July 10, 2019--White Male Privilege

Continuing to ponder the gender implications of the large vote Trump received in 2016 from white women, Guest Blogger Sharon wrote--

One of the questions I keep hearing is should Dems try to get Obama/Trump voters back or go full out Progressive to motivate more new voters.

As much as I hate many aspects of data mining and micro-targeting, it would probably help if the Dems knew more about these and other more reasonable Trump voters and those Dems that didn’t vote in 2016.

With that said, I suspect the real challenge isn’t what candidates say or how they say it but who they are. There just might not be anyone with a wide enough appeal. I cringed when Bill Maher said the only one who could beat Trump for sure is Oprah. But I fear he may be right.

It’s a tiny sample but when a friend from the Midwest had brunch with a friend from New York, he asked him why he and friends voted for Trump. His reaction was people knew him. For me that was a dis-qualifier. But with so many people not paying attention, this may be the key. 

As for more civilized discourse, an acquaintance assisting at the polls on Democratic primary day last month said a woman drove into the church parking lot screaming at her about representing “the party of death” and how she’d never vote for a Democrat. I thought this might just be a disturbed individual. Then I  googled our moderate businessman Senator and former Governor Mark Warner.  The first entry is an ad to defeat him in 2020 because he sides with the “party of death.” Interesting new branding. Not encouraging. 

I wrote--

The most recent ways the Dems are shooting themselves in the foot is to give so much attention to AOC and three (three!) of her colleagues. This gang of four is the gift that keeps on giving to the GOP now that they have someone even better than Nancy Pelosi to demonologize. How self-defeating can we be.

And then Jill Davenport wrote--

I was just this minute reading your blog about women and I believe you’re exactly right. And Bill Clinton was exactly right when he spoke about white men dying of broken hearts.  

There’s another reason as well, and this affects both genders . . . the white male privilege is on shaky ground, and so is the privilege thereby extended to their female counterparts.  They are terribly fearful of the most awful thing that they can imagine . . . being outnumbered by people of color who by nature they believe should be shining shoes in airports.  

Having a black man for president was an unspeakable affront to the proper order as they see it and they thus feel it needs to be restored.  

Obama brought out the latent and carefully hidden racism which came forth like a toxic flood when T-name took over "my" White House.  All of it is, of course, the result of just fear. 

I thought--

Jill's new idea about how for many conservative women male privilege is extended to them is something important to ponder. For me it helps explain why so many white women voted for Trump and how important it is for progressives to understand this in order to find ways to prevail.

November 10, 2015--Angry Black Man

I have been struggling to understand Ben Carson's appeal to Republicans.

He is so boring, so unable to express himself, so passive and weak feeling, so unlike the kind of militant commanders-in-chief conservatives traditionally admire.

And so what is it that for the moment has him as the leader of the GOP pack?

Is it because of his calm exterior, his obvious God-given blessings, or the feeling that as a physician he will heal a deeply wounded America?

Or is his popularity a matter of a physician who has healed himself?

I suspect largely the latter.

I have been particularly perplexed by his defense of his claim that he had a violent past. As he put it in his autobiography, it was the result of a "pathological disease" A pathology he was able to cure, not so much because of his medical skills but because he turned to God. To Jesus.

This is a not an unfamiliar political redemption story that appeals to religious conservatives. Like George W. Bush who when he first ran for president subtly let it be known that he had a drinking problem as a young man but was able to overcome it when he was "born again." Or, to be bipartisan, Jimmy Carter's story about lust.

Redemption is essential to Carson's representation of his own personal narrative. He is after all not running a campaign rich in policy pronouncements and promises. His appeal is his life story itself and outsider status.

But his insistence that he was uncontrollably violent when a young man is unique in political history. Drinking is one thing, lust another, but violence?

If anything, if this were true, one would expect he would minimize, not inflate that aspect of his character. Admitting to having had a violence problem when, as president, he would have access to the nuclear codes with the red button always close at hand one would think would be more a political liability than an asset.

But then in his case there is also the powerful matter of race.

As a black man raised on the mean streets of Detroit, it would be understandable, sociologically and psychologically, that he would be a violent and angry man.  The very kind of African-American that looms in the fearful imaginations of many white people. Especially those conservatives who are dog whistle racists and thus for whom people of color haunt their feverous dreams.

For them, if a black man such as Carson can be "cured" of his blackness, if he can be so neutered and emerge so seemingly self-controlled there is less to be feared about the world and its threats.

For his cure to be fully believable and comforting it is essential that voters believe he began as that archetypical angry black man he repeatedly represents himself to have been. If he could heal himself of that perhaps he can be trusted to "treat" all the others with similar "pathologies" who make so many people feel threatened.

