Tag: racism

Antisemitism is a thread interwoven into all parts of the political tapestry

German Jews in Berlin

[I’m normally a big advocate of linking for claims. In this post, I won’t, for various obvious reasons—I’m talking about what people on really awful websites are saying, and I’m uncomfortable giving them the traffic. My decision not to include links means that I’m not presenting this as a set of defensible claims in an argument about policy, but a personal reflection based on my wandering around dark corners of the internet. My hope is that it will make people curious so that they will google the various claims I make. If you google, and think I’m wrong, feel free to comment.]

A lot of people are shocked by the current rise in antisemitism, but I’m not, nor is anyone who knows anything about how racism works. It’s confusing to a lot of people because far too much public discourse about politics relies on the false binary of left v. right (a false binary not made any better by pretending it’s a continuum) and actively damaging stereotypes about what racism is.

For people whose (racist) stereotype of Jews is that they’re lefties, it seems puzzling that other “lefties” would be antisemitic. For people who think that racism is undying and relentless hostility, and whose (racist) notion is that Jews are all supporters of the most extreme policies of Israel, then it’s puzzling that anyone on the right would be antisemitic, let alone any supporters of Trump would be, since his daughter and son-in-law are Jewish.

That there is violent antisemitism on the part of people our gerfucked political discourse identifies as left and right gets rabid factionalists biting their own tails and engaging in a lot of no true scotsman, but it really should be seen as the kind of anomaly that gets people to reconsider the taxonomy.

Our culture is demagogic because it makes every issue a question of identity instead of policy, a rhetorical choice openly advocated by the GOP “Southern Strategy” in 1968, but as old as antebellum politics about slavery. As long as we try to understand our political world in terms of left v. right, we will never understand the pernicious strain of antisemitism in American politics. Antisemitic terrorist incidents will be things we fling at one another as proof that Dems or GOP are evil, rather than facing, honestly, that antisemitism is a thread deeply interwoven into American politics, all over the political tapestry.

Antisemitism is often identified as the first racism, and the origin of racism is often placed in the moment that Spain decided to purify itself of Jews and Muslims (which would mean that antisemitism and Islamaphobia are fraternal twins). Selecting that moment in time might seem weird to anyone who is familiar with earlier writings. Julius Caesar was pretty dismissive about various other groups he fought, and John Chrysostom (an early father of the church) flung himself around about Jews. Cicero has a speech in which he argues that certain witnesses should be ignored because, you know, they’re Jews, and you can never believe them. At least one scholar has argued that racism in the Western world started with the Greeks.

The argument for putting the germ of racism in Spain in the era of the converso policies is that this was a moment when assimilation wasn’t enough. This was the moment was policies were grounded in the sense that some people are essentially different and can never really assimilate.

I think that’s a good way to think about racism: it isn’t about personal hostility, nor about stereotyping other groups (even if negatively) but about a sense that those people are essentially different, and can never really assimilate (I think there are weird exceptions made for token whatevers, which I’d like to call poliocentrism, but that’s a different post).

Every group, from your book club to your nation-state, will fuck up. And when it fucks up, you have a lot of choices. You might decide that it fucked up because everyone was engaged in bad ways of making decision. Or, you might decide it wasn’t about how we decided but these decisions, that somehow triggered us too much to decide well. Or, you might decide that it was about that bitch eating crackers who somehow forced a decision on us or seduced those assholes… or something. You’ll scapegoat the bitch for everything.

Sensible people genuinely engaged in processes of good decision-making take the first choice. The rest of us take the third. And, for most of the history of Western Europe, the bitch eating crackers was Jews.

My family (for reasons I still can’t fathom) once took a road trip that involved our driving along I-5 in California right after it was paved. There were signs saying “NEXT GAS 225 MILES.” We were driving a station wagon with luggage strapped (badly) to the roof. At some point, we realized we’d lost a suitcase far too long after it was reasonable to go look for it. For years after, if any of us lost anything, we would tell our mother that it was in that suitcase. We would tell our mother that things had been in that suitcase we didn’t even own when the suitcase was lost. If what we had been claiming was true, that suitcase would at least have been the size of an intercontinental container. Perhaps two.

Jews are the lost suitcase of Europe.

Some have argued that, since Jews and Muslims were essentialized at the same moment, they’re just as much victims of racism as Jews. But, Muslims were never scapegoated for the ills of Europe. They were other, but not Other (although now they are Other).

Once you understand that Jews are the lost suitcase of Europe—that is, a group that can be scapegoated cheerfully free of any rational argument that might involve coherent arguments with actual evidence—then you can understand the role of “Jews” in demagoguery. It’s never about actual people who are actually Jewish who are actually engaged in actual acts. It’s about a kind of Platonic ideal of “Jews” that can be used as a weapon in the factionalized argument you’re having.

There are three narratives about Jews that have been used to argue for their marginalization, expulsion, or extermination, and we’re seeing all of them right now.

First, they aren’t really “us.” Jews are more clannish, less tied to the country than they are to Zion, better at money. Sometimes, this difference is presented as admirable (as in a recent speech of Trump’s); more often, it’s presented as a reason they should be prevented from joining our country, let alone our country club, or actually expelled as dangerous—an argument that was persuasive in such disparate situations as Madison Grant’s successful arguments that there should be severe limits on Jewish immigration in 1924 and Josef Stalin’s successful pursuit of the Doctor’s Trials.

Second, they are Christ-killers, who need to be kept present so that we can convert them at the last minute and thereby enact our (exegetically indefensible) reading of Revelation. This was, until very recently, the official position of the Catholic church, and a lot of pro-Israel anti-Semites share it. What a lot of people don’t know is that much of the current “evangelical” support of Israel—the kind dominant in the Trump Administration–is a consequence of their reading Revelation in an incoherent and intermittently literal way. Granted, these are the same people who read the story of Sodom as a condemnation of homosexuality, so their exegetical skills are not exactly reasonable, and they’re pretty much a case study in confirmation bias and Scriptural cherry-picking, but what matters about them is that they want nuclear war in the middle east.

Many self-described Christians believe that Jesus will come when “the Jews” are converted to Christianity. That’s a belief that has been repeatedly disproven, but we’ll set that aside. (The people who saw themselves as founding a New Jerusalem thought it meant them. It didn’t.) The important point is that there are a lot of people who support confrontational politics in regard to the middle east because they want a nuclear war that would reduce the number of Jews who need to be converted (I think Pence is among them).

So, anti-semitism is deep among a certain kind of evangelical, even if it’s coupled with support for Israel and a weird kinda sorta if you squint support for Jews (whom they hope will either die or convert).

Third, we aren’t expelling or exterminating Jews because of their race, but because Jews all have bad politics (or you can’t trust any single Jew not to have the bad politics of some of them—the poisoned peanut analogy). It’s important to remember that much of the genocide in Central Europe was under the cover of killing “partisans.” People making this kind of argument says it’s about politics (or culture) but that political determination is always based in race, and they’d really appreciate if you didn’t mention that.

And antisemitism sometimes masks itself as praise. I am old enough to remember people saying, “I’m not racist; I admire that colored people are great with children, and have such a wonderful sense of rhythm.” They thought it was praise as it wasn’t saying that all African Americans were bad, but it was racist af because it was praising a group for talents that aren’t valued. And granting African Americans some (only sorta) “good” qualities, was what they seemed to think was a “get out of racism free card” for what they were about to say next. (Much like, “I’m not racist, but….”) In the case of “the Jews” (as though they are all the same), the “praise” is precisely what Trump said: Jews are good with money and ruthless in their pursuit of it.

That “praise” is the fuel for  the narrative that equates modernization, globalization, “international banking” and Jews. That false equation is  as old a connection as the volkisch myths on which the Nazis drew. The argument is that Jews don’t have a nation, they have a global relationship. The Nazis and neo-Nazis love(d) that narrative, although it’s cheerfully fact free (after all, the same could be said of Christians, Muslims, or any other religious group that claims to value their religion over other ties).

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Nazis, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists would promote old and busted narratives about Jews being involved in global conspiracies to control all the money, but exactly the same narratives are promoted by far too many people who self-identify as lefty.

I crawl around dark corners of the internet, and, for complicated reasons, at one point I found myself crawling around the weirder parts of the anti-globalist rhetorical world, and I found that antisemitism is alive and well there. I found Holocaust deniers (Holohoax, they call it), people citing the Protocols as though that were a reasonable source, promoting exactly the same myths as neo-Nazis (Jews control the media, own more of the world’s wealth than actually exists, and so on). Every once in a while, I’d run across the old and busted claim that none of the Jews who worked in the WTC showed up that day for work (they did).

