Category: racism

Racism, slavery, and nativity scenes

You might have noticed that nativity scenes have three wise men. Scripture doesn’t say there were three, nor does it specify that one is African. But, that’s what they always have (and the Holy Family is always white, often blond).

So, where did those details come from? From the need to shift slavery into a race-based and perpetual condition. In general, except for a few striking exceptions like the Spartans’ enslavement of the Helots, slavery was generally a temporary condition, the consequence of something like indebtedness or capture in war, and wasn’t connected to any notion of race (which itself wasn’t really a concept until the 15th or 16th centuries).  Enslaved people often had ways of working their way out of slavery, slavery didn’t necessarily extend to their children, and it certainly didn’t apply to everyone like them.

But, for various reasons, at a certain point, people needed to justify slavery as a necessary consequence of having a particular heritable identity. At that point, Christians adopted the Muslim reading of Scripture, and began to read Genesis IX as God’s creation of races. Genesis IX involves Noah’s three sons, and racists read that passage as God’s creation of Africans, whites, and Asians. That reading was especially useful for, and promoted among, pro-slavery rhetors in the US because it appeared to legitimate southern practices (actually very extreme) by grounding them in Scripture. So, as Stephen Haynes shows, reading and portraying the wise men as three–a white, African, and Asian–was part of back-reading Scripture to legitimate the notion of three races, and the notion that one was condemned to servitude.

It’s interesting to look at representations of the nativity, and notice the moment that you get the three races, and where those paintings are from.

I think of myself as a good listener, and a critical interpreter, but, when a pastor said, “Listen carefully to this passage,” and then read it, and then said, “How many wise men did the passage say there were,” I was certain I’d heard him say three. We always read by what we think we know.

Things like this Nativity scene are perfect examples of how racism actually works. Too many people think that racism involves self-conscious intent, a specific desire to oppress or slur a race, but nobody got up in the morning and, to meet their daily quota of racist acts, decided to put together this Nativity scene. They might have even thought (as I once mistakenly did) that such scenes are anti-racist because they show the diversity of people worshipping Jesus. And it wouldn’t be much better if they made all the participants white. The problem with racism and representations of traditional scenes is that those representations almost inevitably rely on conventional understandings of what happened (I thought there were three wise men). Given how deeply interwoven racism is in our traditions and conventions, a representation that is simultaneously comfortably traditional and not comfortably racist is often impossible. And that is how racism works.

The photo at the top of this article is from the paper copy of the catalog for Frontgate. You can get the whole set for about $2k, or maybe not. It appears to have disappeared from their online ordering.

Niemoller and the “atheists are bad because Nazis were atheist” argument

A lot of people love to quote Martin Niemoller, thinking he was a poet who wrote a poem that functions as a metaphor for complying with evil.

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

There are various versions of it, some of which begin with the Nazis coming for communists first, and some with the Nazis coming for the Jews first. But, it wasn’t actually a poem. It was something that Neimoller said in lectures, because it wasn’t metaphorical—it was his narrative of what actually happened to him, and how he actually responded. And his whole point was that he was okay with what the Nazis did as long as he thought their policies didn’t hurt him. It was only when he ended up in jail that the problem with Nazis wasn’t their outcomes (which he liked till they hurt him), but their way. Their process was one to which he should always have objected, but he didn’t because he liked the outcome. Till he didn’t, and then he realized the process had been wrong all along.

Those processes were ones that could be used to hurt him, and so he should have paid attention to them.

I think that’s where we are. I think a lot of people are okay with Trump’s processes because they like the outcomes and they don’t realize those processes could hurt them. Niemoller realized, once he was in jail, that the ends don’t justify the means—because the means remain.

Here’s what Hitler promised: I will protect the in-group. I will institute a government that is not about fairness across groups; my policies will be entirely about promoting and protecting the in-group. That is a way  of determining policy: the government should protect and support people like me, and it’s not my business if official policy is something I would be outraged if applied to me.

Hitler said (and had always said), there are true Germans, and the German government should protect and promote their interests. That’s an argument (I will protect true Germans), and a way of arguing (laws should be applied differently depending on identity).

That second level is the one Neimoller bungled: he was fine with how the Nazis treated people until and unless it hit people like him (the Christian churches in Germany never objected to the treatment of Jews—they only mildly objected to the treatment of converted Jews; in other words, they only protected am in-group). Niemoller accepted the premised that, as long as your in-group is okay, the government is okay. Let’s think of that as the “argument from in-group/out-group” level. People might support Nazism because it seemed to support their in-group, and the hostile actions were against an out-group.[1] The way that Nazis operated—laws should be applied differently for in- versus out-group—was bad, but Niemoller was okay with it till he was a victim of that way.

This is what is important about Niemoller: his way of thinking was wrong. He was wrong because he was fine with a set of policies that applied to people that he didn’t want applied to him.

In other words, Niemoller was fine with other groups being treated in a way he would not want to be treated. It isn’t about what you’re doing; it’s about how you’re doing something. Are you treating others as you would think fair were you treated that way?

There’s a guy. He said in-group/out-group membership didn’t count. He said fairness across groups matters. Niemoller’s mistake was ignoring what that guy said, and that’s the point of his quote. People shouldn’t judge the actions of another (or a government) on the basis of whether we are harmed or benefitted at this moment, but whether we would think those actions just if applied across groups.

Hitler said (and all demagogues say), “I am you. You and I need to expel/exterminate this group that wants to exterminate us. Because they want to exterminate us, anything we do is justified.”

What Hitler did (and, to be blunt, all authoritarian demagogues do) is equivocate on the construction of that in-group. In-groups are often defined in the negative—we are this because we are not that. We take pride in not being that (to give a personal example, ELCA taking pride in not being Missouri Synod). In a culture of demagoguery, there is an out-group (Jews, communists) and any violence against that out-group is justified because they are toxic to the body politic. You demonstrate your commitment to the in-group by how much hate you express about the out-group.

When Hitler was coming to power, Niemoller was a conservative Lutheran pastor who thought the Nazis might be useful allies in regaining some of the ground lost under the socialist democrats, both in terms of the power of the church (especially Protestant) in material and cultural ways. He thought he was in Hitler’s in-group. And he thought that because there was so much rhetoric that said that there were only two sides: you could be an atheistic communist, or you could be Nazi. Hitler never argued against the many parties in the middle (including Democratic Socialists, who were not atheist, nor fascist, nor communist).

The socialists had been in favor of a separation of church and state, and so allowed secular public education, and Niemoller (and other religious figures) were worried about possibly additionally losing the substantial amount of money they got from the state. He believed, correctly, that the Nazis would not allow for the separation of church and state (whoops on how he read that belief), that they would insist on religion in the classroom, that they would have a government with an openly religious mission, and he thought he could work with them on the money issue. As far as cultural issues, Niemoller’s politics were far closer to the Nazis’ than to the socialists. He believed, correctly, that the Nazis would reinstate conservative policies regarding homosexuality, abortion, birth control, women’s rights, and religious intolerance. Niemoller was pretty typical in that regard. What that means, and this is important, is that Niemoller and people like him, because they weren’t willing to deal with a mild cutting back on their privileges, actively supported a regime that would eventually exterminate them.

And they did it because they were so obsessed with getting certain policy points–abolition of homosexuality, abortion, and birth control; a judicial system that (they thought) would promote their political agenda; financial benefits for the churches; protection of rabidly religious education—that they were willing to overlook how those policy goals would be attained.

But it’s the how that matters. Not just how policy was attained, but how people reasoned.

There is a talking point now that Nazis were atheists, and therefore atheists are bad, so, as long as we keep atheists out of office, we could never have a Holocaust. Hitler talked a lot about God, almost certainly sincerely, and, while he had some higher-level supporters who espoused atheism, most of the higher-ups were some kind of theist (even if neo-pagan), and, overwhelmingly, supporters of the regime were avowed Christian. Nazism was openly genocidal from 1939, and the genocides were not some kind of secret activity on the part of a few people. Genocide was the official and open policy of the Wehrmacht—the orders were to kill everyone who might be a political or ideological threat, and that “threat” was determined racially. People who identified as Christian stood by the side of a ditch and laughed as blood spurted from the layers of people they were killing. Had all the Christians refused to engage in genocide, the war would have ended in 1939. They didn’t. The Nazi regime was a Christian regime because most of the people enacting Nazi policies were Christian.

