The video is available here, along with various other UT Writing Center videos.
Difference between undergrad and grad (if oriented toward academia) • Undergrad: smart insight (“At first it might look like this, but if you look more closely you see…”), good close analysis, good organization • Scholarly: insight that changes a scholarly conversation • Grad: insight that extends a (possibly very specific) scholarly conversation in some specific way
Some things that make scholarly writing hard for graduate students (and junior scholars) • We think of “the scholarly conversation” in terms that are too broad (“rhetoric,” “teaching writing,” “Victorian Literature,” “history of slavery”) • We are accustomed to starting the writing process by coming up with our thesis • Asking a graduate student to make a significant contribution to “the field” is like asking a guest to give you advice on redecorating your home when they’re still standing in the front door and haven’t seen the rest of your house • The metaphor of finding a “gap” is advice that made more sense many years ago when it was possible to read “everything” written about a subject • We’re accustomed to letting panic drive the bus (partially in order to manage imposter syndrome) • You read things that write in a way that might be rhetorically unavailable to you (unsupported generalizations about a field, neologisms, swipes at major scholars) and don’t read the genres you’re writing (so you don’t have the templates)
Some potentially useful strategies • Write to learn, to think through things, to imitate others, get some ideas on paper—in other words, be willing to write crap • Get a first draft by imagining a friendly audience (e.g., another student in class, an undergraduate teacher), writing inductively (start with the close analysis), and generally not feeling that you have to write the paper in the order it will eventually have • Start with a question: a puzzle, apparent contradiction, confusion (existing scholarship suggests we should see this here, but we don’t—we see something else; why?) • Write an introduction that works for you (why are you writing about this, what’s the best way to formulate the question, what makes this an interesting question, how did you come to this question) and then write a new introduction as your last step in the writing process • Instead of thinking about a gap, try to formulate a question that might put you in a different posture in regard to existing “literature” on the topic o Additive o Definitional (redefining the question—the “prior question” move) o Methodological (proof of concept) o Refutative o Synthesizing o Taxonomic
There are some things about people who call themselves “conservative” that I find really interesting. To be clear, I think conservatism, as advocated by Schlesinger, Niebuhr, Oakeshott, and various other theorists is an important view that we need in our political deliberations. I don’t agree with it or them—I think they’re wrong. But I think that political deliberation (or, to be honest, any policy deliberation) is better if there are people arguing from various premises (which, as I’ve said in many places, is not a binary or continuum of left v. right). We should have a public sphere of discourse in which there are people arguing vehemently for a social safety net, an unconstrained market, a market that is constrained in such a way to promote fair competition, isolationism, protective trade, free trade, a foreign policy that promotes our economic interests, a foreign policy that promotes democracy, a foreign policy, the government taking on issues of long-term concerns ignored by the market, and so many other positions.
The media is demagogic to keep referring to sources or figures as “conservative” who simply aren’t. Fox News isn’t conservative—it’s pro-GOP. And the GOP is rarely conservative.
Conservatism is skepticism about social change, grounded in skepticism about human nature (so “prosperity gospel” is completely incompatible with conservatism). In fact, people who call themselves “conservative” are far closer to “neo-liberal” than “conservative,” at least insofar as what they claim to have as principles. Neo-liberals (such as Reagan) endorse “a policy model that encompasses both politics and economics and seeks to transfer the control of economic factors from the public sector to the private sector. Many neoliberalism policies enhance the workings of free market capitalism and attempt to place limits on government spending, government regulation, and public ownership.”
The GOP is and has long been intermittently neo-liberal; they’re neo-liberal in terms of the principles they claim to have, but not in terms of policy agenda, as various sources have noted. The one position on which the GOP has been consistent since 1968 is racism—sometimes dog whistle, and sometimes trumpeted. When it comes to neo-Jim Crow policies (that is, laws that make it harder for non-whites to vote) they reject the notion that a free market will lead to the right outcomes. And they long have–the Georgia race-based voter suppression “is the sort of policy Republicans used to enact quietly, with little protest, back before everybody detested them.”
So, in the GOP ideological world, saying that someone is “woke” is an insult. What does it mean to be “woke”?
