Film Review--All Night Long (1962)

In the context of the rest of the collection, I was surprised by the final installment in Basil Dearden's London Underground, 1962's All Night Long. After the polemics of Sapphire and Victim and the political tomfoolery of The League of Gentlemen, I didn't expect a jazzy confection to round us out. It's not a great film, but it's a little more substantial than I initially gave it credit for. As an adaptation of Shakespeare's Othello, this is Basil Dearden's philosophy in practice and, because it stays fairly close to the original material, it has a stronger structure than the other films in the set.

I won't recap Othello for you, but here's how it works in the confines of Richard Attenborough's jazz club. Bandleader Aurelious Rex (Paul Harris) has recently married Delia Lane (Marti Stevens) and everybody's thrilled. Everybody, that is, except Johnny Cousins (Patrick McGoohan, The Prisoner). He wants to start his own band and even has a gig, but it won't go on unless he can recruit Delia to sing. Unfortunately, Delia retired after the wedding and won't return while she's married, so Johnny hatches a plan to convince Rex that Delia is having an affair with best friend and trumpeter Cass Michaels (Keith Mitchell). But, you know, best laid plans and all of that.

Without Shakespeare's plot, All Night Long likely wouldn't be anything that great. McGoohan and Attenborough do pretty well, but the rest of the performances are not up to the level of what we've previously seen in the collection. Because there's already baggage from thousands of performances of the main characters, it doesn't come off as completely hollow, but the lack of any real standout performace and some questionable casting choices give the film an unfortunate amateur feel. The real culprit, though, is the stunt casting of the house band. Johnny Dankworth and Tubby Hayes may never have held the biggest sway in the jazz world, but putting Charles Mingus and Dave Brubeck in the band is agregious. They may have been exceptional instrumentalists and one may have trained his cat to use the toilet, but actors they are not. While closeups of their hands are cool, their main function is to say things like "That's some hot playin', Charlie!" and "Thanks Dave" in tight cutaways. It reminds me of something that might have hapened in Gold Diggers of 1932. That is not a compliment. That said, the three or four minutes of music we get to hear are pretty good, so it's not a total loss, I guess.

There isn't a lot of outward connection between this film and the others here, but there are similarities in tone and attitude. Most importantly, the world of All Night Long is integrated, and the non-chalance of it is interesting. Obviously, the Moorish lead character in the play makes that interracial couple natural (though Paul Harris is black, whites in makeup would play the part for years after this came out), Dearden inserts other mixed-race relationships into the scene. Importantly, he never mentions it. This is not a political film; it's Othello, but that the director sees fit to quietly place them in the film is proof in practice of the heavy-handed ideals he presents in the earlier films.

Taken on its own, All Night Long would probably fare better, but within the confines of this collection, it feels somewhat trifling. It isn't just the lack of an overt political message, although that's part of it; outside of the Othello trappings, there's simply nothing going on. At least in a movie like Tim Blake Nelson's O, which I like but is of mixed quality, had some stylistic flourish. Even if it's a little pretentious, at least he's trying. Here, it seems that Dearden was content to film the play with little style outside the musical interludes. The film isn't boring and, because of the source, plays out well, but it doesn't come anywhere near the other films here and isn't the kind of sendoff I would have hoped for for such an eye-opening collection.

Eskimo Images in Advertising

Another great post and set of images from Sociological Images

Is Interracial Sex the Key to a Better America?

Dom Apollon's thoughtful piece responding to this week's Times article about the rising number of multiracial children makes me wonder if interracial sex isn't just about the best thing for this nation.

Not that non-white people can't become conservative. But they usually don't. And at the very least, they usually aren't openly racist. Which would be an improvement for much of America. This nation could use more tolerance. Multiracial people are pretty much the Republicans' worst nightmare.

In this one-drop nation, Barack Obama is black. Derek Jeter is black. So is anyone else with any black blood in them. Of course, the meanings of white have changed over time and as some have said recently (though I can't remember the specific references), it's entirely possible that some Latinos and Asians get whitened in future decades in the same way that Italians and Jews did in the mid 20th century. Could happen. On the other hand, the Republican Party is so anti-immigration and racist that accepting large numbers of Mexicans as white seems unlikely. Already white Cubans, sure.

Also, the rise of people aware of this whitening process makes it less likely it will happen without a lot of bitching about it.

As Apollon points out, more interracial kids doesn't mean race doesn't matter in America. Not by a long shot. 

So it seems awful unlikely to me. And reaffirms my idea that interracial sex is awesome for America.

I'd like to think I'm doing my part by marrying an Irishwoman. They aren't considered white yet, are they?

Historical Image of the Day

This week's images will consist of anti-imperialist cartoons produced during the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars.

Anti-imperialist cartoon showing President William McKinley thinking about American expansion while ignoring racial violence at home. Literary Digest, November 26, 1898

Unions and Racism

Coming out of yesterday's discussions at LGM of the left blogosphere and lack of labor coverage among progressive websites was this comment by J.Dunn after I said that the constant progressive critique of unions as racist and sexist were unfair:

I would argue that those critiques were right (at least in retrospect) and that unions and the New Deal social contract in general as constituted then probably had to die to usher in the civil rights and women’s lib era. Also, that it was probably worth the cost in the long run to put us on what I’m increasingly sure is a permanent path to a vastly more inclusive, fully democratic, and socially tolerant society. Most of those changes aren’t going back in the box, barring apocalyptic scenarios, and the gains were very real and broadly realized. 

I feel this whole argument is deeply problematic. Obviously, the gains made by the civil rights and women's rights movements are great, but that's not the point. What's important here is the assumption that unions were responsible for holding these groups back and that without breaking the New Deal Coalition, civil and women's rights would have been delayed or denied.

I'm going to focus more on racism than sexism here, but much of the critique holds.  What I find remarkable is how strongly the image of hardhats beating hippies in 1968 remains relevant within the minds of many progressives. Maybe this is because a lot of ex-hippies are among the leaders of Democratic causes today. Maybe it's because today's progressive writers tend to come from the same upper-middle and elite classes that the hippies did and thus have never actually known union members and don't feel much class solidarity.