People who want to argue that being Christian makes someone a better person (really bad theology) and that, therefore, we should only have Christian judges and politicians, try to use Nazi Germany as an example as to why leaders should be Christian. The Nazi regime was atheist, they say, and it was bad, therefore regimes should be Christian. Not everyone in the Nazi regime was atheist, however, and most of the people who voted for, supported, and enacted Nazi policies were Christian. But, that argument is that Hitler’s entourage had a disproportionate number of atheists, and therefore atheists are dangerous. Or, Hitler’s entourage had a disproportionate number of non-Christians, and therefore this is proof that a predominantly Christian government is safe.

Here’s the problem with how people tend to argue (and it’s the problem Niemoller was trying to point to): it isn’t what you argue; it’s how you argue. For a long time, all he cared about was what people were arguing, and then he suddenly realized that what mattered was how they argued.

Milton Mayer’s troubling book They Thought They Were Free describes ten people who submitted to Nazism cheerfully, and who continued to believe that Hitler was good (but had bad advisors). It has a brilliant explanation as to why they continued to believe in Hitler, and one part of the explanation is that people tend to think in the short term as to whether they are, in this moment, better, and not whether the way they got the things they like is a good way. Mayer says that they believed “Adolf Hitler was good—in my friends’ view—up until 1943, 1941, or 1939, depending on the individual’s assessment of his strategy” (69-70). In other words, he was good for Germany until things started to go bad, but Hitler’s strategy was bad from the beginning—his was of deliberating, his plans for world domination, his racist policies. It’s as though they thought that drinking arsenic was great till the moment it killed someone—they didn’t acknowledge that the way Hitler ruled was always going to end up in an unwinnable war, racial extermination, and a devastated Germany.

There are a lot of ways to assess an argument; here I want to mention three. First, it’s a good argument because it’s made by someone you thinking is good. Second, it’s a good argument because it confirms your beliefs, and so it intuitively feels right. Third, it’s a good argument because the way it’s argued would be, you think, a good way to argue even if you didn’t like the outcome.[2] There is a similar division in terms of thinking about politics: you can decide that a policy is good because it’s advocated by someone you like; or it’s good because you’re benefitting from it here and now; or it’s good because the way it was argued and enacted and applied would be, you think, good even if you didn’t benefit from it.

The argument that Nazism was atheist fits into the first and second categories, but not the third. It is probably made by people you like, and it gets you a conclusion you like (Christians are good and Nazis are bad). But the way it’s argued—if you consistently applied that logic—would lead to your endorsing Nazi policies.

I say, “Kale is bad because I threw up after eating it.” If I sincerely believed that was a good way to argue, then I’d be willing to stop consuming anything that made me throw up. [In rhetorical terms, the enthymeme has a major premise I’ll support in other circumstances.] But, what if I threw up after drinking tequila? If I’m going to stick with the premise established in regard to kale, then I’d also conclude that tequila is bad (personally, I’d support that conclusion), in which case my argument about kale is logical. But, what if I ever want to drink tequila again (and, really, I’d say you should think about that), then my conclusion about tequila has a different premise from my argument about tequila.

In other words, the major premise of my stance about kale (things that make me throw up should be avoided) is not one I hold consistently, so it isn’t actually helping me make decisions about what to consume. It’s only helping me rationalize decisions I make for other reasons.

If I like tequila (really, why would you do that?), I’ll find lots of reasons to exempt it from the “it makes you throw up” argument I’m willing to make for kale. And that’s the important point, if I’m not willing to reason across kale and tequila, then I don’t have a logical argument. I’m just looking for reasons to hate kale and like tequila (don’t—don’t do that).

If my way of making decisions is to protect my commitments, then I will start with a premise (kale is bad), and I will just look for datapoints to support that premise. And here’s what’s important for thinking about how people reason—I will feel that I am logical in my feelings about kale since I can find lots of evidence to support my claim. You can find lots of evidence to support any claim, after all. What you can’t find (and this is where Infowars and conspiracy theories get it wrong), is evidence that you apply with consistent premises. But that’s a different pot. Here’s the point I’m making: if I’m not actually willing to apply my reasoning about kale to other things that make me throw up, then I’m not being logical; I’m just neck-deep in the swamp of confirmation bias.

It might be true that kale is bad, but kale being bad doesn’t confirm my way of reasoning. What I mean by that is that it might be true that Nazis are bad political leaders (they are), but that doesn’t mean that Christians are good political leaders. Nazis weren’t bad because some of the Nazi leaders were atheists; Nazis were bad because they were entitled authoritarian racist fascist militarist German exceptionalists who rejected any notions of universal human rights. The Nazi way of reasoning never changed, but its outcomes did—what Mayer shows is that, when that way got people what they wanted, it seemed good; when it didn’t it got bad. They didn’t see that the bad was the inevitable consequence of the apparently good.  The Nazi way of reasoning initially seemed good to Niemoller, because it got him what he wanted. But it wasn’t a good way, because it got him in jail. And then he saw it was bad—it was bad all along, but he didn’t see it till he was in jail.[3]

What the Nazis should teach us is that our group succeeding is not a good reason to support a politician—we should support politicians who advocate policies we would support regardless of whether they benefit us personally. And we shouldn’t just judge an argument as to whether it gets a conclusion we like; we should think about whether we would consider it a good way of arguing for everyone.

And that’s where the “Atheists are bad because the Nazis were bad” gets awful. That argument assumes that you can and should take disproportionate representation of some group in a bad power structure as proof that the group as a whole is evil. Nazis were evil, you reason, and a disproportionate were atheist, and so all atheists are dangerous. So, if that’s a good way to argue, then if a disproportionate number of leaders of Pol Pot’s revolution were left-handed, we should consider left-handed people evil. Or, if a disproportionate number of people in Lenin’s group were Jews, then Jews are bad.

And that is exactly how Nazis did (and do) argue. So, if you think that the presence of atheists in the Nazi regime is proof that Nazism is essentially atheist (regardless of the religious affiliations of the people who enacted Nazi policies) then you’re a Nazi. Lenin’s group had a disproportionate number of Jews, so, your logic says the Nazis were logical to say all Jews are essentially bad. That’s how you reason.

I’m not saying that you think Jews are essentially bad. I’m saying you’re Niemoller. Niemoller didn’t think Protestants should be jailed. But he didn’t like communists or socialists or Jews. And he knew that the Nazis would violate laws and act in authoritarian ways to exterminate out-groups. For a long time, he was only concerned with the outcome of their policies, and not the way they enacted their policies. Hitler was a liar, and had always been a liar, but, when Hitler told a lie Niemoller liked, Hitler’s way of arguing or administering didn’t matter. It was only when Niemoller ended up in jail that he realized Hitler’s way was wrong, and it had always been wrong.

The way matters. If you think that atheists can’t be trusted because leading Nazis were disproportionately atheist, then you think the Nazis were right about the Jews. Or, in other words, you aren’t really thinking.

[1] And here I have to stop and explain that sociologists use the in-group/out-group distinction in a very specific and useful way. People often use “in-group” to mean people in power, but sociologists use it to mean the group you’re in. So, while pitbull owners is not a politically central group, it’s an in-group for people who believe that owning a pitbull is an important part of their identity.

[2] I am in an intermittent state of rage as to how scholars in rhetoric talk about Aristotle’s ethos/pathos/logos—it’s read in light of logical positivists logic/emotion binary. If you read what Aristotle says about politics and ethics, however, I think you end up with something much more like what I’m saying here.

[3] I’d also say it matters because all scams—ethical or monetary—rely on getting people to ignore major premises. If you want to scam someone, you get them to reason the wrong premises. Someone sells you a bad car on the grounds that he’s a nice guy; someone gets you to vote for her on the grounds that she is like you; someone persuades you to buy property on the grounds that he’s sold other property that made money. Those are all arguments that rely on major premises that are obviously invalid.