I have to say that I haven’t heard a leftist use the term “woke” in anything other than an ironic way in years, but a google search suggests that some people are still using it in the old way, which was “being awake to social injustices , especially those created by racist institutions.”
What’s incredibly weird about how the pro-GOP media and supporters use the term is that’s what they mean too. They believe that being “woke” means calling attention to racist injustice.
They think it’s a joke because because they believe that there is no racism. Because they’re racist.
Although they admit that non-whites have higher rates of getting arrested, convicted, and killed, have a harder time getting jobs or apartments, and are generally treated worse, they think that’s because non-whites deserve the treatment they get—a very racist belief. Pro-GOP are sad puppies because racist books don’t win prizes, publishers decide not to publish racist books, scholars who do shitty research that supports racism have trouble getting published, people who say racist things get criticized, racists get fired, companies and advertisers don’t want to be associated with racists. They’re victims because they can’t advocate racism without getting called racist.
So, people who claim to be the party that advocates personal responsibility feel sorry for themselves if people hold them responsible for their statements and actions. If you’re bragging that you aren’t “woke,” you’re bragging that you’re racist, and you’re bragging that you’re a whiner who doesn’t like to be called racist.
Image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Onion_bulbs#/media/File:Cebolas.JPG
When I first read that Hitler was vegetarian, I found all sorts of reasons to say he wasn’t really vegetarian. For instance, and this is just one of the deflections I found, I decided (and told people) that he was what snarky vegetarians call “carbotarian,” meaning he just ate pasta and dairy. And some people say he sometimes ate meat. The fact is that he was vegetarian. But the interesting question is: why did I care so much that I would engage in hair-splitting about it? Why was his being vegetarian such a threat to me that I, a scholar of argumentation, engaged in really bad arguments to make him not a vegetarian?
Because that’s how we all are when it comes to protecting our sense of our in-group as essentially good.
Vegetarians are an in-group for me. I have some grumps with vegetarians, but, since they’re an in-group, I always attribute basically good motives to them (even when I think they’re wrong). And that’s pretty typical for how all of us cognitively manage appalling behavior on the part of an in-group member. Once we’ve gone through “they didn’t do it,” “it wasn’t that thing,” “others have done worse,” and we’ve got Hitler, and he’s in our in-group, then we say, “he isn’t really in our in-group.”
So, obviously, this post isn’t really about Hitler, and it isn’t about vegetarians, but it’s about how we engage in actively stupid and irrational reasoning (“Hitler was a carbotarian”) because we’re really trying to hold onto the moral licensing that in-group membership gives us.
“Moral licensing” is the term that some researchers use for the fact that we all engage in very bad math about our own behavior. We have a tendency to engage in a credit/debit calculation: I did this good thing, so it’s okay for me to do that bad thing. But it’s always bad math. Giving some money to a homeless person on the freeway off-ramp doesn’t erase from the ledger voting for criminalizing homelessness or cutting services to the poor. But that’s how we reason.
I love the story in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov about the onion. A woman who has been completely evil in her life begs to be lifted from Hell on the basis of having once given a beggar an onion. It doesn’t work because that one act of kindness was just the only time she was ethical. In-group membership is the onion—it’s the one thing we do that we hope will justify everything we do and are.
The fantasy of in-group social licensing goes further—it goes into our fantasies about our in-group and history. We all want to believe that we would have been in the resistance, we would have been abolitionists, we would never have supported Hitler because our in-group is good, and therefore members of our in-group have always been on the right side of history, and therefore we would have made ethical choices.
But, if Hitler was vegetarian, and vegetarians are an in-group for me, then my in-group identification doesn’t guarantee I would never have supported Hitler. Hitler being a vegetarian means that being vegetarian isn’t a guarantee that I am and would always have been good.
And that is why I was so intent on profoundly irrational ways of trying to make Hitler not a vegetarian: because what was at stake was not whether he was vegetarian, but whether I was willing to admit that my in-group should have moral license—whether being a member of my in-group means that we are guaranteed to be right and good on the whole and can therefore be shitty at all sorts of individual moments.