Unions did suffer from racism.. This cannot be argued. Most unions were dominated by white men who believed in full employment for whites under a single-family income. The big industrial unions of the CIO were filled with white men who moved north for industrial work and immigrant men who found that becoming "white" after World War II meant significant improvement in social acceptance. If becoming white meant also rejecting blacks, well, it's not as if that was going to be hard for people who usually looked down on blacks anyway. Meanwhile the old AFL craft unions had always committed themselves to white solidarity, with Samuel Gompers openly disdainful of immigrants, women, blacks, and child labor.

Employers often used race to split working-class solidarity. They would hire large groups from multiple rival ethnic groups in Europe, figuring the occasional fight on the factory floor was much less of a problem than unionization. Coal companies would go to Alabama and recruit black stikebreakers, take them up to West Virginia, and put them in the mines, exacerbating racial tension to undermine the possibility that the strikebreakers would join the strikers. They also saw hiring black factory workers as a way to undermine unions in the 1930s onward. And while I'm hardly excusing racism, if you see another group of people as a threat to throw you and your family out of their jobs and onto the street (and remember this is in a society before the New Deal with essentially zero safety net), it'd be pretty easy to target that group.

I'm consistently amazed by how little modern progressives (or hippies in the 60s) seem to understand this. Unions didn't cause racism, they reflected it. All of society was racist and sexist in the 1960s. Much of it remains so today. It's important to recognize how unions were racist and sexist. It's equally important to understand that unions were not the primary institution holding back civil and women's rights. Doing so and continuing to taint unions today with that charge serves capital's interests.

What's more, the story is a lot more complicated than we are led to believe. First, union members vote Democratic at far higher rates than non-union members. They might be bad on personal racial issues, but they vote for the political party that supports relative racial democracy. Second, there were many union members who did support workplace equality, including in the rank and file. UAW President Walter Reuther was a big-time ally of the civil rights movement, speaking at the March on Washington for instance. Reuther and his allies in the UAW always struggled with educating their members on the need for equality. But it was resisted by the rank and file who did not want to work with, live with, or go to school with blacks. And as Democratic politicians in Detroit found out as early as the 1940s, union members would vote Republican if race dominated the campaign.

So what was Reuther to do? In the UAW's case, the union itself was pro-equality, but the rank and file was not. Breaking the UAW did not help equality for anyone--it made inequality much worse. Unions have always struggled with educating their members, but that's a hell of a lot harder than it sounds. I might teach my students a powerful version of American history focusing on a story of struggle and equality, but they aren't all going to come away with that message. It's not strictly on the union structure to control their attitudes of their members that are shaped by family tradition, church, social clubs, television and radio, and any number of other factors, including workplace culture and labor unions.

And given the impossibility of this task, we are down to blaming working-class white men for being racist and being glad they are out of our political coalitions. While that might sound good from the pedestal we place ourselves on, it's pretty bad from a coalition-building standpoint. And it certainly can get in the way of building class alliances to fight the worst of neoliberalism.

Racism is a problem throughout society. Let's blame unions for their share of it.  But let's also remember that unions have done more than almost any organization in this country to promote democracy and equality. And let's also remember that unions only played a small part in holding back the rights of women and African-Americans. The decline of unions in this country has not helped democratic movements in any way. It has made inequality much worse and seriously hampered the ability of working people from all races and genders from fighting back against globalized capitalism.

Cowboys and Race

Interesting NPR story on black cowboys and how African-American music forms influenced cowboy music.

I will quibble with the article a bit though. Americans tend to think of race as black and white when it is far more complicated than that. Of course, there's lots of good reasons to think of our past in this way. But when we are thinking about the West, race becomes multifaceted. For instance, while the article references Mexican cowboys, it suggests nothing on how Mexican music could have influenced cowboy music. Similarly, while there were in fact white, black, and Mexican cowboys, there were also a lot of Native American cowboys, particularly after 1900. While the open range and the classic days of the cowboys had passed by this time, and while the standards of cowboy music and cowboy culture had already started becoming canonized in popular culture, did Native American music affect cowboy music much? And did cowboy music affect Native American music? Certainly there's a long history between country music and Native Americans.

The diversity of cowboys should hardly be surprising--the reality was that cowboying was (and is) a terrible job. The hours were long, the isolation tremendous, the physical danger very real. This was not a job for people who had a lot of other economic options. And in 19th century America, that meant for non-whites. The romanticization of the West and cowboys that began as early as the 1880s whitened our memories of it, something that is hardly surprising since the popularity of Western literature, music, and art has always been far more about the urbanized eastern mind than any sort of reality.

Anyway, I wish the article more directly dealt with the complex diversity of race among cowboys rather than tell the story primarily as black and white.

Spatialized Segregation

Cool maps showing the segregation of various cities.

Here's Detroit:

Well, that explains a lot. Detroit is an extremely racist city and has been going back to at least World War II.

Segregation is everywhere, but some places it's more complex. Here's San Antonio:

San Antonio looks segregated too, but if you click on the larger version of the map, you can see that in fact there are lots of Latinos (yellow) in the white (red) neighborhoods and the other way around to some extent.

Anyway, it's all really fascinating.

How the Democratic Party Fell Apart

Joan Walsh's excellent discussion of Jefferson Cowie's new book, Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class and subsequent interview with Cowie provide an enlightening discussion of the split between the New Left and the American working class that has weakened the Democratic Party for the past 30 years.

Cowie's book just came out today so I haven't read it, though I highly recommend his 2001 book Capital Moves: RCA's 70 Year Quest for Cheap Labor for a brilliant discussion of deindustrialization and globalization.

Cowie spreads plenty of blame around on the fall of the New Deal coalition, including to the AFL-CIO, to the architects of the New Deal itself who left out workplace protections for everyone who wasn't a white man, to American capitalists who moved jobs overseas just as grassroots unionists and the federal government were forcing workplace integration, and, to a lesser extent, the new identity politics intentionally alienating the white working class. Most of all, he blames AFL-CIO President George Meany and Chicago Mayor Richard Daley for refusing to support George McGovern in 1972, thus showing to the New Left that the old racist white establishment would never support them, even in a fair fight. The book sounds fantastic and I can't wait to read if (if I can ever find the time).

I do want to qualify one point from the interview.

You also explain the way the New Deal set up some of this conflict by leaving out service and agricultural workers, largely blacks and women, from a lot of  protections -- Social Security, the Wagner/labor relations act. Then, when we turn to the agenda of individual rights in the '70s, those protections get administered very separately, through the Civil Rights Act. So we created equal opportunity, but there was never an integrated approach to women as workers, or black people mainly in their economic context. The New Deal that we hail now built in that separation and segregation.
 