Migration to Hope: A Call To Action

[This is a guest blog post by Michelle Castillo]

I remember it like it was just yesterday: we had been learning about racisim and discrimination in Ms. Moxley’s fourth grade class. We had read a picture book about Rubi Bridges, and I had been reading Number The Stars – a book about a girl living through Nazi-occupied Denmark- as my take-home book on the unit.

And I was deeply affected.

I went home and at night in my prayer, I cried. I demanded that God tell me how people – how adults – could do such horrible things to other people, to hate so deeply without knowing them, just based on the color of skin or a different belief system. I promised God I’d do everything in my power to change that. And, as all little girls should, I felt I would.

In undergrad, I was blessed to have taken Trish Roberts-Miller’s class on the rhetoric of racism that helped me answer the “how” that comes down to, simply in my mind, fear. Fear of the “other,” that allows us to strip the “other” of humanity and project fear’s progeny of anger and hate into the unthinkable things we do to “others,” like enslave, hose, beat, bomb, and destroy.

Today, our government is tearing children, in some cases toddlers, away from their parents for seeking asylum in our borders. These are families that are fleeing violence and persecution from their countries, and the only way — let me say this again — the only way they can seek asylum is to present themselves at the border. And for doing that, our government is taking their children away. They could be us. Some of us are them. Some of us, our parents or grandparents or great grandparents were them. We could have been them had we been born in another place.

This administration is weaponizing the most powerful feeling on Earth, that many faith traditions use to explain God,
that of a parent’s love for a child — that would literally walk a thousand miles to protect their children from violence only to have that child ripped from their arms — to achieve its twisted immigration ends of deterrence.

Their message: “if you come here with your children fleeing violence, we’ll take your children, so don’t come.”

And this government is getting away with doing this state sanctioned violence towards children – today, right now – because 1) we’ve allowed Trump and his enablers to call immigrants “animals,” to strip all of us, really, that don’t see the world as they do of our humanity, and 2) because of the silence of some of our friends.

Friends that don’t like to talk politics.
Friends that voted for him because he was “prolife” but are now silent in condemning this torture of children.
Friends who, yeah feel bad this is happening, but it’s not happening to them, doesn’t impact anyone they know, so they’re staying out of it.
Friends that see this as a partisan issue and they’re Republican so even though they’re morally repulsed by the idea, they’re uncomfortable speaking out.
Friends that don’t yet know the power of their voice in creating change.

Friends, I realize this has been a long post, but since you’ve stuck with me this far, I’m here to ask you to break your silence. If you haven’t called your elected officials, if you haven’t donated for the legal defense of these children and their families, if you’re a person of faith and haven’t prayed for these families, please do.

As fourth grade Michelle quickly learned, she can’t change the entire world. But you can impact those around you. And that’s a hell of a start.

[Some of] These People Are Animals

[From this article]

From Understanding Genocide

“We cannot expect bystanders to sacrifice their lives for others. But we can expect individuals, groups, and nations to act early along a continuum of destruction, when the danger to themselves is limited, and the potential exists for inhibiting the evolution of increasing destructiveness. This will only happen if people–children, adults, whole societies–develop an awareness of their common humanity with other people, as well as of the psychological processes in themselves that turn them against others. Institutions and modes of functioning can develop that embody a shared humanity and make exclusion from the moral realm more difficult.” (Staub 35)

“Similarly, the philosopher Beryl Land has written about how very often, before the Nazis exterminated Jews, they first reduced them to a ‘subhuman state’ through ‘systematic brutality and degradation.’ This, he argued, made killing them more ‘palatable,’ because it is easier to kill a person once he or she no longer resembles a human being. [….] [P]erpetrators could have focused on the degraded and pathetic state of their victims as justification for both their past and future victimization, even though the perpetrators were actually responsible for their wretched state.” (Newman 59)

I know that people defending our President’s characterizing people trying to come to America as “animals” by saying that he just meant some Mexicans–members of a dangerous gang. And that’s a common move. He didn’t mean everyone; he only meant one part of that group, and it is a justifiable and accurate way to characterize that one part. Thus, Trump’s use of the term “animals” for some people trying to come into the country is nothing like Nazi rhetoric.

Nope, that makes it exactly like Nazi rhetoric about Jews. It’s also exactly like pro-internment rhetoric about Japanese Americans, anti-immigration rhetoric directed at Italians, eastern Europeans, the Irish, the Germans, Muslims, red-baiting, and, well, every argument for disenfranchising, expelling, or exterminating some group.

Nazis regularly acknowledged that not all Jews were bad. What they argued is that some part of that group was so dangerous that none of them should be treated as full citizens (the same argument about all the groups mentioned above), and all should be treated with extreme suspicion.

That kind of move–allowing the worst members to stand for the entire group–is only something that happens with an out-group. But it does happen. And Trump’s rhetoric is vague; he does seem to be talking about all Mexicans, and he is heard as doing exactly that.

Trump’s rhetoric won’t necessarily hurt his chances with Latinx–it’s fairly common for recent immigrants to band together against this set of immigrants (my own family history demonstrates that), and so they are likely to hear him as criticizing some immigrants. It’s easy for people to acknowledge exceptions within the in-group. But non-Latinx aren’t.

But Trump’s way of talking about parts of some immigrant group is vague. A friendly reading says he’s talking about a small group and just failing to make clear that he doesn’t think that subset represents the whole group. A less friendly reading wonders why he keeps making that mistake.

Another friendly reading says he doesn’t make the group/sub-group distinction because the sub-group is a synecdoche for the group as a whole. After all, that’s how thinking about the out-group works–any member can be taken as representative of the whole. And, clearly, that is how many supporters of Trump hear him, especially the non-trivial number of his supporters whose racism motivated their support for him.

More important, that is how exclusionary rhetoric works, including Hitler’s, by allowing or encouraging the public to think that a group is dangerous because its representative members are. What Trump is doing, and has been doing for a long time, is encouraging people to fear immigrants because some of them might be bad. And it’s working.

Easy fascism and romance novels

One thing that is hard for my students to understand is that fascism was (and is) much more normal and widespread than you might think. It appeals to certain surprisingly widespread notions, especially that some people are simply born to be leaders (because of their blood) and we should put all political power in the hands of one of those people.

Elsewhere I’ve written about antisemitism and inter-war thrillers, and here I’ll just give some examples from a fairly banal inter-war romance, D.E. Stevenson’s The Baker’s Daughter (1938).

I liked Stevenson’s Miss Buncle series, so I have nothing against the author (in fact, I know nothing about the author), and my point isn’t that Stevenson is bad–it’s about how normal various notions were that were useful to fascism.

The novel concerns a charming young woman who impulsively decides to keep house for a woman and her artist husband. Sue Pringle is a thoroughly attractive protagonist, with whom the reader is supposed to identify, and she’s a Franco supporter (mentioned twice), her drifting brother is transformed by joining the Army, and the novel completely endorses the notion of the purity of race/entitlement.

(Spoiler alert–but if you haven’t figured this out by about page 29, you don’t know the romance genre)

Sue and the artist fall in love, but there appears to be a problem that in that he runs among the elite, and she is descended from shopkeepers. No, it isn’t a problem! She is the illegitimate daughter of an upper class Admiral!

That’s a common plot point in early 20th century and late 19th century novels, so common that the importance of it can go un-noticed–she was raised by a shopkeeper, as was her mother. The rightness of her marrying into the upper class is settled by blood. A racist notion.

A lot of novels look as though they are critiquing racist notions about the heritability of aristocratic values by showing that an apparently “common” person can have better values than (or just as good as) the elite, but, by the moment of reveal when the hero/ine turns out to have the right blood, they are reinforcing the notions that “blood will tell.”

And then there’s this–when the hero is painting her:

“For instance, thought Darnay [the hero], we may not admire the golden skin and slant eyes of the pure Mongol, but who can dare to say that the Mongol has no beauty of his own? If we do not believe that purity of race is beauty then we deny God and God’s hand in our making–in the making of the races of the world.” (71)

That wasn’t 1938 mainstream anthropology, by the way. Mainstream anthropology was so critical of the notion of race (and especially purity of race) by the teens that racists had to form a new discipline (eugenics). Even biology had a lot of critiques of the notion of race. This was eugenics, not anthropology, and candy to Nazis, American segregationists, and fascists of various stripes.

