bloodygranuaile | Entries tagged with racism

For the politics book club (currently the only one I’m still trying to participate in at least semi-regularly–there’s a lot going on right one) we’re reading Sabrina Strings’ Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia. I was initially worried the material would be too heavy for the amount of brain I have right now (which is not much), but it’s really not–it does obviously cover quite a lot of very unpleasant subject matter, as it is about racism and body policing and fatphobia and dodgy medical shenanigans, but it’s pretty accessibly written and the material is really fascinating. It’s a particularly interesting journey through not just the changes in beauty ideals but also the changes in who sets them–the earlier part of the book is largely art history, where discourse about ideal beauty was largely the province of (overwhelmingly male) painting masters. From there we move into the philosophers that invented “race science,” the rise of women’s magazines, and eventually the establishment of the medical field as a main modern authority on bodily ideals and the invention of the “obesity epidemic.” The main thread followed here, which differentiates it from some of the other writing I’ve read on fatphobia, is the way in which it follows the evolution of ideas about white women’s bodies and black women’s bodies specifically, and the ways in which they have been played off each other to pathologize black women and discipline white women. Overall I found it a really fascinating read, and I think we’ll have an interesting discussion about it next weekend.

BDSA’s SocFem WG and AfroSoc are co-hosting a reading group on Angela Davis’ Women, Race & Class, which I bought from the LPC a while ago. I figured this would then be a good time to move it from the unread nonfiction shelf to the read nonfiction shelf, even though the discussion is only on one chapter. It’s not a very long book, and I’m a completist.

Each of the 13 chapters has a tightly focused subject and the book as a whole reads like 13 essays rather than… well, rather than a book as a whole. This is fine–lots of great books are compilations of essays–but it wasn’t what I was expecting going into it. Angela Davis is a very good short-form political writer; she’s easy to read, and her essays are always information-dense and reasonably jargon-light.

The subject of the book is exactly what it says on the tin. Each essay chronicles a portion of the rocky histories of the various women’s, Black liberation, and labor movements, starting with white women’s role in the abolitionist movement before the Civil War and continuing up to the contemporary hot topics when the book was published in the early ‘80s. Special focus is given to the forging and deterioration of solidarity between different issues and demographics among and across movements, highlighting the gains that could be won when people supported one another and the weakness and fissures that develop in movements when they fall prey to supremacist thinking. Some of the history covered here I think has been mainstreamed a little since publication, but much of it is still rarely discussed outside of Angela Davis reading groups.

Some particularly thought-provoking subjects covered: The history of Margaret Sanger’s involvement in the socialist movement, before she quit the Socialist Party to chase eugenics money; the racial complications of the “wages for housework” movement; the history of abortion and infanticide among enslaved women and its implications for the reproductive rights movement; the legacy of the myth of the black rapist among white anti-rape feminists; everything about Ida B. Wells.

The chapter we’re discussing tonight, “Chapter 5: The Meaning of Emancipation According to Black Women,” is only seven pages long, but covers a range of subjects regarding Black women and labor, and should provoke a solid amount of discussion. I’m looking forward to it.

I did not pick a yearlong book to read at the beginning of 2020 the way I had in 2019 with A People’s History of the United States, and partway through the year I began to regret that and thought it would make a good tradition for making myself get through some of the longer books that tend to sit around on my shelf. So over the summer I decided to parcel out over the remaining six months of the year the 500 pages of Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which I had picked up at a launch party at Trident a few years earlier.

Shortly after I did this, a book club I was in decided to read Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, which made me worry that the two would be too similar. But mostly they aren’t. How to Be an Antiracist has quite a lot of biographical information, whereas Stamped from the Beginning focuses most of its time on its actual subject: the history of the production, dissemination, and reinvention of racist ideas in the U.S.

The book starts with Portugal’s enslavement of Africans and the subsequent concocting of justifications for doing so, and goes up right until about midway through the presidency of Barack Obama. It chronicles the rises and falls of various theories about the inferiority of Black people, and the failures of a number of common strategies to end racism, such as “uplift suasion,” which is a fancy academic term for just behaving really unimpeachably in the hope that this will prove to other people that their racism is factually incorrect.

Strengths of the book include that it puts a lot of emphasis on laying out really clearly the way that racist ideas are manufactured, they don’t just sort of occur to people, and that they are deliberately manufactured because they serve certain people’s material interests, often providing post-hoc justification for theft and violence that they have already committed. I personally got occasionally annoyed that the 500-page serious volume of history seemed hardly less chicken than the self-help primer for liberals who just discovered police brutality in terms of avoiding introducing the reader to any suspicious Marxist language, thus effectively presenting this as a new insight of Kendi’s and not something that the anticapitalist left has been saying for years. That said, it’s not like he chickens out of bashing capitalism.

A random thing that jumped out at me is that Michael Harrington is mentioned a few times, and I think might be the only white guy in the book that is spoken of in un-hedged positive terms (I’m sure this is only because there’s like three sentences about him total, though). Another thing that jumped out at me is that not only does Kendi have big issues with much of the Black elite’s classism and general moralizing, but he seems to take a sort of glee in puncturing the images of Black elites that are highly regarded by Whites, in particular, including ones that are seen as antiracist icons. Also, he has some amusingly vicious things to say about John McWhorter.