Definitely. I'm trying to get around this very common problem of pitting some ideal sense of class politics against identity politics, which is often the way the debate goes here. There's probably a little something to upset both sides on this. As this vibrant rights movement takes off, it really does present that zero-sum problem you were talking about. But then there are these ideas that show people were kind of aware of that moment. Like the Humphrey-Hawkins [full employment] Act. Now it just seems like crazy talk: "We can guarantee a job to everybody." But it provided a material foundation for everybody to be able to have economic rights.

If everybody's going to have equal opportunity, you are probably going to have to make sure you also expand opportunities.
 
Exactly right, and when the steel mills are closing, at the same time that blacks are getting positions in the steel mills, that's not going to do any good.

OK--but I think the racial problem is about quite a bit more than the government forcing the all-white unions to allow black people into the workplace. I agree entirely that declining economic opportunities combined with white racism and the civil rights movement's success to make whites believe that black people and a federal government they believed served black people were at the root of their problems. But even in a period of expanding opportunity, racist politics within the white working class moved union members to the Republican Party, at least on the local level.

As the exploding historical literature on conservatism's rise has shown, in cities like Detroit and Chicago during the 1950s, public housing and desegregation of schools moved white working-class people to revolt even as their union victories with the active assistance of Franklin Roosevelt's administration were fresh in their mind. Just because an activist government helped them didn't mean they wanted an activist government to help other people. Race trumped class, as it has through much of American history.

None of this contradicts Cowie's interview, but I think that even without declining economic opportunities and deindustrialization, the white working class probably still more or less abandons the Democratic Party by 1980 over the issue of race and other cultural changes associated with the New Left and identity politics. I'd call deindustrialization more the nail in the coffin than the bullet that killed the New Deal coalition.

Animated Soviet Propaganda: Black and White (1933)

This extremely powerful piece of animated propaganda from 1933 attacks U.S. race relations. It's hard to argue with this--the Soviets were right about American race relations. Paul Robeson's voice adds great power to the message. The scenes with blacks lynched from the telephone wires like Sparatcus' army leaves a haunting image in the mind. The film does make some attempt to place race relations within the general corruptness of capitalism; after all, the overseer whips both the black and white worker. But given that African-Americans were almost entirely working class and the upper class almost entirely white, talking about race and capitalism made perfect sense.

During the Cold War, the Soviet analysis of American race relations had great importance. As the nations of Asia and Africa threw off their colonial chains in the 1950s and 60s, and as Latin American nations began to choose governments less tied to the United States, American treatment of black people proved a powerful tool in the Soviet arsenal. Why would a newly freed African nation side with the U.S? After all, their president would have to stay in a segregated motel when visiting Washington! I don't know if the Soviets sent these race-based cartoons to their allies in the developing world, but they certainly played up each racial incident. And as Mary Dudziak convincingly shows in her book Cold War Civil Rights, the knowledge that segregationist violence was hurting the U.S. in the Cold War helped move presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson to move more aggressively on civil rights than they otherwise would have.

Finally, the animation is pretty first-rate for 1933. Between the simple figures of lynched blacks to the expressive face of the man at the end of the film to the rich capitalist who kills the black man who won't shine his shoes, this is first-rate art as well as effective propaganda.

We Clearly Live in a Post-Racial Society

Good ol' Louisiana.

Keith Bardwell, Justice of the Peace in Tangipahoa Parish refuses to conduct interracial marriages:

Bardwell said he has discussed the topic with blacks and whites, along with witnessing some interracial marriages. He came to the conclusion that most of black society does not readily accept offspring of such relationships, and neither does white society, he said.

"I don't do interracial marriages because I don't want to put children in a situation they didn't bring on themselves," Bardwell said. "In my heart, I feel the children will later suffer."

If he does an interracial marriage for one couple, he must do the same for all, he said.

"I try to treat everyone equally," he said.

Race totally doesn't matter in America anymore....

Via Think Progress

Racism or Nativism: The Anti-Obama Rallies and Race

James Vega has a provocative and I believe solid piece about the racialism of the teabagging rallies. After carefully examining just what sorts of images of Obama appeared on signs at the rallies, Vega notes that relatively few contained the traditional iconography of anti-black racism. Rather, they remind him more of the late 19th century "yellow peril" anti-Asian freakout.

The “yellow peril” comparison suggests a much more robust conceptualization of the protesters attitudes – not as an antagonism against African-Americans in particular, but as a broader antagonism to the growing racial and social diversity of America in general – to the replacement of a white-dominated, traditional, conservative small-town American culture with a “Tiger Woods” racial mélange of white, black, brown red and yellow Americans and an eclectic urbanized culture of diverse tastes, values, music, clothing, slang and even sexual preference and expression. It is a reaction against a new world of Spanish signs on stores, Asians and Indian families moving in next door, gays calmly accepted as part of ordinary daily life and the necessity of having to be retrained in new jobs and fields in response to the economic demands of a complex globalized world. The “real America” the protesters want to restore is the America of Tom Sawyer and Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” – a culture rooted in the rural and small town values that are still a very real and significant part of America.

Democrats need to call this perspective by its correct name. It is not simply anti-Black racism, but rather a modern version of the “nativism” or cultural xenophobia that has been a recurring feature of American culture and politics throughout the country’s history – a fear not simply of alien and foreign ideas but of wrenching social and cultural change in general.

Vega goes on to explain why its so important that Democrats are careful what they call this reaction--because a lot of Americans are not willing to call this racism. It doesn't sit right with them. Many Americans think of racism as a strictly bound set of actions--supporting segregation, not allowing blacks to vote, maybe opposing your family members from relationships with people of other colors. Outside of that, they don't see it that way.

I know these teabagging actions are racist and you know they are racist, but that doesn't mean everyone sees it this way. I think there is a non-zero chance of Democrats overplaying this card and alienating some white voters who don't like to hear their own attitudes called racist when they oppose segregation and such. I'm a big believer in accurate nomenclature and while these actions are racist, they are also more accurately nativist. Calling it such probably makes more sense politically as well.

The N-word

Ok, this might be a difficult post, and I apologize in advance if I offend anyone, but I would rather talk about it than not talk about it because I think it is important.  