What I had to do was to step back from my thinking about Hitler in terms of trying to hold onto a moral license for vegetarians and instead look at all the major scholars of Hitler, and admit that there was only one that would support my argument. More important, I had to think about how I was arguing. Could I find data to support my claim? Sure. Anyone can find data to support any claim. Having data doesn’t make an argument rational.
What I couldn’t do was make an argument that Hitler wasn’t really vegetarian that wouldn’t also mean all sorts of other people weren’t really vegetarian. What I couldn’t do was create a set of criteria of vegetarianism that I was willing to apply across people I do and don’t like (including me).
There are people who claim that Nazism was Protestant, left-wing, Catholic, or atheist, and they are making arguments as desperately irrational as my trying to claim that Hitler wasn’t vegetarian. They can find evidence to support their claims, but what they can’t do is come up with a set of criteria for Nazism being Protestant, left-wing, Catholic, atheist, or whatever that wouldn’t also apply to lots of governments, groups, and people (even including themselves) that they don’t want to condemn. For instance, if Hitler was left-wing because he supported a social safety net, then so was Reagan. If Hitler was Protestant because many of his supporters were Protestant, then Niemoller and Bonhoeffer were Nazis. If voting for Hitler becoming dictator means a group was Nazi, then Catholics were Nazis. Instead of deflecting the data, we need to think about the major premise: supporting a social safety net doesn’t make a person left-wing (as both Reagan and Eisenhower show); that Protestant areas gave Nazis a lot of support doesn’t change that the Catholic Party voted unanimously for Hitler becoming dictator. In-group membership is not some kind of “you’ve always been on the right side of history” guarantee.
Hitler was right-wing. There is simply no doubt about that. He was part of a right-wing coalition, he supported right-wing policies, and right-wing politicians saw him as any ally. The only people to vote against his becoming dictator were democratic socialists.
But, and this is the important point: Nazism eventually got buy-in from most Germans. Nazism was not a system of a small group of people who, because of their being members of some out-group, were able to force others to do tasks those people knew were wrong and didn’t want to do. Nazism was a group of policemen standing by a ditch murdering Jews even when they didn’t have to. And that group had people from all over the political, religious, and cultural spectrum. Nazism is not what that out-group does. It is what members of our in-group did. It isn’t what people like us would never do; it’s what people like us did. If we don’t understand that, then we will never understand Nazism.
We are so desperate to hold on to in-group moral licensing that we compulsively engage in all sorts of hair-splitting (not really vegetarian, dog-lover, conservative, Catholic, Protestant), even when that hair-splitting is completely inconsistent. That we use that kind of hair-splitting to pretend that people like us had nothing to do with Nazism (although they did) isn’t the worst consequence of in-group membership being treated as moral license.
In addition to in-group moral licensing enabling us to engage in bad math about behavior, and tell ourselves comfortable lies about how our in-group is always on the right side of history (and therefore we are, always will, and always would have been on the right side of history), it enables Machiavellianism and a sloppy moral relativism. Machiavellianism, in psychology, is a personality trait of people who “are temperamentally predisposed to be calculating, conniving, and deceptive. Essentially amoral, they use other people as stepping stones to reach their goals.” Machiavellianism says that strategies for getting what we want—the means—are amoral. Moral licensing says that lying, coercion, violating the law, blackmail—they’re amoral. What makes them moral or immoral is whether the person is engaged in them is in- or out-group. Since the in-group is essentially moral, then any act on the part of an in-group member oriented toward the triumph of the in-group is moral, even if we would condemn it as immoral were it done by out-group (once again, moral licensing). This sense that the in-group can behave in ways we would normally condemn as immoral and yet still praise their actions as moral is the basis of far too many Law and Order episodes, as well as almost all action movies.
In-group moral licensing is all about saying that we are allowed, in this moment, because of who we are and what we believe, to engage in behavior we on principle condemn, while we continue to claim that we are adherent to that principle. Moral licensing enables us to claim that we are committed to principles we violate (feminists and Bill Clinton, Mitch McConnell and the timing of appointing a SCOTUS justice). In-group moral licensing enables factional Machiavellianism.