One thing that gets a bit frustrating--and this is hardly unique to this book, although I find it more often when reading older primary sources, rather than modern books commenting on older writings--is trying to parse precisely what sort of judgments are being made and then how we should judge those judgments when it comes to older commentary around education and standards of “achievement” and other such vague terms. A lot of older writing advocating education for various groups that had traditionally been denied it can certainly be read as privileging certain types of education as inherently worth more than others, and as saying that people who have not had these particular types of education are stupid, but that hardly seems to me like a fair reading when you’re trying to parse stuff written before we came up with terms like “epistemic injustice” that now allow us to talk about why denying people access to the mainstream education that gatekeeps the stuff they need to know to navigate the dominant culture is discriminatory and is a form of harm, without implying that being ignorant of specific culturally privileged information makes them worse people. It’s certainly quite possible (or… extremely likely) that Dr. Kendi knows a lot more than I do about how to properly interpret what was being said in these sorts of writings in the language of their time, but I’m not sure this book actually explained that as much as I needed it to, as I kept being like “I suppose that’s one way to read that” or “How precisely are we using the term ‘something wrong’ here” and anyway, education is a complex topic, and in my experience discussions of it feature quite a lot of people talking past each other, so I’m always on high alert for Places Where People Might Be Talking Past Each Other. Some of the other parts of the book had similar places where I thought the language being used was a little more vague than Kendi was treating it as, but educational topics are where it stuck out at me the most.

Overall, though, there’s a lot of really interesting history that doesn’t get told very much in here, like early anti-vaccine hysteria (short version: early anti-vaxxers were mad that Black people invented the smallpox vaccine before they did), which I had only ever heard about very briefly because there’s a plaque about it on a bridge in Boston (the plaque leaves out the racism angle, unsurprisingly). And for a 500-page nonfiction work, it reads pretty quickly.

The politics book club decided to read Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist and, after a short bout of being like “But I’m in the middle of reading one of his other books” and “But that’s one of the Ten Books Every White Person In the US Is Reading Right Now,” I’m glad they did. Kendi is a truly excellent writer in a way that few people with Ph.D.s are, and so despite being about a lot of extremely distressing material, a lot of it was actually quite a joy to read, and I ended up spending a lot of time examining the writing to see if I could learn a thing or two about that in addition to learning things about racism.

Much of the book is framed around Kendi’s personal journey through adopting a variety of theories and hot takes about race in varying levels of half-bakedness, beginning with a high school speech competition in which he gave one of those “you’re letting down Martin Luther King Jr.” harangues that James Forman Jr. skewers in Locking Up Our Own (predictably, he won an award for this entry) and going through a variety of self-deprecating learning experiences until, after publishing a weighty tome on the history of racist ideas, he founds a policy research center, on the suspiciously left-wing idea that the secret to defeating racism is not focus on ideas in isolation, but to change the policies that these ideas were created to naturalize and provide justification for. I can’t tell to what degree this “history of my own wrongness” framing is intended to actually widen the audience for the book beyond white people and how much it is just intended to make it less threatening to white people by pretending not to be aimed at them--I can only speculate based on how cynical I’m feeling--but it does provide us with an entertainingly impressionable central character to follow as we explore every take anyone in the US has ever had on race, from the Nation of Islam’s origin story of white people (i.e. we were bred on an island by a mad scientist to be terrible) to the assimilationist logic behind the bussing policies of the ‘70s. (I admit I wasn’t expecting the moment’s foremost scholar on racism in America to take the “bussing was stupid, actually” line, but his argument checks out). Chapters in the second half of the book focus on the intersections between racism and other major categories of oppression, such as gender, sexuality, immigration status, and class. The class chapter does not shy away from calling out capitalism explicitly as the historically and intrinsically racist system it is, including a couple of polite but firm digs at Elizabeth Warren’s well-meaning but ahistorical “capitalist to her bones” comment. (There are also quite a number of much less polite digs at assorted stupid things Dinesh D’Souza has said; I don’t know why Dr. Kendi specifically singles out D’Souza so much but it is extremely satisfying, because D’Souza is a fucking idiot.)

Kendi is very big on providing clear, concrete definitions of terms and then sticking with them, which is an enormously important writing practice and something that nearly everyone should do more of. Some of these are extremely funny, such as when he defines and contextualizes the term “microaggression” and then goes on to explain why he doesn’t use it anymore (short version: it got popular and then all the meaning got beaten out of it). Others are just, like, very no-nonsense! I approve greatly and I hope that once Kendi is done writing how-tos on having better opinions for every conceivable market segment (I’m not sure where he can go from smol babby but I’m sure the publishing companies will figure it out) he writes a book of writing advice.

Plotwise--to the degree that nonfiction books have plots--the climax of the book is Kendi’s battle with stage 4 colon cancer, which gave him only a 12% chance of survival. As you can probably tell by the fact that he was hired at BU this year, he did, in fact, survive. This allows him to set up a somewhat cheesy but surprisingly workable metaphor for racism in America, where it has metastasized throughout our entire society, is making us horrendously sick, and is probably going to kill the country stone dead any day now--but there is still a fighting chance, even if it is hard and unpleasant and the odds are quite bad. In this scenario, developing antiracist ideas is analogous to the exercise and eating healthy portion of the recovery regimen, in that it is extremely important in order for the heavy medical intervention stuff to be able to work and not leave you completely fucked up, but the idea that you’re going to diet and exercise the cancer away without the rest of it is delusional hippie shit.