My point is that antisemitism is all over the political tapestry. It isn’t an issue of left v. right. It’s an issue of antisemitic tropes being ones that people all over the political tapestry find useful because it’s woven in there, and, yet, oddly enough, the accusation that they are antisemitic is also all over the political spectrum.

We need to stop saying that having a Jewish friend or relative means a person can’t be antisemitic—Adolf Eichmann made the first argument, and Magda Goebbels made the second (and it was true in both cases). We need to stop saying that supporting Israel means you aren’t antisemitic—supporting Israel because you want most Jews to die is antisemitism. We need to stop pretending that simply because you have a lefty agenda you couldn’t possibly be endorsing racism.

We need to understand how deep antisemitism runs in our culture, and we need to stop pretending it’s only a problem for them. It’s true; they are antisemitic. But so are we.

The deficit model of education and unintentional racism

If you stop someone on the street, and ask them about what it means for something to be racist, it’s pretty likely that they’ll tell you that racism is what racist people do, and that racist people are people who consciously hate everyone of some race, or, perhaps, everyone of every other race. Racists are evil, deliberately evil, intentionally evil. Racist acts are acts that are done by people who intend to be racist.

If you’re reasoning from within this (inadequate) understanding of racism, as long as you do not consciously hate every single member of some race, or if you don’t intend to do them harm, or you do not intend to be racist, you aren’t racist. And, therefore, you didn’t do anything racist. You are not evil. So, whatever you did that someone is saying is racist is now off the table of consideration, since the real issue is whether you’re a mustache-twirling racist who gets up in the morning and thinks about how to harm people of other races. You aren’t. You don’t even have a mustache.

Therefore, anyone calling you racist is engaging in defamation of character, since they’re saying you’re deliberately evil, and, if someone calls you racist, your losing your temper is justified, since what they did to you is so offensive.

That’s a little muddled, but it’s how far too many arguments about racism play out:

Chester: “You did a racist thing.”
Hubert: “You’re calling me a racist. And here are all the ways I’m a good person (and therefore not racist). You’re the real racist here for making it an issue of race.”

I’ve seen this flawed understanding of racism, and then the same domino effect of fallacious reasoning (I didn’t do anything racist because I’m not a racist because I sometimes do non- or anti-racist things) all over the political spectrum, and on scholarly mailing lists, at meetings of scholars, at faculty meetings—so, this problem isn’t just something They do.

This common notion of racism is wrong because the issue of a racist world is not usefully reduced to the problem of individuals who consciously feel hostility to members of other races or intend to be racist (nor is racism bad just because racist words “offend” people). There isn’t some binary between racist and non-racist, and, therefore, that a person has done something non-racist doesn’t mean they can never do anything racist. That you hate racism doesn’t mean you are magically immune from doing anything racist. In fact, you can be trying to do something you think is anti-racist, and unintentionally be making things worse.

Take, for instance, the deficit model of education. The deficit model of education says that some students struggle because they lack things that good teachers should pour into their heads. Rather than presenting students as people who are bringing a lot of knowledge and skills, it describes them as little jars of absence.

Often, that absence is described as a consequence of their coming from a deficient culture. Their cultural (racial) background is inferior to the dominant culture, and so we need to pour into their brains (or drill them on) the things they don’t know, the habits they don’t have. This model means that teachers work with their students from an assumption that they need to pull some students up to the mean, and, too often, that assumption is racist, even when the teacher is trying to do the right thing. I’ve seen teachers respond with so much enthusiasm to the contribution of a student of color that I wanted to crawl under a table and hide.

Basically, the “deficit model” appears to be anti-racist insofar as it’s saying that students of color who are underperforming (or not—they might be performing just fine) need extra care from a white teacher because they lack certain things the (white) teacher can pour into them. The white teacher is trying to save them, so isn’t racist (racists hate people of other races). The white teacher feels compassion for these students and is trying to save them.

But it is racist in so many ways. For instance, it reinforces the racist cultural narrative that all important stories about reducing racism are about how white people use their agency to save POC, and POC are (or should be) grateful subjects of how good white people use their agency. A narrative about people of color who succeed is about the white people who helped them.

A racist act is one that reinforces the racist hierarchies of a culture or society; and racist hierarchies are hierarchies that are socially constructed categories that claim to be essential and inherent in groups.

As the Encyclopedia of Educational Psychology(Vol. 1. ) says,
[T]he deficit model asserts that racial/ethnic minority groups do not achieve as well as their White majority peers in school and life because their family culture is dysfunctional and lacking important characteristics compared to the White American culture. […]

Criticisms of the deficit model are numerous. First, the deficit model is unfair to minority children and their families, focusing the blame on their culture. The deficit model is also inaccurate because it deemphasizes the powerful effects of poverty on the families, schools, and neighborhoods, which synergistically affect academic achievement and occupational attainment. It also strongly implied that White middle-class values are superior. Fourth, the deficit model became equated with pathology in which a group’s cultural values, families, or lifestyles transmit the pathology. Finally, the deficit model has limitations for scholarship because it is too narrow as an explanatory model (i.e., rigidly blames the family) for the academic underachievement of poor minority children. In short, the deficit model’s negative effects are that children were narrowly viewed as “deprived” and their families became “disadvantaged,” “dysfunctional,” and “pathological.”

The deficit model is racist in impact, and not intent. It implies that good teachers would identify students whom they think are deficient (likely to be POC) and try to save them by pouring into their heads the things they lack. Those teachers would mean well, and still be engaging in actions that reinforce our racist culture. Does that mean they’re racist? Yes. Does that mean they wear a hood and burn crosses and intend to be racist? No. Is it useful to identify the problem as their being racist people? No. Does it matter that they’re (unintentionally) promoting a racist narrative about students? Yes.

Are some students lacking important skills important for success in college? Yes.

In fact, students should be lacking the skills we intend to teach in our class—otherwise, why are they in the class? Every person, including the teacher, walks into a classroom deficient. A good class makes everyone in that room better. Every person, including the teacher, walks into a classroom with an excess of gifts, skills, and knowledge. Assuming that the deficiencies map onto (or are explained by) race or culture is inevitably going to put white students at an advantage. But teachers with the deficit model are likely to pay more attention to “grammar” errors on the part of students of color (or multi-lingual students) than white students; they’ll over-identify errors (noticing ones they wouldn’t notice in a white student’s paper, identifying as “grammar” errors things that are orthographic, stylistic, or rhetorical). They’ll also explain the errors differently, as the consequence of gaps in knowledge (whereas they’re likely to explain white students’ errors as typos). By conveying the expectation that POC students will perform badly, and need saving, they deny students something all students need: confidence.

Racism isn’t about intent, or whether people have their feelings hurt. Racism is about actions, policies, structures, practices, systems, institutions that reinforce the racial hierarchies of a culture. A narrative that students from certain cultures are deficient reinforces the very narratives and tropes central to our current racist world.

If someone says you did something racist, that is not an argument about your identity

When someone gets criticized for having done/said something racist, it’s too often framed as an identity issue—either by the person making the criticism, or by the person defending themselves. So, instead of saying, “That was a racist argument,” someone says, “You are a racist.” Or, when criticized for having made a racist argument, a person says, “I can’t have made a racist argument because I’m not a racist.”

And then you get the three defenses:
1. I’m not a racist because I have opposed racism in another context;
2. I’m not racist because I have friends of a race other than mine;
3. You’re the real racist because you made this about race.

Those are all irrelevant and fallacious responses.

As I argued elsewhere, if I drift out of my lane and hit your car, you would be furious if I responded by saying, “I can’t have hit your car because I’m a good driver” and then argued:
1. I’m not a bad driver because I have been a good driver in another context;
2. I’m not a bad driver because I have been complimented on my driving;
3. You’re the bad driver because your car got in my way.

It isn’t about whether someone is (or is not) a bad driver.

I think it is possible to decide that we shouldn’t allow someone to take the wheel because s/he has a history of bad driving, and it might be reasonable to conclude that the person is, on the whole, a bad driver. But we’re still going to get those same three defenses, and so it might be rhetorically wise to keep the stasis on the question of their pattern of bad driving.

Because, even if I really am, on the whole, a good driver, I’m still not off the hook for hitting your car.

I’m saying this because of a particular incident that has popped up in my field, but, really, it’s constantly a problem because we spend way too much time arguing about identity and not enough arguing about actions and policies.

