Jeb Bush: Latinos’ Candidate?

• • Hispanic, language & discourse, Latinos, political parties, politics, Spanish, white privilege, whiteness

Jeb Bush finally announced his candidacy for President of the United States as a Republican. According to a reporter, Jeb portrays himself as

[A]n executive animated by big ideas and uniquely capable of carrying them out, pointing to his record in Florida of introducing a taxpayer-financed school voucher program, expanding charter schools, reducing the size of the state government by thousands of workers and cutting taxes by billions.

He also portrays himself as near-Latino.

One of Bush’s campaign major strategies is the pursuit of the Latino vote. It centers on Bush’s claim to Latinos that “I’m close to you, I understand you”: I speak your language, I embrace your culture and I know firsthand the immigrants’ experience. He says nothing about issues of importance to Latinos.

Bush’s repeatedly emphasizes his fluency in Spanish. He also asserts that Spanish is important in his family: He and his wife speak Spanish at home and their children are bilingual. OK Bush, it’s nice that Spanish is important to your family, but how does that help Latinos? Does that mean that you’ll champion immigration justice or accessible health care for poor Latinos? If not, which is certainly the case, your Spanish is just for show.

Bush also proclaims a deep attachment to Mexico:

Here in the U.S., Cinco de Mayo has become a day where we celebrate our ties with Mexico and the great contributions of the Mexican-American community in the U.S. In my case, this relationship is very profound. My wife Columba was born in Mexico, my family has always had strong ties with Mexico and I have great respect and affection for our neighboring country.

What Mexico are you talking about, Jeb? The Mexico of Mexican elites? I doubt that you are speaking of the large number of people that would need your help the most: the undocumented poor who experience exploitation in their jobs and racial profiling on the streets.

His last affirmation is completely absurd:

I know the power of the immigrant experience because I live it each and every day. I know the immigrant experience because I married a beautiful girl from Mexico.

Come on, Jeb: Are you serious? What immigrant experience are you talking about? Your wife married a wealthy white aristocrat whose family includes two former Presidents of the United States. Your wife’s experiences have nothing in common with the mass of Latin American immigrants. She has almost certainly not been racially profiled in public spaces or spent years in this country without papers afraid that after years of hard work she could be apprehended and deported.

Jeb touts portions of his biography that are vacuous and not substitutes for a clear statement about how he would address as President the needs of the mass of Mexican and other Latino immigrants or the large population of poor US born Latinos. Don’t expect Latinos to vote for you simply because you speak Spanish and your wife is a Mexican immigrant. Offer them concrete solutions to their problems.

Death in South Carolina: The Denial of Truths

• • African Americans, political parties, politics, racism, religion, violence, white privilege, white racial frame, white supremacists, whites

Viewing the narrated event of Charleston within the dark and secure confines that surrounded me under a waxing crescent moon, created a nauseating pit within the center of my chest. As the news began to sift in, the sensation proceeded to raise the minuscule fine hairs upon the back of my petered-out neck. Knowing nothing in particular about the city, beyond the fact that it was not on my bucket list of places to visit, seeing the old and famous AME church and Charleston, South Carolina police lights splashed across my high-definition screen created a sense of confounding distress and sadness my soul had issue in articulating. Before the picture was put to color and detail, I knew, I secretly knew. It was not simply a lunatic, as pundits like to describe the distant “other.” It was not ISIS. It was not gang violence. It was not a disgruntled parishioner or jealous spouse looking to settle a scorned romantic score. It was an ancient, but at the same time, an in-vogue thriving hate of another kind!

It was hard for me to watch as I rested that night, for my feelings were precipitously pointing to a racially motivated depiction of white violence. The next morning the world discovered what I assuredly suspected the night before. The following days after the shooting were filled with sights of racially mixed church audiences (normally segregated and unwilling to discuss this fact at the moment) in places of worship holding hands and singing the Lords prayers. Sights of communal prayer, shared tears, and hardened faces were captured through the lenses of still photography and video apparatuses from sources such as the New York Times and Fox News. Flowers and other symbols of sympathy are, for the time being, placed at the doorsteps of the church as well. Mourning and celebration of life were mentioned heavily by an array of people put on display by the media.

On the other hand, as the week progressed, not only were further details of the shooting available to the public, but also an assortment of rhetorical misdirections wrapped in hypocrisy began to seep throughout the landscape of America. At times, the verbal stench was hard to bear. As I watched and listened throughout the week, the rage overtook the initial distress and sadness in my heart. The muddied mix of liberal and conservative news organizations and pandering politicians brought to a boil an elixir of emotional and intellectual pain that created one overwhelming conclusion in my mind: The truth about race in America is once again seen as a narrative we choose to avert with due diligence. The all too familiar decaffeinated approach to racialized topics of importance was upon the lips of many. This included many within the media and their invited succubi whose ultimate job was to underwrite their hosts’ initial political perspectives. Oddly enough, perspectives such as Dr. Ben Carson, Republican presidential hopeful, were as rare as recent sightings of unicorns. Further, he stated:

Let’s call this sickness what it is, so we can get on with the healing. If this were a medical disease, and all the doctors recognized the symptoms but refused to make the diagnosis for fear of offending the patient, we could call it madness. But there are people who are claiming that they can lead this country who dare not call this tragedy an act of racism, a hate crime, for fear of offending a particular segment of the electorate.

His GOP political rivals decided to follow another path. In essence, they discussed the matter utilizing a more conservative-staunched narrative. Instead of observing the shooting through a racialized lens, Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee both described the attack as an assault on religion’s liberties. In order to move the focus from the presence and current effect of a country built on systematic and racialized oppression, Bill O’ Riley, used the art of political and social deflection by interviewing the likes of David Clarke, Milwaukee County Sherriff. This tactic focused on illustrating that Blacks are not in danger from Whites, but from other Black elements within their own communities. Mr. Clarke states:

As a Black American, I do not live in fear in the United States…a persons fear has to be based on rationalization. I face more danger and I feel more danger putting my uniform everyday and going in the American ghetto to police.

When O’Riley asked if Clarke “had come across white supremacy in Milwaukee,” and if white supremacy, as stated by some in the media, was a legitimate rationale for the underlying cause of the shooting in South Carolina. Clarke argued:

[Clarke laughs]…that is high hyperbole and demagoguery…[those who used this argument] want to keep the animosity stoked up, this division between people. But I got over that a long time ago.

Fox “News” also used Bishop E. W. Jackson, of Virginia. He argued,

Most people jump to conclusions about race…I long for the day when we stop doing that in our country…He didn’t chose a bar. He didn’t choose a basketball court. He chose a church. And we need to be looking at that very closely.

In connection with divergent tactics to avoid in-depth conversations about white racism, many in the media and political candidates have exceptionally targeted the conveyance of forgiveness by the victims’ families and other Blacks within the community. To me, their actions are astounding and wonderful. But their actions have also served as a two-edged sword that has lead many (white) politicians to use it as a focal point while avoiding the hard questions about racism in this country.

Even though the killer at the time had yet to be captured, the clues leading one to conclude the shooting was racially motivated were quite clear. But people such as Governor Nikki Haley missed the crumbs of evidence due to their fear of alienating the right-winged conservative base of their political party. This was evident within Governor Haley’s outré tweet Wednesday night. She wrote:

While we do not yet know all of the details, we do know that we’ll never understand what motivates anyone to enter one of our places of worship and take the life of another. Please join us in lifting up the victims and their families with our love and prayers.

While flaunting their sympathy, others such as GOP presidential candidates and heads of government expectedly and typically avoided the topic of race and gun legislation. For example, Rand Paul spoke to a group of religious conservatives and said, “It’s people not understanding where salvation comes from.” In addition, Rick Santorum stated:

All you can do is pray for those and pray for our country. This is one of those situations where you just have to take a step back and say we — you know, you talk about the importance of prayer in this time and we’re now seeing assaults on our religious liberty we’ve never seen before…It’s a time for deeper reflection beyond this horrible situation

Baseless fearmongers such as Donald Trump even exposed their own narcissism and need for intense psychotherapy by making the death of nine innocent individuals about themselves.