Anyway, the book is very good and deserves a more thoughtful review than I can muster at the moment, but I finished it more than a week ago and have been slowly forgetting things as I put off writing this by taking a nap every time I have a spare minute instead. So I’m going to wrap up my rambling now and go take another one.

Given the recent mass protest events I, like everyone else, decided it was timely to read some things about racism in the United States. Having already read The End of Policin g last year and being too much of a snob to want to read any of the 10 books with titles like “How To Not Be Racist” that everyone else is reading (even though some of them are supposed to be quite good), I figured it was therefore time for me to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

To be fair, it was actually long past time for me to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, I just habitually don’t read books until well past time for me to do so. I had read a few excerpts back when I was working at Pearson; the bit where he re-learns to read by copying the dictionary in Norfolk Prison Colony is included in some of their American literature anthologies. That segment is both an excellent piece of writing on its own, hence its inclusion in the American lit anthologies, and also the sort of thing directly calculated to appeal to me personally as a huge dork.

Malcolm X was a hell of a talker and Alex Haley was a hell of a writer and between them both, The Autobiography of Malcolm X is a hell of a book. It is by turns funny, shocking, moving, incisive, dramatic, and even relatable. That last one is part of how you can tell just how well the book is crafted, since literally nothing about Malcolm X’s life bears any sort of resemblance to mine, unless you count “living in Boston” in its absolute broadest sense.

The most exemplary anecdote here is the one where teenage Malcolm, having made a few friends after a few months in Boston, first conks--i.e., chemically straightens--his hair. The way this story is told is whimsical and a bit self-deprecating, but only in the way that any story told as an adult about one’s teenage fashion adventures tends to be self-deprecating. Though this particular story concerns Black men in Roxbury in the 1940s and involves chemicals I’d never even heard of, the “country kid gets big city makeover” or “young person gets their first [insert significant adult beauty process here]” type story, whether real or fictional, is familiar enough for readers of any background to feel like they get what’s going on, and probably to bring back memories of whatever dumb shit they did in their teens to try to look cool (I have some less than dignified recollections of rinsing poorly toned hair dye out in the basement sink and essentially waterboarding myself in the process). There is no political commentary in this story as it is being told, just an amusingly earnest teen who is very excited about getting to be one of the cool guys now. Or there isn’t until the triumphant moment when baby hipster Malcolm looks into the mirror at his fashionable new hair, at which point author Malcolm recontextualizes the whole anecdote in terms of Black adoption of white beauty standards, theorizing that the conk represents internalized anti-Blackness and “self-degradation” and making the reader (or at least, this reader) feel like an entire dumbass for having been like “Haha, what a cute and structurally familiar story, this is a nice break from all the heavy political stuff” for even a minute, like, what fuckin’ book did I think I was reading? Just an absolute masterclass in setting up expectations and then batting your audience in the face with them.

It’s actually kind of wild how much of the book is funny given that most of its subject matter is extremely grim. The book kicks off with Malcolm’s family being threatened by the Klan while he is still in utero, and the violence in his early life escalates from there, including his house being burned down and his father being murdered and left on the railroad tracks. From a strictly storytelling perspective this is also very well done because setting that context right at the beginning really highlights how self-serving and point-missing all the white defensiveness is later in the book, when he has a speaking career that consists largely of fending off white journalists shitting their pants at the idea that he or anyone else might not like white people very much, although given that this is nonfiction and the choice to tell the story in a linear, chronological fashion is a fairly standard one, it would perhaps be putting it on a bit thick to credit that entirely to the authors. What is creditable to the authors is that they tell it very well; they know when to editorialize and when it’s more effective to just lay out shocking events plainly.

The parts of the book that take place in Roxbury and Harlem are certainly the most colorful, and not just because the fashion at the time involved loudly pigmented zoot suits. The slang is also to die for if you, like me, have an interest in historical slang, and it is never not funny to see people treat the word “cool” as if it is highly subcultural flash patter in the same register as calling someone “daddy-o.” This is also the part of the book where Malcolm falls into a life of crime, and who doesn’t like reading about people who have fallen into a life of crime? Even when it is not romanticized--and Malcolm X takes great pains to point out that living a life of crime is in fact bad, hazardous to one’s health as well as injurious to one’s morals--if it is told at all well it cannot help but be an exciting read.

After getting busted for running a drug-fueled armed burglary ring in Harvard Square, Malcolm is sent to prison, where we spend time in two different facilities: the ancient Charlestown State, which is now closed, and the Norfolk Prison Colony, now MCI Norfolk. Reading about Norfolk in the 1940s was quite interesting to me because at the time it was basically considered the swanky prison, given that it had flush toilets, and you could go into the library. It was founded as a “reform” prison and I guess this idea had not completely collapsed yet at the time Malcolm X was incarcerated there. This is a sharp contrast to the stories coming out of MCI Norfolk these days, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is raging through the Massachusetts prison system like a wildfire. Prisoners are being denied medical care, PPE, and basic cleanliness, while the Department of Corrections drags its feet on acknowledging the extremely basic fact that you can’t do social distancing in a prison, especially not one with a 134% overcrowding rate. MCI Norfolk also has well-documented issues with water cleanliness, and removed bottled water from the prison commissary somewhere around week three of the pandemic officially hitting the state. So yeah, it’s kind of weird to read about someone having a reasonably edifying time there, quietly working his way through the library and honing his rhetorical skills in the debating society.

