police unions to create unjustified fear that creating such accountability would render society less safe. It has thus become patently clear the only way a community can adequately and systematically address issues of police accountability is if it creates an independent civilian complaint review board with effective subpoena power. That is the one necessary and inescapable requirement for the systemic rehabilitation of the relation between the police and the communities they have the responsibility to serve with equity and justice. Short of that, there will be no fundamental solution to the inequities in policing that have been, and are continuing to tear our communities apart, thus rendering us all less safe.

For a little perspective, Newark NJ created a Civilian Review Board that goes beyond the power to subpoena, but also includes the powers to recommend disciplinary action and to review decisions by the Police Chief. And equally important, 7 of the 11 members of the Board are appointed by community organizations that are concerned about police abuse, including the ACLU, NAACP and the People’s Organization for Progress, whose leader, Larry Hamm, who we’ve known for years (as has anyone in NJ involved in anti-racist, anti-war, pro-labor, pro-environment struggles). He’s absolutely incorruptible and indefatigable.

The Review Board is under challenge by the police union, but was restored by the appellate court after being gutted by the lower court. The NJ Supreme Court heard oral arguments in April. Hopefully part of George Floyd’s legacy will be to set the stage for a positive court decision.

If anyone is interested at looking in more detail at these issues, as well as the status of Civilian Review Boards across the country, here’s a great article by Udi Offer, former head of the NJ ACLU, now assistant political director of national ACLU.

https://scholarship.shu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1572&context=shlr

Biden v. Trump: Are We In Or Out?

An important article for Progressives, I would like to share from Carl Davidson’s “Leftlinks” website

“Biden v. Trump: Are We In Or Out?”
by Whitney Maxey

The next few months are decision time for the left.
Either Donald Trump or Joe Biden will be inaugurated President on January 20, 2021.
Millions of people, including the vast majority of voters of color and of workers of all backgrounds who reject bigotry and lies, will cast their ballots for Biden. Among them will be a large cohort who regard Trump as a unique danger and will go all-out to beat him.
Will we join them in that effort or not?
I believe if we throw down, and if we are successful, we create the best possible fighting conditions for working-class and people of color movements domestically and internationally.
And we will build a stronger and bigger left in the process.
BIDEN AND TRUMP ARE NOT THE SAME
We will shift the terrain because Biden and Trump are not the same.
There are major qualitative and quantitative differences between them. Trump heads a right-wing populist and authoritarian trend dripping with white supremacy. Biden is a neoliberal but is subject to pressure from the left to address at least some of our concerns. Denying those differences and choosing not to mobilize to beat Trump is turning our backs on multi-national working class and people of color communities and movements in their time of most need the world over.
Trump’s doubling down on neoliberal ideology to let government create the best circumstances and avenues for the market to do what it pleases to coordinate and direct national medical resources. He rejects the demand for government to step in to at least try and make the process more equitable. This literally means the difference between life and death for people who have contracted Covid-19, who are disproportionately working-class Black and other people of color.
Trump, along with European powers and the right-wing populist bloc he has been facilitating, have exacerbated the plight of many in the Global South. This bloc has repeatedly interfered to try and grossly undermine the various self-determination struggles. This has meant further destabilization and less of an ability to navigate the Covid19 multi-pronged crisis for so many of these countries. For example, since the start of the crisis, Trump has increased sanctions on countries like Venezuela and increased military presence throughout Latin America. The last thing these countries need is to be handcuffed as they struggle to see their country and the people in it through this crisis.
In contrast, Biden has called for lifting sanctions that prevent Iran from getting medical and other essential supplies, and condemned Trump pulling out of the JCPOA nuclear agreement (a.k.a. the Iran nuclear agreement).
Biden wouldn’t have pulled the US out of the Paris Climate Accord and would put us back into the agreement. Though the action itself is symbolic, it points to two very important things that our movements can build on: 1) A belief that Climate Change is real and something must be done about it on a global scale and 2) science and facts matter.
These are two major areas of departure between Trumpism and the moderate thrust of a Biden-led Democratic administration. Given part of the crisis we are facing is ecological our movements would be much better served with an administration led by someone who is already down the path of recognizing that there is a problem to be fixed (Biden) versus someone who thinks the whole thing is a “hoax”.
 