Privilege and the rhetoric police

[Image from George Walling’s 1887 Recollections of a New York Chief of Police]

A lot of people assume that the only function of rhetoric is to persuade all readers to adopt your point of view. That’s wrong in a bunch of ways. A lot of times people have a composite audience, and might have different intentions for different audiences (such as a text with dog whistles, intended to calm some audience members down about whether the rhetor is a war-mongerer while having enough dog whistles that other members of the audience are cheered by the racist and war-mongering of the text—Hitler’s March 23, 1933 speech).

But, in addition, sometimes people have an intended audience, and have no intention of trying to persuade every person who comes in contact with the text.

Imagine that you and a friend are chatting quietly in a fairly empty Tacodeli, and you’re talking about how much you hate squirrels and how awful squirrels are. Although uninvited, I come in and sit at your table, and then say, “You shouldn’t be saying this or talking this way. I like squirrels, and you are doing nothing to persuade me that you’re right. In fact, you’re making me think that your kind of people are irrationally anti-squirrel.” You’d be thoroughly justified in saying, “We weren’t talking to you.” This is rhetoric policing.

Imagine that you and a friend are ranting about squirrels in a Tacodeli, and everyone there is forced to listen to your rant—it would be fair for someone to tell you to tone it down.

The internet makes that analogy weird, in that you can wander into all sorts of conversations in which you’re not part of the intended audience. Imagine a site oriented toward talking about college football. A person who thinks college football is boring might wander on and say, “This site is stupid, and I’m not interested in anything you’re saying, so you all suck. You need to make this site more interesting to people who hate college football.”

Perhaps it’s someone who loves Twilight, and the site has a lot of snark about Twilight, and so that officer of the rhetoric police says, “I have no interest in college football, and I love Twilight, and so your site is doing nothing to persuade me to like football. You should be more welcoming to Twilight fans who hate college football.” It would be perfectly fair for the regular members of the community to say, “I am so sorry that there is something so wrong with your internet connection that you have no possible way of engaging with the vast array of possible communities, and only have access to this site.” Or, perhaps, “I am so sorry that someone is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to read this site. Try dialing 911.” Or just, “Go away.”

I once wrote a talk I rather liked, oriented toward academics, about the ways that Milton’s Samson Agonistes exemplifies misogynistic discourse about women. I had a misogynist (let’s call him Bunny) not at the conference,but who ran across the talk somewhere, tell me that it wasn’t a good talk because it didn’t persuade him. He was rhetoric policing, and he wasn’t part of my audience.

But, he said, if feminists really want to change things, we will have to persuade men like him that there is some validity to our arguments. Therefore, I should have imagined someone like him when I wrote that talk. I pointed out to him that he didn’t try to think about how feminists might respond to anything he wrote, including what he was writing to me at that moment. He never understood that point. He was pretty clear that changing things about feminism would require that anything that any feminist wrote at any time and for any audience had to be oriented toward him, but he honestly was confuzzled at my notion that he would try to be aware of my rhetorical needs in something written to me.

All discourse had to accommodate him and his beliefs, but he didn’t have to accommodate others’ beliefs. His rhetoric policing was an absolutely perfect gem of privilege.

One of the powers of privilege is the power to interrupt conversations of which you are not a part and insist, not just that you be made a part, but that the whole conversation be oriented toward you, accommodating your beliefs, answering your concerns, being careful about your feelings.

Imagine a problem-solving discussion between two highly-ranked tech people about a very specialized issue. It would be seen as weird (or worse) if an intern in advertising interrupted their conversation and insisted they have the discussion in a way he could understand. But their boss, even if zir background wasn’t tech, could interrupt and rhetoric police. The boss has that privilege.

And lots of people have that privilege. Parents have the privilege to ask what their children were talking about (and most children will lie), K-12 teachers have the privilege of asking students what they were talking about (college teachers have the privilege of saying “STFU and listen to what I’m saying”).

If you are from a privileged background (as I am—very privileged), you have a tendency to assume that everyone must accommodate your beliefs, preconceptions, prior knowledge. Bunny unintentionally gave away the playbook for misogynists—what he was saying was that he knew people like him were in power, and that they would only go along with change if their concerns were pandered to.

There is a website that is, as it says everywhere on their site, “Black News, Opinions, Politics and Culture.” And a white guy wrote in and said that, while he was trying to be anti-racist, he found the site didn’t really accommodate his beliefs.  And so, Michael Harriot wrote back:

“The Root is a site for black people, by black people, about black shit. We are not in the business of transforming racists into social justice warriors or changing hearts and minds in hopes of reversing white supremacy. Words cannot do that. If they could, I would have slit my throat with the sharpest, shiniest razor I could find years ago. I would consider my life a failure.
We don’t mind if white people read our content. In fact, we like it when you do. But don’t think for a minute that we are selecting words while considering the sentiment of Caucasian acceptance.
I know that you are accustomed to existing in a universe where everything bends toward whiteness, but do not let that factoid delude you into believing that you are the sky. You are eavesdropping on a conversation among black people. We don’t care if you listen. In fact, we are happy that you are listening, but don’t be bamboozled into thinking we are talking to you.”

Rhetoric policing can be helpful, when it’s from someone we’re trying to reach, and they’re helping us be more effective. As soon as it’s about how you can persuade me, and you should do so because I count more than the audience you’re explicitly trying to reach, it’s all about privilege.

Racism and the false binary of shame/pride

Showing the GIS results of "beautiful hair"

It’s really hard for us to have a good conversation about racism for a lot of reasons, but mostly because we have a lot of false assumptions about what racism is and how it functions. I’ve mentioned elsewhere the false notion that you aren’t racist if you’re talking about culture—racism has always really been about culture. I want to mention three other beliefs here.

First, we should talk about racist actions, but instead we talk about whether a person is racist. We believe that racist actions are the consequence of deliberate decisions to be racist on the part of people who consciously decide to engage in an action that they themselves believe to be racist because they are racists. In other words, we think there are some people who are racist, and everything they do is deliberately racist.

Second, we think there is a binary between racist (really bad) or not (good).

Third, we also have a binary of shame v. pride—we tend to assume that you are either proud of yourself (meaning you haven’t done anything really bad), or you think you’ve done something bad (in which case you’re ashamed of yourself). This applies to your sense of your group—you can either take pride in your group (meaning it’s great), or you can think your group has behaved badly (in which case you should be ashamed of your group).

Imagine that someone says to you, “Hey, I think what you just did there was kinda racist,” or “America has a racist past,” or “The Confederacy was racist.” If you believe the three false assumptions above, then here’s what you hear: “Hey, you are a bad person who should wallow in shame because you decide to be racist every day and every way.” Or, “As an American, you should wallow in shame about the US and spend your whole life apologizing because America and Americans are entirely evil for their deliberate racism.” Or, “If you live in a CSA state or are descended from anyone who fought for the CSA, you should do nothing but wallow in shame and hate your ancestors because they were completely evil.”

You hear someone making a claim about racist behavior as an accusation of your being an evil person (or part of an evil group) who should be filled with shame, wandering around beating your breast, and hating yourself and everyone in your group.

You might believe that because you consume media that tells you that’s what SJW believe, and they might even find a quote from someone they say is an SJW that kinda sorta maybe could be interpreted as arguing that you are condemned to a life of shame. That’s because your media is engaged in inoculation.

There isn’t a binary of shame v. pride—to take pride in something, it doesn’t have to be perfect. And shame is not a particularly useful response to criticism (in fact, it shifts the stasis from what you did to who you are—which is sidetracking).

Racism is an instance of in-group favoritism—the tendency to think that members of your in-group are entitled to more than members of out-groups; that in-group members have good motives, and out-group members have bad motives; that the world (or your nation, culture, community) would be better were it only in-group members; that most of our problems are caused by the out-group; that the in- and out-groups shouldn’t be held to the same standards.

So, for instance, I live in an area that has a lot of cyclists come to time themselves for races. Many of them run stop signs, yell at pedestrians, and are generally jerks. I am not a cyclist. At a certain point, I found myself thinking that cyclists are all jerks. But, once I thought about it, I had to admit that every day I see one or two cyclists behave like jerks, and I see twenty or more cyclists. Every day, I see a much higher percentage of drivers behave like jerks, but I never came to the conclusion that drivers are jerks. That’s how in-group/out-group thinking works—your mental math is different about in- and out-group members, so you always think that your judgment of the out-group is grounded in empirical data—those two jerk cyclists—but it isn’t, because that data wouldn’t cause you to condemn your in-group (drivers). That’s in-group favoritism.

You take bad behavior on the part of an out-group member as proof that they are basically bad people.