In Norfolk Malcolm is converted to the Nation of Islam, a somewhat fundamentalist, very American sect of Islam that is in large part a cult of personality around a guy who (quite predictably, IMO) later turns out to have been fucking his secretaries. The book does a very good job of explaining why this sect was attractive to the people who joined it, not just ideologically, but in terms of the actual concrete ways in which it helped the people who were involved, from its success rate in rehabbing people off drugs to the self-defense classes it ran (which, predictably, scared the shit out of white people). The accounts of Malcolm X’s career as the Nation’s main spokesperson and “the angriest black man in America” are also extremely funny, in that they really succeed in highlighting how ridiculous the white press’ freakouts over the Nation of Islam were. White people’s concern about Nation of Islam was not wariness over the cult of personality aspect, which would be normal and sensible; instead, we are treated to a parade of highly undignified displays of white defensiveness, to which Malcolm does not concede one inch of cover. It probably wasn’t funny to have to deal with on a regular basis, but it’s pretty entertaining to read.

Following an acrimonious split with the Nation of Islam, Malcolm goes traveling, where he has many wholesome experiences dealing with non-American white people who aren’t terrible that cause him to develop somewhat less bitter, more optimistic views about the possibility of people of different races getting along if we can somehow purge America of its addiction to being racist as shit. While there is a bunch of really good stuff in this part of the book, I still found it a bit of a lull, because I am a terrible person as a reader and don’t go in much for wholesome stuff, and certainly not stuff that’s both wholesome and spiritual. The lull does make a pretty brilliant tonal setup toward the end of the book, all this becoming nicer and more optimistic sort of thing, because as you probably know, at the end he gets brutally murdered.

The epilogue, which runs a full 75 pages and is written in first-person POV by Alex Haley, is riveting. The beginning gives us a behind-the-scenes peek at the stuff we’ve all just read, and a different, outside perspective on Malcolm X, one unmediated by Malcolm’s own editorializing about what other people think of him. The middle recounts the weeks before the murder, as they rushed to get the autobiography finished, knowing that it was likely that one of the attempts on his life could be successful at any time. And the end is a horrifyingly unputdownable account of the assassination itself and its aftermath, including the unanswered questions about who actually carried out the murder, and why.

Fortunately for me, there is a Netflix documentary series that further explores those unanswered questions, so I might actually be motivated to carve out some time for myself to sit down and watch some TV like a normal person for the first time since this pandemic started.

For the politics book club this month we decided to read Michelle Alexander's bestselling expose of the War on Drugs and mass incarceration, The New Jim Crow : Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. It had been referenced, usually favorably but sometimes with a few critiques, in other book we'd read, such as Angela Davis' Freedom Is a Constant Struggle and James Forman Jr.'s Locking Up Our Own. Alexander also appears in Ava DuVernay's documentary 13th, which Gillian and I watched sometime last year.

As a result I thought I was reasonably well informed already going into the book. This is the work that basically kicked off the current criminal justice reform conversation, which makes it quite successful at one of its stated goals, although it turns out that the current criminal justice reform conversation is goddamn infuriating to anyone who's read pretty much anything about the criminal justice system, because like most political conversations, there's a lot of people saying the same wrong things over and over again.

One thing that was really striking to me when I was reading this book was just how comprehensively bad the system is, especially once all the drug war policies got passed--the worst possible policies and the worst possible norms prevail at every single step of the process, by every single actor in the system. It's just blunt force racism all the way down. Every single step at which "due process" or something was once theoretically a thing has been formally eviscerated because drugs!!! on top of a long history of not being applied to black people in the first place. It really, really should put to bed any real doubts about the practicality of prison abolition even for law 'n' order-y type folks who haven't read anything about prison abolition. Do you care about stuff like rule of law and due process and holding people accountable for anti-social behavior? Then the U.S. prison and policing systems should be anathema to you. Do you like the Bill of Rights and various other U.S. Constitutional Amendments? Then reading this book will make you want to throw all the courts into the sea and replace them with literally anything else, maybe someone reading bird guts. Whatever non-racist things you want getting done that you think we need the police or prison system for: We don't, and if you want the thing done, we should get rid of the current system that's lying to you about having a purpose other than racial control.

There are a couple places where it becomes pretty clear that this book was written a few years ago. It was written before the rise of Black Lives Matter, so I think the level of public awareness of police brutality and capriciousness has inched up a tiny bit, which is good. Somewhat more depressingly, the myth of colorblindness, racist as it is, has taken a bit of a shredding in the past year or two, and the idea that people are racist but don't want to say too explicitly racist things paired a bit funny with the fact that I was trying to cram finishing this book around counterprotesting a literal neo-Nazi rally where people stood on the steps of the Massachusetts Statehouse and yelled about how they wanted to do ethnic cleansing. (Granted, there were only like 30 of them, but still -- five years ago they weren't having rallies at the Statehouse.) On a minor but jarring note, the book references Bill Cosby a few times, but only as a proponent of respectability politics.