THE UPSIDE AND THE DOWNSIDE OF BIDEN
A Biden presidency creates more favorable conditions for our communities and movements to fight for the audacious ideas and demands that this crisis affords us the ability to do in a way that wasn’t possible even three months ago.
Biden would have to be more responsive to the political power that is being constructed by an increasingly galvanized and organized left wing of the Democratic Party social base. Approximately 25% of the Democratic Party electorate is progressive or left of progressive and thus Biden recognizes that he needs us to win. This is evident in his concessions to Bernie Sanders and statement that he needs Bernie not just to win the election but to govern. That means we can win more concessions as we go forward to include more of the things we want in his vision and plan for the US and abroad.
Additionally, we have a larger, though still relatively small but influential and loud progressive congressional leaders that are symbolized by “The Squad”. This provides more opportunities for our movements to center class, race, and gender into the narrative of the Democratic Party and inform more of its policies and programs.
Biden has and will continue to speak out, to the best of his ability, against white nationalism. He will not be beholden as Trump is to the Christian fundamentalist bloc which promotes a political program that hits hard at the multi-national working-class and people of color.
Will Biden be an avid defender of social democratic ideas that excited and energized so many within social movements? No. But he was never going to be. That’s not the ideology or world view that he represents and is fighting for. But he does have to be responsive to those ideals and the energized base that accompanies it.
We’ve already seen that around the expansion of healthcare debate which at its core is about human rights vs. the market. Will we allow the private market to effectively monopolize meeting our health care needs, or is health care a human right that must be insured by government action? Biden, and other moderate Democrats, have been forced by grassroots pressure to warm up to the idea of a public option for Healthcare. We should build on that shift and not thumb our nose at it, especially since any gains we are able to make on this front will necessarily mean greater access to health care for working-class and people of color. We have seen shifts in their political positions on the Hyde Amendment and how to center people in these Covid19 stimulus packages. These examples demonstrate our movements’ ability to influence those in Biden’s ideological lane, or close to it, that he represents.
 
NO QUICK FIX
We aren’t going to get everything we want in one fell swoop. We are fighting to build political power and fighting for hegemony amongst other competing forces who have started out much stronger than we are.
But the class struggle that centers race and gender is alive and well. Let’s not waste an opportunity to create more favorable conditions for the movements and communities we care about domestically and internationally by reducing Biden to be the equivalent of Trump.
We have to engage in the conditions we are presented with even if they are not to our liking. We need to be central to, not stand aside from, the actual ideological and on-the-ground struggle that is underway in this country. That means mobilize against Trumpism and the GOP in 2020 and beyond; expand the social bases that made up the Bernie coalition; develop independent political organizations and other statewide independent political power building formations that center people of color and the multi-national working-class; and continue to build tactical and strategic alliances with those that comprise the anti-Trump/anti-GOP front.
 
STEP BY STEP TOWARD OUR LONG-RANGE GOALS
Immersion in the battle at hand gives us a fighting chance to win, over time, things like:
A response to the COVID-19 pandemic that gets closer to the approach outlined by the five principles of the Peoples Bailout, including Green New Deal policies and programs
Healthcare for All
Programs that center the needs of Black, Indigenous, and other POC communities in government responses and interventions
A shift in how the Global North (and the US specifically) relates to the Global South (especially Africa which has been systematically underdeveloped and politically undermined for centuries) during the Covid19 pandemic, and in its aftermath
Demonstrating that the working class is too big to fail by having policies and programs that promote the increase of its health, wealth, and relationship to work and industry
The outcomes of this 2020 electoral cycle matter from the presidency down to the city level. We have a role to play and an ability to flex some of the hard-earned independent political power we have built in the last several years. Let’s use that power responsibly to create circumstances and avenues that can make possible today and tomorrow what was impossible yesterday.
We can’t afford to let up now. The global multi-national working class and communities of color are counting on us.

Whitney Maxey (she/hers) has done community organizing for the past 10+ years primarily in electoral and housing issues in Florida. She currently does organizing work with an independent political organization in Memphis, Tennessee called Memphis for All. All of her organizing experience has been working predominantly within working-class Black and Latinx communities. As a member of the Organizing Upgrade editorial collective, Whitney brings on-the-ground organizing experience and some organizational development experience to the team.

Blaming Trump, Blaming Biden, Saving Ourselves

Let me share with you this excellent article by my dear friend and superb Political Scientist at U. of Indiana, Jeff Isaac.

Blaming Trump, Blaming Biden, Saving Ourselves

Donald Trump is a threat to American democracy. This has long been known. But only in the past month or so has the magnitude of the threat he presents become crystal clear. In the face of a deadly virus he has weakened key government health agencies; lied about the danger; failed to take decisive action, and then followed with rash and inconsistent action. All the while he has placed an entire nation at risk as he has exploited the crisis, partly of his own making, in order to further cement his authoritarian hold on the presidency.