The overall bobbing and weaving performed by these and others like Governor Nikki Haley, Ted Cruz to Marco Rubio were amazingly inept. It was not until more information confounding the initial clues (such as the obvious symbolizing of the pro-apartheid flags upon the jacket of the domestic terrorists or his connection to a white supremacist groups) that these same political pawns moved chaotically to the “left” during their performance of the cowboy bump on issues such as removal of the Rebel Dixie flag from South Carolina state property. Regardless, in terms of the flag being seen as a racist symbol in a state many feel shows its white oppressive teeth quite often in order to remind Blacks exactly where they are in terms of the hierarchies pertaining to power and humanity, Governor Nikki Haley once said,

What I can tell you is over the last three and a half years, I spent a lot of my days on the phones with CEOs and recruiting jobs to this state. I can honestly say I have not had one conversation with a single CEO about the Confederate flag.

After licking a finger and thusly putting it up in order to determine which way the political winds were blowing, she at that time did not call for the removal of the Dixie flag from state property. As long as it is politically convenient and creates no harm to your base, erring on the side of right is definitely seen as in fashion. Only later did she act.

Legislative initiatives to take down the flag down are simply the absolute least possible thing that can actually occur within the state of South Carolina. Is the creation of an authentic dialogue concerning white racism and current racial segregation within the country, and specifically in the state of South Carolina on the dockets for further analysis? No? Well surely the manner in which humanity was shown to the shooter of nine Blacks versus the behavior of law officers in the heinous shooting of Walter Scott will create healthy dialogue pertaining to racialized differential treatment of law enforcement? Are we at least going to recognize and discuss the fact that the Charleston County Magistrate, James B. Gosnell, who is overseeing the initial proceedings of the killer’s trial has said “nigger” in open court? No? Maybe deal with the fact that South Carolina is one of only five states that does not have hate crimes legislation? No? Are we as a nation going to at least change some of the names of the streets that represent pro-slavery historical Charleston characters or remove monuments of the likes of that celebrate historical individuals such as Dr. J. Marion Sims who is essentially in the same league, and hopefully burning in the same hell, as Josef Mengele? No? Oh well.

It is important to recognize that this city and this state were both built and flourished due to the huge slave trade that flourished in Charleston. By 1860, there were roughly 4 million Black slaves in the U.S. Importantly, ten percent of those slaves resided in chains and racial oppression in South Carolina. With a past such as this, in combination with our country’s avoidance of confronting a brutal history that continues to have power over the minds and actions of a great many non-Blacks regarding Black Americans, the rise of white hate groups and hate crimes, and ramifications of the racialized tongue-and-cheek political satire of members of the GOP, the Dixie flag is the least of South Carolina’s current and future worries.

In Delivering Eulogy for Charleston Shooting Victim, Obama Finds Grace

• • violence

The funerals for the Charleston shooting victims – all nine of them: Cynthia Hurd, 54; Susie Jackson, 87; Ethel Lance, 70; DePayne Middleton Doctor, 49; Clementa Pinckney, 41; Tywanza Sanders, 26; Daniel Simmons Sr., 74; Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, 45; and Myra Thompson, 59, – continue with regularity, each one a painful reminder that the violence of white supremacy costs lives.

President Obama stepped to the podium and into this difficult moment in US history to eulogize Rev. Clementa Pinckney. And in delivering the eulogy for Rev. Pinckney, Obama found grace. If you haven’t watched the whole speech, you can here (37:58):

The transcript is available, but it’s a speech that is better viewed than read.

In his analysis of the speech, John Dickerson, writing at Slate, had this to say about the President’s theme of ‘grace’:

This was not a rhetorical exercise, or not merely one. It was a demonstration of the power the president had found in the example of the people of Charleston—both the living and the dead. He wasn’t just telling. He was showing—the power he was trying to summon in this speech came from his own feeling of gratitude and obligation to serve as an example of grace. Even if you didn’t agree with any of what the president said, the distance the president traveled in this one week was a kind of testimony of its own. By the end of his oration, the president was leading the congregation in an impromptu rendition of “Amazing Grace.”

There was something incredibly powerful and moving in the choice of ‘grace’ as a theme to tie this speech together, and perhaps one of the elements that so resonated for me is the way that it reframed the talk about ‘forgiveness’ of the shooter. In his analysis at The Atlantic, James Fallows takes this up when he says:

It allowed him to recast one part of the shooting’s aftermath in the most glorious way. When the families of the nine murdered victims told the killer that they forgave him, one undertone of their saintliness was that we might be in for another “noble victim” episode. Black people would be killed or abused; they would prove their goodness by remaining calm; and in part because of their magnanimity, nothing would change.But by characterizing their reaction as a reflection of grace rather than mere “forgiveness,” Obama was able to present it as something much different than patient victimhood…”

Fallows has a long, section-by-section break down of the speech if you want to know more about the way the speech worked, which is interesting if you’re interested in how speeches work.

If you’re still just trying to come to terms with the awful events in Charleston, have a listen to President Obama’s speech and find some grace.

The Charleston Shooter Has Plenty of Company on the Internet

• • cyber racism, violence

When I first heard there was a shooting in Charleston and that a white man was the main suspect in killing nine people in a historic black church, I knew, like too many of us, that this had everything to do with race. When I saw photos of him with a disaffected stare and wearing a jacket with patches of the flags of segregated Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa, I knew immediately he was connected in some way to the white nationalist movement. And when I heard the statement he made about rape and take-over, I was pretty sure I knew where Roof had been spending time online.

The shooter, wearing white power symbols

The shooter, wearing white power symbols (New York Times)

I knew that the attack would be linked to a white nationalist because I have spent a significant amount of time monitoring Stormfront.org( using do not link URL), the main online hub of the white nationalist movement. As a white anti-racist, I began studying the website in 2004 as part of research for my master’s degree on the contemporary white supremacist movement. At the time, the site boasted over 30,000 views per day, while today the site claims over 300,000 members.

 

Sylvia Johnson, who spoke with one of the survivors

Sylvia Johnson, who spoke with one of the survivors

 

“You are raping our women and taking over the country.”

This is what Ms. Sylvia Johnson told the world she heard from a survivor of the attacks. This statement by Dylann Roof made during his killing spree is loaded with white nationalist paranoia. It is a claim to victimhood and innocence, even in the act of perpetrating a massacre. The statement frames the twin concerns of the contemporary white nationalist movement succinctly, uniting sex and space, morality and politics, the home and the nation.

As yet, we do not know if Roof spent time on Stormfront (although I’d be surprised if he did not), but in his recently exposed manifesto he does identify as a white nationalist. He also names the Council of Conservative Citizens specifically as helping to foster his racist views. While Stormfront offers a “big tent” approach to white nationalism, and thus represents a variety of political perspectives, it collectively represents the key tenets of white nationalism. Discussing them sheds light on this violent act and may help us understand it.

So, what are the themes that make up the white nationalist ideology? There are three key themes that appear at Stormfront and in Dylann Roof’s manifesto.

1. White Innocence

By 10:41PM on June 16th a discussion thread had already been created on the site responding to the Charleston massacre, and over the next two days the forum generated over 1,100 posts. Participants on Stormfront were almost immediately discussing whether or not the perpetrator was one of them. Just after 11:00PM, user WhiteNationhood wrote, “there’s been some dude over at /pol/ who has posted about scenarios where you could shoot up a black church and make an escape. I always assumed it was a (tasteless) copy pasta [sic] but with this I’m worried it might be him.” After Roof’s rape statement and photos with apartheid badges were circulated Thursday morning, Darling Blade posted, “Dare I ask the question? Was he on here?”

While a few Stormfront members made statements either supporting the murders or dismissing them as insignificant, the majority of posters claimed they do not support violence and some even offered condolences to the victim’s families. However the collective ideological response was one of deflection of blame, and a claim to innocence.

 

Robin DiAngelo has written on what she calls white fragility, the idea that whites are institutionally guarded from racial stress and so experience even minor racial stress as deeply troubling. Framing whites as targets of racial violence allows individuals who experience whiteness as fragile to develop a framework where violence is justified. Since the founding of Stormfront moderators have focused on rules that limit threats of violence or illegal activity and people who make such threats are censured or banned. Most participants claim they support white pride and segregation, not violence. Shortly after the shooting MattwhiteAmerica wrote, “White nationalism is about the survival of the white race. WE do not promote violence..> [sic] Certainly, we do support separation, but not violence. This piece of human filth is condemnable. I hope all guest [sic] can understand this and join us in our journey to preserve our race.” This is a popular opinion on the site, however the logical response to their ideological position is to engage in violence against people of color and Jews, although this violence is seen as self-defense.

Roof certainly came to this conclusion, writing: “We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.” After encountering the barrage of selectively curated crime stories on these sites that portray whites as always innocent victims, many participants come to the conclusion that they also must join the race war by enacting violence.