Recently two of my good friends (both people of color) were arguing about the n-word and whether or not it can be used in certain situations or never.  One was arguing that in some situations, the meaning of the word has changed and that it can be used in a positive way to refer to a friend or whatever.  The other was saying that the history of the word can never be separated from the word, and therefore it should never be used.

About the first argument:  

First, I hate censorship.  Not only because I like cussing (which I do), but also because I think it is dangerous to limit freedom of expression.  Huckleberry Finn was one of the most commonly banned books during the 20th century because of the number of times that the n-word appears.  People that argued for the book to be banned would often use the fact that the n-word appears however-many hundred times.  However, if you actually read the book for it's content instead of counting "n*****," you know that the book was actually ahead of its time in terms of race relations (especially in the South) and carries a very strong anti-racist message.  Just because Mark Twain actually used the language of the people doesn't change that.  This book was really commonly banned from being taught in schools, but I would rather my children read books like this that show a more accurate history than one that has been censored and polished.

Second, I love word reclamations.  I love that languages are always changing.  The word "queer" was originally a derogatory term given to homosexuals and people perceived to be homosexual, but the LGBT community has reclaimed the word, which I think is absolutely beautiful.  The word can no longer be used against them because they own it.  This is what my first friend was arguing had already happened with the n-word.  He says that his family and friends use it all the time and it never has a negative connotation.  I think that's great - who am I to tell them what to call each other?

And about the second argument:

The n-word is VERY offensive.  And people have a right to be offended by it, especially people that identify with the people that the word was used for.  And as much as the word as been popularized and as much as it shows up in music and in movies, the word is still often used in a very hateful way toward Blacks.  My second friend told me that once at a party, her friend asked some people to stop singing the n-word in Kanye West's song "Golddigger" because it was really offensive to him.  They laughed and kept singing all the words.  This is unacceptable.  Whenever someone politely asks you to stop saying one racially-charged and very offensive word, why the hell wouldn't you stop?  There is no situation in which you NEED to say it, and it's pretty easy to just not say it, so when someone asks, just don't.

So I don't know who's right.  I still think it is dangerous to say we absolutely cannot say the n-word in any situation.  This would only make the terrible history associated with the word invisible.  And who am I to tell Kanye that he can't use the word as he wishes?  But as a white person with no personal connection with the word, who am I to tell someone that they shouldn't be offended by it?  Comments welcome of course.

You and Your Crystal Meth

At first sight, these numbers about changes in the racial makeup of who is getting sentenced for drug crimes seemed promising:

The D.C.-based Sentencing Project reported that the number of black inmates in state prisons for drug offenses had fallen from 145,000 in 1999 to 113,500 in 2005, a 22 percent decline. In that period, the number of white drug offenders rose steadily, from about 50,000 to more than 72,000, a 43 percent increase. The number of Latino drug offenders was virtually unchanged at about 51,000.

A second glance though is much more depressing. While the War on Drugs has maybe begun to move beyond its "let's use this phrase as a euphemism for arresting black and brown people" phase, there hasn't been any drop off in the numbers of people sentenced for drugs. We still are seeing about 250,000 people a year sent to prison, 95% of whom have done no harm. And what these racial changes reflect is the rise in crystal meth which is popular with whites.

Plus, even these significant changes in the racial makeup still leave us with African-Americans, who make up 12% of the population, with far more in prison than whites, who make up about 70% of the population. This is not good. When progress still sucks, you know things are really screwed up.

Can we please just end the drug wars for christ's sake?

Parliamentary Procedures Do Not Explain The Southern Strategy

Richard Reeves' odd explanation of how the South went Republican really doesn't make much sense. Rather than talk about race, he claims the roots of this shift go back to Kennedy forcing a change in the size of the House Rules Committee, which placed more of his allies on it and embarrassed leading Southern Democrats.

This explanation just doesn't hold water. As a commenter on the post named Bill said:

This is bad history. Absent the Voting Rights Act and the other civil rights legislation, it would have taken much more than a rules fight to get the South to defect to the Republican Party. Race, race and race is at the heart of Southern politics. The 2008 election is a measure of how absolutely poorly Bush had performed in office and a growing small band of younger southerners for whom race is not the lynchpin of politics who joined with an omnipresent band of liberal whites of all ages that was helped by record African-American turnout.

Yes. This actually reminds me of arguments claiming the Civil War was not about slavery. Sure, you can point to other areas of tension, but without slavery, none of those other reasons were sufficient for Americans to start killing each other. Similarly, Kennedy undermining the power of conservatives in Congress allowed for civil rights legislation to pass, but it was that legislation specifically, along with Richard Nixon taking advantage of white southern discontent to push his own ambitions, that created the all-Republican South. This legislative battle is an interesting story, but Reeves puts way too much explanatory power on its shoulders.

That fine line between talking and not talking about race

This article in the Washington Post aptly sums up the dilemma with finding that elusive middle between discussing relevant issues of race that still divide this country, and running into the danger of belaboring it – a point we discussed in our earlier posts about race relations in America here and specifically, Erik's post on the importance of Black History Month here.

Writing about Michelle Obama’s education of middle-schoolers about African American heritage at the White House, and Eric Holder’s controversial speech to the Justice Department, among other things, Krissah Thompson says that this sort of focus on race is getting mixed reviews from people on the left and right alike.

Thomas Mann, a political scientist at the Brookings Institution had an interesting point: "They definitely have to be careful. Better to have the president and his top African American aides serve as role models and achieve the broader objective by indirection."

He is not alone in thinking that top back officials in the Obama administration may be treading on dangerous territory by expanding the conversation on race, as many have voiced these concerns, including Maureen Dowd. I’ve often believed that talking too much about race may have a very real danger of diluting the issue, and have the effect of cloaking the real problems –such as economic classes as we discussed in previous posts - but I’m not sure if putting things in context, so that generation Y could get a better perspective about the history – and hence, the very real racial scars that have been left as a result - is such a bad idea.

Also, these incidents were part of the celebration of Black History Month, and not some out-of-the-blue forays into the subject. I would think it would be an important part of the commemoration to not only celebrate the milestones, but also to take the opportunity to allow those who have come this far to share their experiences and thoughts.