I’m not saying that “both sides are equally bad”—I don’t think US politics is about two sides, and I’m not going to endorse the bad math of in-group moral licensing. More important, it doesn’t matter if the “other side” violates a principle. If we violate it, then it isn’t a principle for us. As Bill Murray says in Ghostbusters, it’s more of a guideline than a rule.
In-group moral licensing enables a kind of sloppy moral relativism in that the morality of an action is entirely dependent on whether the person engaged in the action is in- or out-group.
Here’s what I’m saying.
We can have a political world in which political leaders are motivated by the principles that maintain democracy or we can have factional Machiavellianism. If people want to engage in rabid factionalism, then they should own it, and stop claiming that they are acting on any principle other than promoting the in-group.
I’m a big fan of a guy who is very unpopular in US political discourse right now, who completely rejected the notion that your in-group membership means you can treat people in ways you would never want to be treated. If you take seriously what he said, then there is no such thing as moral licensing. That you believe that you are on the side of the good—that you believe your in-group is good—doesn’t, by his standards, mean that you can violate principles you want maintained on your behalf.
As I said, not a lot of people care about what he said. He didn’t say “do unto others in your in-group” or “do unto others except out-group.” He didn’t mumble.
And, if you’re claiming something is a principle, except when it isn’t, it isn’t a principle. It’s a rationalization. Hitler was a vegetarian. Your in-group membership is an onion. It will not pull you to heaven.
A stained glass from the Brussels Cathedral showing Jews desecrating the host, a libel that led to a massacre of Jews and a Catholic cult was recognized until 1968.
I retired for several reasons, but one of them was so that I could work more. I love visiting campuses and classes (it’s teaching without the grading), doing podcasts, and writing. I think I wrote five or six contributions to book collections this year, visited three or four classes, and gave two or three workshops. I made a lot of progress on a new book. That’s what I wanted to do with my retirement. If anything, I’d like more class visits, workshops, contributed chapters, and lectures than I had this year. I’m saying this just to be clear that I don’t object to working, but I object to working when something is supposed to be play.
I signed up for a course that was supposed to be play—about the Inquisition (way out of my area of expertise). It wasn’t play; it was work. The first part of the course was about various heresies in the early Christian church, and it was fascinating, useful, thoughtful, and nuanced. And then we got to the Inquisition. And I dropped the course because it turned into work.
But the way that this class was work is a useful example for something I’ve had a lot of trouble explaining in my writing: how in-group favoritism can seem and feel harmless, since it happens when we’re focused on praising or defending (especially defending) our in-group, and we don’t necessarily mean to do so by denigrating, blaming, or negatively stereotyping some out-group. But it happens. What I have trouble explaining is that in-group favoritism can easily lead into defending the in-group in such a way that problematic in-group behavior gets minimized, redefined, dissociated, and deflected onto the victims, and then it becomes racist.
And that’s what happened in this class. And you see it all the time—people trying to defend Prince Philip end up diminishing (or seeming to justify) his racism, probably out of the impulse to give a very, very old guy a break.[1]
When we admire a person, civilization, or policy of the past, we’re almost certainly admiring something racist, colonialist, misogynist. That’s just how history works. It doesn’t mean that we can’t admire anything or anyone in the past. The false assumption that things (people, institutions, actions) are either good or evil, and that it is an absolute binary—good things are purely good, and anything not purely good is evil—means that we have trouble talking usefully about racism. If we think of racism as an evil, and that no good person has any evil, then we either have to condemn everyone as equally evil, or we have to find ways to say that the in-group wasn’t evil. And so we justify, deflect, and rationalize the racism of people, institutions, or practices that we believe aren’t completely evil.
And then we’re enabling racism.
If we stop thinking about racism as an evil pit in which evil people live, and instead as an unconscious and damaging way that we understand our world, then we can simultaneously say that someone was racist, and that that someone did a lot of good things. We can praise that for the good things, and yet condemn their racism. In other words, condemning racism isn’t condemning a person as a being spit into the outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth—it’s condemning what they’ve said or done. Similarly, condemning an institution for racism isn’t necessarily saying that the institution has never done anything good; it’s saying the institution engaged in racist practices.