2. Whiteness is about gender and the family, and it is good

The foundational assumption and understanding of white nationalism is that whiteness is morally good and whites are superior. Much scholarly work on the white nationalist movement has shown that the white nationalist movement is primarily a movement designed to defend white masculinity and white femininity, to defend the always already heterosexual white family as the source of all things good.

If you want the deep dive on the research on this, check the following:  Daniels, White Lies (Routledge, 1997) Daniels, Cyber Racism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009); Ferber, White Man Falling (Rowman & Littlefield, 1998) and Statzel, R. S. (2006). “The Apartheid Conscience: Gender, Race, and Re-Imagining the White Nation in Cyberspace.” Ethnic Studies Review 29(2): 20-45.

 

This understanding of the white family and white (hetero)sexuality as inherently moral allows for a justification of white violence, as white violence is framed as a defense of the good. Roof’s claim that he is defending white women from the threat of black rape is shaped by this ideology of white morality, so that even in the act of murdering innocent people—primarily black women—his narrative implies his actions are defensible.

The morning after the massacre, Stormfront member Freedom lover discussed Roof’s statement that the murders were a defense of white women, writing: “Dare I say it, if this is true and this is the real reason, then it’s karma being visited on the negro race. Someone was going to react sooner or later. If they thought we would accept being slaughtered like lambs, this guy has answered them in no uncertain terms.” Freedom lover continues, “This will just happen more and more often as the embattled white race are forced into a corner. We need people to stand up and instead of condemning this guy’s actions, they should condemn the vile brutes who made this possible, the liberal marxists who now run white countries. These are our real enemies. ”

This history of whiteness is a history of racial terror, which bell hooks so clearly discusses (bell hooks, “Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination.” Cultural Studies. 1992, Eds. Lawrence Grossberg et al. London: Routledge: 338-342) but white racial terror has consistently been justified as a defense of white femininity. In this framing, an imagined hyper-sexual black terror circulated as the inverse of a purported white innocence.

 

3. Whites are under attack.

The savvy use of new media has allowed white nationalists to circulate their ideology that whites are already under attack, that a race war is already underway and most whites are oblivious of this to their own peril. In his manifesto Roof credits his racial radicalization to the news surrounding Trayvon Martin’s murder, writing that the media response to Martin’s murder, “prompted me to type in the words ‘black on White crime’ into Google, and I have never been the same since that day.’’

Circulating the idea that there is an epidemic of black on white crime is perhaps the most popular theme on Stormfront, and the two main forums in the popular Newslinks section are the “Ethnic Crime Report” and the “Jewish Crime Report.” For over a decade these forums have chronicled hundreds of purported crimes committed by people of color against whites. The Council on Conservative Citizens hosts a similar site, with the title, “Our black on white murder study has shocked even us,” replete with photos and a numerical tally of white victims. As on Stormfront, dozens of photos of smiling white faces alongside mug shots of primarily African Americans and vivid descriptions of murder and rape provide visual and narrative proof that whites are the victims of racial violence.

The tagline for Stormfront is, “We are the voice of the new, embattled White minority!” Circulating the false idea that whites are an embattled minority already under attack by racial others inverts the history of institutionalized white supremacy to portray whites as victims of history. This false portrayal allows white nationalists to frame anti-racist efforts as part of a conspiracy to destroy the white race, and leads at least some to feel compelled to violence to protect whites.

The anti-racist challenge

In this time of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, with so much attention being paid to the dehumanizing racism of police brutality, the Charleston massacre reminds us to remain concerned about the threat of organized racism. The recent Southern Poverty Law Center’s report on the link between Stormfront and nearly 100 murders provides a broader context for concern about the online white nationalist movement. For people concerned with racial justice, we must be aware of ongoing threats the racist right poses. The white nationalist movement has proven adept at utilizing online venues to pursue their goals and engage in pedagogical projects, with devastating effects for many. Anti-racists are now challenged to also engage in savvy new media interventions to work to challenge this threat.

Any strategy for countering the effects of the organized white nationalist movement is complex, and should not involve posting anti-racist challenges to these sites. Many white nationalist actually enjoy responding to “antis,” the name given to everyone who challenges white nationalist ideas, and responding to these posts can actually serve to solidify white nationalist views. The challenge to anti-racists is how to also utilize the power of new media to both challenge white nationalist logic, and to provide a different lens for disaffected whites to interpret their malaise within.

~ Sophie Bjork-James is an anthropologist and a postdoctoral fellow at Vanderbilt University. She is an expert in conservative and white supremacist social movements in the US and has monitored the largest white nationalist website, Stormfront.org, since 2004. Bjork-James has published her findings in “The Apartheid Conscience: What the white nationalist movement can teach us about the reproduction of white supremacy in America” and the chapter titled “Cybersupremacy: The new face and form of white supremacist activism” in Tactics in Hard Times: Practices and Spaces of New Media.

Understanding the Charleston Shooting from a Sociological Perspective

• • violence

The shooting at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, on Wednesday has shaken the country, leaving many reflecting on the state of race relations in the United States.

Nine people, including Rev. Clementa Pinckney, the church’s pastor and a South Carolina state senator, were shot to death by accused gunman Dylann Storm Roof at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Authorities have called the shooting a hate crime.

But how does one explain such a crime from a scientific perspective? What could lead someone to commit a racially motivated hate crime? What is racism — and how can we as a society overcome it?

HuffPost Science posed those questions and others on Thursday to Dr. R. L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy, an associate professor of sociology at The City College of New York (CUNY) and author of the book Inequality in the Promised Land.

Dr. R. L'Heureux Lewis-McCoy

Dr. R. L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy

I would define racism as a system of social advantages and disadvantages doled out based upon group membership, particularly what we have socially defined as races. Among sociologists, we also talk about a newer form of racism known as “colorblind racism” (Eduardo Bonilla-Silva pioneered this work) that emerged after the 1960s, where the outward expression of racial animus and explicit discriminatory laws have been silenced or removed, but unfair racial advantages or disadvantages are still doled out, despite few people admitting to being devout racists.

From my framework, it is possible for someone to be working in service of racism by endorsing white supremacist ideologies. For example, Dylann Roof in South Carolina opened fire in Mother Emanuel Church and subscribed to beliefs about the superiority of whites and the “natural” order of things. Alternatively, someone who is black can also endorse negative beliefs about their racial siblings despite being a member of that group. A common example of this would be a police officer who is black but utilizes racial profiling in her or his everyday police work.

How would you then describe the ways in which our society is set up to perpetuate racism?

Our society is ripe with messages about the meaning and limits of race. In contemporary America, the immigration debate is often framed around Latinos from Central America, when in fact immigrants come from a wide range of locations and vary greatly by hue. In domestic policy, issues of welfare are often framed [with] African-Americans … assumed to be the beneficiaries of social support, when in reality far more whites receive federal and state support for poverty alleviation. In the area of international violence, terrorism has become nearly exclusively associated with Muslims, both in the Middle East and here in the states.

All of these media frames and our often unquestioned endorsement of them perpetuate racism. They lead people to think the observed differences they see are naturally occurring. Because of these frames, people can believe in the intellectual inferiority and superiority of differing groups, in the athletic abilities of another and in the artistic capacities of another. Rarely are these things questioned. An example I often use is that if tomorrow the Educational Testing Service came out with results that said white Americans outperformed all other ethnic groups, it would not result in an ounce of attention or scrutiny. However, if tomorrow the ETS presented results that said African-Americans outperformed all other ethnic groups in math and reading, there would be considerable uproar, because many of us have been taught the shape of racial inequality and will fight to maintain it.

Do you think economic factors perpetuate racial inequality?

Economics and race have always been tied. It’s hard to understand racism without a fundamental understanding of how economics play into the inequalities of our lives. Contemporary wealth inequality is a perfect example. Demos recently published a report showing the average white family has $111,146 in wealth holdings, while the average black family had $7,113 and the average Latino family $8,348. These disparities are huge! They are not simply the function of some groups working harder than others — instead, they result from differences in the opportunity to accumulate wealth. The history of unequal home loans, access to higher education, as well as wage gaps, have allowed whites to gain advantages at the expense of other racial groups. However, contemporary racism often asks us to ignore the role of the past on the present, which turns a blind eye to the hands of inequality in the past and present.

In that case, do you think America is still suffering from slavery, and how so?

America is not a country that has forgotten about slavery — after all, you can stay at bed-and-breakfasts on “plantations,” visit museums that discuss the wonder of the cotton gin and even attend Civil War re-enactments. However, America is a country that has failed to fully reckon with slavery. The unequal racial worlds that we live in today are tied back to the critical “peculiar institution” of slavery. The wealth accumulated on the backs of African people, the laws erected to separate races, and the resulting social ethos and material inequalities remain unrattled.