Racism takes in-group favoritism and “naturalizes” it by associating that bad behavior with culture, “race,” ethnicity, or some inherent and inescapable character of a group. My irrational assessment of cyclists wasn’t racism not just because I never said or thought the word race, but because “cyclist” isn’t a category associated with an ethnicity, race, country of origin. Once that cyclist wasn’t on a bike, I wouldn’t assess them as out-group. Racism has two parts: it is in-group/out-group thinking that makes out-group an inescapable identity; also, it is the world in which privileges are (generally unconsciously) given to the inescapable identity of in-group.

Those two things are equally important. Trump’s racist tweets are a good example of the first; google image searching “beautiful hair” is a great example of the second. (That picture is above.)

Racism isn’t about people getting up and thinking about ways to express their conscious hate of that race. Racism is about relying on the cognitive bias of in-group favoritism; it’s about thinking that people like us are normal, and people not like us don’t merit consideration; it’s about how we explain behavior; it’s about our unconscious framings.

There isn’t some binary of being racist (bad, shameful) and not racist (good, pride). Racism isn’t about who we are; it’s, to some extent, about what we do, but even more, it’s about how unconscious biases on the part of many people have a particular outcome. No one got up in the morning and said, “How can I be racist today?” and decided to make sure that a GIS of “beautiful hair” was racist. But you can see the results show that how we think about beauty is racist.

Racism is a cultural phenomenon and, in my experience, very rarely a conscious hostility. It’s people who value standardized test scores when there’s no evidence that those scores are predictive of success in a field; it’s people noticing errors in resumes when they think the applicant is African American; it’s a teacher or school who treats a children of color differently from white children who did exactly the same thing; it’s a director who has few POC in their films; it’s our culture’s reliance on racist tropes.

Racism isn’t really about hostility as much as it is about forgetting and assuming.

That means that racism isn’t about a racist twisting his mustache thinking about how to be extra racist today. It means that racism is about how a culture works, and not necessarily the conscious intent of individuals. It means that an individual being racist is like an individual being greedy, or selfish, or irrational.

My husband makes fun of my family because, as he says, “They are always one step away from fame doing something mildly disreputable.” And, really, that’s true. One ancestor involved in the Revolutionary War was such a terrible commander that he got removed from active duty and was put in charge of a prison. When I joined a genealogy group, I found a relative who tried to make him out as a great man and hero of the war. It wasn’t. She was lying.

If you try put everything into the shame/pride binary, you either have to condemn him, which is odd, since he did support the Revolution, or you have to deny his being appallingly incompetent (her choice). Maybe just say he did some good and bad things, and take pride in the good things.

If you accept the shame/pride binary, and you accept that being racist is not good, then you either have to condemn your ancestors, or you have to deny they were racist. Because, let’s be blunt, not only would it be hard for most of us to say we have never been racist, we would have an even harder time claiming that no one in our ancestry was racist.

The world is not a fight between your in-group (obviously and always good) and everyone else (obviously and always bad). The world is a complicated place in which we are always failing to be as good as we would like, but in which we might be better than we are.

Rhetoric, Respect, and Institutional Racism

A few months ago, I was talking with a lot of rhetoric scholars trying to identify the qualities of good rhetoric, and it was suggested that one of the important characteristics is respect—that people need to respect each other. I was completely incoherent in my response.

Arguing that respect should not be considered a criterion for good rhetoric sounds like attacking Santa Claus, baby bunnies, or apple pie. One thing I couldn’t make clear is that I wasn’t saying the respect is bad, but that it’s setting an actively harmful criterion, for four reasons:

  1. It’s setting the bar too high—if the parties respect each other, we’re probably in good territory anyway. We need to figure out how to have productive arguments when the people involved don’t respect one another. If respect is required for productive argumentation, then we’re saying that instances of conflict without respect have to go to violence. So, by setting the bar too high, this criterion truncates the possibilities of argumentation.
  2. It makes the common mistake of thinking that our problem is the consequence of bad feelings for others—it’s like the civility argument. Respect is an affect; it’s a posture. We tend to judge it by whether we feel comfortable with the tone someone is using. Therefore, as long as someone is using a tone we find comfortable, we’ll infer respect. That tendency to infer respect by what feelings of ours are (or are not) being triggered (comfort/discomfort) means that we are more likely to get prickly and defensive about how someone is disagreeing with in-group members than out-group members. It’s inevitably a non-reciprocal standard—it is never applied equally across interlocutors.
  3. And, hence, and this is the point I couldn’t get across, respect as a standard will always get entangled in hierarchies of power and authority. We don’t ask that parents treat children with the same respect as children are supposed to treat parents; we have different standards of respect for how students treat teachers than vice versa. Respect is always going to benefit people who have cultural, political, or legal authority more.
  4. There’s another way it isn’t an equal burden on all parties, and this also is a consequence of “respect” being something we infer through affect and tone—like the notion of “civility,” it puts a higher burden on rhetors arguing for major social change or who are the victims of institutional oppression and violence. There was no way for abolitionists to make a “respectful” condemnation of slavery, because it was always taken as an attack on slavers (some of whom were euphemistically called “slaveowners” or “slaveholders”).

You see this issue with accusations of institutionalized racism—the people who benefit from the current system feel themselves attacked by such condemnations, and they inevitably express that they feel disrespected. And they do feel disrespected. So, if we’re going to say that respect is a requirement of productive rhetoric, then powerful people feeling disrespected ends the argument. In that world, how can someone raise the issue of institutional racism?

They can’t. Or, they can, but their argument will be dismissed as disrespecting people who deserve respect. And then we’re on the identity stasis, arguing about the goodness of the people who felt criticized. Political rhetoric spends way too much time on the feelings of the powerful.

And notice that this, again, doesn’t apply equally across all parties. Slaveholders, surprisingly enough, could use a language and posture of respect for their attitudes toward slaves; racists always use a language of respect for their feelings toward other races. It’s not uncommon for them to claim to respect the other group more than that group respects themselves—that they are the ones who really understand that group, and who can see what that group really needs. If you assess respect by tone and the feelings it triggers in the judge, then extraordinarily disrespectful discourse can slide through by looking calm and rational; patronizing dismissal doesn’t set off disrespect alarms in other in-group members.

We don’t know one another’s hearts, but more powerful people think they do (asymmetric insight is worse for people with power). So, what I wish I’d said is, “Making ‘respect’ one of the criteria for productive rhetoric guarantees that we won’t be able to have the hard arguments—because we’ll end up with the more powerful people focused more on how they feel disrespected than on whether we need substantial change.”

Scholars and racism

There is a controversy in one of my disciplines right now, and it’s ugly, and it’s getting uglier. And the nastiest part of this argument is nasty because people are arguing as though there is a shared definition of what it means to be racist. There isn’t, and that is the problem. There are at play at least four different ways of thinking about racism: aversive, unconscious, disparate impact, systemic.

Briefly, the controversy concerns the long and documented failure of the NCA Distinguished Scholars to include a significant number of POC in its membership. There are various ways of explaining that failure—off the top of my head, I can imagine someone arguing:

That POC don’t merit inclusion in the group because they are bad people (a racist argument).

    • Or, that the 70 Distinguished Scholars are knowingly engaged in aversive racism—the conventional notion of what racism is (conscious hostility toward and aversion of POC). In other words, the problem is that they are bad people.
    • Or, that unconscious racism means that the kinds of networks necessary to come to be seen as “distinguished” are unintentionally racially exclusive.
    • Or, that something is wrong in the process such that POC scholars have to meet a higher bar or that makes their kind of scholarship invisible in some way.
    • Or that systemic racism means that POC scholars haven’t had the kinds of advantages and breaks (including mentoring) necessary to meet the implicit criteria of the Distinguished Scholars.

[There are other issues in this controversy, including some procedural ones—as to how NCA has made and communicated decisions. I’m not going to talk about those issues because I don’t know enough to say anything, not because they’re unimportant.]

Notice that these can be divided up—the first argument is simply racist (and I think many people are reading some of the documents involved as making that argument—I have trouble imagining that it is, but that’s an issue worth clarifying).

The second is saying that this is an issue of aversive racism, in which people see that someone is a POC and consciously deny them the honor.

The third is unconscious racism, such as if people are more likely to vote for people with whom they feel more comfortable, or (as will be discussed below), white discomfort with POC means that POC aren’t included on panels, in edited collections, or invited to lunches.

The fourth is what is legally called “disparate impact,” in which intent is irrelevant—if scholars’ implicit criteria is a kind of scholarship POC tend not to do (as happened with women when women started publishing more), then there is racially-valenced discrimination with neither intent nor aversion. The politics of respectability–the ways we define and enforce norms about respect and respectability–apply disparately to POC, whether they’re intended to or not.