As Shawnta Walcott, a pollster quoted in the article put it:

“Holder, [Lisa] Jackson and Obama are the first African Americans in their positions, and it should come as no surprise that their celebration of black history is different from their predecessors.”

That is an important point. Even the Bush administration had several minorities in its cabinet, but mere appointment to high office is not going to solve the race problem if you don’t use their presence to actually address the issues, and worse still, simply use it as a talking point to prove that you’re not divisive. In that case, you not only don't deal with the subject, but also sidestep it by proclaiming that it is a non-issue.

How History Has Ruined Everything

The introduction paragraph to Lynn Foster's A Brief History of Mexico, Revised Edition states 

"The democratic reforms in 2000 that ended 70 years of party domination in Mexican politics by the Partido Revolutionario Institutional (PRI) have swept in a new era in Mexican history..... The corrupt party leadership that so long ruled Mexico has ended, and everything from labor relations to indigenous rights has been affected.  Moreover, these momentous changes, unlike so many others in Mexican history, were accomplished peacefully.  The political confidence of Mexico today could not contrast more sharply with the ominous foreboding described in the earlier edition of this book."

Yeah, it's true that some things have changed now that there is a new party in power, but there is certainly no more "political confidence" now than when the PRI was in power, and the Mexican distrust of their government is not going to change any time soon.  If you ask any indigenous person, nothing has changed.  They are still discriminated by almost every government policy and regarded as backward people who don't want to "develop."  

We visited with some members of the indigenous community of Amatlán in the state of Morelos.  They told us that not long ago, some people from the government wanted to come visit the community to offer a proposal for a development plan, and the community welcomed them.  But when they proposed a program for developing fish farms in their town, the community members just laughed.  Every year, there is a period of 5 months where water is so scarce that they barely have enough for their basic needs!  How are they ever going to develop fish farms?  Of course they refused the proposal, and no doubt the government reps when back to their people and told everyone that those damn indians don't even want to develop...  So clearly, there are still problems with the Mexican government.

This is the problem capital-H History and history books in particular: they always portray history as a past struggle that has resolved itself already.  In elementary school, we learned (a little bit) about the struggle for women's rights, which basically went like this: "Women used to not have the right to vote.  Can you imagine?! But now they do!  Yay!  Thanks to the women of the past, women don't have to fight for their rights anymore!"  Similarly, the history of race relations in the US goes like this:  "Black people used to be slaves, but then they weren't!  Then they were segregated, but not anymore!  Yay!  Everything is perfect!"  History books teach us not to recognize current systemic problems because it only shows us how they have already been fixed.  No different than a fairy tale, history books only feed our need for a happy ending.

So basically, history teaches us to be complacent and to accept the status quo - Thanks!

The Future of Brazilian Race Relations: A Barack Obama Effect?

I stayed out of the original comments thread from Karthika's post because I had plenty to say, and I think between the comments there and Erik's post, a lot has already been said. Erik gets Brazil right for the most part, as do Randy and Venha Futuro; there, race is incredibly coded in terms of money, clothing, education, and capital-c "Culture." Thus, Sao Paulo residents call idiot drivers or the poor or anybody who pisses them off "baiano" (in Rio, it's "Paraiba," another poor northeastern state with a large number of Afro-descendants), and I've had conversations with my "whiter" Brazilian counterparts where they have point-blank said that there is no racism in Brazil, all while sitting and eating in a pricey restaurant where all of the poorly-paid staff is brown-to-black, or heard somebody explain to me how the funk of the favelas is not "culture," that "culture" means Beethoven and Monet. This is in no way to enter into a "whose racism is worse" debate by claiming Brazil's racism is worse than the U.S.'s- such a debate over things like racism or slavery is less than useful, and tends to obscure the fact that those institutions are appalling regardless of where they are or their particular structures. Each country has its own historically formed racist expressions and structures, and it should go without saying that they are both troubling.

I think a lot of what Erik is saying about the U.S. is fascinating (and frightening). I am a bit curious as to what role he, Karthika, or anybody else thinks identity politics might play in combatting or reifying racism in the U.S. And I am a bit bothered (though it's no fault of his own) that this talk of America being a post-racial society is a particularly white issue (at least it's seemed as such to me). As Erik alludes, it's easier for whites, and maybe even others, to say America is "post-racial" now, but given the implication that racism therefore is no problem seems risible, and I'm fairly certain if I were to walk into Harlem, Washington Heights, the California fields, etc., and suggested that racism was dead, I would be met with a justified amount of derision.

However, what I really want to address here is the flip-side of Erik's discussion; specifically, the effect Barack Obama has had on Brazil. In short, Obama has given hope to more people than just U.S. residents. For generations, Brazilian and American scholars have debated whose racism and/or slavery was worse, and it's not uncommon to hear from most Brazilians the statement that American racism is worse (and again, I don't endorse this view or its opposite; I think neither view is particularly helpful). However, Obama's victory has forced a bit of a re-evaluation and introspection in Brazilian society, especially among Afro-descendants. For example, declaring oneself to be "black" has become far more popular than it had been prior to the election, and while a majority of Afro-descendants still categorize themselves as "brown" (and certainly some politically active Afro-descendants called themselves "black" before the election), I think it's safe to say that self-identifying as "black" has become a much stronger claim to personal pride and ability than it had before Obama was even campaigning. In some ways, it's almost the opposite of what's happening in America: where we are now seeing a major discursive effort to hide race under the rug by pointing to Obama's victory, some in Brazil are forcing the issue of race into public discourse by radicalizing their identity within Brazil's social structure, drawing inspiration from Obama's victory.

What is more, Obama's victory has forced some more uncomfortable self-evalutaions in Brazilian society. If America was supposed to have a worse racism than Brazil, and we've now elected an Afro-descendant to the office of the presidency, why hasn't Brazil done so? And not just to the presidency; the number of "brown" to "black" people in office at the national, state, and even local level is miniscule, and may be poorer than in the U.S. Certainly, Rio has never had a David Dinkins or a Ray Nagin. In short, the fact that we've been able to not only nominate but an elect an Obama has forced some Brazilians to quietly ask why they haven't been able to do so yet. Some progressives in Brazil have countered Obama has a Brazilian counterpart in Lula, who rose up from being a metal worker with no college education to become president of Brazil. While this is true (who's the last labor union leader we've elected? Oh, right....), the class-based nature of this argument in Brazil in some ways just reifies the racist structures of Brazil; by suggesting that Obama is to Lula what race is to class again denies the race-components of class in Brazil (as well as the class-components of race in the U.S.). In other words, they claim that Brazil only has class issues to overcome, and made great strides by electing Lula, thereby ignoring the racial problems still present in Brazil.