Last year, when Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote “The Case for Reparations” in The Atlantic, he was pointing to unequal practices that occurred since the end of slavery because he knew America would not deal with [its history of] slavery. While his piece was widely celebrated, people are scared to confront the Jim Crow South and the industrial North, so slavery remains unaddressed. Today, Americans are still scared to confront why they have accumulated [wealth] while others haven’t, and if those differences in accumulation are tied to race. Instead many buy into the belief in meritocracy and desire their gain to be based on what they’ve accomplished. Unfortunately, our national history and present show that meritocracy was never the system that governed reward — here or abroad.

Is Southern culture perpetuating unequal practices or such thinking? For instance, the accused shooter, Dylann Storm Roof, in Charleston hadConfederate license plates on his car, and the Confederate flag is sometimes used as a symbol of post-Civil War white supremacy.

Southern culture in particular and American culture in general often casually perpetuate racism in the present, often by recrafting narratives of the past. The Confederate flag, which flies over South Carolina, was not a long-lived historical symbol — it was the symbol of a rebel force against the United States. The “heritage not hate” trope conveniently skips over the central issues of the Civil War, the position of black people who labored in the antebellum South, as well as the costs that the war had on the nation. Symbols like the Confederate flag are common among hate groups, but also are part of the state’s image. The history of those symbols, along with the large number of schools and statues named for Confederate soldiers and even [Ku Klux] Klan members, create a hostile environment for those who understand the history of race in the nation, and those whose ancestors were painfully forced to labor under those flags during and after the end of slavery, and who had their lives terrorized by groups like the KKK.

dylann storm roof

Dylann Storm Roof is seen in his booking photo after he was apprehended as the main suspect in the mass shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church that killed nine people on June 18, 2015, in Charleston, South Carolina. 

 

Were you surprised by Roof’s age of 21? Why do you think a young white man from a young generation could be motivated to commit a racially motivated hate crime?

I was not surprised by Roof’s age. Outspokenness of white supremacists may be on the decline, but white supremacist ideology exists in a range of ages. Hate groups often have events where children are socialized into racial hate. As well, the Internet has democratized access to white supremacist information. If I am a white high-schooler who feels he has been mistreated while racial minorities have been favored, I’m only a couple of clicks away from a myriad of sites and message boards where I’ll find kinship with folks who are in legion of racial hatred or racial nationalism.

If the shooting in Charleston hadn’t happened on the heels of many other high-profile race-related incidents — from Ferguson to Walter Scott — do you think the general public would have reacted in the same way, why or why not?

I think the shooting’s timing was significant in that we are seeing a greater national concern about “Black Lives Matter.” The visibility of police violence, particularly due to technology, has meant the American public is now more aware of the dangers that black people face on a daily basis. With that being said, a young man shooting into a church on a Wednesday night should raise ire and action. In the past, we’ve had church burnings, bombing and a host of other moments that make the nation pause and reflect on how far we have come in terms of race relations and how far from healed and whole we are.

Indeed, the shooting in Charleston eerily parallels the racially motivated 1963 Birmingham church bombing, in which four young girls were killed. Can you explain the long history of violent attacks on black churches and racism?

Understanding racism as a system means we must understand the ideologies associated with racism. In the contemporary U.S., colorblind racism demands people not outwardly display their hatred — instead those beliefs lie just beneath the surface. When the Civil Rights Acts were passed, they did not magically change the hearts or minds of racists. Instead, they made it unpopular to express such beliefs publicly and made certain activities illegal.

Today, the tensions that exist around race are rarely new. They’re composed of xenophobia, a belief in the natural order of things and impending threats. Thus, in 1963 in Birmingham, we see a church attacked as black people fight to have the same rights as all Americans and in 2015, we see a church attacked because, [as Roof allegedly said,] “You are taking over the country.” The fear of usurpation of power is central.

How can we overcome racism?

To overcome slavery and end racism we first have to reckon with their effects. Not simply pay lip service but look deeply at the wounds and unequal worlds created. This is not simply about a class divide. It has been, and still is, about the fictions around race that were created — the belief that black is inferior, that white is superior and that all others must earn their space in the American hierarchy is dangerous and must be dismantled. The path to overcoming can only happen once we go through it and make sure that people are not only held accountable in rhetoric, but also deeds. From lending institutions to learning institutions, racism continues to structurally and socially divide. The true solution to such a gargantuan task is to dismantle the social world as we know it. Importantly, that does not mean the end of this planet, it simply means the end of an unjustly created, defined and refined world. Until we can see that as a possibility, racism and slavery will continue to shape our daily lives.

 

~ This interview was conducted by Jacqueline Howard for The Huffington Post Science, where it originally appeared.

Of Rachel Dolezal and Other Confused White People

• • African Americans, anti-racism, multiracial, white privilege, whites

Like Wendy Moore, as a white antiracist scholar and mother of biracial (African American/white) children who has spent the majority of her life in intimate relations with people of color, I have been asked a lot lately to give my two cents on Rachel Dolezal. And also like Moore, I initially hesitated to speak, because it seemed so many excellent points had already been made, especially by Jessie’s insightful post: that Dolezal’s experience cannot be neatly equated to being transgender; that being black is not a costume one cannot take on and off at will without serious social and political ramifications (the majority of which the masqueraders seem to obfuscate, deny or not even consider); and that any well-intentioned antiracist efforts Dolezal may have attempted are surely cancelled out by her dishonest cooptation of resources that otherwise would have gone to people of color.

Yet we whites are often fond of playing the good white, bad white game: Bad Kramer from Seinfeld , bad Paula Deen—it would seem we may hold up the “bad white” examples to make our own selves feel better. I may put my foot in my mouth sometimes when it comes to race, but at least I don’t do it to such public and blatant proportions, so that must make me not racist—or so the confused logic goes. At least I’m not Dylann Storm Roof, who committed the brutal anti-black hate crime of shooting 9 people in a Charleston, SC church—although by confused white logic, we may not even be sure if we can put him in the good white or bad white column, since, after all, amidst all the racist propaganda he collected, he also “had black friends.”

Not unlike the white students in my Race classes who eventually reach their oversaturation point in exposure to white racism, stating exasperatedly, “why does everything have to be about race?” (um, because that’s the title of the course? Why does everything have to be about chemistry in your chemistry class?) it is clear that much of white America can only take so much of the media attention on police shootings of unarmed African Americans. It’s harder to play the good white, bad white game with such stories of institutional systemic racism, for several reasons. There’s often not a single/lone culprit. Moreover, as in the case of Baltimore, some of the officers weren’t even white—and boy, do whites get really confused then (because the concepts of internalized and institutional racism don’t typically come up in the good cop/bad cop discussions). And more to the point, we are often told that officers shot because they “felt threatened.” Now all bets are off for the good white, bad white game. The object of the game is to absolve whites of their guilty consciences by focusing on white racists who do “crazy” things that average whites convince themselves they would never do—and what white person hasn’t “felt threatened” by someone who is African American? Given what research tells us about the amount of antiblack attitudes held by a majority of white Americans, including assuming blacks are prone to crime, it’s doubtful that most whites are able to draw such a clear dividing line in their minds between themselves and a police officer who “felt threatened” by a black man.

So what better relief from this cognitive dissonance than to shift the mass media discussion away from such institutional racism and toward a white woman—Rachel Dolezal—who has nowhere near the power of the racial state that will soon likely acquit yet another (and many other) officers murdering unarmed African Americans for so-called “justified” reasons? In the game of good white, bad white, most whites can tell themselves, at least I haven’t lied about my race and pretended I was black. The Dolezal story thus presents a more palatable racism news feed for many whites who may be able to see themselves in the shoes of a “threatened” police officer but can’t ever imagine themselves masquerading as black.

It’s so much easier to put a demonizing face on a single white woman (Rachel Dolezal) who deceitfully stole an opportunity from potentially other equally or better qualified African Americans than it is to do a news story on the scores of whites who everyday take opportunities from equally or more qualified people of color through the “opportunity hoarding” that Nancy Ditomaso describes in her book about mostly all-white job referral networks. So Rachel Dolezal gets to be the scapegoat for confused whites, while the rest of us are deluded into thinking our white privilege and racism is normal and not worthy of public outrage, by comparison.