Trump’s response to the crisis has laid bare the irresponsibility and malevolence of his administration and the challenge his very political existence poses to public health and to democracy itself.

It is thus easy to blame him for our current situation. And it is necessary to do so.

Less than two weeks ago, this case was made by two of the best columnists covering the plague that is Trumpism. Michelle Goldberg insisted that “Of Course Trump Deserves Blame for the Coronavirus Crisis,” noting:

It can become tedious to dwell on the fact that the president is a dangerous and ignorant narcissist who has utterly failed as an executive, leaving state governments on their own to confront a generational cataclysm. But no one should ever forget it. Soon, even if the pandemic is still raging, there will be an election, and the public will be asked to render a verdict on Trump’s leadership. Being clear that people are suffering and dying needlessly because the president can’t do his job isn’t looking backward. It’s the only way to move forward.

Jamelle Bouie followed a day later with “Don’t Let Trump Off the Hook,” insisting that: 

It is the political task of the Democratic Party to make the public understand the nature of the Republican Party and its leading role in this disaster so that when November comes, Americans hold no illusions about what it would mean for their futures — and their lives — to give Republicans another four years of power in Washington.

I agree with Goldberg and Bouie. Trump is a menace, he is responsible for the magnitude of the current crisis, and blaming him, and then removing him from office, is the only way to get a government capable of dealing with COVID and its effects in a way that is just, competent, and simply humane. In order to remove Trump, it is necessary to relentlessly expose and to blame him.

At the same time, this has proven to be a difficult thing to accomplish politically. And while we writers and activists must relentlessly criticize Trump, we also need to understand the reasons why the opposition to Trump has been so profoundly hamstrung by its inability to effectively blame him during the current crisis as it has thus far unfolded.

One reason is simply that the very real crisis has given Trump, always the master of mass media attention-getting, a perfect platform for his unique brand of daily reality TV, and he is exploiting this to the max. The virus–and Trump’s responses, non-responses, and Tweets—has literally taken over the news, spreading like the virus itself, and crowding out everything else. Trump is using his “bully pulpit” to bully, bloviate, and lie, and as his voice has been magnified, all others have been diminished. 

There are obvious exceptions, like New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, and to a lesser extent his counterparts in Ohio, Washington state, and elsewhere. But in a way they are exceptions that prove the rule. Because, at the same that these figures have been able to garner justifiable media attention for their efforts to contain the pandemic, they have been forced by circumstance to moderate their criticisms of Trump and in effect to play along as if he were the responsible and competent president that he manifestly is not. A recent Associate Press story by Kathleen Ronayne and Jonathan Lemire states the challenge confronting these Governors well: “Flatter or fight? Governors seeking help must navigate Trump.” As Ronayne and Lemire make clear: 

“Facing an unprecedented public health crisis, governors are trying to get what they need from Washington, and fast. But that means navigating the disorienting politics of dealing with Trump, an unpredictable president with a love for cable news and a penchant for retribution. Republicans and Democrats alike are testing whether to fight or flatter, whether to back channel requests or go public, all in an attempt to get Trump’s attention and his assurances.”

This, then, is the second reason it has proven so difficult to hold Trump politically responsible: because it is impossible for any elected official at any level of government to accomplish anything meaningful to address the pandemic without some assistance from the federal government, whether this be executive action by Trump or legislation, which of course requires the approval of a Trump-dominated Senate and the signature of Trump himself. During the intense negotiations surrounding the two pieces of emergency legislation passed in recent weeks, it was common to hear Democratic Senators and House members talking about how important it was to “work across the aisle” to get the legislation passed, and to “look forward” to what can be done rather than “look backward” at who is responsible for what. Admittedly, that was, and remains, a very fine line to walk. And there has been a constant rhetorical wavering between the rhetoric of “coming together for the public good” and the rhetoric of outrage and blame of Trump’s handling of the crisis. In recent days Nancy Pelosi has come out with strong and entirely legitimate attacks on Trump. At the same time, she and Chuck Schumer have been compelled by circumstances to work closely with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, one of Trump’s closest confidants, to finalize deals with the White House. This has understandably muted their attacks on the administration. Unlike during the protracted impeachment struggle, it has been impossible for most Democratic messaging to focus on Trump, for it has been necessary for all elected public officials to focus on the virus.