I think that Obama's victory and this self-imposed introspection in Brazil may actually lead to some small but important shifts, though. Just this past election year, international news agencies ran stories on 10 candidates who ran for public office in Brazil as "Barack Obama" (in Brazil, you can have virtually any name you want appear for your candidacy on the ballots). Just recently, Frontline ran an excellent report on one of the first of Brazil's "Baracks," as it followed Claudio Henrique's campaign to become the first black mayor of Belford Roxo, one of Rio's poor suburbs (and, in a great epilogue, his journey to the U.S. to attend the inauguration). The 10-minute story (which I highly encourage you to take time to watch) really gets at the key issues of how Obama has affected racial identities, society, and the political landscape in Brazil. Henrique didn't run as "Barack Obama" as some sort of gimmick; he ran because he had genuine hope and admiration for the man he felt had made his own candidacy possible. As one of the people interviewed put it, Obama has become a symbol for uniting, for overcoming society's racial obstacles, and this symbology has taken on major importance in Brazil.

This isn't to say that Obama's candidacy and now victory will lead to a "post-racial" society in Brazil anymore than it will lead to a "post-racial" society here, and many people in Brazil are dismayed and fearful that Obama's victory will lead to Brazil's own racially marginalized only getting "uppity" and making demands that rock the boat of denying racism. Nonetheless, the importance of Obama's victory to racial politics in Brazil cannot be denied, and it seems, at least right now, that there could be some subtle but important shifts in how Brazil deals with its own racial problems and legacies in the next several years.

The Future of U.S. Race Relations: Are We Starting to Think Like Brazilians?

Karthika's post has engendered a lot of conversation about the future of race relations in the United States. What strikes me about the way that young people especially, but also society at large, are talking about race relations is an increasing denial that race really matters. People, and you really see this among students, simply don't believe that race is a major barrier to success in modern America. Their obvious point of evidence is the election of Barack Obama.

Certainly race is changing. The legal structures of racism have largely broken down. The more intractable issue of individual racial prejudice is also declining. We have made real progress as a society.

However, I worry that the Obama election may actually lead to less discussion of race in this country. For the most part, I and others I have talked to find that young people are generally reticent to talk about race. They love talking about gender and sexuality. They are by and large great on GLBT issues. But race makes them uncomfortable. It seems that they believe we are forcing this non-issue down their throats.

But of course race still matters in this country. A lot. The rise in people denying this seemingly obvious fact begs the question: Are we beginning to copy the Brazilian model of race? I really think the answer might be a qualified yes.

First, let me set out in very general terms the Brazilian racial paradigm. Naturally, my small school doesn't have any of the major books on race in Brazil in its library and it has been a few years since I've read the relevant literature that I hoped to review. So if I am missing any key points in this discussion, please let me know.

Basically, most Brazilians deny that racism exists in their society. They point to never having a system of legalized segregation, as opposed to the United States; the ability of individual people of African descent to rise to positions of power, and the interracial mixing of the population as reasons none of this matters. While all these points have merit, it serves to obscure the severe racial problems in Brazil that extend back to slavery. The darker you are, the higher the chance that you are poor, live in a favela, experience police brutality, have limited opportunities for education, economic advancement, and access to health care.

Brazilians think about race in a very different way than Americans. The United States has long been defined by the "one drop" rule, where even people of only 1/8 African descent were legally defined as slaves. That Barack Obama is defined as black in our society is a sign of how powerful these ideas remain. The man is 50% black and 50% white, but he is black to most of us. In Brazil on the other hand, your behavior, social class, and way of carrying yourself, as well as your skin color, define your whiteness. Thus, you might see a very dark skinned individual, clearly of almost all African descent, refer to themself as "white," an assertion that would be accepted by much of society. Rather than focus on a blood quantum, it is behavior that matters.

Of course, all the positive attributes a person can have are considered "white." Skin tone, wealth, education, employment, neighborhood of residence, marrying a light skinned person, etc. Thus, all the negative attributes are "black." Living in a favela, gang membership, begging, unemployment, poverty, etc. Moreover, as people have pointed out in comments to Karthika's post, Brazilians will throw around racial epithets left and right, all the time denying that they are in fact epithets or negative in any way.

Essentially, Brazil is a society with massive racial problems and a total unwillingness to admit that any of those problems have anything to do with race at all.

Now, the United States is obviously a different nation, with a distinct history and race relations. Certainly there are a lot of Americans who are confronting race all the time, i.e., the African-American community. We have a long history of dealing with race fairly directly, whether that be through slavery, lynching, or fighting racism. But I really think that is changing. The promotion of Martin Luther King as the great American national hero with little black children and little white children playing together as the key construction of his dream has made a big difference over the last 30 years. Today, you have white kids throughout the nation who have grown up with black kids. They did play with them. They are friends with them today. They date and marry them. Because those old racial taboos have fallen, because their sanitized understanding of King's dream has been fulfilled, and because we have elected a black man to the highest office in the land, haven't we entered a post-racial society? Those old demons of race belong to the dustbin of history, just like Al Sharpton, Bull Connor, Jesse Helms, and Martin Luther King. What's particularly remarkable is that I've even heard this kind of talk from children of mixed-race relationships.

Here's the problem and here's what I think could ultimately lead us down a Brazilian path of racial denial in the face of massive racial inequality. Americans, both young and old, are largely unwilling to deal with issues of class seriously. We are still the descendants of Horatio Alger. Ragged Dick pulled himself up by his bootstraps and made himself a leading member of Gilded Age society. Barack Obama had a peripatetic childhood without a lot of inherent advantages and he grew up to become president. Why can't everyone be Ragged Barack? If they try hard enough, they can make it too. Like in Brazil, this can now happen on a case by case basis. This is particularly true because of the huge growth in the black middle and upper class since 1970. Today, lots of African-American children have significant advantages that the poor do not. Latinos also share in some of these advantages, though that is incredibly complicated and has a lot to do with ancestral nationality, time in America, where you grew up, and what social class your parents or grandparents were in before they came to the U.S.