I’m not saying that Stevenson was a fascist, or that people who like the book are fascists and racist and evil. I’m saying that the basic premises of fascism were (and are) so widespread that they were/are un-noticed.

A racist fascist reading this book would find it confirming–someone neither racist nor fascist would probably not even notice those aspects of the book. Ideology is always about the narratives we tell about causation–what causes some people to be better than others? If we say that blood causes some people to be better than others, then we will be comfortable with racist policies. If someone is in a world in which the dominant narratives all say it’s about blood, that person is likely to find racist policies normal and unremarkable.

Persuasion, as Kenneth Burke said, is about repetition. As Paul Ricoeur said, is about narrative–the stories we tell.

No one will be suddenly converted to racist/fascist ideologies by reading this charming romance. That isn’t my point. What’s important about this book is that it isn’t important. It’s just a romance.

[Image from here: https://paperbackrevolution.wordpress.com/2016/04/04/collins-white-circle-in-australia/fn-stevenson-miss-bun-the-bakers-daughter/]

It isn’t about a person being racist; it’s about doing something racist

When I was wandering around pro-Trump pages and groups prior to the election, I found a large number of people who said, “I don’t like being called racist, and so I’m voting for Trump.”

While I do believe that all racists voted for Trump, I don’t think all Trump voters were racist. And, really, whether they are racist or not doesn’t matter as much as whether we can talk about racism rather than racists. What’s interesting about that argument is that it isn’t just a pro-Trump argument–not all the people who object to being called racist voted for Trump after all–but why people would vote for someone with an obvious record of very racist statements and actions because they themselves feel unjustly accused of racism.

And, so, really, this is about how to talk about racist statements and actions.

Sure, some of the people who come out regularly to support Trump’s racists statements, are avowedly racist—the neo-Nazis who support Trump wholeheartedly [1].  But I want to talk about supporters who aren’t Nazis, don’t like Nazis, and don’t like being called Nazi (or racist).

Being a racist person in our culture (especially media) is associated with all sorts of horrible things—with being vicious, immoral, evil. If you think in terms of good and evil being absolute binaries—something is either good, or it is entirely evil–and you think of racism as evil, then saying that someone is racist is telling them they are entirely evil. And their response is, quite reasonably, they aren’t entirely evil. In fact, they’re good people because they think racism is evil.

This whole situation is complicated because of how racism is a natural out-growth of three conventional ways of thinking—what sociologists call in-group favoritism, what social psychologists call “faith in group entativity,” and what cognitive psychologists call “confirmation bias.”

In-group favoritism

We tend to think in terms of “people like us” and “people not like us.” And, completely unconsciously, we tend to think that “people like us” (the in-group) is better. So, if an in-group member does the same thing as an out-group member, we’ll explain them differently. The in-group member did it because of being a good person (if it’s a good thing), and an out-group member did it for bad reasons.

If I steal a parking place from you, and I appear to be in-group, you’ll either explain my behavior (she was in a rush, she didn’t see me) or make me not in-group (she looks like an LSU fan). There are all sorts of things that factor into your decision as to whether I’m in- or out-group—what bumper stickers do I have on my car, what kind of car am I driving, how am I dressed, what race/ethnicity am I. Racism is simply the tendency to make race, completely unconsciously, one of those factors. Being racist doesn’t make you evil; it makes you human. [2]

If you’re twitchy about people who appear to you to be transgender, and I am otherwise entirely in-group, you might be slightly more hostile in your interpretation of why I took the place than if I were in-group in terms of your ideas about gender, but still less hostile than if I were out-group in every way (a liberal transgender LSU fan). But you would never think, “Oh, I liked that person till I thought gender was not an issue, and now I don’t.” Biases happen in moments of perception—it’s not easy to see when we’re being biased.

People think of racism as a self-aware pure hostility to every member of every other “race.” If that’s what racism is, then you couldn’t do it without knowing, and you couldn’t be friends with anyone of other races, and you would never do anything kind to any member of any other race. The kind of people who support Trump think that’s what it means to be racist—to hate every member of every other race, and so they think they’re being accused of being like that. And so they’re mad. And, if someone in their in-group (especially a person they see as representing their in-group publicly) says something that might be racist, they’ll find ways of excusing it, largely on the grounds that “He isn’t racist, so he can’t have said something racist.”

But that has never been what racism is—it’s never been pure hostility to every other race. Let’s start with the premise that genocide is racist—all advocates of genocide, or race-based slavery, could think of members of other races for whom they had affection. Adolf Eichmann, who relentlessly pursued the eradication of European Jews, emphasized that he had Jewish friends (and he did). Slaveholders talked about their affection for some slaves, advocates of segregation claimed that their stance came from concern for non-whites (see Bilbo’s introduction to his racist book arguing for getting all African Americans out of America, or David Duke, an actual Nazi, talking about his affection for his African-American maid).

So, simply having kind feelings toward people of other races doesn’t make us not-racist. Racism isn’t about feelings that individuals have for others.

In our culture racism is bad, and we have a hard time thinking of acts as bad without immediately jumping to the actor being equally bad. That was a complicated sentence. Here’s what I mean: I spend a lot of time in the courses where racism comes up (courses on racism, free speech, demagoguery, going to war, Hitler) and I say that “being racist doesn’t mean a person is evil.” And some students hear me saying that racism is okay, and they’re shocked. And that isn’t what I’m saying. Not-evil people say and do racist things. We all do racist things, and we aren’t all evil.

Racism is very bad, but not every act of racism is equally bad, and the worst kinds of racism are the consequence of institutional practices, that don’t necessarily involve anyone being deliberately hostile to someone else.

Think about this in terms of disability. My campus is really bad for anyone with even mild mobility issues—lots of the larger classroom have stairs such that you can’t get to the stage if you are on a scooter or in a wheelchair (and it would be really difficult on crutches), there aren’t enough ramps or curb cuts around campus, elevators are wonky and small (and there aren’t enough), there are buildings with stairs in the middle of hallways and at most entrances, and some ramps are too steep. The people who designed those buildings didn’t do so because they were trying to make it hard for anyone with disabilities to navigate campus—they didn’t say to themselves, “Wow, I sure hate people with disabilities—I’m going to put a stairway here.” Instead, they were designing at a time when the style was to have entrances have a few steps—the idea is that they look more elegant that way. The architects didn’t think of what it would be like to navigate the building or campus with a mobility disability (or any other kinds, really) because that concern was invisible to them. They didn’t think. So, what they did was bad and discriminatory, but it didn’t come from evil intentions; it came from a lack of thought.

So, culturally, we need to talk about the harms caused by actions, policies, and institutions, and not whether the individuals involved are good or evil. The next time Trump says something racist, we need to stop shifting the stasis to whether he’s racist—what matters is that thing was a racist thing to say. As long as we allow the stasis to shift to whether he is racist, then his PR people can point out a single non-racist thing he did, or some relationship he has with a non-white, or condemn the people who quote him, or some non-white says he’s okay, or point out that he didn’t do something even more racist.  What he says matters more than who he is. If someone comes back with a “Well, it was an unfortunate comment,” then we can point out he’s got a lot of comments like that. He says a lot of racist things, and that matters, not because of what it means about his soul, but because what he says matters.

People want to believe that our group is basically good, and we are drawn to someone who tells us that. When people are told that someone they believe represents the in-group (when they identify with that person) then they feel that they have been accused of being racist, and that means they feel accused of being evil.

I think it would help if we imagined people as more like those architects—not evil, but thoughtless.

And yet there is a moment when you can stop calling the architect unintentionally thoughtless. If an architect has a history of designing buildings that are inaccessible, and it’s pointed out, and they keep doing it, then we can condemn their architecture as being discriminatory—it doesn’t matter if they have a friend in a wheelchair, or don’t make jokes about disabled people. We can say they shouldn’t design any more buildings.

We can say that a person with a long history of racist statements shouldn’t be in a position of decision-making in which race might matter. That isn’t attacking a group, and it isn’t attacking the person who likes Trump; it’s criticizing Trump. (Of course, charismatic leadership makes this complicated.)