The fifth is systemic or institutional racism, in which institutions and organizations were structured for the benefits of the dominant group at the time, and, while there is no longer necessarily a conscious intent, there is still the impact (such as previously male institutions that have inadequate women’s rest rooms).

At least one widely-distributed argument assumes that this controversy is all about identity—the identity of the Distinguished Scholars. There is one editorial being distributed that makes two occluding assumptions: first, that any claim that a process is racist is the same as accusing the people involved in the process of aversive racism. The criticism is, as this editorial says, “an attack on the association’s own Distinguished Scholars,” that the NCA is “implicitly accusing them [the Distinguished Scholars] of racism.” This editorial frames the changes in NCA procedure as an attack on the identity of the Distinguished Scholars—on their goodness, character, and judgment.

The second occluding assumption is that the only way to include more POC is to ignore merit in favor of decisions based purely on identity. That seems to be saying that there are no POC scholars who merit inclusion—what, then, are the reasons for their exclusion? Because they are excluded.

I don’t know what the NCA argument is, and I can imagine that there are legitimate complaints that the NCA Distinguished Scholars might have about how the NCA has handled this problem. But I’m concerned that there appears to be no acknowledging that there is a problem of exclusion.

This isn’t to say that you can look at the numbers and infer aversive racism on the part of the Distinguished Scholars—the assumption that many people seem to be making. I doubt it is aversive racism; it certainly isn’t about the feelings or character of the people involved. This shouldn’t be an argument about their identity.

If we move the stasis from the identities of the Distinguished Scholars, to the fact of exclusion, then we can talk about processes and institutions and systems. And, really, racism is generally about processes, about often completely unconscious biases built into those processes, even on the part of people who mean well. Racism is often about the sometimes unintended and too often unacknowledged consequences of the ways that powerful organizations and institutions function.

Take, for instance, the problem of racism in science grants. A 2016 study of NIH grants concluded that:

White women PhDs and MDs were as likely as white men to receive an R01 award. Compared with white women, Asian and black women PhDs and black women MDs were significantly less likely to receive funding. Women submitted fewer grant applications, and blacks and women who were new investigators were more likely to submit only one application between 2000 and 2006. (Ginther et al. “Gender, Race/Ethnicity, and National Institutes of Health R01 Research Awards: Is There Evidence of a Double Bind for Women of Color?”Academic Medicine Volume 91(8), August 2016, p 1098-1107)

Ginther et al. suggest that there was no conscious racism involved on the part of people reviewing applications—they noted that both women and men of color submitted fewer applications (implying problems with institutional support or mentoring).

An Economist discussion of the study points out that:

Another possible explanation is social networking. It is in the nature of groups of experts (which is precisely what peer-review panels are) to know both each other and each other’s most promising acolytes. Applicants outside this charmed circle might have less chance of favourable consideration. If the charmed circle itself were racially unrepresentative (if professors unconsciously preferred graduate students of their own race, for example), those excluded from the network because their racial group was under-represented in the first place would find it harder to break in.

If that is the case, this is not aversive racism, let alone conscious hostility.

But there is a problem with NIH grants. And, similarly, there is a problem with the processes by which the Distinguished Scholars group is constituted.

But, to solve that problem, we don’t have to talk about the identities or characters of the Distinguished Scholars.

This isn’t about them; it’s about our field, and its processes, organizations, and institutions. Let’s talk about them.

Teaching a class on Hitler

I mentioned elsewhere that, after years of avoiding it, I decided I should teach a course about racism.  I was hesitant because I think there are too damn many white people telling non-white people about their experiences. I decided to teach it when I realized my goal wasn’t telling non-white people about their experiences, but about trying to get people currently on the winning side of institutional racism to understand why and how we’re winning, and how to talk to other people of privilege about racism without falling into the thoroughly useless slough of white liberal guilt.

My area of scholarly interest (sometimes I say “expertise,” but I really shouldn’t, since there is no way to be an expert on this) is train wrecks in public deliberation (aka, pathologies of deliberation). Cases that I thought would be really different turned out to be very similar: evasion of policy argumentation in favor of factionalized zero-sum thinking; the reduction of the varied array of available policy options to This Policy or Doing Nothing; the assumption that the course of action is obvious, and motivistic dismissals of anyone who criticized This Policy, or even wanted time to think (they’re on the side of the enemy, they want us to do nothing, they’re cowards, they’re effeminate); faith in The Will, so that a plan is completely impractical is irrelevant because Real Americans (Athenians, Germans, Whatevs) who beleeeeeve enough can make it happen (meaning political discourse is now reduced to the scene in Peter Pan when the audience claps enough to make Tinkerbell shine again); and, well, a lot of other things.

Those things (scholars of rhetoric would call them topoi) show up in all sorts of places. I’ve listened to people appeal to the “if we commit with full will to this plan it must succeed” topos in gatherings of political groups, MLA Delegate Assembly meetings, far too many State of the Unions or political speeches generally, Sunday school, faculty meetings, Fourth of July speeches, homeowner association meetings, even a random guy who stopped to talk to me while I was weeding appealed to it. It’s in self-help rhetoric, pickup artist rhetoric, the entire world of make money fast, any incarnation of prosperity gospel, weight-loss ads, and far too much discourse about politics.

My goal in teaching, like my goal in scholarship, came to be to persuade people that what matters about what people argue is what it means for how they think about political argument. And, it’s pretty clear that certain topoi are consistently problematic, such as the “if you have enough will” topos.

It’s hard for people to see the problems with many of the most consistently disastrous topoi since it often took years before the disastrous outcome happened. (And, as with the slaver state commitment to slavery, when their commitment turned out to be disastrous, they just pretended they’d never had it—a not uncommon response to profoundly disconfirming evidence.) And even now, many generations later, many descendants of the people who made the disastrous decision to go to war over slavery won’t admit it’s a mistake.

War, famously, has a way of testing theories very quickly: no battle plan ever survives contact with the opposition, and the enemy has a vote. Someone might argue that the CSA was right to go to war to protect slavery and get some supporters, but they’d have a very hard time getting anyone to support the argument that they won that war.

I developed a course, “Deliberating War,” that was an attempt to: 1) complicate students’ understandings of public discourse, especially to disentangle deliberation from compliance-gaining; 2) get them to see some of the patterns about disastrous public decision-making; 3) get students to see that, just because someone says “We have to go to war because otherwise the enemy will destroy us, so this is self-defense” doesn’t mean it is. And, of course, Hitler figured in that course. (Most of that course was about the Peloponnesian War, but that’s a different post.) Hitler also figured in the “Rhetoric and Racism” course I teach. And, consistently, in anonymous end-of-semester evaluations, students said they wanted to know more about Hitler.

I’m not Jewish. I’m not German. I was once translation fluent in German, but I now struggle. So, once again, there is an issue of feeling like an interloper.

Talking about Hitler is always talking about persuasion. And it’s also, interestingly enough, talking about how false models of persuasion mean that people get persuaded.

So, I girded my loins, and created a course on Hitler and Rhetoric. It’s a funny course in a bunch of ways. It gets a huge number of students who sign up, get the syllabus, and then drop. A large number get as far as when the first paper is due, and they drop. It is, fundamentally, a course about the distinction between deliberation and compliance-gaining models of public discourse, and so student papers have to be deliberation. Students are well-trained in papers oriented toward display (as though that is compliance-gaining), and so can be intimidated when you ask for deliberative papers.

My goal in the course was to have students begin with Hitler’s rhetoric, then move to the rhetoric that supported him, and then have the third paper about the Hitler comparison, but that never happened. Here is what did happen.

I explain elsewhere why I write prompts the way I do. Here’s the information I gave students about the papers:

The prompts are designed to get more complicated and more time-consuming as the semester progresses—you’ll need a lot of time just for research for the final paper. I’ve made an effort to come up with topics that are comparable in terms of work and difficulty. Sometimes we can work out other topics, but only if you come talk to me at least two weeks before the paper is due.

Whether or not you do outside research, remember that you have to cite the sources of ideas as well as language–it doesn’t matter if the source is another student, another class, a paper for another course, the Internet, a book, or an article. If you have any questions about how to cite appropriately, or if you are nervous that you are plagiarizing, just write a note in the margin of your paper to that effect. Any handbook tells you how to cite sources, including webpages; papers without appropriate citation will be considered late.

I’ve grouped the assignments on the basis of course readings, but, if you discuss it with me at least one week before the paper is due, you can do an assignment from another part of the course. I just need to make sure that you write on a range of topics, and that your papers remain within an appropriate range of difficulty. If you simply turn a paper in from another part of the course, you can expect icky consequences.