In Malcolm X’s autobiography, he argues it is no accident that the history books paint John Brown (a white man executed for his role in an 1859 slave rebellion) as a “nut case.” Malcolm X asserts it’s quite intentional that the white power structure doesn’t want the masses of whites to think it’s normal to challenge their own white privilege. Although I do not believe the heroic acts of Brown and the cowardice of Dolezal can at all be equated, I argue in my book Whites Confront Racism (2001), as others have before me, that the historical silence about white involvement in antiracist struggle can leave whites confused about where they fit in. Perhaps in Dolezal’s small town upbringing, and subsequent experience of racial politicization in the context of an HBCU campus, left her with a false dichotomy: be white and part of the problem, or be black and be part of the solution.

Newly declared antiracist whites can tend to distance themselves from their own communities and position themselves as “down with the black people” instead, as a way of assuaging their white guilt. Yet people of color will consistently tell white antiracists that the very thing they most need is for whites to go back into their own communities and talk to other white people about racism. We have a unique position from which to do this, in ways that people of color cannot, since whites so often see them as self-interested or “playing the race card” when they speak the truth about racism. In what I call privileged polemics, we are more likely to be believed by fellow whites when we say, yes, racism really happens. Sad, but true. So in choosing to cut herself off from her white family and ally herself in less-than-forthcoming ways with people of color, perhaps Dolezal was one of those confused white antiracists that did not realize there was a place for her in the movement just the way she is. Dolezal’s actions are certainly not congruent with those of principled antiracists. But fully all of the more respected antiracists will tell you that we white antiracists probably fumble around, fail, and put our foot in our mouths more than we succeed. We are constantly learning, and constantly making mistakes—sloughing off a lifetime of racist conditioning, one baby step at a time. So like Moore, although I cannot personally relate to the path Dolezal has chosen, I’ll let those without mistakes on their track record hurl their stones at her. I can only pray that she (and more importantly many more others) eventually become(s) less confused about what racism is, and why fighting widespread white privilege and mass incarceration (among many other forms of systemic racism) is so much more worth our time and attention than one white woman’s confusion.

Eileen O’Brien is a leading researcher on white anti-racists and Associate Professor of Sociology and Assistant Chair, Social Sciences at Saint Leo University (Virginia Campus)

Juneteenth and the Struggle Behind It

• • African Americans, racism

As with church going, sartorial display is connected to resistance and celebrations of the African American holiday Juneteenth. “By putting on their very best clothes, the black people were signaling they were free,” historian Jackie Jones relates. “It enraged white people. They hated to see black people dressed up because it turned their world upside down.”

Emancipation Day, Austin, Texas, 1900 (from Wikipedia)

 

Today is the 150th anniversary of the original  Juneteenth, a celebration marking the end of slavery. What began as a regional celebration in Galveston, Texas has grown to a national commemoration that people celebrate in a variety of ways. NPR’s Code Switch has been collecting stories of how people celebrate at the hashtag #WouldntBeJuneteenthWithout, but I there is a pall over the usual celebratory mood of this Juneteenth by recent events in Charleston.

Indeed, after a 21-year-old white gunman opened fire on a bible study group at the historic predominantly black Emanuel AME Church leaving nine dead, the celebration of Juneteenth and the struggle behind it, take on a renewed sense of urgency and poignancy.

The Struggle to Make Juneteenth a State Holiday

Juneteenth hasn’t always been recognized as a holiday, and in the family I came from it was often scoffed at (lots of derision about the name of the holiday).  So the fact that Juneteenth is now an official state holiday in Texas and many other communities across the US, is significant and is only possible because of a political struggle waged by one Houston Democratic legislator, (former) state representative Al Edwards.  It seems impossible now to mention a black, Democratic state representative and not call to mind, Rep. Clementa Pinckney, gunned down while leading that Wednesday night service in Charleston.

Former Texas State Rep. Al Edwards

Former Texas State Rep. Al Edwards

Edwards was born in Houston in 1937, the sixth of sixteen children, and was first elected as a state representative in 1978 from Houston’s District 146, the area known as Alief. A year later, in 1979, Edwards authored and sponsored House Bill 1016, making June 19th (“Juneteenth”) a paid state holiday in Texas.

Everyone, it seemed, opposed the idea. In a recent interview about this bill, attorney Doug McLeod, a conservative Democratic representative from Galveston at the time said of Edwards, “He really had an uphill battle. He had opposition from the left and the right.” Mostly white conservative Democratic majority viewed the bill as a hard sell to their constituents and many of Edwards’ 14 fellow black legislators saw it as a diversion from securing a holiday for Martin Luther King.

House Bill 1016 appeared to be headed nowhere when Edwards, a Democrat who was new to the legislature, originally filed it. Eventually, he got McLeod to sign on to the bill and Bill Clayton, then speaker of the Texas legislature.

Then-Gov. Bill Clements, a Republican, declined to endorse the Juneteenth bill, but he agreed to sign it if passed. Through a series of negotiations and brokered deals over votes, Rep. Edwards eventually prevailed and got the bill through the legislature.  When the bill passed, white conservative opponents urged the governor not to sign the bill, but Clements kept his word and signed the bill on the Texas State Capitol steps. This prompted other states to follow suit. Now 43 states and the District of Columbia recognize Juneteenth in some way or another.

History and Struggle Behind Juneteenth

President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863 and Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered on April 9, 1865, but people remained enslaved within the state of Texas.

This happened for two reasons.

First, Texas slave owners refused to release the people they were holding as slaves.  They basically just wouldn’t acknowledge that the Emancipation Proclamation or Lee’s surrender had happened or had any bearing on them (cf. “States Rights,”  see also Texas is a Whole Other Country).

Second, slave owners from neighboring states in the south looked on Texas as a haven for slavery, so they poured into Texas with an estimated 125,000-150,000* enslaved people  from surrounding Confederate states (*historians debate the precise number).

In a recent interview, Jackie Jones,a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin.”The idea was Texas was so vast that the federal government would never be able to conquer it all. There is this view that if they want to hold onto their slaves, the best thing to do is get out of the South and go to Texas.”

This ended on June 19, 1865, when Union soldiers arrived in Galveston and again declared the end of the Civil War, with General Granger reading aloud a special decree that ordered the freeing of some 200,000 people still in bondage in Texas.

Today, some 43 states and the District of Columbia recognize Juneteenth in some way. This would not have been possible without the vision of Rep. Al Edwards and the struggle to make it a reality.

In times like these, what’s to celebrate?

With the official, legal end of chattel slavery — and the enforcement of that decree in Texas — there was much to celebrate in 1865. It was no longer legal for human beings to be sold on auction blocks as they had been. And, to be clear, the US didn’t just tolerate slavery as an economic system, it expanded and prospered on it.  The overturning of this dehumanizing system was a momentous victory for a multi-racial group of abolitionists who waged a decades long campaign to end slavery.

Reconstruction followed, creating new opportunities for African Americans who owned and profited from their own land and began to participate in local politics.

Most Americans remain confused about the period of Reconstruction, and many still subscribe toA false story of Reconstruction disseminated in popular culture through things like the film Birth of a Nation.  Although historians including Columbia University’s Eric Foner have shown the extraordinary political, economic, and legal gains of Reconstruction, as Gregory P. Downs notes at TPM.

One historian, C. Vann Woodward, has called the period of “the forgotten alternatives.” During the period between 1870 and 1900, there was some racial integration in housing and privately-owned facilities. Black people could travel on public transportation, vote and get elected, get jobs, including on police forces, and enjoy many public facilities.

But. the gains of Reconstruction were short-lived.

This “alternative” approach to race during Reconstruction ended when what Woodward calls the “strange career” of Jim Crow segregation, began — first by whites in the North, and expanded with a vengeance by Southern whites. Within thirty years of emancipation, laws were instituted that stripped African Americans of their rights, making celebrations like Juneteenth a distant memory. A prison-labor paradigm developed. White jail owners profited from the hard labor of their black inmates who were incarcerated for petty crimes like vagrancy, which carried long sentences. White landowners replaced chattel slavery with a deceptive practice called debt peonage, a new form of bondage continued for many blacks for decades. It wasn’t until 1941 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Circular No. 3591 which strengthened the Anti-Peonage Law of 1867, making it a criminal offense.  Roosevelt launched a federal investigation, prosecuted guilty whites and effectively ended peonage in 1942.

 

So, why celebrate Juneteenth if white supremacy re-emerged with such a bloody return thirty short years later? Because celebration, commemoration and community is how we gain strength for the larger struggle.