Group entitativity

Social psychologists talk about “group entativity”—that is, the degree to which someone thinks about groups as Real Things. For some people, groups are just ways of grouping things that could be grouped in other ways—you might take a group of college students and group them by year, astrological sign, writing skills, major, paper topic. The value of that way of grouping would depend on what you were trying to do. If you were trying to put students together for group writing projects and wanted to make sure that each group was balanced in terms of skill, then grouping them by astrological sign wouldn’t make any sense. It would make more sense to group for diversity of writing skill. If you were going to have student groups work with a research librarian, then grouping by paper topic would probably make the most sense. That way of seeing groups is as functional and pragmatic.

That pragmatic way of thinking about groups makes some people nervous, since they want to see social groups as Real—they want to believe that people in this group are Really Different from people in that group. They believe that all you need to know about someone you can know by inferring their group memberships, and they reason deductively from that—if you’re a woman, you must be bad at sports. (If you’re a woman, and good at sports, they’ll often invoke the No True Scotsman rule.)

Some people, in other words, strongly believe in group entativity. Sometimes they’ll work to make the groups absolutely perfectly distinct—such as prohibiting African Americans from learning to read, so that they could maintain their belief that African Americans aren’t intellectual, or prohibiting Japanese or Jews from owning land, and then condemn them for not being grounded.

People who believe in Real groups often believe that the fundamental Real distinction is between Good and Bad people. So, when you say that someone in their group is racist, they hear you saying that their group is made up of Bad People. And they know that isn’t true, because they know they do good things.

It’s the same problem with hearing someone say that white people have an advantage—some (white) people hear that as saying that they didn’t work at all, or work for anything. They hear that as a claim that white people are lazy. And that means their group is bad.

They hear it that way because, if groups are Really totally different from one another, then either a group earned what it has achieved through good things or it didn’t.

The notion of white privilege also threatens the Just World Hypothesis, which is central to the Prosperity Gospel. So, saying that the playing field isn’t even, and not everyone who succeeds worked harder than anyone who didn’t, threatens some people’s sense of their group, themselves, and their sense of the very world. That’s why they get so mad.

Confirmation Bias

I’ve written about this a lot, but it’s central. People who believe that groups are Real, and that only Bad People are racist are also likely to believe that you can just look and see if someone is good or not. In other words, they don’t recognize that we are all subject to confirmation bias.

But, if they think in black or white terms, then the notion of confirmation bias is really threatening. If things are either completely good or entirely bad, and research suggests that our perception is flawed, that must be saying that we can never tell whether someone or something is good or bad. It must mean we have no judgment at all, and they can point to lots of times they had good judgment, so their judgment is good, so confirmation bias is wrong.

A sweet case of confirmation bias.

Demagoguery and the “That thing you said was racist” problem

When you have people who reason from identity (people in this group are good, and people in that group are bad), it’s really hard to get them to see that their in-group information sources are giving them bad information. They will believe things that come to them from the in-group because the in-group is good.

If you’re in an echo chamber, as it’s called, it doesn’t look that way because you’re very aware of all sorts of in-group disagreements. You can see disagreement, so you think you’re in a world of dissent. And, if you equate in-group membership and reliability, then you also believe what your in-group information sources tell you that the out-group is saying about you.

Right now, our media world reminds me of the world described by Queen Bees and Wannabes, in which manipulative people create solidarity by repeating nasty things other people (are supposed to have) said about you.

The most damaging aspect of demagogic media, and this is just as true of Fox as it is of OccupyDemocrats, is that it normalizes demagoguery—that is, making every issue an us vs. them issue.

Whether someone said something racist isn’t an us vs. them issue. It’s a what did they say issue.

So, telling someone that they said something racist, or that someone they like said something racist, involves keeping a clear eye on the stasis—it isn’t about which group is better. It’s about what they said. Keep the stasis there.

 

[1] It doesn’t bother Trump supporters that neo-Nazis like Trump; they think revolutionary Marxists liked Obama, and they think that evens things out. Of course, revolutionary Marxists hated Obama, as they hate all third-way neoliberals.

[2] I’m not saying that all forms of in-group favoritism or out-group aversion are the same, equally bad, or anything along those lines. They are wildly different in impact depending on things like social structures, history, power.

[3] It’s important to be careful about how class is factoring in to this—so, if it’s a poor Lithuanian family, don’t ask whether you would judge a rich Moravian (because you’re Moravian) family the same way. Ask whether you would tell the same story about a poor Moravian family.

As long as I can think of someone more racist, I’m not racist at all

My *favorite* assignment in the Rhetoric of Racism course is having students look at a text (or practice) about which there is an argument (ideally a text they think is racist) and explain why there is a disagreement.

There are basically eight ways people argue that a text isn’t racist:

  1. a text isn’t racist if it doesn’t make a big deal about race;
  2. texts are either racist or not racist and so if there is any way in which this text criticizes racism, then it can’t be racist;
  3. it’s just a “feel-good” text and you’re over-reading;
  4. it isn’t racist because what it says is true (in other words, the person saying the text isn’t racist is racist);
  5. racists are people who explicitly and self-consciously hate everyone of every other race, and only racist people say racist things, so if the person created the text isn’t someone who never ever associates with or who never says anything “nice” about any member of any other race, then the text can’t be racist (also known as the “some of my best friends are…” defense);
  6. the author didn’t intend to be racist (so it’s only racist if the individual who created the text engaged in actions s/he knew to be racist);
  7. it doesn’t have the marks of hostility toward another race (the tone isn’t over-the-top, it doesn’t use racial epithets);
  8. it isn’t racist because there are other texts that are more racist, or it doesn’t endorse the most extreme versions of racism, or the person knows of people who are more racist (what I’ll call the “Eichmann defense”).

This is also a list of how racism is legitimated—these are the ways that people allow racist practices to continue. They’re all complicated to talk someone out of (although there are ways), and here I want to focus on two of them: 4) and 8), which often co-exist. These are the ones that really muckle my students, and they are really interesting.

I think the two of them share the assumption that calling a text racist is a personal attack on, not just the author(s) of the text in question, but anyone who likes it. The underlying logic is: racists are evil, evil people are entirely not-good, people who like something racist are racist, so calling someone racist, or saying something they like is racist, is saying they are entirely evil.

That logic is a good example of what Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca called “philosophical paired terms.” The logic maps out like a question on a standardized test “Dogs are to mammals as parakeets are to ____.”

And, therefore, since good and evil are binaries (something is entirely good or entirely evil), then, if you can imagine something more evil, you must have some good, and so can’t be entirely evil, and so you can’t be evil at all. Therefore, you must be on the “not racist” side of the equation.

Most of us (perhaps all) engage in judgments comparatively, so that, as long as we are more [whatever] than our peers, we feel good about ourselves. Clearly, 8) relies on that move—as long as you aren’t as racist as someone else, you can feel good about your attitudes.

Interestingly enough, Adolph Eichmann relied on that argument a lot. In the interrogations, he several times condemned people for a Streicher-kind of anti-Semitism—part of trying to persuade his Jewish interrogators that he wasn’t anti-Semitic. He also continually tried to represent his job as okay because it wasn’t as directly death-dealing as the people who actually pulled the triggers or applied the gas.

If someone else was more guilty, then he wasn’t guilty at all.

This move is sometimes characterized as “whataboutism” but it’s actually different. Whataboutism is sheer tu quoque—it’s an attempt to shift the stasis of the argument away from what I did to some competition as to which group or individual is better. It’s almost always an admission that the people making the argument are engaged in sheer factionalism (there are complicated exceptions). So, for instance, defenders of Trump said Clinton did it too (a fallacy). But, some critics of Bill Clinton pointed out that he claimed he was a feminist and supporter of women’s rights, so his sexually harassing women was a violation of feminist principles. That’s a legitimate and important argument.

People who claim that the GOP is morally superior to the DNC can’t logically use the “Clinton groped women” argument at all because it shows that they think both parties are just as bad—and they’re claiming theirs is better.