But also like in Brazil, the poor in America are disproportionally people of color. There are an almost endless number of structural barriers to the poor reaching financial and political success--bad schools, lack of health care, parents having the ability to spend time with their kids, exposure to drug abuse at home, police brutality, and perhaps most importantly, a general sense of hopelessness and lack of expectations that life can get better. This isn't all that much different in the hills of West Virginia, the ghettos of Detroit, the reservations of South Dakota or the fields of California. But there is one important exception. Those white Appalachian kids are going to be accepted into a wealthy white society with greater ease than Latinos from the Rio Grande Valley, Pueblo Indians from New Mexico, or African-Americans from Compton. The ability to overcome class is greater if you are white.

When you combine the significant class biases and barriers that are already exacerbated by racism with the racial stereotypes and expectations that still inhabit the souls of too many Americans, you can see the incredible difficulty of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. To give one of hundreds of possible examples, tomorrow my class is reading Gregg Mitman's excellent history of allergies, Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes. One chapter is dedicated to the asthma epidemic in inner cities. Mitman shows how racism and structural inequality combines with terrible housing conditions to create conditions that lead to high rates of asthma among inner city children, again largely children of color. Dilapidated public housing provides perfect cockroach habitat, a frequent cause of allergies. For decades, allergists ignored inner-city neighborhoods in their research. The pharmaceutical industry has little interest in getting drugs to poor families and the for-profit medical system does not serve these children well. Thus, they get sick at higher rates, miss more school, and fall behind. This is on top of the already significant disadvantages they have when competing with privileged white kids (or privileged black kids for that matter) for college, jobs, and career advancement.

Until this inequitable public housing is taken care, we do not live in a post-racial society. Until racial discrepancies in asthma rates are eliminated, we do not live in a post-racial society. And until hundreds if not thousands of other racial and class differences are resolved, we do not live in a post-racial society. I believe the post-racial myth to be one of the most threatening ideologies we face as a nation today. That I see it so prominently in young people is alarming. Moving to a Brazilian race system of individual advancement masking overwhelming signs of racial inequality combined with an unwillingness to discuss race would be a disaster. Certainly it would happen differently here than in Brazil, but any move in that direction is not healthy. I see it as my duty as a teacher of U.S. history to point out the severe problems with this idea and to give students an understanding of our racial past and present that demonstrates the intractability of structural racism that continues to shape our lives today.

Rambling about race.

Thanks, new trolls, for inspiring this one. ;)

I'm a middle-class white girl. I like to joke about being downwardly mobile, since my parents are small-business owners who make about $100,000 a year and I'm getting my second degree in a field that averages more like $40,000. Personally, I don't have a heck of a lot of economic privilege at the moment, but I sure as hell have a support system I can turn to, and I'm certainly part of the overeducated blogging class.

I'm also Jewish. Matttbastard joked that we're both "ethnically Marxist," and it's an interesting thought (aside from one that made me laugh out loud). Jewish identity was used two ways in the election--most obviously by the McCain campaign's continued evocations of Iran's threats toward Israel in what several of us called Operation Scare the Jews. I got a mailing a day from the "Republican Jewish Committee" in the last week before the election, usually with a large picture of Obama splashed next to one of Ahmadinejad.

Then there were the high-class articles associating Jewishness with Communism and both with Obama. (That must be why I've dated black men, eh?) And as I wrote about here, blackness was the undertone to McCain's constant comments about socialism.

But I still look like a white girl. (I'm a stealth ethnic Marxist.) Other people don't get to hide their ethnicity, and they're having a rough time of it right now.

Over at bastard.logic, you can check out a lovely sign basically begging for Obama's assassination. (Interestingly, the sign evokes James Earl Ray, the killer of Martin Luther King, Jr., rather than Lee Harvey Oswald, the killer of an actual president. Says something, I suppose, about certain people's inability to see Obama as the president of the country.)

Racialicious has more about hate crimes against South Asian-Americans, many of whom were mistaken for Muslims, and most of whom were blamed for Obama. Muslim has become a stand-in term for frightening difference, and it almost always is equated with dark skin, despite about 80,000 white Muslims in the U.S.

Jack at Feministe has been keeping on top of Duanna Johnson's murder as well as several other murders of trans women recently. One thing I want to stress about these murders is that we should remember that these are not just transgender people. They're trans women of color, mostly. Their bodies are marginalized from so many angles, and that makes them people who can be killed with few repercussions, even from the LGB community.

Renee has an eloquent post up calling for white liberals to stand up for their convictions. One of the things that's disgusted me the most since the election was the backlash against the black community post-Prop 8, and the tendency for white people to act as though they'd done black people a favor by voting for Obama.

Let's be clear. Obama won a majority of the popular vote and a rather large majority of the electoral vote because most people realized that he'd be a better president FOR THEM. I met many people who let out a string of racial slurs before admitting they'd vote for Obama because he'd be better for their economic interest. Gay people didn't vote for Obama to do a favor for black people--they voted for him because he was the only major candidate, even in the primaries (Sorry, Hillary supporters) who supported overturning the Defense of Marriage Act. Obama won as much in spite of his race as because of it.

And there are still many, many people out there in this country who hate him because of it. We are no more in a post-racial society than we are in a post-feminist one (and once I'm done with more of my research on Sarah Palin coverage, we can talk about that too.)

Barack Obama - the Lula of the U.S.?

The Christian Science Monitor has an article up that raises an interesting comparison/question - will Obama be to the U.S. what Lula has been to Brazil? It's a tough question to answer, primarily because Lula has 6 years of presidential administration behind him, while Obama has, well, none. As a result, the article focuses more on what Lula has accomplished. Still, given that, like Obama, Lula inherited a government whose economy was in trouble (though not like the global economy today) and who had come from his country's political left (yes, Obama isn't "left," but in terms of our party system, it's as close as we've had in a long time).