The prompts ask that you apply a concept from rhetoric. You can use anything (other than ethos, pathos, or logos) from Jasinski, and here is a list that is likely to help:

    • any of Burke’s terms from “Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’”
    • art of masculine victimhood (Johnson)
    • the four terms described by O’Shaughnessy (pages 4-5)
    • condensation symbols (Jasinski)
    • dissociation (the rhetorical concept)/paired terms (it’s rare that you can do one without the other)
    • dog whistle politics
    • enthymematic reasoning (beginning from common ground)
    • identification through transcendence/common ground
    • inoculation
    • interpellation/constitutive rhetoric
    • jeremiad
    • prophetic ethos
    • rhetoric of survivance (Powell)
    • specific or universal topoi
    • stock topics (policy argumentation)
    • ultimate terms

Some good resources for the papers include:

    • The Domarus collection of Hitler’s speeches and proclamations. Available here.
    • This collection of Nazi propaganda
    • Here is a link to the official records of speeches in the Reichstag (in German). This is July 13, 1934—for other dates, just use the forward or backward arrows.

Paper One. Use a concept from rhetoric (from Jasinski or the list above—NOT ethos, pathos, or logos) to explain something puzzling about one of these speeches by Hitler:

    • April 12, 1922 speech in Munich
    • Something from The New Germany desires Work and Peace (not the March 23 speech)
    • “Sportspalast speech” (you can hear it here)
    • April 28 1939 speech (coursepack)
    • Deliberations with his generals (from Hitler and His Generals: Military Conferences 1942-1945; edited by Helmut Heiber, David M. Glantz) (some is in the coursepack, but a lot of it is really fascinating)
    • Invasion of Poland
    • February 20, 1933 “Speech to the Industrialists”
    • Announcement of the Soviet invasion June 22, 1941
    • November 8, 1942 (“Stalingrad speech”)
    • November 8, 1943 speech (a recording is here: )
    • His “last speech”

For these papers, your audience is other class members, and so the “puzzling” something should be something that you find interesting or weird about the text—that it doesn’t fit your image of Hitler, for instance, or that it seems completely different from other things we’ve read, or that you can’t imagine it being effective, or something along those lines. In class, we’ll go over thesis questions (that is, a statement of the puzzle you’re pursuing) so that we can make sure that you’ve got a manageable topic.

Paper Two
1) Trace out the development (or not) of a specific rhetorical strategy (use Jasinski or the list above—NOT ethos, pathos, or logos) from at least three speeches within a set such as these:

    • Hitler’s speeches about the Soviet Union
    • Goebbels’ birthday speeches for/about Hitler
    • Hitler’s declarations of war/speeches at the moment of invasion
    • Hitler’s speeches about (references to) the United States/FDR
    • If you didn’t do this for the first paper, you can write about Hitler’s deliberations with his generals (from Hitler and His Generals: Military Conferences 1942-1945; edited by Helmut Heiber, David M. Glantz)
    • If you’d like to do a different set, you need to get written approval from me by 2/27
    • Nazi theories of propaganda: in addition to what Hitler says in Mein Kampf, Goebbels’ Knowledge and Propaganda, and Our Battle Against Judah.

2) Or, write about the rhetorical strategy of one of these texts resisting/criticizing Hitler and/or Nazism. Use a concept from Jasinski or the list above (you can also use “rhetoric of survivance”—you can’t use ethos, pathos, or logos).

    • Otto Wels’ March 23, 1933 speech against “The Enabling Act.” This one is harder than it looks, since it’s short. You’ll need to talk a lot about it in the context of Hitler’s speech and the rhetorical situation.
    • Various responses to the “Aryan Paragraph” (you’ll need to talk about all of them probably, since they’re all pretty short—you can find them in M. Solberg’s A Church Undone)
    • von Papen’s “Marburg Speech” (You’ll find Evans’ discussion of that speech helpful [II; 27-41] and Ullrich
    • Clara Zetkin’s 1933 Reichstag speech (if you can find the full text in English, or can read German)
    • July 2017 speech by the President of France
    • Thomas Mann’s “This Man is My Brother” (coursepack)

Paper Three. For this paper, write about characteristics of Hitler’s rhetoric in other places. Use terminology from this class (that is, again, something from Jasinski or the above list, and not ethos, pathos, or logos). Thus, you won’t just be showing that they were praising Hitler or repeating what he said—you need to show that a concept from rhetoric helps us understand what is or is not the same about this rhetoric.

    • Adolph Eichmann’s testimony and/or interrogation answers (pick one section from this). You can also watch Eichmann’s testimony here.
    • The Nazi Generals’ discussion of their situation (from Tapping Hitler’s Generals)
    • The Daily Stormer style guide
    • Hermann Goering, Reconstruction of a Nation (1934)
    • Aryanism.net or something from David Duke’s website
    • This site (essentially, a guide how to argue for white supremacy)
    • Gertrud Scholtz-Klink’s speeches about women and Nazism
    • A pamphlet released after things started going badly in Stalingrad: What Does Bolshevization Mean in Reality? Be forewarned, it’s really grim and deliberately horrifying—even I find it almost unreadable.
    • Theodore Bilbo’s Take Your Choice. Bilbo was a segregationist who cited the same authorities the Nazis cited. He was an Alabama governor and Senator, and his book is from 1948.
    • How Nuremburg defendants framed/explained their actions (see Interrogations), showing that a rhetorical concept explains their strategies (so you have to think rhetoric does).
    • F. von Bernhardi’s 1912 Germany and the Next War

==========
And here is the TOC for the coursepack

Rhetoric and Hitler Table of Contents

Syllabus
Rhetoric and Hitler: an introduction
Kenneth Buke, “Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’”
O’Shaughnessy, from Selling Hitler
McElligott, from Rethinking Weimar Germany
Hitler, March 23, 1933 speech
Sample papers
“Advice on Wrting”
Hitler, speech to the NSDAP 9/13, 1937
—. speech, 8/22/39
—. interview with Johst
—. speech, 1/27/32
Tourish and Vatcha, “Charismatic Leadership and Corporate Cultism at Enron: The Elimination of Dissent, the Promotion of Conformity and Organizational Collapse”
Entry on interpellation
Hitler, speech 4/28/39
Selection from Hitler’s Table Talk (480-83)
Kershaw, from The End (386-400)
Hitler, speech 7/13/34
Longerich, selection from Holocaust (Nazi evolution on genocide)
Selection from Hitler’s Table Talk 12-16, 422-426
Entry on inoculation
Selection from Tapping Hitler’s Generals (30-62)
Kershaw, from Hitler, The Germans, and the Final Solution (197-206)
Selection from Mayer, They Thought They Were Free (166-173)
“Dog whistle politics”
Selections from Shirer’s radio broadcasts
Selection from Snyder’s Black Earth
Selection from Hitler’s Table Talk (75-79)
Selection from Spicer’s Antisemitism, Christian Ambivalence, and the Holocaust
Hitler, speech 4/12/22
“Dissociation” from Perelman and Olbrecths-Tyteca’s The New Rhetoric
Selection from Encyclopedia of Rhetoric
Selection from Eichmann in Jerusalem
Selection from Eichmann Interrogated
Selection from Hitler and His Generals
Selection from Ordinary Men
Louis Goldblatt’s testimony before the Committee on National Defense Migration
Letter to Mr. Monk
Thomas Mann, “That Man is My Brother”
“Masculinity and Nationalism”
“Art of Masculine Victimhood”
Hitler, speech 6/22/41
selection from Longerich’s Hitler
selection from Maschmann’s Account Rendered

========

Here is the course calendar. It’s pretty messy, so, if you’d like a copy that’s a table, just email me:

8/29 First day of classes
8/31 Read “Rhetoric and Hitler: an introduction” and the course syllabus (especially the part on microthemes). Microtheme (due by 8:00 am [not as attachment—please never send microthemes as attachments]: what questions do you have about the class? What other rhetoric classes have you taken? What other courses about Hitler have you taken? What questions do you have about the material?
9/3 Labor Day
9/5 Read sample papers (coursepack) “Hitler’s speech to the NSDAP September 13, 1937” (coursepack) and “Advice on Writing” (coursepack and here https://www.patriciarobertsmiller.com//advice-on-writing/ ) Microtheme (due in email, by 8:00 a.m.): how is this advice like or unlike your writing processes on previous papers? What surprises you about the papers? What aspects of them do you especially like? What are some questions you have about the prompts? What prompt do you think you’ll answer? If you were going to write about this Hitler speech, what are some puzzles or odd things you might identify?
9/7 Read Evans, I: 1-76; Ullrich 92-109; Gregor 57-89. Microtheme (due by 8:00 am : What questions do you have about the reading? What sorts of topoi did the historical and cultural circumstances provide a racist and authoritarian rhetor like Hitler?
9/10 Read Ullrich 174-181, “Nation and Race” from Mein Kampf, and Burke’s “Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’” (coursepack). Microtheme (due by 8:00 am : what questions do you have about the reading? Which of Burke’s unification devices do you see in this chapter from Hitler? A lot of students find “Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’” a really useful basis of analysis—using it for their papers.
9/12 Read Ullrich 436-445; Evans I: 310-354. Read O’Shaughnessy (Selling Hitler cp) 4-5 and 170-181. Read McElligott (Rethinking cp) 181-207, and Hitler’s March 23, 1933 speech (cp) and Jasinski “Case Construction” and “Stock Issues,” (you can get that through the UT library—it’s an ebook). Microtheme (due in email, by 8:00 a.m.): apply the Jasinski to the Hitler speech. What kind of case does he make? Which stock issues does he use?
9/14 Microtheme (due by 8:00 am ): read the section in the syllabus on thesis questions, and submit at least one thesis question. You’re welcome to submit more than one. This is not your thesis statement.
9/17 1.1 due. If you’re the sort of person who prints up drafts, please include them. Microtheme (due by 8:00 am to patriciarobertsmiller@gmail.com): where is your thesis statement? Where is your thesis question? What is your primary text? How many quotes do you have from that text?
9/19 Read Longerich’s explanation of Nazi evolution on genocide (coursepack) and Evans III: 3-23 (in coursepack), Hitler’s August 22, 1939 speech (coursepack), and selections from his Table Talk (12-17; 422-26, coursepack), and article on inoculation. Microtheme (in email, by 8:00 a.m.): How does Hitler inoculate his audience in the speech?
9/21 Read Hitler’s interview with Johst (January 24, 1932, coursepack) and his (long and boring) speech before German industrialists (January 27, 1932, in the coursepack) and Ullrich 290-293. Microtheme (due by 8:00 am : German industrialists would later support Hitler wholeheartedly, but, as Ullrich says, this speech didn’t do the trick. Apply Burke, topoi, or one of the other concepts from the reading to discuss this speech.
9/24 Return 1.1. Microtheme (due by 8:00 am : 2 Read Jasinski on “prophetic speech/ethos,” article on charismatic leadership (coursepack) and “Our Hitler” (1935 birthday speech) http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/unser35.htm Microtheme (due in email, by 8:00 a.m.): apply either concept (prophetic speech or charismatic leadership) to the reading.
9/26 Otto Wels decided to respond to Hitler’s speech in favor of “The Enabling Act.” Before doing any of the reading, make some notes as to what you would do in that situation. Then, read the information on “interpellation” (coursepack) and Wels’ speech (coursepack) and Hitler’s response (coursepack). Also read McElligott 214-215 and Evans’ discussion of the Enabling Act. Microtheme (in email, by 8:00 a.m.): did Wels take the strategy you would have? How would you characterize Wels’ response? Are you surprised or puzzled by it? What rhetorical strategies does he use? How is Hitler’s rhetoric different in this speech from his speech earlier that evening? Why wasn’t that speech in the Nazi pamphlet? How does Hitler hail Germans such that they should support him?
9/28 Class cancelled because of individual conferences.
10/1 Microtheme (due by 8:00 am : revised introductions for your first paper. Make sure that your introductions sets up your thesis question, and that your thesis statement is delayed till the end of your paper.
10/3 1.2 due. Include all previous versions of every paper. If you’re the sort of person who prints up drafts, please include them. Microtheme (due by 8:00 am : what changes did you make to your paper? Where is your thesis statement? How much close analysis do you have in your paper?
10/5 Quiz.
10/8 In class: return 1.2 and go over sample student material.
10/10 Read William Shirer on Hitler’s April 28, 1939 speech 397-404, coursepack), and then that speech. Microtheme (in email, by 8:00 a.m.) what seems weird to you about Hitler’s speech? What rhetorical strategies does Hitler use?
10/12 Microtheme (due by 8:00 am : read the section in the syllabus on thesis questions, and submit at least one thesis question. You’re welcome to submit more than one. This is not your thesis statement.
10/15 2.1 due. Include all previous versions of every paper. If you’re the sort of person who prints up drafts, please include them.
10/17 Read Mein Kampf 176-186, 394-412, 579-589, selection from Table Talk (480-482) and this material on propaganda: “The Nature” http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/dietz.htm “First Course” http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/lehrgang.htm “Directive” http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/bolshevist.htm and Kershaw 386-400 (cp). Microtheme (in email, by 8:00 a.m.): As always, just feel free to react to the material, and don’t worry about reading the Mein Kampf carefully (the Kershaw will also have a lot of references you don’t get). What rhetorical strategies are constant in this material, and what changes?
10/19 Read background to the “Night of Long Knives” (Ullrich 458-473) and Hitler’s July 13, 1934 speech justifying the massacre (coursepack). Microtheme (in email, by 8:00 a.m.): As always, just feel free to react to the material. What rhetorical strategies does he use? This happens to be one speech where there is reasonably good evidence (which Ullrich mentions) that it was persuasive. Can you speculate as to why it worked?
10/22 [Return 2.1] Read these articles about American Nazis: https://the-avocado.org/2018/08/11/how-we-got-here-the-mad-legions-of-america/ and https://the-avocado.org/2018/08/11/how-we-got-here-the-mad-legions-of-america/ (you can see footage from the rally here https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/542499/marshall-curry-nazi-rally-madison-square-garden-1939/) and https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/8/15/16144070/psychology-alt-right-unite-the-right . Microtheme (in email, by 8:00 a.m.): how similar (or not) are the rhetorical strategies?
10/24 This reading is fairly disturbing: it’s about how various groups (such as“ordinary Germans” or military officers) rationalized supporting the regime. Selection from Tapping Hitler’s Generals (30-62, coursepack), Kershaw, “Popular Opinion” (197-209, coursepack), selection from They Thought They Were Free (166-173, coursepack). Microtheme (due by 8:00 am ): these readings all concern the complicated interactions of coercion, rhetoric, compliance, and belief. What role do you see rhetoric playing for these various kinds of Germans?
10/26 Read Hitler’s speech announcing the invasion of Poland (https://fcit.usf.edu/holocaust/resource/document/HITLER1.htm), “dog whistle politics” (coursepack), and excerpts from Shirer’s radio broadcasts (coursepack and here https://www.patriciarobertsmiller.com//excerpts-william-shirers-berlin-1999/). Microtheme (in email, by 8:00 a.m.): As always, just feel free to react to the material. Also, how is Hitler framing the situation? Are there dog whistles and, if so, what are they and how do they function?
10/29 1.3 due. Include the marked copies of 1.1 and 1.2.
10/31 Read background to invasion of the USSR; (Snyder [Black Earth] in coursepack and this: https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005164) read Hitler’s speech on Stalingrad (http://comicism.tripod.com/421108.html) Microtheme (in email by 8:00 a.m.): what are Hitler’s main rhetorical problems and constraints with this speech?
11/2 Quiz.
11/5 2.2 due. Include all previous versions of every paper. If you’re the sort of person who prints up drafts, please include them.
11/7 Read Hitler selection from Table Talk 75-79, Spicer 105-120, Hitler’s April 12, 1922 speech and Perelman on dissociation (all in coursepack) and Jasinski on dissociation (ebook). Microtheme (due by 8:00 am : How does he use dissociation? Also, note his use of religious rhetoric. 11/9 Read “Duties of a Law-Abiding Citizen” (from Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem). Arendt is a tough read because she engages in a lot of indirect paraphrase (so she is often describing a point of view she does not have, such as that Eichmann was a victim) and the selection from Eichmann Interrogated (both in the coursepack). You might also find this background helpful: https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007412 Microtheme (in email, by 8:00 a.m.): do you see any of Hitler’s topoi in Eichmann’s rhetoric about himself or his situation? What is Eichmann’s argument, and how does he make it?
11/12 Return 2.2. Read Hitler’s September 30, 1942 speech and and background information from Kershaw 534-555 (both in coursepack) Microtheme (due by 8:00 am :
11/14 Read selection from Deliberations with His Generals (coursepack). Microtheme (due by 8:00 am : how is this private and deliberative rhetoric like or unlike his more public rhetoric?
11/16 Microtheme (due by 8:00 am : Introductions for 3.1.
11/19 Microtheme (due by 8:00 am necessary but not sufficient for getting an A on 3.1 or 3.2). Draft of 3.1. 11/21 Thanksgiving break
11/23 Thanksgiving break
11/26 Read the speeches by Speer and Goebbels trying to make the best of a bad situation: (Speer) http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/tatsachen.htm
and (Goebbels): http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb40.htm Microtheme (due by 8:00 am : what rhetorical strategies do they use? How is their rhetorical approach different (from each other, or from previous speeches of theirs) or alike?
11/28 3.1 due. Include all previous versions of every paper. If you’re the sort of person who prints up drafts, please include them. For class, read http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-stupid-ways-alt-right-destroying-itself-from-within/ Microtheme (in email, by 8:00 a.m.): What do you think about the strategy of humor in regard to Nazis?
11/30 Read selection from Ordinary Men (coursepack). Microtheme (in email, by 8:00 a.m.): this is a difficult reading, and it’s challenging for thinking about rhetoric—what difference did rhetoric make in the “persuasion” of these “ordinary men”?
12/3 Return 3.1 In class: quiz. Microtheme (in email, by 8:00 a.m.): what’s a concept from this course that you used outside of class? How did you use it? Or what’s a concept from this class you’ve found really useful outside of class?
12/5 Read this article about modern Nazis’ use of digital spaces: “Killing 8chan: The Heart of Modern Nazi Terrorism [CW]” https://c4ss.org/content/51110 Microtheme (due by 8:00 am : In what ways are these Nazis like the Nazis they admire? What rhetorical concepts help us understand these groups? What surprises you (or not) about them?
12/7 Read Goldblatt’s speech before the Congressional Committee on Japanese internment (which they called “evacuation” coursepack) Microtheme (in email, by 8:00 a.m.): what’s a concept from this course that you used outside of class? How did you use it? Or what’s a concept from this class you’ve found really useful outside of class?
12/10 Last day of classes
3.2 due. Include all previous versions of every paper, your filled-out gradesheet, and printed versions of any plus or check-plus microthemes. If you’re the sort of person who prints up drafts, please include them.

