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Junkie
Location: Some place windy
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by host
That's an easy one, pan....Obama is a defender of the status quo...the top fraction of one percent in this country who hold controlling interests in wealth...
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An article in Le Monde Diplomatique this month makes a similar claim: That a vote for Obama may be a vote for the status quo...
Race and gender distract from class in US primaries: Some Democrats are more equal than others click to show
Quote:
http://mondediplo.com/2008/06/05equality
Class is the great unmentionable in the Obama-Clinton campaigns. US progressives want to diversify the elite across colour, gender and ethnic background, while accepting ever greater inequalities of wealth between the elite and the rest of the nation.
By Walter Benn Michaels
There have been two defining moments related to race in the Obama campaign, and more generally in United States progressive politics. The first was in January on the night of the Illinois senator’s victory in South Carolina when, in response to comments by Bill Clinton about the size of the black vote, the Obama crowd started chanting: “Race doesn’t matter.”
“There we stood,” said the novelist and Obama activist Ayelet Waldman, “in the heart of the old South, where Confederate flags still fly next to statues of Governor Benjamin Tillman, who famously bragged about keeping black people from the polls (‘We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it’), chanting race doesn’t matter, race doesn’t matter. White people and black people. Latinos and Asians, united in our rejection of politics as usual. United in our belief that America can be a different place. United. Not divided” (1).
The second moment was in March when, in response to the controversial sermons of his former pastor, the Rev Jeremiah Wright, Obama gave his “more perfect union” speech, declaring: “Race is an issue this nation cannot afford to ignore right now” and inaugurating what many commentators described as a supposedly much-needed “national conversation on race”.
I say supposedly because Americans love to talk about race and have been doing so for centuries, even if today the thing we love most to say is that “Americans don’t like to talk about race”. What we aren’t so good at talking about is class, as Obama himself inadvertently demonstrated when he tried to talk about class on 6 April at a closed-door San Francisco fundraiser (“Bittergate”). He tried to explain the frustrations of some small-town Pennsylvanians: “It’s not surprising that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment.”
’Change we can believe in’
There seems to be an obvious contradiction here. First, the chant of race doesn’t matter; then the speech about why race does matter. But after reflection the contradiction fades, since the need for the speech, the history of American racism, is what prompted the promise of the chant: the idea that electing a black man would be a major step toward overcoming that history. Which, of course, it would.
It is the promise of overcoming the long history of racial division, the promise of solving in the 21st century what W E B Du Bois (2) described as the overwhelming problem of the 20th century, the problem of the colour line, that gives the Obama campaign its significance. The “change we can believe in” is not ideological, it’s cultural (Obama and Clinton are ideologically almost identical; if people had wanted ideological change, we’d be talking about John Edwards). And at the heart of that cultural change is the fact that it cannot be proclaimed. It must be embodied, and only a black person can embody it. We can elect white people who say that race shouldn’t matter, but only the election of a black person can establish that it really doesn’t.
So the Obama campaign is and has always been all about race, and especially about anti-racism as progressive politics. Whether or not he ultimately wins, and especially if he doesn’t, we are still being shown the “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party leading Americans toward an increasingly open and equal society, for African-Americans and also for Asians and Latinos and women and gays.
But the problem with this picture – a problem that is also a crucial part of its attraction – is that it is false. There has been extraordinary, albeit incomplete, progress in fighting racism, but the picture is false because that progress has not made American society more open or equal. In fundamental respects it is less open and equal today than it was in the days of Jim Crow when racism was not only prevalent but was state-sponsored.
The hallmark of a neo-liberal political economy is rising sensitivity about differences of identity – cultural, ethnic, sometimes religious – and rising tolerance for differences of wealth and income. Readers who are familiar with the jargon of economic inequality will have an immediate sense of what it means to say that equality in America has declined when I tell you that in 1947, at the height of Jim Crow and the segregationist laws in the South, the US Gini coefficient was .376 and that by 2006, it had risen to .464. Since on the Gini scale 0 represents absolute equality (everyone makes the same income as everyone else) and 1 represents absolute inequality (one person makes everything), this is significant.