At first, I wanted to reflexively disagree with the article's suggestion that Obama is the U.S.'s Lula, but the more you look at things, the more similar they are: both were raised by single mothers out of relatively difficult positions; both were "outsiders" to the traditional party systems who managed to overcome the entrenched political aristocracy to become leaders of their respective countries; both advocate social change, but with a methodical, steady approach, rather than an "all the chips on the table" method; and both are big proponents of diplomatic relations to resolve their own country's and other countries' issues. What is more, both Lula and Obama mark a major social shift in an office that had traditionally been held by white elites; Lula, as a worker who rose up through the metal factories to become a union leader before entering politics; and Obama, an African-America. Finally, like Lula, I suspect that Obama will have to lead from the center-left, creating real social change but still disappointing his more progressive and radical supporters (though certainly, after eight years of Bush, many of Obama's supporters, while perhaps disappointed in the future, will also have a fairly good grasp of the alternatives). Despite my initial reflex, reflecting further on the issue, there seemed to be more in common between the two men than I at first wanted to admit.

I think the major differences between what the election of Lula meant to Brazil and what Obama's election means is not the differences (or similarities) between the two men, but rather the differences in the context of the two. Brazil's electing of Lula was a major watershed, because it did prove you did not have to be part of the elite to attain higher office. Lula is a man who never had a college education, and who had to work in his youth instead of going to school, just to help support his family. He lost a finger working in the factories, and gradually rose up through the labor structure to become a major union leader, gaining fame in fighting both for greater workers' rights and fighting at the head of a new coalition of opposition towards Brazil's military dictatorship in the late 1970s (Lula was even briefly arrested and tortured). Yes, by the time Lula was elected in 2002, the PT had been active as a political party for over 20 years, and Lula had won in his fourth attempt to become president (having run unsuccessfully in 1989, 1994, and 1998), so he was far from a political "outsider." Nonetheless, he marked the first time Brazil elected somebody who was not from the economic and political elite, and thus marked a major breakthrough in the classism of Brazilian elections. Indeed, it was his very background as a laborer and union leader that has caused so much animosity, hatred, and slander from many sectors of the middle class (many of my in-laws included).

Likewise, as many people have observed, Obama's election was a breakthrough, in that the U.S. elected an African-American. The historical import of this cannot be overstated, and there have been plenty of anecdotes, images, and historical reminders of just how huge it is that Obama won, ranging from the fact that only 54 years ago, Brown v. Board was decided; the Civil Rights Act is only 44 years old; Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed 40 years ago; and if those reminders didn't say enough, the tears flowing down Jesse Jackson's face last Tuesday night said more than enough. In many ways, what Lula did for class barriers in Brazil, Obama did for racial barriers in the U.S.

But, as I said, I think the social and historical context of the two countries makes Obama's victory and Lula's presidency more different symbolically. Simply put, I think Obama's victory is more symbolically important than Lula's, and the reason is simple: I think racism in the U.S. is structurally stronger and more severe than classism in Brazil or the U.S. The reasons for this are multiple: in the U.S., class and race are closely (though not always) tied together, so that often statements of class really are statements on race. What is more, our notions of "middle class" are so vague and open-ended that virtually anybody can and does claim they are "middle class," from the family of four making only $50,000 collectively per year to the lawyer who pulls in $300,000+ and considers herself/himself "upper middle class." Because of the ways race has historically operated in this country, we simply base many of our judgements based on one's racial qualities, and I think it's fair to say that, in the most general terms, racism trumps classism in how we view our fellow citizens. And I realize that's a huge, charged statement. I want to make absolutely clear that there is, without question, classism in the U.S. too. The very fact that virtually everybody identifies as "middle class" shows the stigma towards being "poor," and we often make fun of "white trash" and "rednecks" and "shitkickers," with class being a central part of those criticisms. Nonetheless, the number of times that we lynched a poor person, prevented a poor person from voting, or hired a poor person based simply on class and not on race, is relatively small compared to the number of times those things were done based on race.

In Brazil, it's not so clear-cut, and I would suggest that racism and classism are far more muddled in Brazil than they are even in the U.S. Ever since Gilberto Freyre's work in the 1930s, Brazil has culturally refused to acknowledge its racism, claiming that because Brazilians were historically "forced" to mix between Portuguese, indigenous peoples, and African slaves because of the colonial context in Brazil, there can be no racism. The logic goes that, because of all of those generations of mixing, there are too many skin tones to be able to simply categorize somebody as one race or another, and since there's a whole lot more "brown" in Brazil, there can't be racism like there is in the U.S., where there is the "black/white" dichotomy based on the one-drop theory. What is more, Brazilians have often reinforced their argument of being incapable of being racist by pointing directly to the U.S. They have suggested (in a foolish argument that found support both in Brazil and the U.S.) that slavery was somehow "worse" in America, and the fact that America legally codified racism via Jim Crow laws (in addition to very public lynchings) just further reifies the arguments made in Brazil that American racism is worse than Brazilian racism.

What this thinking has done has allowed Brazilians by and large to deny the existence of racism while further encoding it in other categories, such as "culture" and class. In many of the elections, Lula constantly faced criticisms based on his education, class, and birthplace (the Northeast of Brazil, generally viewed as "inferior" by the Southern Metropole in Brazil, in no small part because of the concentration of Afro-descendants in the Northeast). Each of these criticisms carried heavy overtones of barely-hidden racism. Yet the racial content of these critiques wasn't really broached, or even confronted. Thus, even while Brazil, like Europe, has applauded the U.S. in its ability to (temporarily) overcome its racism enough to elect an African-American (and to be clear, I am in no way saying that now the U.S. is less racist than the rest of the world simply because Obama won this time around), but like Europe, Brazil has failed to reconcile itself to its ability to have an Obama-like figure in its own society. And that's exactly where the symbolic difference between Lula and Obama appears: Brazil may one day have somebody who shatters barriers like Obama did, but Lula, for all of the barriers he himself shattered, is not that person.

To sum up what is admittedly a rather long post, there are a lot of similarities between Lula and Obama. However, I think this similarities do not overcome the major symbolic difference each man represents to his own respective culture and society. The major difference between Lula's 2002 victory and Obama's 2008 victory is the social monoliths which they have challenged. Lula's victory did indeed break through the elitism that had dominated Brazil's political class since the colonial period, and the "elephant" of classism in Brazil's room was very real. But racism was and remains the larger proverbial elephant in Brazil; chipping away at classism did not erode the deeper-seated ways that racism operates in Brazil. Thus, in terms of what the event of Obama's election represents to the U.S. vs. what Lula's represented to Brazil, the comparison simply does not hold up - Obama's symbolic importance has done things for American society that Lula's has not done and never could do in Brazil. For that to happen, Brazil will need its own "Barack Obama."