And, once we can say and see that someone or some institution we admire has done and said racist things, then we are more open to seeing how we do racist things. And then we can try to be less racist. As long as we refuse to see or acknowledge racism in our in-group, we will not change the actions and beliefs that are racist.
As I’ve argued elsewhere, neither demagoguery nor racism are necessarily intentional—in fact, I think it’s pretty rare that someone believes that they are engaged in demagoguery or being racist and does so anyway.[2] And racism is not about individuals who are consciously hostile to members of other races, or individuals who decide that they will get up today and be racist; it’s often about how in-group favoritism fuels, justifies, or enables us to ignore systemic differential treatment of various groups. It’s about how people only think about this particular policy, person, incident, issue, or case affects us without thinking about how what we’re saying has larger and longer implications and consequences.
And here I should explain briefly about in- and out-groups. In-groups are groups we’re in—they’re groups we use to identify ourselves to others, and whose basic goodness is intermingled with our own. If I believe that my rescuing dogs from shelters is a good thing, then I will think of myself as in the category of people who rescue dogs from shelters—I’ll identify with them, in Kenneth Burke’s terms. And, since I think I’m good for rescuing dogs, then I’m very likely (illogically) to decide that people who rescue dogs are good. (Since I’m good for rescuing dogs, people who rescue dogs are good.) They’re in my in-group, and, if that group is accused of bad behavior, I’ll defend it as vigorously as I’d defend and deflect accusations of bad behavior against me.[3]
That’s what this prof was doing (and what we all do). He was responding to ways that Catholicism has been under attack. And, to be clear, it has. Most of our notions about the torture devices of the Inquisition are 19th and 20th century tourist trap bullshit or anti-Catholic demagoguery. And, like many people defending their in-group, he engaged in textbook in-group favoritism and its attendant deflection and dissociation (in the rhetorical sense, explained below). He over-defended his in-group to the point that he got into very creepy and not okay territory. As do we all. And that is my point in this (very long) post.
Here was his argument about the Inquisition. Initially, the “inquisition” was the first step in someone having been accused of heresy, and it was conducted by the church, and oriented toward persuasion. It only involved “minor” torture (he used that term multiple times), and the vast majority of people expressed sorrow that they had been wrong in their doctrine, and were happy to have been corrected. They were given some minor penance. Only a small percentage were handed over to the secular authorities, who tended toward execution. So “the Church” didn’t execute people; secular authorities did. The Spanish Inquisition was entirely secular authorities. The official position of the Catholic Church was that conversos (Jews who had been forcibly converted or only converted to escape death) could renounce their conversion with no punishment. Many didn’t, and so, when the Spanish Inquisition started—which he was clear was initially completely out of control, and basically a witch hunt—and conversos were particularly victimized, many came forward to prevent being executed, and they blamed their drifting back into Jewish practices on Jews (since they often chose to live in Jewish communities). So, the secular authorities decided that Jews were infecting the state and expelled them. The question of the burning of the Torahs also came up, which he described as, after the initial burning, very minor. As long as authorities didn’t know about the Torahs, they wouldn’t do anything, so, when it happened, it was because another Jew had reported that there was a Torah.
Like much in-group favoritism that drifts into racism, it was thoroughly well-intentioned. He was trying to counter the anti-Catholic demagoguery of the 18th and 19th centuries that created myths we still have about the Inquisition and Catholicism. Richard Hofstadter once said that “anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan,” and he was right. People opposed to pornography in principle could read descriptions of convents as whorehouses for priests and feel simultaneously pruriently stimulated and self-righteous. Six Months in a Convent and Awful Disclosures of Maria Monkwere best sellers, after all.
Torture devices attributed to the Inquisition are almost all semi-pornographic (or full-on pornographic) imaginations of Protestants, such as the Iron Maiden (which was never used in the Inquisition). But, there is one device they used (as did the Nazis), the strappado. Since strappado is so horrifying, but I will link to something, and, just all the content warnings. It’s torture. This professor said the strappado was “minor” torture, and that people who were threatened with it were “persuaded.”