But overall, things have really not changed since this book was written. The noises are starting to be a bit different, which I suppose is the first step, but the system remains, with only the most minor of reforms starting to be implemented--frequently at the expense of doubling down somewhere else in order to look balanced and fair, a thing that wasn't necessary when the War on Drugs was being launched but is Obviously Just How Politics Is now. Black Lives Matter has been immediately countered with Blue Lives Matter, like there's some sort of deficit of power and coddling being given to a class that's literally legally allowed to steal people's lunch money like heavily armed, completely immunized from consequences schoolyard bullies. The entire Massachusetts Congressional delegation just voted for a Blue Lives Matter bill in the House. In the last days of the Obama Administration, the DOJ decided to stop contracting with private prisons; Attorney General Evil Keebler Elf reversed the policy before it could be implemented. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently made a big song and dance of reforming a felon disenfranchisement law that will probably end up restoring voting rights to like, ten people. Everything is still trash. Donate to your local bail fund.

The last book of the year that we read for the political book club was James Forman Jr.'s Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. I'd learned of this book when Mom and I attended a talk at the Boston Book Festival with Forman and Chris Hayes, moderated by Kim McLarin (the third author who was supposed to be there, Carol Anderson of White Rage, was sadly unable to make it).

The talk--titled Racism in America: It's a Crime--was excellent and I wish I had taken notes, but a lot of it involved dissecting what gets talked about as "crime" politically and the ways in which it does and does not relate to actual crime, as in the reality of people doing illegal and/or harmful things. Forman spoke a bit about how, during the crime waves of the '70s and '90s, black communities asked for funding for a variety of solutions to these problems, which included more prisons and police, but also for drug treatment, community investment/development, better schools, etc., and higher (white-dominated) levels of government were happy to comply with the police stuff but not so much the rest of it.

This, then, was the sort of political context that shaped the subjects examined in Locking Up Our Own, which examines the role of black communities, especially the black political elite (mayors, judges, attorneys, etc.) in unwittingly helping build the mass incarceration machine that blights America today.

Forman's aim in this book is not to cast blame, but to understand the political contexts that made supporting increased punitive measures seem like a good idea at the time, and to examine why these policies didn't turn out the way people hoped they would. The first part of the book, "Origins," covers up through the 1970s, and examines three major topics: the War on Drugs, gun control, and the integration of the police force. A few common threads pop up through these three topics: One is the degree of lawlessness that black communities had previously been abandoned to, with white police officers ignoring crimes committed in black communities. Another common thread is the class divisions within black society, especially in light of the rise of what was basically the country's first black petit bourgoisie -- prior to the 1960s or so, there simply had not been a black elite, so the expectations put on that newly formed class were unprecedented and fragile. A third (but perhaps related to class) element is the variety of political traditions within the black community, something that I think gets erased from a lot of mainstream American political discourse as it disappears under triumphant numbers showing that 90-odd percent of black voters vote for Democrats. But there are black conservative traditions and black radical traditions and black liberal traditions, and questions of respectability politics and what racial solidarity really means permeate the newspaper articles, courtroom speeches, and other primary sources that Forman cites.

The second part of the book, "Consequences," takes us from the '80s up through the present day, with the most infuriating chapter being largely about Eric Holder and pretext stops. It's infuriating because by the time pretext stops became a thing, most of the other, smaller punitive measures had already been passed, so it seems like it should have been a lot easier to spot how this was going to go wrong. By the time we cover pretext stops, we've also established mandatory minimum sentencing, warrior policing, draconian drug laws, and all that stuff that lead pretext stops to be so devastating to so many people.

In addition to being very well researched, I was impressed at how effectively this book was organized. Forman starts off each chapter by discussing a case from his time as a public defender in Washington, DC, featuring a client trapped in the criminal justice system via whatever set of regulations will be covered in the rest of the chapter. This provides an emotionally engaging illustration of how each aspect of mass incarceration traps real people in grinding cycles of poverty, cutting them off from opportunities for education and employment.

The book ends with some discussion of the current state of the criminal justice reform movement, including what it's doing right and what it's doing wrong. His final conclusion is that the problem was built bit by bit and might have to be solved bit by excruciatingly small bit, and that activists should be prepared to be in for a long slog. While prison abolitionists will likely ultimately end up looking elsewhere for their ultimate vision of how to eliminate the carceral state, Forman's policy prescriptions all seem like vital and solid short-term reforms, and I think the book provides vital background on how good people can wind up supporting bad policies.

Our two-hour discussion of this book last weekend ended up focusing a lot on questions of what lessons people should take from it and apply to other forms of thinking about activism and policy. The chapter on police integration raises a lot of tough questions for proponents of increasing the diversity of hostile institutions as a method of reforming them; other chapters raise other tricky questions of policy-crafting and unintended consequences that none of us were smart enough to solve (that's what think tanks are supposed to be for, right?) but from which activists could probably learn what kinds of questions to ask when deciding whether to throw their support behind a proposal or not.

Anyway, for something as short and blessedly readable as this book (seriously, some policy history kinds of books are dry as hell), there is all kinds of stuff packed into it that you might not know about, especially if you are a sheltered white person who wasn't even alive for most of this, like myself.

Current Mood: exhausted

After the relentless epic that was Dark Money we decided we'd like to read something shorter and lighter for the next book club; however, because we are bad at not being morbid, we instead decided to read Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me, which is shorter but really not any lighter, since it is about police brutality and America's multi-century history of vicious, violent racism.