And this leads to the third reason why blaming Trump has been so difficult: because the pandemic, by literally shutting down all forms of public gathering and virtually eliminating all forms of face-to-face interaction, has essentially shut down the Democratic primary campaign, and along with it all forms of public campaigning and all kinds of public assemblies, demonstrations, “town halls,” and events where people can come together to be politically mobilized.

The enforced social distancing, however necessary, has been profoundly enervating for everyone, turning most of us into house-bound and anxious individuals whose social contact is extremely limited. And with the complete closure of public life, the only form of mass politics and political mobilization that currently exists is the form of mobilization practiced by Trump through his monopolization and manipulation of the mass media. 

And so we confront a bitter paradox: the more necessary it is to hold Trump responsible, the more difficult it is to hold him responsible.

Governors are trying to govern, legislators are trying to legislate, health care workers and other “essential personnel” are working hard at their jobs at great risk, everyone else is trying to get by while “sheltering in place,” and Trump alone dominates the public sphere.

This is an explicable and even predictable consequence of a crisis of this magnitude.

But dominance can be challenged. And indeed, it was presumably the purpose of the Democratic primary contest to select a Democratic candidate best suited to challenging Trump’s dominance. Such a challenge is necessary now, more than ever, and the fact that the obstacles are great only means that determined and creative leadership is all the more necessary. 

In the face of this need there is now an obvious void, as Joe Biden, having claimed “victory” after his strong Super Tuesday results, has more or less gone into quarantine.

To be fair, he has attempted to speak out, appearing regularly on cable news shows, making announcements, and even organizing a few video “events.” As Eugene Scott of the Washington Post’s “The Fix” has noted, “Joe Biden is Working From Home.” But, as The Hill’s Bernard Goldberg has also noted, “Joe Biden can’t lead the charge from his home in Delaware.” And while in recent months I have disagreed with much of Ryan Cooper’s relentless criticism of Biden, it is hard to argue with his recent assertion that “Joe Biden is the worst imaginable challenger to Trump right now.” What Cooper says seems true:

Indeed, Biden has barely been doing anything. As the outbreak became a full-blown crisis, Biden disappeared for almost an entire week. His campaign said it was trying to figure out how to do video livestreams, something any 12-year-old could set up in about 15 minutes. (Hey guys: Any smartphone with Twitter, YouTube, or Twitch installed can become a broadcasting device with the press of a single button.) When Biden did finally appear, he gave some scripted addresses that still had technical foul-ups, and did softball interviews where he still occasionally trailed off mid-sentence. . . . 

Trump, meanwhile, is similarly out there on TV every day boasting about how what he’s doing is so smart and good. What he’s saying is insanely irresponsible and has already gotten people killed, but absent an effective response from the Democratic leadership, it can appear to casual news consumers as though he has the situation in hand. Democratic backbenchers and various journalists are screaming themselves hoarse, but it plainly isn’t working.

I am unconvinced by those on the left who have never reckoned with the real weaknesses of the Bernie Sanders campaign, and who now believe that COVID can revitalize Sanders’s bid for the nomination. (Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor declared on Monday that “Reality Has Endorsed Bernie Sanders.” But, as one Facebook friend put it, “Reality” has no Democratic delegates.)  But I am equally unconvinced by those Democratic centrists who are now denouncing Sanders’s refusal to leave the race. And the reason is simple: while Biden acts like the nomination is his, and while almost everyone else acts like the nomination is his, and while in fact the nomination probably is his, Biden has allowed the COVID crisis to sideline him, and has allowed the momentum of his campaign to wane. And now is not the time for the presumptive Democratic nominee to rest on his laurels. If Biden is going to lead us forward, he needs to be woken up and energized. And if he can’t now compete with Sanders, how is he going to compete six months from now with Trump? While weeks ago it made sense for many, including some important left activists, to call for Sanders to leave the race in exchange for real concessions from Biden, now it is necessary to reignite some version of a Democratic campaign. If Sanders can light a fire under Biden’s ass, all the power to him. And if Biden continues to remain in his basement, then this will be telling indeed.

What should Biden do? There is no easy answer. But it is clear that he should get his act together. If he is going to run an effective social media campaign while temporarily in quarantine, then he needs to put together a real social media campaign. He needs to be proactively in the public eye, and do everything he can to gain positive media attention every single day. Indeed, if Andrew Cuomo can venture out in public and hold a makeshift press conference every day, surrounded (at a distance) by his advisers and in the presence of a small group of reporters who question him, why can’t Joe Biden do something similar? Yes, he is a much older man, more susceptible to the virus (but Cuomo, at age 62, is also in the at-risk age group). But he is running to hold the most powerful position in the country. If he is too frail to do what Cuomo is doing, and if he has no alternative way of performing leadership, then it is hard to see how he can effectively run against Trump in November.