“Whataboutism” works by accusing the out-group of doing the same thing the in-group has recently been outed for doing. But this move doesn’t accuse the out-group of anything—it just points out that there is a worse version (perhaps even a worse in-group version) of this behavior.

Eichmann defended himself as not anti-Semitic because another Nazi was more extreme. During slavery, slaveholders defended their treatment of slaves on the grounds that there were other slaveholders who were worse (they also engaged in tu quoque, but that’s a different story); pro-segregationists posited the KKK and violent segregationists as worse than they; the people I know who drink the Rush Limbaugh/Fox News flavor-aid all name somein-group pundit too extreme for them.

That someone may be more racist doesn’t mean you aren’t racist. Both you and they might be racist.

Talking about racism means, I think, getting the argument away from whether people are racist, whether their intentions are deliberately racist, and whether racist/not racist is a binary.

[Image screenshot from here.]

On the precious little snowflakes who want to ban _To Kill a Mockingbird_

We have all read about the precious little snowflakes who want great pieces of literature banned because they feel that their group is attacked by some piece of literature generally considered by scholars to be great. This is a rallying point on the part of the Right-Wing Outrage Machine (RWOM), about how effeminate and sensitive students are being created by the faculty of political correctness who go on to insist that students not be allowed to read a book. That effeminate group is offended by something about the book, perhaps a word, more commonly the representation of a character who might be taken to represent their group. Perhaps the character is the only member of that group represented, or perhaps even every member of that group is represented as ignorant, violent, and criminal. The argument, according to the RWOM, is that these people say that you can’t have literature in K-12 classrooms that makes some of the students feel bad about their group, and the RWOM) is clear that they think that is a bad thing to do.

This claim—that people who object to great pieces of literature on the grounds that it makes them feel bad about their group—is an important plank in the platform of RWOM—that “liberals” are too precious to have their concerns taken seriously. “Liberals” are simultaneously sensitive and authoritarian—they can’t stand criticism of their group, and they will silence anyone who criticizes them. Thus, “liberals’” views on policy issues can be dismissed—they don’t understand that democracy is about being willing to be tough and listen to criticism of our in-group.

So, this issue, as far as the RWOM is concerned, isn’t just about the book—about whether “liberals’” concerns need to be considered at all.

And, for the RWOM, To Kill a Mockingbird (TKAM) is a case in point. There are people who object to this book being taught in K-12 because it portrays their group unfavorably. And the RWOM is univocal that those people are idiots, whose views on politics are so impaired (soft, weak, sensitive) that the people who make those arguments shouldn’t even be considered in political discourse.

The argument about TKAM, then, isn’t just an argument about that book—it’s an argument about who is should even have a voice in democratic political discourse. Democracy, as the founders said, is about disagreement. The principle of democracy is that a community benefits from different points of view. The RWOM argument about trying to censor TKAM is pretty clear: the people who want it banned from high schools are weak people who don’t understand democracy. It isn’t just that their views are bad, but that they are such weak and fragile people that their entire group should not be considered when we are thinking about policy.

Banning the book is “caving in” to people who want it banned is stupid.  Banning TKAM is a war on learning. The National Review asserts that the records suggest that all attempts to ban the book come from people who don’t like books with the “n word” in them (that isn’t true, but it is one of the reasons often given).

“But a different sin concerns today’s anti-Mockingbird crowd. In fact, the last time Mockingbird was challenged solely for its depiction of sexual intercourse, rape, or incest was in 2006 in Brentwood, Tenn. Since then, all five challenges — in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2012, and 2016 — have involved parents or children made uncomfortable by the use of the “N-word” or the book’s depiction of racism.”

That National Review article condemns, in no uncertain terms, people who want the book banned because it makes them uncomfortable. So, as far as the National Review is concerned, banning the book is, prima facie, evidence of your entire political group being an idiot.

The RWOM is unusually unanimous on this point: people who object to teaching TKAM because it hurts their feelings are fragile little snowflakes whose views can be dismissed from consideration on the grounds that they are…well…too fragile. And they are clear that this isn’t a partisan issue: “But to consider To Kill a Mockingbird racially divisive is exactly backwards. The book is invaluable both for introducing students to the reality of America’s racial past and for exposing its injustices.” As in the above cases (both minor and major media), they were unequivocal that they were operating on a principle of education: that, as the National Review says, “Eliminating the hard stuff eliminates the reality.”

In other words, they aren’t taking this position because of partisan politics: it’s a principle that they hold universally.

For the sake of argument, let’s treat that as a principle. I have often argued that the RWOM makes arguments that present themselves as thoroughly, totally, and deeply principled, but are actually rabid factionalism. They were opposed to pedophilia till a pedophile was the GOP candidate for Senate; they wanted Clinton impeached for groping till they had a groper in chief. The RWOM says that their stance on TKAM is principled. Is it?

And here it’s useful to distinguish tu quoque from an argument from principle. If a person really cares about a principle, they will condemn anyone—in-group or not—for violating that principle. If concern about the principle is just a handy brick to throw at the outgroup, then, when it’s pointed out that they are violating a principle they claim to be sacred, they will say, “The out-group does it too!” That’s tu quoque. It’s a fallacy.

More important, it’s an admission that the principle didn’t matter. If I say, “You are bad because you pet squirrels,” then I am making an argument that has the major premise “people who pet squirrels are bad.” If I later defend someone who pets squirrels, I have violated the logic of my own argument. I am putting faction above principle. I don’t think someone is bad for petting squirrels—I think out-group members are bad for doing that, but not in-group members.

So, is the RWOM flinging itself around about sensitive snowflake lefties on the basis of a principle about democracy and the need to read unpleasant books? Or is this about faction?

Most of the articles I could find on the right were about the Biloxi, Mississippi controversy, when a school board decided that the book would not be required reading in eighth grade English classes, and I couldn’t find any major right-wing media who endorsed banning the book. So, this might look as the RWOM is acting on principle.

But there is some sneaky partisanship: snowflakes are lefties, and people who want to ban the book are fragile snowflakes—a term that has become a synonym for social justice warriors. So, condemning the specific policy point of wanting TKAM banned isn’t just a condemnation of that policy point—as far as the RWOM is concerned, the stance of various groups about banning TKAM can be used to condemn the entire group.

The RWOM is so drunk on outrage about the fragile lefties who want the book banned that they make objection to the book, on principle, a sign of being partisan: “I wonder if any of the Biloxi school district’s administrators know how to read.” Obviously, anyone who wants it banned is an idiot, regardless of party.

And it’s interesting to me how the metaphors work in this argument—the people who want the book banned from classrooms are girly (weak, fragile, frail, sensitive) while the people who want it taught are masculine (strong enough to see criticism of America), anti-racist (they univocally endorse Atticus Finch’s stance), and, unlike flaccid lefties, not people who demand “to soften education, to remove any pain or discomfort.” They are firm, strong, and standing tall. (The tendency on the part of the RWOM to use metaphors of hardness for their view and softness for the opposition is both sad and hilarious.)

Were this a principled stance—if the people who have worked themselves into outrage about Biloxi are acting on principle and not just partisanship–then the National Review would fling accusations of flaccidity and girlyness at anyone who objected to TKAM on the grounds that it criticized their group. Do they?

Nope.

There are two, very different ways, this book is challenged.

First, there is the argument it is racist, and that’s complicated. That argument is public because it gets to school boards—the first thing a parent does when objecting to a book is go to the teacher, then the principal, so going to the school board means the teacher and principal are holding their ground.

So, what, exactly, are the arguments that TKAM is racist?

Well, for one thing, it uses the ‘n word’ a lot. And here I will say that I frequently teach material with racist epithets in it, and I make sure they know it on the first day of class. I believe, firmly, in the notion that students should be warned about what they’re getting into, and students who don’t want to read anything with racist epithets shouldn’t take the class. That isn’t because there’s anything wrong with students who would rather not read a lot of appalling racist things, but because they have a right to make choices as to whether they will read them. So I try to be clear about just how awful the reading will be.

My courses are not required; my students are college students. I thoughtfully design my classes so that students can choose to skip a fair number of readings a semester and still get a good grade on the “keeping up with the reading” part of the grade because I know that some of the readings may be unhelpfully provocative, and they can miss up to two weeks up class with no penalty. So, students who are “triggered” by readings can make strategic choices about readings and attendance. High school students don’t have those choices.