Although this book was short—about 150 pages—it took me three days to read because I tried to read it slowly and carefully. It's not something to just zip through.

Between the World and Me reminded me of James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, and a quick look through the press the book has gotten makes it clear that this was likely intentional; the parallels are pretty clear. Coates' book takes the form of a series of letters to his teenage son, Samori, just as Baldwin's book was in the form of a letter to his nephew. Both are works of memoir, discussing their visceral, lived experiences of American racism and tying their life stories in closely with the philosophical, historical, and political dimensions of American racism. The parallels are even stronger in part because there are some broad-brush similarities in their life trajectories. Both grew up in poor, often violent urban areas--Baldwin in Depression-era Harlem; Coates in Baltimore in the '80s (i.e., during the crack epidemic)--and spent a lot of time in libraries; both are atheists; obviously, they both became highly influential writers--more specifically, they both became authoritative voices on racism in America and developed platforms within what is still a very white liberal literary establishment. But beyond that, the similarities between the two books come mostly from the depressing fact that racism in America hasn't actually changed nearly as much between 1962 and 2015 as we'd like to believe it has.

One of the motifs Coates uses a lot is the invocation of the body, often using terms like "my body" where most people would probably just say "me" or "black bodies" where most writers would use "black people," etc. Coates is pretty clear that he's an atheist and believes that our bodies are all we're made of and that consciousness is an emergent property of the body and all that materialist stuff, so his focus on the body is the opposite of how a lot of other writers, especially religiously inclined ones, use it, where the body is just a shell and what happens to it is not of ultimate importance; instead, Coates uses the unambiguous physical existence of bodies to break past the abstract tendencies of so much of Western discourse, to bring the realities of racism home from the vague philosophical plane that people take refuge in when talking about terrible things. (I'm perhaps being condescending here but it never ceases to amaze me what a widespread habit of thought this is and how hard it can be to break through it, on any subject, from parents telling kids to "just ignore" bullying because they assume all bullying is verbal and it doesn't occur to them that it's hard to ignore being shoved into a locker, to all the various people I've witnessed who know that Nazis are bad but who still had to be walked through the idea that Nazis do bad things--and were surprised.) Coates' continual invocation of the body makes it clear that "rights" are not abstract and "racism" being systemic is not the same thing as it being philosophical; that what's at stake here is not just intangible ideals about dignity or belonging, but actual fear of physical violence. He talks about the psychic toll of constant hyperawareness; the fear behind the harsh discipline that parents inflicted on their children in the neighborhood he grew up in; the threats from other boys in the neighborhood compensating for their lack of bodily security by engaging in their own violence and territorialism.

The other big motif in the book is the Dream, which is only superficially a lovely dream, but Coates uses it to mean comforting myths or self-delusions that people use to avoid learning about or facing up to the violence in American life and American history. the Dream, which is a false, stands in contrast to the body, which is real, and again is a noticeable departure from how these concepts are traditionally invoked in high-minded Western writing. You can see parallels between the Dream as it is dreamed by "people who believe they are white" and Baldwin's argument about "the innocence which constitutes the crime." Coates is pretty blunt about the level of longstanding delusion it requires to maintain the Dream, the "practiced habit of jabbing out one's eyes and forgetting the work of one's hands."

One of the early arguments Coates makes in the book is that racism isn't the result of race; race was basically invented to provide a justification for racism. Racism, of course, was invented for reasons of wealth and power; while I don't think Coates is an anti-capitalist writer, he's very well informed about the ways American wealth was built on the stolen labor, stolen wealth, and stolen bodies of black people--including that enslaved people were considered not a consumer good but a commodity, meaning that not only could they be bought, sold, and traded, but they could be underwritten, securitized, insured, and turned into all sorts of fancy Wall Street financial products. He discusses how difficult it is for black families to build wealth; in his famous The Case for Reparations piece in The Atlantic, he goes into more detail about redlining and other racist housing policies. But he also talks about the ways in which ascending into the middle class can afford some kinds of privilege and escape compared to how he grew up, but also the ways in which, in essence, middle-class blacks still can't buy their way out of being black, with all the danger that comes along with it in America. The last part of Between the World and Me relates the story of Coates' former classmate at Howard, Prince Jones, who was shot by the Prince George's County police in front of his fiancee's house. Jones was raised in a securely well-off household and was about as respectable as it's possible to get, and it didn't save him, which seems to have made a pretty big impression on Coates. At the end of the book he recounts a lengthy, powerful interview with Jones' mother.

Between the World and Me, while obviously heavy, is not completely bleak all the way through. Coates talks a lot about his time at Howard University, and its impact on his thinking about black history and identity. (This section left me with a long list of things to read, starting with The Autobiography of Malcolm X.) The love with which he writes about his school, which he refers to as The Mecca, and all the people he met there and all the things he learned from them, as well as his adventures in learning how learning about history works (i.e., it's messy and contradictory), is heartwarming.

One thing this book isn't, obviously, is an objective in-depth study of any of the topics it touches on. But that's OK, because it isn't intended to be, and there are many other good, heavily researched books you can read about police brutality, or black poverty, or the history of racial constructions in America, or race and capitalism, that you can pick up at the library if you want to learn more about these subjects, which we all should. But the book has a lot of moral and philosophical force, and it challenges those of us who are not Coates' kid to whom the book is explicitly addressed, but who are reading it anyway because it was published for mass access, to both think and feel deeply about the material and physical consequences of what it means to be black or to believe you are white in America.