So, let’s take seriously what he was claiming (more seriously than he did). If the strappado was minor torture, and someone told, “Agree with me, or we’ll apply the strappado to you” was an object of persuasion and not coercion, then were I to say to him, “I think you’re wrong, so, either agree with me, or I’ll use the strappado against you,” then he would say I persuaded him.
Of course he wouldn’t. But, if he wouldn’t, then his whole argument about the “inquisition” being about persuasion and not coercion collapses.
He could say that people confronted with strappado were facing “minor” torture (and people who were threatened with their holy books being burned was “minor”) because he never imagined himself as the object of that behavior. I want to stop here for a moment, and emphasize this point. He would never have told the story of the Inquisition the same way he did had roles been reversed, and Catholics been treated exactly as Jews and Muslims were. He would never make the claims about the Inquisition had he been the one “persuaded” by the threat of the “minor” torture of the strappado.
In-group favoritism is always a failure of imagination. It means we deflect, dissociate, rationalize, or minimize behavior toward others we would be outraged were that behavior oriented toward us because we are imagining the situation only from the in-group position. We don’t imagine ourselves being the object of in-group action, only the subject.
We are all drawn to defending our in-group, and we therefore do what he did. We minimize the actions of our in-group (strappado was minor), put our behavior in the most favorable possible light (threatening someone with strappado if they don’t confess and renounce their beliefs is “persuasion”), deflect responsibility onto the victims (Jews turned other Jews in—this was an important point for him), engage in the most hair-splitting of rhetorical dissociation (so “the Catholic Church” is not what Catholics, nor Catholic governments do, even if they have officials of the Catholic Church participating, but only [the most rhetorically useful] statements on the part of the Pope).
I want to pause on a point that is easily lost. The Catholic church banned the Torah—he made a big point that Jews were allowed to argue for it not being banned—and so any Jewish community with a Torah had to live in constant fear that they would have their Torah confiscated and burned. He dismissed that condition as minor, and he said a Torah was only burned if a member of the Jewish community reported that there was a Torah.
He may be technically correct that Jews during the Inquisition and throughout the many years of the Torah being prohibited were “turned in” by other Jews. Why make that point? People who want to defend the slaveocracy of the US will often point out that African slaves were initially enslaved by other Africans. Why is that point relevant?
When I’ve asked people, they say, “Well, it’s true.” Well, lots of things are true. It’s also true that the “secular” authorities that engaged in the behavior he wants to deflect and dismiss were Catholic governments, who saw themselves as promoting Catholicism. It’s true that the Catholic church actively venerated the massacres of Jews until the 1960s. Simon of Trent was in the Roman Martyrology until 1965. The cult over the Brussels massacre of Jews was recognized by the Catholic Church until 1968. I could go on. (I could also go on about Protestant abuses of Jews.) It’s also true that conservative white Evangelicals defended slavery (and segregation), and still do.
That some Jews turned in a Jewish community for having a Torah, or that Africans sold other Africans into slavery has no relevance to the question of whether Catholics persecuted Jews or Americans bought slaves. Nor do those facts make the persecution of Jews or American slavery any less appalling and immoral than they were.
So why did he emphasize it?
People who are irrationally committed to defending the in-group shift the question of “did our in-group do this bad thing” to “are we, and we alone, responsible for the tragic consequences of our behavior?” And then we try to find other groups on whom we can fling some of the blame, as though that’s relevant. It isn’t. Whether Catholics who banned and burned Torahs were sometimes assisted by Jews doesn’t change that Catholics banned and burned Torahs. Whether Africans sometimes sold other Africans into slavery doesn’t change that Americans are entirely responsible for American slavery.
What if looking at history wasn’t about defending our in-group, but about understanding what happened? What if the question was one about rhetoric? Instead of trying to deflect, dissociate, and diminish the bad behavior of our in-group, what would it be like if we instead asked a question about rhetoric: how did our in-group–which we want to believe is good–get persuaded into doing that bad thing?