The use of the ‘n word’ in TKAM is complicated, as it is in comedy, and high school students aren’t very good at that kind of complexity, and it is used in the book in a way intended to inflict damage. Granted, one can (and, I think, should) read the book as condemning that usage, but reading the book that way involves understanding other minds and perspective-shifting, and not all high school students are there. In other words, as anyone remotely aware of scholarship in rhetoric, reader-response, or, well, basic teacher-training knows, whether a particular class can understand the complicated relationship between the narrator and the events being narrated is something only the teacher of that class could know.

But, let’s side aside the notion that audiences are different from one another and that people receive texts in different ways (really, that only means setting aside sixty years of research, so not that much).

There is another argument, mentioned above. Malcolm Gladwell has made this argument best, and I would simply add that there is a toxic and racist narrative about the Civil Rights movement in our world. That narrative is that people were racist—meaning they irrationally hated everyone who wasn’t “white” and knew that they hated everyone and knew it was irrational. So, a racist person got up in the morning and said, “In every way and every day I will irrationally hate all other races.” As long as you didn’t say that (if, for instance, you said to yourself, “I will only rationally hate all other races”), you weren’t racist.

This is the classic move of feeling good about your decisions because you could imagine someone who was behaving worse. Cheating on this exam by glancing over is okay because you didn’t get the whole exam ahead of time like someone might. Cheating That Race on the rent is okay because you didn’t try to evict them for their race. Adolph Eichmann justified his racism because he wasn’t like Julius Streicher.

What did Atticus Finch do? He, against his will, defended a black man whom he knew to be innocent in a case he knew to be entirely the kind of case Ida B. Wells-Barnett had already named years before. And, throughout the book, he insisted that the racism that would put Tom Robinson to death was one that could (magically?) be cured if people were… what? nicer? less redneck?

Finch acknowledges that the system is SO racist that Robinson telling the truth will tank his case. Robinson mentions that he was nice to the young white woman because he felt sorry for her. And Finch flinches. That moment is why this movie, and the book, are racist.

He knew he lost the case at that moment because he had a racist jury. So, does he try to do anything about their racism? Nope.

Instead, the moral center of the tale says that you need to be nice to racists and hope they’ll be a little bit less racist.

That’s racist.

I love the book. I love that one of my sisters called me “Scout” for a while because I looked like Scout. The movie and book rocked my world, and helped me to see how racist my community and culture were. It was a great book. Now it’s racist.

In its era, it wasn’t. A major issue in 1960 was that “good” people accommodated the KKK, lynchings, Citizens Councils, and that juries couldn’t be counted on to do the sensible thing. So, something that said that the KKK is not actually okay, and that juries that endorsed state-sponsored terrorism were bad was making a useful argument.

We’re way beyond that. There are various problems with TKAM in our era. Atticus Finch is a white savior, his whole stance is the progressive mystique, and the basic message of the story is that racists are rednecks, but we should all submit in a civil fashion to racist justice systems while privately bemoaning that we can’t get a better outcome. (Too bad about Tom!) To be clear, had more people in the South been like Finch in 1960 the world would have been a better place. But, in 2017 we don’t need to make heroes of people who believe that racism is a question of individual intention and feeling, and who think there are good people on both sides. There aren’t. There weren’t. Atticus was wrong about that.

And a text that can make white students feel that racism is over because it isn’t as bad as it was then, and that they would totally have been Atticus Finch (even though they do nothing that involves the same level of risk his actions involved) doesn’t do any kind of anti-racist work. It might even (albeit unintentionally) endorse racist beliefs, insofar as it makes all racism an issue of personal feeling.

This isn’t 1960, and what Finch proposes (and does) isn’t enough for where we are now. That’s another way that people can argue it’s racist—that it can make people feel that we just need to be like Finch and racism will end (or worse yet, that racism did end). So, the argument that the book is racist isn’t a stupid argument, and it certainly isn’t one that assumes some inability to handle difficult or unpleasant material—on the contrary, it’s grounded in the notion that TKAM is simplistic. And, so, as far as the Right Wing Outrage Machine goes, I am a precious and fragile snowflake because anyone who makes the kind of argument I am making is a snowflake.

But, let’s consider fairly the RWOM argument that lefties are weenies who want to silence free speech. Granted, the RWOM never engages the argument I made above—a nuanced and complicated argument about TKAM. Their argument is (as I hope I’ve shown) the false argument that anyone who objects to TKAM being taught in K-12 is a weeny who doesn’t want to hear criticism of their in-group.

If you are intellectually generous, you can find an implied syllogism in the RWOM outrage about TKAM: Lefties are people whose views can be dismissed because they oppose texts like TKAM on the grounds that it offends their feelings about their in-group.

That’s a potentially logically argument, and argument from principle: anyone who objects to TKAM on the grounds that it offends their feelings about their in-group is promoting a political agenda we should dismiss.

Recently, I spent the day with high school teachers from various places in Texas, and the issue of TKAM came up, especially their being told they couldn’t teach it. I was familiar with the cases when it came to school boards, and was willing to defend the case that it wasn’t a useful book for teaching about racism because we’ve moved beyond when aversive racism was the major issue, but that wasn’t the main complaint for any of them.

Every one of them said that the book was pulled because parents of white students complained that it made white Southerners feel bad about their past. They complained to the principal, and the book was pulled.[1] That’s the second reason the book is pulled, and you can see it in the ALA list of reasons the book is challenged.

So, I’m sure, now that I’ve said that racist white Southerners feel hurt about TKAM the RWOM will, because it’s a principle about criticism, insist that TKAM be taught. Who is the snowflake here?

I’m sure, since the Right Wing Outrage Machine is all about principle, they’ll now look into this issue.

I’m also sure I have a unicorn in my garden that poops gold.

[1] Here is the interesting point. Yes, parents who didn’t want TKAM taught because of the n word, and because of complicated issues about its racism, went to school boards. Presumably they didn’t first go to the school boards; they went to the principal and didn’t get anywhere, so they kept taking it up the ladder. Parents who didn’t want their white students to have to confront white racism went to the principal, and got their way. In other words, people who wanted to protect the fragile feelings of white Southerners didn’t need to go to the School Board—they could count on principals protecting the feelings of their previous snowflakes white students who didn’t want to hear that segregation might have been bad. Parents with more complicated issues had to go to the School Board.

On normalizing Nazis

 

I often find myself telling people that we demonize Hitler and his followers, and therefore we can’t learn from their example. But even I am unhappy about the NYTimes article about a neo-Nazi because it doesn’t make a Nazi more understandable—it actually makes him less understandable while making him more empathetic.

What’s clear from scholars of the Holocaust is that Nazism was normalized, largely through identification with Hitler (people saw him as the person they would be if the leader), and also through normalizing him and other Nazis. Hitler at Home does a thorough job of showing just how that normalizing worked—careful control of his public image, including the design of his private spaces. And Hitlerland shows how many people were suckered by Hitler and Nazis, to think that their concerns were legitimate (when outside of in audience spaces, Hitler didn’t talk much about Jews, and talked mostly about the Versailles Treaty and reparations), that Nazis were persuaded to become Nazis because of desperation about their economic situation, and that the antisemitism was just rhetoric, so to speak.

That isn’t how it actually worked then, nor is it how it works now. Nazis were anti-Semitic, and the antisemitism was central to their identity—more important, they were deeply committed to doing anything necessary to destroy democracy. Neo-Nazis and KKK and alt-righters aren’t people moved to that position because of some single action or a single book or concerns about their economic situation—they are racist, and they are deeply and violently committed to ending democracy. They were generally racist from the beginning (although they will often insist they aren’t racist, and then cite “science” that they say shows non-white races are inferior). They aren’t very bright, as is demonstrated by how often they respond to argumentation with violence or threats of violence—they can’t put forward a logically persuasive argument to save their lives.

And they don’t care about argument, just as they don’t like democracy. They want an authoritarian government.