Douglas Blackmon, author of Slavery by Another Name land co-executive producer of the documentary film by the same name, said this about Juneteenth:

“It’s important not to skip over the first part of true freedom. Public education as we know it today and the first property rights for women were instituted by African-American elected officials.”

Even as there is terrible news out of Charleston, South Carolina by a young white man who was, by all accounts, “enraged” by the freedom of black people, it is worth taking a moment to reflect on other times, other struggles and other victories on this 150th anniversary of Juneteenth.

 

 

 

White Terrorist Takes Nine Black Lives at Historic AME Church in Charleston

• • violence

Grief: Worshippers embrace following a group prayer across the street from the Emanuel AME Church (Picture: AP Photo/David Goldman)

Multiple news outlets are reporting that  a white male suspect, approximately 21 years old, joined a Bible study service at the Emanuel A.M.E. church in Charleston, South Carolina, then stood and began firing a gun. He killed nine people, all of them black, including State Senator and pastor of the church, the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney. At this time, the suspect remains at large.

Roberston’s biography of Denmark Vesey (Knopf, 1999)

The Emanuel A.M.E. church, the oldest AME church in the South and home to the oldest black congregation south of Baltimore, Maryland, is rooted in the struggle for black freedom in the US and has a long history of being targeted by white violence. The church is listed as one of the historic sites in Charleston, South Carolina by the National Park Service, which details some of the church’s history on its website. In 1822 the church was investigated for its involvement with a planned slave revolt. Denmark Vesey, one of the church’s founders, organized a major slave uprising in Charleston. Vesey was raised in slavery in the Virgin Islands, and ultimately won his own freedom and then began to organize for others’ to gain their freedom. He organized a slave rebellion, but authorities were informed of the plot before it could take place. During the Vesey controversy, the AME church was burned. Vesey reportedly advanced the date of the insurrection to June 16, a date that many point to as having significance fort his attack. Ultimately, some 300 alleged participants were arrested for their involvement in the slave revolt plot, and 35 including Vesey were executed. If you’re not familiar with this history, I recommend Robertson’s biography of Vesey.
Black churches have a long history of being targets for white terrorist violence. The bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, where four little girls were killed by members of the local KKK in 1963 is the example with which most people will be familiar, but there are many others.  Bernice King reminded her followers that her grandmother, Dr.King’s mother, was killed in church:

And, these attacks have continued. Throughout the 1990s there were a series of arson attacks against black churches throughout the South for which no one was ever arrested or charged for these crimes.

While the suspect in the shootings in Charleston remains at large, he has been identified by eye-witnesses as a white man and is thus connected to a long history of white terrorism enacted by white men against racialized others in the US. Most recently, David Leonard Zak Cheney-Rice (thanks Kyra!) explained this dynamic in his piece about James L. Boulware, the white man who opened fire on Police Headquarters in Dallas and lived to tell about it.

White domestic terrorists in the US

While Boulware is just the most recent, there is a long string of white men with guns who act out their rage in violent ways. Frequent readers here will know that I’ve been on about the trouble with white women and the way they(we) are implicated in perpetuating systems of white supremacy, but let me be clear: it is white men who are the most deadly threat. Indeed, although the bulk of the mainstream media attention focuses on “Islamic extremists” — and we continue to take off our shoes at airports because of this putative threat — the reality is that most of the terrorist activity occurring in the United States in recent years has come from white men drawn from a combination of radical Christian, white supremacists and far-right militia groups.

Why is it always a white guy and why can’t we connect these dots?

Sociologist Michael Kimmel suggests that it is “aggrieved entitlement that lies underneath the anger of American white men.” Similarly, Joe Feagin has written extensively about the social problems created by white men as a population. Of course, if you’re a woman of color and a professor, saying that America is reluctant to call out white men as a problem on social media could cost your job.

Still, these dots do not get connected. People, for the most part, do not make the connection between Timothy McVeigh – who bombed the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City – and the shooter in Charleston, South Carolina. Part of the reason most (white) people can’t make these connections is the way that this story will get reported in the mainstream media.  My pal Chauncey Devega and I discussed how this is going to play out a little earlier:

 

Even when white men commit the most heinous acts — like killing people at a place of worship — they get treated to a sympathetic narrative and backstory. I promise you when this suspect is identified, we will see multiple mainstream news stories about how “he wasn’t always like this” (complete with baby pictures), testimony from white parents and neighbors about “what a good guy” he always seemed to be, and finally, an “investigative” piece that uncovers the fact that he was posting on Stormfront and asks the burning question: “did the Internet do this to him? Did it lure an otherwise good boy into the dark world of neo-nazis?”

We Need to Talk about White Supremacy

People keep saying that we need to “have a conversation about race” in this country, but what we need to have is a conversation about white supremacy. To be sure, the mass murder at the Emanuel A.M.E. church is an act of white supremacist terrorism. The white man who did this is a terrorist with a political agenda to kill black people. When one segment of the population can easily — and legally — buy and carry deadly weapons and almost never seen as suspect while another segment of the population is always a target of violence, even in a place of worship, that is white supremacy. Yet, for the most part, we have no way to talk about this kind of systemic racism in US culture. When most (white) people hear the term “white supremacy” they think of the people in robes and hoods, not the white men pictured above.

The deaths of nine black people in Charleston, South Carolina who were doing nothing more than attending a Bible study — and were targeted for their blackness — is a stark reminder that there are very real, material ways that all lives do not matter in the same way within a white supremacist context.

Racial Masquerades, White Domination, and Rachel Dolezal’s Racist Co-optation of Black Identity

• • identities, white privilege, whiteness, women

The firestorm over Rachel Dolezal continues to hold people’s attention. As Jessie detailed in her post about Dolezal, the President of the Spokane, Washington NAACP, has presented herself in her adult life as African American (or at least as bi-racial, claiming to have an African American father). Last week her birth parents, both white, told the media that Rachel is, in fact, white – and they illustrated with pictures of her as a child with long blond hair, very fair skin, and blue eyes, a stark contrast to how she looks as an adult:

Rachel Dolezal as a young girl

Rachel Dolezal as a young girl

Rachel Dolezal Now

Rachel Dolezal Now

After some media became aware of her biological parents and the childhood photo, one reporter challenged her, asking about the man she had claimed was her father (an African American man) and asking her directly whether she was African American (at which point Dolezal walked away from the interview). Through a newly established Twitter account, Dolezal has said she will to make a longer statement on Monday.

As these incidents have become public and the issue has begun to receive a great deal of reaction and commentary, there has been much talk about race being socially constructed, about how culture affects our choices about appearance, intellectual pursuits, and ethnic identification. There has even been comparisons between Dolezal’s choices to present herself as African American and the gendered choices of transgendered individuals – this leading to considerations of whether Dolezal might be “transracial”. Most centrally the theme has seemed to be that this is a “complicated” issue concerning race, culture, and racial identity.

As a white woman who grew up in and lives in a black community and family, and as a scholar of race and racism, I received many requests to comment on the issue. At first I was dismissive, because I felt that this was a far less complex issue than many have suggested—but as the requests have continued, and the discussion about this case has proliferated, I felt it necessary to add my voice. Rachel Dolezal doesn’t represent, for me, the difficult question that many have suggested. Yes, race is socially constructed. And yes, we all take on elements of the culture in which we live and love. However, race and culture are constructed in connection with social structure, in this case a racial structure organized around white domination – a fact that is quite frequently missing from racial analyses and is sorely missing from the discussion of this woman. From my own experience I can say that being a white woman in an African American community and family, and having to negotiate my racial identity in a social structure characterized by white domination, is complex and challenging – it is challenging to have cultural elements to your life that don’t match the way people racialize you. It is challenging to have the expectations of others become a critique of your identity. It is, most importantly, challenging to know how to handle the fact that I continuously receive white privilege while those I love do not, to repeatedly see those I love experience racist oppression and even violence, and to try to negotiate that contradiction in my most intimate family relationships.

One of the most complex elements of my life is negotiating the dynamics of being critical of white supremacy, repulsed by the structural reality of white privilege, power, and authority, and at the same time being always unable to disassociate from a social structure that views me as white, and is ready to benefit me with the privileges of whiteness. But – because I abhor white domination and the racial oppression that characterizes our society, I realize that this is an essential negotiation that I must undertake, continuously and with reflexivity.