We’ll be talking about Cabaret, so, if you have a chance, you should try to watch it.

Conservative Christians’ support for Trump isn’t hypocrisy

[Image from here]

Many people are dismayed and shocked at how self-described conservative Christians are justifying our government’s heartless treatment of immigrant children. Since most (perhaps all) of these “Christians” are descendants of people who made exactly the same decision they are now characterizing as “irresponsible parenting,” it’s tempting to call their stance hypocritical.

It isn’t. There is no conflict between American conservative evangelical Christians’ support for an authoritarian, anti-democratic, corrupt, bigot and their fundamental values. Those are their values. They’ve always supported bigoted authoritarianism. They always do.

Self-identified conservatives are, as Elizabeth Theiss-Morse’s research shows, if they consider themselves patriotic, “more likely to set stricter boundaries on who counts as American and therefore  to limit who should receive the benefits of group membership.” (98) What Theiss-Morse calls “strong identifiers” (that is, people who identify strongly with their in-group)  tend to rely heavily on stereotypes about groups. So, people who self-identify as conservative evangelical Christians are more likely to believe stereotypes about out-groups (immigrants, poor people, non-whites, non-conservatives) as lazy, indulgent, weak, and therefore not deserving of support.

Self-identified conservative Christians read Scripture as advocating an us v. them attitude that calls on Christians to protect “us.” And they define “us” by political, not Scriptural, agenda. And certainly not by what Christ emphasized.

Look, for instance, at a defense  of how “evangelicals” are supporting Trump . And notice, first, that the author assumes that all evangelicals are white, and politically conservative. In other words, as I said, Brown’s sense of “us” (which he falsely identifies as evangelicals) is actually his very narrow sense of who is truly “us.” The no true Scotsman fallacy.

Brown’s argument is fallacious and authoritarian to the core. It’s also a rejection of Jesus.

Brown doesn’t think self-identifying evangelical Christians count if they don’t share his very narrow political agenda. They aren’t even in his world. He only thinks in terms of his in-group’s self-identification: as “evangelicals” who have a very specific (and very new) political agenda.

Brown admits that politically conservative white evangelicals “made a gross miscalculation” to think Trump would “change the moral fabric of the nation,” and defending Trump’s treatment toward others has “compromised [their] moral authority]”.

But, he says, ignore all that because Hillary Clinton would have made things much worse because “she would be a staunch opponent of our religious liberties, a zealous advocate for abortion, and a supporter of radical LGBT activism.”

Let’s be clear: Brown is not an advocate of religious liberty on principle. He is, as he says, concerned about “our” religious liberties (meaning his). He isn’t concerned about the religious liberties of evangelical Christians who disagree with him about politics, let alone about the religious liberties of non-Christians. Trump’s judicial appointments are doing extraordinary damage to the principle of religious liberty. But, he’s doing great for people who want the liberty to treat other religions in a way they wouldn’t want to be treated. Brown likes that.

Brown is only concerned about the very narrow “us” and he wants that “us” to be treated differently from how other groups are treated.

HRC wasn’t an advocate for abortion, and he isn’t supporting a policy agenda that would reduce abortion. Radical LGBT activism is simply his term for queer people asking that they be treated as Brown wants to be treated, that they have the same rights he does. Brown doesn’t like the idea that the government would treat others as he wants to be treated.

Jesus never mentioned abortion or homosexuality, and, as many people have shown, Scripture is more oriented toward issues of our treatment of the poor than it is about abortion or homosexuality.  As has been shown over and over, bigoted readings of clobber verses about homosexuality are incoherent.  Yet Brown never mentions anything about the poor, about a Christian attitude toward immigration, about opposition to violence and war.

Brown thinks, correctly, that Trump is promoting Brown’s very limited political agenda. Brown thinks his political agenda is evangelical Christian. That’s where he’s wrong. What Brown wants the government to do is a violation of how Jesus says we should behave.

Brown might be able to cherry-pick Scripture to argue that his political agenda is Scriptural, but he can’t cherry pick what Jesus said—he wants a government that enables him to do unto others as he would not have done unto him.

Brown’s “Christianity” is religious demagoguery. He is arguing for a government grounded in an “us” (people who think the way he does) who are privileged in every aspect and a “them” (people who disagree with him) who should be punished, marginalized, and treated differently.

Unhappily, Brown is not unusual for conservative Christianity. It’s worth remembering that conservative Christianity was on the side of slavery  segregation , and are still on the side of marital rape. Conservative Christians justified Roy Moore’s pedophilia, Trump’s sexual assaults (he bragged about watching underage girls undress), Kavanaugh’s plausible accusation of assault. They don’t really care very much about rape. They also don’t care about the poor.

Advocates of slavery and segregation, conservative Christians, sometimes (rarely) responded to progressive Christian arguments that slavery and segregation violated Christ’s “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” And their argument was always some version of why that didn’t apply, why it was less important than other cherry-picked bits from Scripture. That’s why anti-slavery and anti-segregation rhetoric posed the same assertion that enraged conservative evangelicals: they said, “I am a man.” Conservative Christians rejected that claim; they rejected Jesus’ call.

Current “conservative Christians” are the same. They still can’t defend their politics in terms of what Jesus very clearly said: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Instead, they argue that we are in a battle between good and evil that means we should reject what Jesus said in order to save “us.”

American conservative Christians have always been getting their panties in a bunch about how they are being oppressed, about how they are in an existential fight against extermination, and it’s never been true, and it’s always been in service of enacting oppressive, exclusive, and bigoted policies against some other. It’s always been in service of rejecting what Jesus very clearly said.

Doing unto others as you would have them do unto you means that you, and everyone who disagrees with you, are held to the same standards. Were conservative Christians to follow Jesus’ rule (they don’t, and they never have), then they would have to say that their desire for a “conservative evangelical” to have the “religious liberty” to preach in classrooms, would mean that they’d have to be fine with a terrorist Zoroastrian doing the same.

They aren’t okay with their very narrow understanding of Christianity being treated equally with all other religious beliefs because American conservative evangelical Christianity is, and always has been, a rejection of what Jesus’ commandment that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. American conservative evangelical Christianity has always been on the wrong side of history; it has never been about caring for the marginalized, doing unto others, abjuring violence.

Progressive Christians opposed slavery; progressive Christians opposed segregation; progressive Christians advocate effective policies regarding abortion, progressive Christians advocate compassionate and non-punitive policies about the poor, immigrants, and the marginalized. American conservative evangelical Christianity is, and always has been, about rejecting Jesus’ commandment that we do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Progressive Christians are the ones who’ve taken that seriously.

So, no, conservative evangelical “Christians”’ heartlessness about children being separated from parents isn’t hypocrisy—it isn’t a violation of their core beliefs; it’s perfectly consistent with the values they have and have always had.