I think it’s important to understand that people like that don’t necessarily walk around with swastikas on their foreheads, and they aren’t always screaming, and they can be the people next door, or someone at work. They can be very normal in appearance, but their politics are not normal. And emphasizing one and not the other raises the spectre of just what happened in the Weimar, when Hitler and Nazis persuaded people to support them on the grounds that, despite their politics, they seemed like good people.

The NYTimes article didn’t mention any of that. It didn’t ask the Nazi about democracy, or race.  It just made him seem like a normal person, which he sort of is.

And that’s dangerous in a world in which people believe that they can make all political decisions on the basis of whether advocates/critics seem to be in their in-group.

The underlying assumption is that good people support good policies and bad people support bad policies, and that bad and good are in a binary relationship—something/someone is either entirely good or entirely bad. Thus, if you show that, say, a Nazi is a good person in some way (someone with whom you identify) then some number of people are likely to conclude that Nazism isn’t all that bad.

For instance, notice that it’s common for someone accused of saying or doing something racist to be defended by other people saying “They aren’t a bad person.” As Kenneth Burke said (an author of probably the single most apt analysis of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in its era), Hitler’s rhetoric depended on readers identifying with him. If his readers accepted that there is an us/them dichotomy, then the more he looked like “us” the more they would accept his “us” as normal and his “them” as dangerous.

Nazis want to end democracy. They might be nice, they might claim to be worried about the same things we are, but they blame democracy on the Jews, and they want to exterminate the Jews (and lots of other groups). And any mention of Nazis should keep front and center that they respond to any criticism with violence, they want a violent response, and they want genocide.

And the NYTimes article didn’t do that.  It didn’t explain what a Nazi believed; it just made him seem like a nice guy.

 

 

Teaching about racism from a position of privilege

I’ve taught a course on rhetoric and racism multiple times (I think this is the third, but maybe fourth). It came out of a couple of other courses—one on the rhetoric of free speech, and the other on demagoguery, but also from my complete inability to get smart and well-intentioned people to engage in productive discussions about racism.

I never wanted to teach a class on racism because I thought that there wasn’t really a need for a person who almost always has all the privileges of whiteness to tell people about racism. But I had a few experiences that changed my mind. And so I decided to do it, but it is the most emotionally difficult class I teach, and it is really a set of minefields, and there is no way to teach it that doesn’t offend someone. And yet I think it’s important, and I think other white people should teach about racism, but with a few caveats.

Like many people, I was trained to create the seminar classroom, in which students are supposed to “learn to think for themselves” by arguing with other students. The teacher was supposed to act as referee if things got too out of hand, but, on the whole, to treat all opinions as equally valid. I was teaching a class on the rhetoric of free speech—with the chairs in a circle, like a good teacher–when a white student said, “Why can black people tell jokes about white people, but white people can’t tell jokes about black people?”

And all the African-American students in the class shoved their chairs out of the circle, and one of them looked directly at me.

That’s when I realized how outrageously the “good teaching” method—in which every opinion expressed by a student should be treated as just as valid as the opinion of every other student—was institutionalized privilege.

What I hadn’t realized till that moment was that the apparently “neutral” classroom I had been taught to create wasn’t neutral at all. I was trained at a university and a department at which nonwhites and women were in the minority, and so every discussion in which all values are treated as equal in the classroom necessarily meant that straight male whiteness dominated, just in terms of sheer numbers. Then I went to a university that was predominantly women, and white males still dominated. White males dominate discussion, while white fragility ensures that treating all views as though they’re equal is doing nothing of the kind. The “neutral” classroom treats the white students’ hurt feelings with being called racist as precisely the same as anything racist s/he might say. And they aren’t the same.

That “liberal” model of class discussion is so vexed, and so specifically vexed in terms of race, gender, and sexuality. Often being one of few women in a class, and not uncommonly being one of few who openly identified as feminist, I was not uncommonly asked to represent what “feminists” thought about an issue, and I’ve unhappily observed classes (or was in classes) where the teacher asked a student to speak for an entire group (“Chester, what do gay people think about this?”) It’s interesting that not all identities get that request to speak for their entire group. While I have seen teachers call on a veteran to ask what the entire class of “veterans” think, I have never been in a class where anyone said, “Chester, what do “working class people” think about this issue?” I’ve also never been in a class, even ones where het white Christian males were in the minority, where anyone asked a het white Christian male to speak for all het white males.

The most important privilege that het white Christian males have is the privilege of toggling between individualism and universalism on the basis of which position is most rhetorically useful in the moment. In situations in which het male whiteness is the dominant epistemology, someone with that identity can speak as an individual, about his experience. When he generalizes from his experience, it’s to position himself as the universal experience. Het white males are simultaneously entirely individual and perfectly universal.

The “liberal” classroom presumes people who are speaking to one another as equals, but what if they aren’t? The “liberal” classroom puts tremendous work on identities who walk into that room as not equal—they have to be the homophobic, racist, sexist whisperers. That isn’t their job. That’s my job. I realized I was making students do my work.

That faux neutrality also guarantees other unhappy classroom practices. For instance, students who disagree with that falsely neutral position do so from a position of particularity. The “normal” undergrad has asserted a position which seems to be from a position of universal vision, and so any student who refutes his experience is now not only identifying with a stigmatized identity, but self-identifying as a speaker who is simultaneously particular and a representative of an entire group. When your identity is normalized, you claim to speak for Americans; when your identity is marked as other, you speak for all the others in that category.

There’s a weird paradox here. Both the het white Christian male and the [other] are taken as speaking for a much larger group, but in the case of the het white male it’s that he is speaking for humanity at a whole. If he isn’t, if his identity as het white male isn’t taken as universal in a classroom, then some number of people in that category will be enraged and genuinely feel victimized and dismiss as “political correctness” that they have to honor the experience of others as much as they honor their own experience.

What the white panic media characterizes as “political correctness” is rarely about suppression of free speech (they’re actually the ones engaged in political correctness)—it’s about holding all identities to the same standards of expression. The strategic misnaming of trying to honor peoples’ understanding of themselves as “political correctness” ignores the actual history of the term, which was about pivoting on a dime in order to spin facts in a way that supported faction. In other words, the whole flinging poo of throwing the term “political correctness” at people asking for equality is strategic misnaming and projection.

The second experience was in a class that was about the history about conceptions of citizenship, I was trying to make the point that identification is often racial, and that the notion of “universal” is often racist. I gave the class the statistics about Congress—that it was about 90% male and also in the 90% (or more) white. I asked the white males in the class whether they would feel that they were represented if Congress were around 90% nonwhite nonmale. Normally, this set off light bulbs for students. But, this time, one student raised his hand and said, “Well, yes, because white males aren’t angry.”

Of course, that isn’t true, and I’d bet they’d be pretty angry about not being represented, but, even were it true, it would be irrelevant. That student was assuming that being angry makes people less capable of political deliberation—that anger has no place in political argument. That’s an assumption often made in the “liberal” classroom, in which people get very, very uncomfortable with feelings being expressed. And it naturally privileges the privileged because, if being emotional (especially angry) means that a person shouldn’t be participating (or their participation is somehow impaired) then we either can’t talk about things that bother any students (which would leave a small number of topics appropriate for discussion), or people who are angry about aspects of our world (likely to be the less privileged) are silenced before they speak—they’re silenced on the grounds of the feelings they might legitimately have.

So, if we’re going to have a class about racism, we’re going to have a class in which people get angry, and not everyone’s anger is the same. Racist discourse is (and long has been) much more complicated than a lot of people want it to be—we want to think that it’s easy to identify, that it’s marked by hostility, that it’s open in its attacks on another race. But there has always been what we now call “modern racism”—racism that pretends to be grounded in objective science, that says “nice” things about the denigrated group, that purports to be acting out of concern and even affection. That is the kind of reading that angers students the most, and I think it’s important we read it because it’s the most effective at promoting and legitimating racist practices. But it will offend students to read it.

And so the class is really hard to teach, and even risky. And that was the other point I realized. If we have institutions in which only people of color are teaching classes about racism, we’re making them take on the politically riskier courses. That’s racist.

I remain uncomfortable being a white person teaching about racism, and I think my privilege probably means I do it pretty badly. But I think it needs to be done.