For my politics books club we decided on some light summer reading for June: Robert O. Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism, which explores the creation and expansion of different fascist movements for the purpose of arriving at a working sense of what fascism is based on how it has historically worked, rather than what its adherents said about it.

As someone who got probably a pretty decent overview of both World Wars in high school by contemporary standards but has supplemented it with additional self-teaching in an extremely haphazard and piecemeal fashion (I like to read about very specific historical events like a single intelligence mission at a time), I felt like I had enough base-level knowledge to follow this without having to Google too many things, but it was also enormously helpful to have the subject set out in such an orderly manner. Paxton looks at different “stages” of fascism, of which only Mussolini’s and Hitler’s reigns both qualify as unambiguously fascist (rather than regular ol’ authoritarian) and went through all the stages he lists.

I was expecting it to be a bit denser because some of the reviews I’d checked out said it was a bit dry, but while it doesn’t read in the novelesque way that some history books of more limited scope of subject manage to pull off these days, I really didn’t find it too dense or academic at all. It commits the occasional bit of academese, like “fascisms,” but it’s always quite clear what he’s getting at and overall I found it to be quite clear and straightforward. If you’re interested in the subject—which you should be, because otherwise why are you reading this book?—it should pull you along quite well; the prose style and the overall organization of the book just set everything out in a very plain and straightforward way. The content is terrifying without being either coy or gratuitously graphic.

The book was written in 2004, and… well, I’d be quite interested in hearing Paxton’s take on current events. (ETA: I am a dumbass; he wrote an article about in in the May issue of Harper’s Magazine that I have just not gotten around to reading yet because I am a twit.) A lot of what he talks about regarding the early stages of fascism—it’s ideological incoherence, its poaching of grievances from the left, its roots in socialism and syndicalism even as it immediately became viciously anti-socialist, its alliances with conservative elites who thought they could use its energy for their own ends—sounds uneasily familiar to anyone following modern politics. But there are a lot of movements and regimes that are often called fascist and that may be sort of fascist in some ways but not in others. Paxton gives us a good rundown of unsuccessful fascist movements and of not-properly-fascist authoritarian regimes (I was perhaps inappropriately delighted at the section dedicated to the Perón regime in Argentina and the conclusion that it was not fascist, despite Perón’s ties to Mussolini. Musical theater is a helluva drug, apparently).

This book doesn’t talk a huge amount about propaganda per se, which is something I would usually be disappointed with since propaganda is my favorite, but it does talk a lot about the appropriation of symbols, emotional manipulation, the slippery relationship between fascism and making any sort of coherent sense, and its anti-intellectualism, all of which is much fun, although it’s a bit terrifying to look at the legacy this kind of intellectual nihilism has left on mass politics in more recent years. It’s also terrifying when Paxton talks not about the internal properties of fascism itself but also about the political space that allows it to develop.

Though the book is short and is about 25% footnotes, I think we could end up having a very long book group discussion on this, especially if I come up with enough really good questions. It’s not for three weeks though so I’ll have to review it again when we get closer—and I’m really looking forward to doing so.

Oh, and the book also contains a “bibliographic essay,” which basically is just a lifetime’s worth of book recommendations. Damn you, Paxton. Now I’ve got a TBR list I couldn’t hope to get through even if I turned into one of those doofy Stephanie Meyers vampires that never needs to sleep.

Current Mood: hungry

If you live in Boston, you may have heard some version of this story, in which the Ben & Jerry's franchise at Harvard Square decided to make a flavor for Jeremy Lin, apparently couldn't remember anything about Jeremy Lin other than that he's Chinese-American, and decided to mix lychee and fortune cookie pieces in with plain vanilla FroYo. The initial test batch received complaints that the fortune cookie pieces were soggy, and some sort of "initial backlash" that has not been reported on in detail anywhere, meaning that it could have ranged anywhere from someone throwing a giant fit and threatening to sue, to a few people giving it a side-eye or eyerolls or disdainful glances down the nose, or any number of critical comments in between. As sometimes happens when a new product is introduced and is doing an initial run at only one location, the store responded to its customers' comments by tweaking their product--in this case, replacing the soggy fortune cookie pieces with waffle cone.

Whether or not you live in Boston, by this time, you may have heard the version of this story that goes "THE PC POLICE BULLIED BEN AND JERRY'S (THE ENTIRE CORPORATION) INTO RUINING A PERFECTLY DELICIOUS FLAVOR FOR NO REASON AT ALL EXCEPT THAT THEY HATE FUN AND DELICIOUSNESS, AND ETHNIC STEREOTYPING IS TOTALLY NOT RACIST AT ALL AND YOU ARE JUST LOOKING FOR THINGS TO GET OFFENDED ABOUT AND MAKING A BIG DEAL OUT OF NOTHING, BECAUSE OBVIOUSLY THE ONLY OPTIONS ARE 'BIG DEAL' AND 'NO DEAL AT ALL', AND THE ONLY LEVELS OF PROBLEMS ARE 'NOTHING' AND 'KKK RALLY,' BECAUSE NOBODY WOULD EVER MAKE MILDLY CRITICAL COMMENTS ABOUT SOMETHING MILDLY RACIST, LET ALONE RESPOND TO THEM, BECAUSE MIDDLING LEVELS OF THINGS DON'T EXIST IN MY SIMPLIFIED WORLDVIEW."