And then we don’t have to blame Jews for Torahs getting burned or Africans for US slavery. We don’t have to have a contest about Protestants v. Catholics in terms of bad behavior. We don’t have to call behavior “minor” that we would be outraged were it to happen to us. We can acknowledge that being a member of our in-group doesn’t guarantee that we’re right. We can be part of the vexed, complicated, and unclear world of doing wrong when we don’t mean to, of failing to think from the perspective of others.
Just to be clear: I think the professor is a very good man, and a great scholar, and almost everything he said was (technically) true—except calling strappado minor torture. That’s just false. Setting aside that (kind of horrifying) rationalization of Catholic practices, I’ll say that it wouldn’t surprise me at all if he genuinely had very good friends who are Jews, and he would be outraged, I think, at the implication that he was even mildly anti-semitic. He was very clear that the treatment of Jews under Torquemada was appalling, and he didn’t defend the expulsion of the Jews from Spain at all. He is not hostile to Jews; he doesn’t want Jews expelled from anywhere; he doesn’t want Jews tortured. He’s just very invested in defending Catholicism.
So, I’m not writing about him because I think he is a terrible person—I think he’s a good person. He’s a careful scholar, and a dynamic teacher, and working hard to combat anti-Catholic demagoguery.[4] What I’m saying is that he is us.
We like to imagine that racism is a self-conscious hostility to members of another race, but I think it’s most often in-group defensiveness. People who refuse to think that policing might be racist are more interested in defending an in-group (white police officers) than they are in deliberately promoting violence against non-whites. Regardless of the intention, defending the police to the extent that it involves a refusal to acknowledge racist policing means defending racist policing. People who are committed Lutherans, Republicans, Democrats, vegans, second-wave feminists who are more interested in defending Lutherans, Republicans, and so than we are in trying to make our in-group less racist are racist.
Being Catholic, Republican, or supporting the police doesn’t mean you’re racist. Defending Catholics, Republics, or the police doesn’t make you racist. Being Protestant, Democrat, or criticizing the police doesn’t mean you aren’t racist. Supporting our in-group by deflecting or diminishing our in-group racism is racist.
It doesn’t matter if our in-group is gun owners, Lutherans, vegetarians, Texans, Democrats, Christians, dog-lovers, or anything else. Being right means admitting we’ve been wrong. It means not deflecting, dissociating, and minimizing about how our in-group has been very wrong.
The irony of this very good, and I think very devout, Christian promoting narratives that defend his in-group (Catholics) at the expense of his non-in-group (Jews) and his out-group (Protestants) is that he is, as are we all, rejecting what Christ said. He is a good scholar, but he’d be a better one, and we’d all be better people, were we to take seriously: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
[1] Instead of refusing to call him racist, or pretend he didn’t say racist things, it would have made more sense just to say, “Yeah, racist.”
[2] I’m saying rare just because I don’t like all or never statements, but I honestly can’t think of a time. Even racists like David Duke or Adolf Hitler insisted that they were being realists, not racists.
[3] If I slip from believing that adopting surrendered dogs is a good thing to believing that adopting surrendered dogs is what good people do, then I’ll start to denigrate people who do something else, like get dogs from responsible breeders. That’s a different post.
[4] Which, oddly enough, still exists. For reasons to complicated to explain, I recently ran across work by a major figure among fundagelicals who gets lots of churches to support his work to spread “Christianity,” oriented entirely at Catholic areas.
Various people have said that what states like Georgia are doing is just Jim Crow voting practices—setting in place laws that keep Black people from voting, or from having their vote count as much as the votes of white people. The pro-GOP media sphere (and a shout-out to getting your people in line with repeating the talking points!) are saying that what Georgia did to restrict the ability of people to vote was not going back to Jim Crow because Jim Crow was racist, and this is not racist. It’s political. It’s about keeping Democrats from voting.
They say it’s fine to make it hard for Democrats to vote because they believe that Democrats don’t have a legitimate political position that should be represented in our democracy. They believe that Democrats are all dupes, and so Democratic-prone groups of people should be treated differently from how they want GOP-prone groups treated (thus, they’ve made rural voting easier, but urban voting harder).