And this is NOT what Rachel Dolezal has done. No. Rachel has engaged in an act of masquerade. She has darkened her skin, she has permed and colored her hair. She has pretended that she did not grow up with all the privileges of whiteness. She has taken resources from the Black community in the form of a scholarship from Howard University, an Historically Black College/University. (And no, this is not the same as African American people passing as white so they can gain access to white resources – because our racial structure is based upon white supremacy and the denial of resources to people of color – one of the reasons universities like Howard exist). She has rejected the hard work of trying to negotiate a racial identity that sometimes makes her an outsider in the very community in which she wants to belong – and in doing that she has reified white power, she has made a mockery of the lived experiences of black women in the United States, and she has abrogated her responsibility as white woman who cares about equality. It does not matter if she works in civil rights, it does not matter what she has done for racial equity – her reification of white domination remains, and it belies all of her other efforts.

Rachel Dolezal and the Trouble with White Womanhood

• • whites, women
Rachel Dolezal split screen

Rachel Dolezal

So listen, I set aside June for being away and writing other things than blog posts, but I keep getting pulled back to this story which is complex and related to some other writing I’m doing…so here I go.

You’ve heard, or at least partially taken note of, the Rachel Dolezal story by now. Rachel Dolezal, pictured above – as an adult, presenting as “black” and on the right, as a young white girl – is at the center of a controversy that is set to last for days if the trending hashtags for her name, #AskRachel and #transracial are any indication.

She’s in all kinds of hot water because she lied and misrepresented her racial background to a number of institutions and organizations, most recently to the Spokane NAACP. Dozel also holds a position as professor in Africana Studies at Eastern Washington University. Her page on the university website says that she “holds a Master’s degree from Howard University,” and this apparently is where part of this story began. When Rachel applied to Howard University to study art with a portfolio of “exclusively African American portraiture,” the university “took her for a black woman” and gave her a full scholarship. Among the courses she teaches now are “The Black Woman’s Struggle” and her faculty profile lists “the intersection of race, gender and class in the contemporary Diaspora with a specific emphasis on Black women in visual culture” among her research interests.  Since about 2007, she has been identifying herself as “black”.

A local Spokane-area reporter, Jeff Humphrey, questioned Rachel Dolezal about a photo she posted on her Facebook page of an African American man that she identified as her father.  The interview ended after Humphrey called her on the question:

“Ma’am, I was wondering if your dad really is an African-American man,” Humphrey asked.

“I don’t understand the question,” Dolezal answered. “I did tell you [that man in the picture] is my dad.”
“Are your parents white?” Humphrey asked. At that point, Dolezal removed the microphone, ended the interview and walked away.

Following up on the story, the Washington Post reached out to her parents, Lawrence and Ruthanne Dolezal of Troy, Montana for comment. They said Rachel Dolezal is their daughter and that they are (all) Caucasian. Ruthanne Dolezal said the family’s ancestry is Czech, Swedish and German. She said the family does have some “faint traces” of Native American heritage as well (put a pin there – I’ll come back to this).  When she took a position with the Spokane Office of Police Ombudsman Commission, Rachel Dolezal said she had several ethnic origins on the application, including white, black and American Indian.

Part of this story is also about transracial adoption and a family at war. The parents, Ruthanne and Lawrence, adopted four black children who are siblings to Rachel. And, now, Rachel is in a court battle to adopt one of those siblings.

 

A family photo shows Rachel Dolezal’s family at her wedding reception in Jackson, Mississippi on May 21, 2000. Ruthanne and Larry Dolezal identified the people in the photo as: Back row: Ruthanne (mother), Kevin & Rachel, Larry (father), Peggy & Herman (Larry’s parents); Front Row, our (Larry and Ruthanne’s) adopted children: Ezra, Izaiah, Esther and Zachariah.

 

The Trouble with White Womanhood when Caught Passing for Black 

How do can we make sense of this complex story and what does it mean about white womanhood? As longtime readers here will know, I’ve been doing a series for about a year and a half now on the trouble with white womanhood and white feminism. Through that lens, there’s a lot that this story can tell us about what’s so troubling about Rachel Dolezal’s passing for a black woman.

Access to Resources, aka ‘Theft’ 

First and foremost, the trouble with Rachel Dolezal passing as a black woman is that by doing this she’s taken resources away from another person who is structurally situated as black (in addition to having phenotype that goes with that structural position). So, just looking back at her resume that we know of from 2007 – she got a full ride scholarship at historically black Howard University — an education that would have gone to an otherwise black person.

She got a faculty job (albeit part-time) at Eastern Washington University in Africana Studies, which also might have gone to someone who was actually African American or African.

And, most recently, she got a position as the President of the NAACP in Spokane. This could have gone to a white person (there’s a long history in the NAACP of white leadership, going back to the founders), but in running for that position she misrepresented herself as black. And don’t think people in the NAACP were completely fooled.  The past president of the Spokane NAACP, Mr. James Wilburn, said in an interview that a few members of that group discussed her background before her election late last year. “It was discussed among close members to me, and we kept it like that,” he told the Spokane Spokesman-Review.  It was Mr. Wilburn, who is black, that Dolezal defeated in the election for NAACP President.

The Lying & Erasure of Black Women 

By passing as black, Dolezal told not just one lie, but a series of lies about herself and her past. In an interview from Februrary, 2014, Dolezal was asked about her upbringing.

“I grew up in a very religious family that used corporal punishment as a way to keep their kids from going to hell. … I got beaten with wooden boards and spoons a lot and had to do manual labor jobs like digging potatoes or pulling thistles and weeds, whereas my siblings, who were darker, … were beaten with a baboon whip … and sometimes [my parents] would call the cops on them to get [my siblings] in trouble if there was a sibling disagreement in the teen years. Another punishment was to be confined to your room for up to 2-3 months … with nothing but a mattress and a Bible. You were let out to use the bathroom and eat.”

No one knows if the abuse she alleges happened, I hope not. No child should have to endure that. She may be referring to her adopted siblings here, but by attributing the differences in her family of transracially adopted children to the fact that some “were darker” and she was “light skinned” suggests a different reality.

I don’t know what a “baboon whip” is. This is the only reference to “baboon whip” I could find online (please enlighten me in the comments if you know more). But the suggestion here is of some deep, and deeply messed up, racism if this actually happened. If it’s true, it’s an appalling anecdote about the white parents of black adopted children and she should tell that truth.  If it’s not true and is another one of the lies that she made up to cover her own elaborate fiction, then that speaks to a disturbing psyche at work.

These two – theft and erasure – are the cornerstones of white, settler colonial tactics, and Dolezal used these in perpetrating this fraud. That’s enough right there to call it a day on this story, but there’s so much more.

 

Rachel Dolezal standing before a mural of MLK

Rachel Dolezal standing before a mural of MLK

Colorism & White Privilege

For a black woman, Rachel Dolezal is light-skinned. And she has green eyes. These two phenotypical facts give her an advantage in the U.S. whether she chose to mostly move through the predominantly white culture, or through mostly black or Native American culture, because there is colorism,

Colorism, or skin-color privilege, is the idea that “white is right” and all sorts of advantages just flow to people with lighter skin tones. As an example of this, the “brown paper bag test” was commonly used among African Americans in the 1900s to exclude darker hued bretheren from clubs, organizations and institutions. If a black person was lighter than the brown paper bag, they were deemed sufficiently light enough to gain admittance or acceptance. While this is no longer an overt practice in black institutions, remnants of this practice – a legacy of white supremacy – linger in various ways.

In her rather rapid ascent through the black community from Howard University student in 2007 to NAACP chapter president in 2015, Dolezal no doubt benefitted from colorism. I have no doubt that part of the work that Dolezal intended to do was to challenge white privilege, yet it’s white privilege in the form of colorism that’s implicated in her rise.

 

 

Passing: Transracial is Not the Equivalent of Transgender 

Passing as a different race has a long history in the U.S. Bliss Broyard’s memoir (One Drop) about her father, Anatole Broyard, tells the story of her father’s “hidden history.” Anatole, a Creole of mixed racial ancestry, was light enough to pass the “brown paper bag test,” and eventually severed ties with his darker-skinned kinfolk in order to pass for white. But this sort of passing doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Anatole who was an author and for many years the book review editor at The New York Times, passed as a way to navigate and succeed in a white dominant society. If you’ve read the book, you’ll know that ultimately it wasn’t his racial ancestry that his daughter found so troubling, it was the lying.