Duuuuuuuuuuuudes. If Ben & Jerry's does not want to be even a little bit questionably racist, they are perfectly allowed to realize when they are being a little bit questionably racist by accident and quietly knock it off. You do not have to have massively and irredeemably pissed off every single Chinese person ever so badly that they'll never talk to you again in order to decide that maybe you should not always keep doing exactly what you're doing.

The original flavor may not have been particularly malicious, but it was definitely the sort of thing where you can, in the manner of Yo, Is This Racist?, imagine the creative session where this was greenlit:

"We have to make a flavor for Jeremy Lin!"
"Who's Jeremy Lin?"
"A famous Chinese dude."
"What Chinese foods would work in ice cream?"
"Er... lychee?"
"Good! What else?"
"Fortune cookies?"
"Excellent! Throw it in the FroYo and put it in a carton."

~FIN~

Is this malicious and motivated by intense hatred of Chinese people? No. Do you know what it is? LAZY. Way motherfucking lazy. It's lazy, half-assed, lazy, ill-thought-out, lazy, slapdash, and lazy. Do you know what you call it when you get as far as someone's ethnicity and are then too lazy to continue putting in thought or effort into what you're doing?

motha fuckin RACISM

The fact that they didn't seem to actually test whether the foods they're putting together ACTUALLY went well together or just sounded good also highlights how little thought went into the whole process, which does make the whole thing come off as more racist than if the product had turned out actually meet the same level of quality we expect from Ben & Jerry's. And it makes it particularly irritating that one of the more frequent responses I've heard to this is a sort of knee-jerk "That sounds delicious!" Yeah, it does sound delicious, off the bat; this is likely part of why they decided to put in the ice cream instead of, like, sweet and sour sauce. However, it would appear that it did not turn out to actually be all that delicious in actuality (and if they'd given it a second thought instead of moving right from "sounds good off the bat" to "serve it to people in actuality," it might have occurred to someone that fortune cookies are an extremely porous baked good and get soggy if you look at them sadly, and that ice cream starts to melt immediately at the temperatures you generally eat it). Businesses do not survive by refusing to fix problems with their products and digging their heels in going "Nuh uh, it totally SOUNDS fine, so it IS fine."

Also, even if you still think that something being lazy and stupid in regards to race is totally not the same thing as being racist, because it's not mean, it's just lazy and stupid, guess what: Lazy and stupid are not virtues. You should not strive for them. You should not be focused on how much lazy and stupid you can get away with before it becomes racist/sexist/whatever; you should be trying to be as not-lazy and not-stupid as you can be, and if someone points out that something you're doing is lazy and stupid, that is also a valid criticism and you should respond to it, even if it's got nothing to do with racism whatsoever. And while lazy shit might fly in some spaces, I see absolutely no idea why Harvard Square should be expected to be one of them. It's Harvard Square. Boston as a city is packed solid with more higher education than any one city should be expected to support, and Harvard is supposedly the most prestigious, elite private college in the country. I would be completely unsurprised if the most common form of negative feedback on the flavor was that it was so boring and obvious. Because that is the thing about stereotypes--in addition to being offensive, they are tedious. Tediousness is also a bad thing that people are allowed to not like, and to refrain from showering you with compliments on your cleverness for, and even to complain about, if they think listening to themselves complain will at least be more interesting.

None of this shit makes anybody the mythical PC police. But the anti-PC police are out in full force, Yahoo Sports being one of he worst offenders (sorry, not linking). Sadly, this includes Voltaire, who I follow on Facebook in order to keep up on wacky, dark, and whimsical things, but who, it appears, is still a middle-aged white guy. (How's that for not being PC?) Apparently, some people think that if they are not allowed to rely on boring-ass stereotypes, they will have nothing to say, because actually thinking about what you're saying and trying to come up with original and accurate ways to express your ideas (not to mention coming up with your own damn ideas) is the antithesis of creativity.

Some people are "tired of PC culture". Do you know what I'm tired of? White guys complaining about how totally oversensitive everyone else is. I am tired of anti-PC culture, like being expected to think about what you say or do or what words mean before you open you mouth is just so hard, those women and minorities and immigrants and people with disabilities just don't know how hard it is. I am tired of people who think that any action you take to be a little more considerate of other people, no matter how small, means that you are "caving" and "making a big deal" (again: small deals. They exist. If you do not understand this, you should withdraw from having opinions until you develop the ability to think with nuance) and blah blah blah. I am tired of listening to people go on long 'splainy rants about how that wasn't really racist or sexist or homophobic, they didn't mean "gay" like that, etc. I am tired of people claiming that supporting the status quo and being racist, sexist, classist, homophobic, and basically disrespectful of other people is now the brave, embattled, noble minority position. I am tired of being very, very, very, seriously and painfully aware that most of the people I know are assholes, most of the people I have ever been friends with or loved are assholes, most of my family is assholes, most artists whose work I have admired are assholes, and that realizing this makes me more like them--smug and self-congratulatory about how much better I am than everybody else.

I am tired of assholes who think that intent is fucking magic and I am tired of striking the terrible bargain and I am tired of being tired of people.

I am twenty-four years old and I am already thoroughly sick of this shit.