I have to say that we’re at the point when it’s openly okay for the GOP to say that they want a one-party nation, while they accuse Dems of being fascist and authoritarian. You might quibble whether a one-party state is truly fascist, but it certainly isn’t democracy.
[There’s a long passage I deleted about how what the GOP is doing in regard to voting rights is a violation of what Jesus very clearly said, but I’m deleting it because it’s naive to pretend that the GOP cares about what Jesus said.]
But, back to the argument. We have a deliberately false narrative about the history of race in the US. That deliberately false narrative says that there were people who got up in the morning, looked themselves in the mirror, and said, “I hate Black people, and every day and every way I will make my hatred of them obvious.” And that is what racist people did. So, “Jim Crow” was racist people engaged in actions that they said were racist that they knew came out of hate. And, therefore, as long as we don’t feel hateful toward others, and we aren’t deliberately trying to hurt a race we know we hate, we aren’t doing something racist.
That’s a racist way to think about race. It’s racist because it’s a way of thinking about racism that enables racism.
In addition, there’s a lot of deliberate muddling of what segregation was and how it worked. “Jim Crow” is used in a broad manner to mean all the ways that various states (not just “Southern”) ensured that African Americans and other non-white groups were held to second-class citizen status.
Most people I know who live in segregated states don’t actually know what the culture of segregation meant. They have images of water fountains or food counters, and of lynchings on the part of toothless rednecks done in the dark who bragged about their racism, and far too many of them believe that most ministers opposed segregation.
Conservative Christians supported segregation as not just allowed by Scripture, but actively required—segregation was Christian, they argued, and opposition to segregation was godless communism. Segregation was also, Southern conservatives argued, necessary to prevent the downfall of civilization because, they believed, all other great civilizations decayed when they allowed “race-mixing” to happen. This unmitigated bullshit was popularized by Madison Grant’s incoherent Passing of the Great Race (1916) and Lothrop Stoddard’s tremendously popular Rising Tide of Color (1920) and, although completely discredited by its importance to Nazis (the one good thing Nazis did), it was referenced in Virginia’s argument for prohibiting “miscegenation” in 1967 in their brief for Loving v. Virginia.
Most people I know who live in segregated states don’t actually know what the culture of segregation meant. It meant displays of the power of white supremacy, such as setting up statues to people who were traitors to the US and lost the pro-slavery insurrection they’d started. It meant deliberately reminding non-whites of the power of white supremacy, ranging from lynchings (which were often in public, and often had a pastor present to give a sermon) to separate water fountains or separate entrances to movie theaters (which you can often still see). It meant ensuring non-whites had deliberately inferior schools, health care, social services. It meant that the police were committed to protecting white supremacy, and the whole justice system was oriented toward the principle that the government should protect and not restrict white people, and restrict but not protect non-whites.
Non-whites (meaning African Americans in most places, but including other groups in many states) had to be prevented from voting since they would put in place political leaders who would undermine segregation. Restricting voting was the means to protect racism.
If white supremacists had believed that non-white voters would have voted to support white supremacism, they would have been in favor of non-whites voting.
The prohibitions and restrictions on non-whites voting weren’t advocated, enacted, and enforced by people who thought of themselves as racist. They were advocated, enacted, and enforced by people who thought of themselves as keeping people from voting whose political beliefs were not legitimate, people whose views were un-Christian, communist, and a threat to America. That was Jim Crow voting practices, and that is exactly what the GOP is openly advocating and doing.
That a policy is oriented toward the hegemony of a particular political party—the whole goal of segregation-era voting laws—doesn’t mean that policy gets a “get out of racism free” card. If a group is trying to prevent a party coming to power because that marginalized party would enact anti-racist policies, then trying to restrict the power of that party is trying to protect racism. It’s racist.
In theory, the poll tax wasn’t racist—it didn’t mention race. In practice, it was disparately applied, and it was all about race. It was all about white people believing that non-white people aren’t really citizens whose views on politics should have the same power as the beliefs of white people.
In the Jim Crow era, all sorts of laws were passed that didn’t explicitly mention race, but that were intended to make sure that non-whites couldn’t have the same political power as whites. That’s what Jim Crow voting did.