Back then, the US was in the same league as the countries of western Europe, albeit a little more unequal than them; today we’re up there with Mexico and China (3). In 1947, the top 20% of the US population made 43% of all the money the nation earned. In 2006, after years of struggle against racism, sexism and heterosexism, the top 20% make 50.5%. The rich are richer (4).
Legitimate the elite
So the struggle for racial and sexual equality – the relative success of which has been incarnated in the race and gender politics of the Democratic Party over the past six months – has not produced greater economic equality, but been compatible with much greater economic inequality, and with the formation of an increasingly elitist society (5). There is a reason for this. The battles against racism and sexism have never been to produce a more equal society; or to mitigate, much less eliminate, the difference between the elite and the rest; they were meant to diversify and hence legitimate the elite.
This is why policies such as affirmative action in university admissions serve such a crucial symbolic purpose for liberals (6). They reassure them that no one has been excluded from places like Harvard and Yale for reasons of prejudice or discrimination (the legitimating part) while leaving untouched the primary mechanism of exclusion: wealth (the increasing-the-gap between the rich and everyone else part). You are, as Richard Kahlenberg put it, “25 times as likely to run into a rich student as a poor student” at 146 elite colleges, not because poor students are discriminated against but because they are poor. They have not had the kind of education that makes it plausible for them even to apply to elite colleges, much less attend them.
What affirmative action tells us is that the problem is racism and the solution is to make sure the rich kids come in different colours; this solution looks attractive long after graduation, when the battle for diversity continues to be fought among lawyers, professors and journalists – in fact, any profession with enough status and income to count as elite. The effort is to enforce a model of social justice in which proportional representation of race and gender counts as success.
If what you want is a more diverse elite, electing a black president is about as good as it gets. Electing a woman president would be a close second. But if you want to address the inequalities we have, instead of the inequalities we like to think we have (inequalities produced by inherited wealth and poverty); if you want a political programme designed to address the inequalities produced not by racism and sexism, which are only sorting devices, but by neo-liberalism, which is doing the sorting, neither the black man nor the white woman have much to offer.
They are two Democrats who can’t even bring themselves to acknowledge publicly, in their last debate in April, that Americans making between $100,000 and $200,000 a year hardly qualify as middle class. Clinton committed herself “to not raising a single tax on middle-class Americans, people making less than $250,000 a year” and Obama (who was, as a commentator put it, “a lot squishier” about it) also committed himself to not raising taxes on people making under $200,000.
Root of inequality
But only 7% of US households earn more than $150,000; only 18% earn more than $100,000; more than 50% earn under $50,000 (7). Once you have Democrats who consider people on $200,000 as middle class and in need of tax relief, you don’t need Republicans any more. Clinton and Obama are the emblems of a liberalism which has made its peace with a political ethics that will combat racist and sexist inequalities, while almost ignoring inequalities that stem not from discrimination but from exploitation. The candidates’ death match prominently features charges of racism and sexism.
In 1967, after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and at the beginning of the effort to make the rights guaranteed by that act a reality, Martin Luther King was already asking “where do we go from here?”
King was a great civil rights leader but he was more than that, and the questions he wanted to raise were not, as he pointed out, civil rights questions. They were, he told the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, “questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth”.
There were then, as there are now, more poor white people than poor black people in the US, and King was acutely aware of that. He was aware that anti-racism was not a solution to economic inequality because racism was not the cause of economic inequality, and he realised that any challenge to the actual cause, “the capitalistic economy”, would produce “fierce opposition”.
King did not live to lead that challenge and the fierce opposition he expected never developed because the challenge never did. Instead, not only the anti-racism of the civil rights movement but also the rise of feminism, of gay rights and of all the new social movements proved to be entirely compatible with the capitalistic economy King hoped to oppose.
It is possible but unlikely that Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton might some day take up King’s challenge. Neo-liberalism likes race and gender, and the race and gender candidates seem to like neo-liberalism.
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Last edited by sapiens; 06-14-2008 at 12:47 PM..
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