So as we blame Trump, it is also appropriate to blame Biden, for not doing more to lead, visibly and publicly, at a time when leadership is needed now more than ever.

At the same time, even if Biden were an utterly electrifying and media savvy personality, the defeat of Trump and his Republican enablers in November would still require an energetic grass-roots campaign and sustained voter mobilization. And this is the work of campaign workers, activist groups, and engaged citizens. Even before COVID, such an effort was an urgent challenge. Both the urgency and the challenge are now greater. We know this. And yet we shelter in place, for at least the next two months. And in the best of circumstances, if something approaching “social normality” returns in mid-summer, it is likely to be disrupted again by the coming of flu season in late Fall. And in November we will confront a fragmented and inefficient election system that might well be unable to accommodate the needs of “social distancing.” And a president empowered by the exhaustion, alienation, and anxiety of the citizenry at large. Democracy itself is thus at grave risk.

Can the Democratic party get its act together, and reignite a real campaign animated by a real vision?

Can we save ourselves, from the plague that is COVID or the plague that is Trump?

Combatting Progressives’ Self-Destruction

Combatting Progressives’ Self-Destruction

Entering 2020 at a time of growing existential threat to basic humane values in America, and across the world – concern for human decency, respect for science, valuing democratic institutions – it would seem to be an overriding imperative for progressives to do all in their power to unify the forces of human decency in the service of an inclusive vision of social justice. But I have become deeply distressed by the recent tendency I have seen among many groups on the Left of developing an increasingly intolerant racialized politics.

Losing sight of the historic concern of progressives for building an egalitarian multi-racial, multi-ethnic, democratic society committed to combatting all forms of ethnic, racial, religious, and gender prejudice, many having taken to blaming white people, often particularly white males, as the cause of the suffering of black and brown people. And they have shown increasing intolerance for any who challenge their racialized politics, rather promoting an identity politics that explicitly sets racial and ethnic groups at odds with one another, and denigrates and alienates vast segments of the population. And this regardless of the widespread and shared suffering of so many that results from the vast disparities in wealth and power consequent upon de-industrialization, privatization, deregulation, automation, the decimation of the organized working class, unconscionable reductions in government income due to the practical disappearance of taxes on the wealthy and large corporations, and the consequent evisceration of the social “safety net,” not even to speak of the growing existential threat posed by global warming.

Having spent a good part of my adult life fighting for the values embodied in the mission statement I wrote more than 40 years ago: “promoting sustainable development, revitalizing local communities, enhancing human dignity, creating effective democracy, and achieving economic, social and racial justice,” it has particularly pained me to see two local historically progressive organizations, Citizen Action of New York and the Long Island Progressive Coalition, with which I have long been associated, increasingly lose interest in that inclusive progressive vision. Rather they have become relatively uninterested in the general societal issues effecting all working people. They have increasingly come to see all issues in racial terms, tending toward exclusively prioritizing a racialized politics. They have thus become quite comfortable blaming white people for the oppression of black and brown people, even going so far as to claim that all white people are racists. And they have become increasingly intolerant of divergent opinions, thus creating a toxic interpersonal environment for any who dissent from their “group think”. This view was exemplified recently by a LIPC Board member who said that he didn’t give a damn about the working class in general, or for the Labor movement, in particular. A further clear example of this trend can be seen by Citizen Action’s recent appointment as its Statewide Political Director of a person who had recently posted a blog entitled “All White People are Racists – A History Lesson.”

I find these views quite unacceptable. The entirely legitimate and necessary concern with fighting racial discrimination has degenerated into a racialization of political discourse which it has long been the goal of progressives to combat, namely that of stigmatizing an entire population because of the color of their skin. Is that not the classic definition of racism? Further, such a policy, beyond being morally indefensible, is politically disastrous. How can we expect to build an effective progressive movement while alienating the majority of the population? Rather than such demonization and divisive attacks, progressives should be building that multi-racial, multi-ethnic, socially inclusive, program which maximally unifies the 99% around a program of social justice and democratic empowerment, not one which divides that potentially empowering majority. We must repudiate such racialized attacks, and rather give renewed voice and vitality to that inclusive vision so brilliantly articulated by Dr. King when he dreamed of a world in which his “four little children will … live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character … and (where) little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers”? That’s a vision that we must not lose sight of, and one which should continually motivate our work and guide our activity. And any organization that would move us in an opposed direction certainly does not deserve our continuing support.