James McBride’s memoir, The Color of Water, is about his discovery at age 26 that the mother he believed was black was in fact a white Jewish woman. His mother cut all ties with her white family, married two black men, had a dozen or so black children (they didn’t identify as biracial) that she raised in Red Hook, Brooklyn. He subtitled the book “a black man’s tribute to his white mother.” She didn’t lie about her past, she mostly just didn’t want to talk about it and let people assume her racial identity. It was until McBride coaxed her into telling her story that it came out. At one point in the book, she says that at some point, “she crossed over” into the black community, but she did this mostly by living in a predominantly black neighborhood, raising black children, and serving in a black church.

Conservatives and a few white liberals have been quick to jump on the discussion of Rachel Dolezal’s passing to make an argument, or at least raise the question, about “transracial” being the same as “transgender.” It’s not a simple analogy.  If you want the advanced course, there’s this thoughtful article by Leslie Bow at Signs from 2009 (paywall and a long read), which offers a nuanced consideration of what she calls a “twinning” of “transgender” and “transracial” in order to understand “both interstitial subjects with rights and the abstract nature of interstitiality, the political valance of ‘representing’ between the dominant symbolics.” I told you it was the advanced course.

In plainer terms, sure people can “pass” along racial lines (Anatole Broyard, James McBride’s mother) just as people have “passed” as a different gender, but that doesn’t erase the social structure that shapes these choices. Cisgender people dominate the world, just as white people dominate U.S. and colonial societies. The power structures of gender, sexuality and race operate in different and intersecting ways, and simple “if this, then that” type analogies are inadequate to the task of understanding what it means to pass or transition.

 

Going Native and “Faint Traces” of Native American Heritage

Ruthanne Dolezal says that their family has “faint traces” of Native American heritage, sprinkled in with the other Czech, Swedish and German ancestry. This is, I want to suggest, another lie but one where Rachel seems to be telling the same story as her parents. There is a long, long history of “playing Indian”  among white people as Philip Deloria and other scholars have pointed out.This is connected to other examples of “going native” among white women and white feminists that I’ve discussed before, here and here.

In the case of Rachel Dolezal, she appears to have “gone native” in her acquisition of blackness as part of her identity (that’s her in the photo below, second from the right).

Rachel Dolezal "Going Native"

Rachel Dolezal “Going Native”

But, like the putative memoir of by Margaret Seltzer a white girl supposedly raised in foster care and sold drugs for the Bloods in South Central L.A. that turned out to not be true, Dolezal’s back story doesn’t pass the truth test. Why are white women like Seltzer and Dolezal compelled to tell the stories that make them seem down with blackness and indigeneity? At least part of it has to do with what cultural critic bell hooks describes in her essay “Eating the Other”:

“The commodification of Otherness has been so successful because it is offered as a new delight, more intense, more satisfying than normal ways of doing and feeling. Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.”

Because of the intense and centuries-long anti-blackness of U.S. culture, there have been relatively few instances of white people deciding to pass as black. However, there many, many examples of white (and some black) people trying to pass as Native American. In fact, there are so many examples of this type of cultural appropriation, I started a Pinterest board with a bunch of these images.

The Education of Little Fraud

The relevant example in U.S. history for understanding the Rachel Dolezal story, is Asa/Forrest Carter and The Education of Little Tree.  Asa Carter was a white supremacist, a KKK member, and ardent supporter and sometime speechwriter for Alabama Governor George Wallace. Asa Carter wrote Wallace’s infamous, “Segregation Now, Segregation Tomorrow and Segregation Forever,” speech that he delivered to block school desegregation. Carter became disaffected with Wallace as the governor turned away from his more ardent segregationist supporters. Carter left Alabama, moved to Texas and re-invented himself as a novelist. Originally, he took the nom de plume Bedford Forrest Carter, a direct reference to KKK-founder, Nathan Bedford Forrest.  He then dropped “Bedford,” as as Forrest Carter wrote a novel Gone to Texas, which later became the film The Outlaw Josie Wales. His second book was published in 1976 as a “memoir” was supposedly about his upbringing by his Native American grandparents, The Education of Little Tree.  Similarly, Rachel Dolezal’s story of her upbringing was that she was “raised in a teepee” and “hunted food with bows and arrows” (see also, “The Lying”).

Carter’s memoir has been exposed as a lie over and over again, but it still routinely makes “recommended reading lists” (including Oprah’s) from time to time. Part of why this fraud of ‘Little Tree’ persists is because Carter struck a nerve among white readers. In 1997, Paramount even made a film out of the book. As scholar Shari Huhndorf explains the narrative:

“In the film version, Granpa Wales – still the repository of Indian knowledge – is now racially white. Early on, he explains: ‘I was born white…but when I met your Granma…we was married, and I begun to see the world through Cherokee eyes.’ He becomes, in the words of another character, a ‘white Injun.’ Importantly, the film neglects any mention of the Indian Nations or any other communities of Native people bound to a particular place. Its narrative thus concludes not with Little Tree heading for the Nations (although this proves a false hope in the book). Rather, he heads to the woods with Willow John, the one who was ‘the magic, ‘ to learn ‘all there was to know about being an Indian.’ Countless New Agers…follow Little Tree’s path by journeying into the woods in search of Native wisdom.

In the New Age, in other words, Indianness has been transformed in American popular culture into an abstraction, into pure knowledge, into an essence divested of the histories and the presence of Native people. Indians, it seems, can now be fully possessed by white society” (Going Native, 2001, p.160).

In Rachel Dolezal’s case, I think that “blackness” works in much the same way that “Indianness” does in the film version of The Education of Little Tree.  Blackness here, has been transformed into an abstraction, into pure knowledge, into an essence — and set of hairstyles — that are divested of the histories and presence of black people who can now (and again) be possessed by white society. Like Granpa Wales who configures himself a ‘white injun’ who has ‘begun to see the world through Cherokee eyes’, Rachel Dolezal may believe that she sees the world through a different set of eyes.

It may well be, as her father explained in an interview, that after Rachel Dolezal’s experience at Howard University and her involvement in social justice work led her to be “assimilated into [black] culture so strongly that that’s where she transferred her identity.”   Perhaps so. And, had she lived her life out like James McBride’s mother did, having and raising black children in a predominantly black community and serving in a black church away from any kind of media (or Internet) attention, she might have “crossed over” with little more than whispers.

But this moment, right now, is a really challenging one in which to just cross over into another racial identity without anyone noticing.

This Moment Right Now: Visual Digital Culture, Black Twitter, #WhiteTears and Trolls

As Lisa Nakamura has so deftly explained, we live in a visual digital culture which is governed by “racio-visual logic.”  The Internet is a visual technology, Nakamura reminds us, a protocol for seeing that is interfaced and networked in ways that produce a particular set of racial formations. Within this visual digital culture, it is unfathomable that someone could become any kind of public figure and not have childhood photos appear. The fact that Rachel Dolezal believed that she could be in a public role, like leader of a local NAACP chapter, and not have her past revealed speaks to the depth of her self-delusion.

She also seriously underestimated the swift ferocity of Black Twitter. Once #RachelDolezal became a hashtag, the speed of uncovering her past was lightening quick. As Sanjay Sharma observes, racialized hashtags form and change meaning quickly on Twitter and as Sarah Florini notes, it is a powerful resource for the performance of black cultural identity. But make no mistake. Black Twitter is does not suffer fools, or minstrels or racists, lightly. Misjudging the powerful force of Black Twitter, and not having much of a following among black folk on Twitter, were part of Dolezal’s undoing.

Jon Ronson, defender of another white woman at the center of a Twitter firestorm (Justine Sacco, part of what prompted me to launch this series), has also been quick to jump to the defense of Rachel Dolezal. Perhaps no surprise since his main point seems to be coming to the aid of white women. If I were to predict what happens next, I would anticipate that there will be a lot of coming to Rachel Dolezal’s defense, clucking about her hurt feelings and you can find that all under the hashtag #whitetears. Meanwhile, black women on social media get regularly attacked, dragged, and their lives threatened and there seems to be little concern about this by the likes of Ronson and others wringing their hands about “public shaming” via social media.

And, finally (I know – so many words!), whenever there’s a trending hashtag with as much activity as this one, especially one about race, there are bound to be trolls. This time, the trolls are the 4chan boys who are trying to disrupt the conversation. So, you know all that mess about “well if, transgender then transracial…” Yep. 4chan trolls. All hail to @FeministaJones for pointing that one out:

 

The whole #wrongskin hashtag is one started by right-wing trolls who want to disrupt any complicated or nuanced discussion about race and racism. Contrary to the simplistic minds of such trolls, the Rachel Dolezal story — whatever the rest of the story turns out to be and there are plenty of unanswered questions — illustrates once again that we need to think more critically and in more nuanced ways about white womanhood.