I is thus essential to this hopeful personal narrative that Carson was as violent as he has repeatedly represented himself to have been. That he stabbed his friends and once threatened to strike his mother in the head with a hammer must be believable if his campaign is to have this unique appeal and traction.

If he somehow grew up a sweet little boy who then managed to get to Yale and medical school--an urban Horatio Alger story--the meaning of his life story would be merely a remarkable exception, not literally miraculous.

And here is the political point and the key to his appeal--unless his representations are true, he could not represent himself as able to bring about similar cures for others equally afflicted. 

He represents the promise that blackness itself can be overcome. That it is curable. He is living proof of that.

Just as other Republican conservatives hold views about other pathological Americans who can be cured by prayer--homosexuals who, if they want to chose another "life style," can pray away the gay, Carson tells us that Blackness too can be prayed away.

From Ben Carson's House 

September 14, 2105--What's With Ben Carson?

Not only has Dr. Ben Carson surged into second place in polls of Republican voters, almost in a statistical dead heat with Donald TRUMP, but national polling shows him doing best among GOP candidates in the all important head-to-head with Hillary Clinton.

According to the latest CNN poll, TRUMP and Hillary are tied, Clinton bests Jeb Bush by 4 percentage points, but loses to Carson by 5 points.

It's still very early, but this makes one think.

An African-American, evangelical, conservative surgeon?

So he is not just an unexpected and unusual Republican favorite but his appeal goes beyond the evangelical base of the Grand Old Party and includes many Democrats and Independents.

Of course he has that anti-government thing going. Along with Carly Fiorina and Donald TRUMP, the three non-establishment candidates, they garner well over 50 percent of potential Republican primary voters.

We tend to think of African Americans as pretty automatically voting for Democrat candidates. The last three Democrat nominees for president received on average about 90 percent of black votes.

One question, then, about Dr. Carson--would he get more than 10 percent if he were the nominee? Obviously, yes, and that would give him quite a leg up in key swing states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania,  Florida, and Virginia. In the general election if he could carry those four states he'd be well on his way to winning the presidency.

But that's political inside baseball. It does not say much about Crason's clearly wide appeal.

Some remind us that there is a long tradition of Black conservatives who have thrived on the national political scene. Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts and Colin Powell come to mind. Many feel Powell would have been able to win the GOP nomination in 1996 and had he done so would have had a good chance of defeating Bill Clinton.

Carson's cultural conservatism appeals not only to large numbers of blacks (about one-third self-identify as social conservatives) but also to white and Latino religious conservatives. His views on abortion and same-sex marriage (he opposes both) are cases in point.

Like other African-American conservatives who preceded him, he comes off as comfortably non-militant. He doesn't threaten as many whites as did Jessie Jackson and even Barack Obama.

I think, though, that there are other reasons why he is doing so well. Primarily because he is a physician, not just because he is anti big government. Then, there is kind of surgeon he is (neuro) and the fame that accrued to him from his successful, highly publicized effort to separate conjoined twins.

Many feel we are in our national core virtually terminally ill and in need of treatment. Metaphorically, of course, but those who feel this way, considering the state of our national health, may be thinking why not call on a doctor to heal us?

And then there is the further metaphor of his work with Siamese twins. As with them, we were at one time a conjoined body politic, but in recent decades have lived separately and angrily in our partisan corners. Little gets done. We barely speak to each other.

Carson is someone who understands the difference between being united and being separate. And how to do both successfully.

By this logic, I doubt if he would have the same appeal if he were, say, an orthopedic surgeon.

One the other hand, remember George W. Bush who declared himself, "a uniter, not a divider"? Though we know how well that turned out, we did elect him with an assist from the Supreme Court.

June 22, 2015--Black Like Me

In 1957, in The White Negro, Norman Mailer wrote about young white people who so liked jazz and were so turned off by what they saw as conformist white culture, that they adopted black culture as their own.

Four years later, in 1961, journalist John Howard Griffin, wrote Black Like Me. It is a non-fiction account of his six-week experience traveling in the racially-segregated South while passing as a Negro. Reversing the much more common reality of some light-skinned black people who, to avoid discrimination, passed for white.

In Griffin's case he arranged for his skin to be darkened through the administration of Oxsoralen, an anti-vertigo drug that also darkened skin, prescribed for him by a dermatologist. In addition, he spent 16-hour days for weeks under an ultraviolet lamp.

He met segregation, threats, and enough overt racism that within days he feared for his life and tried to blend into the background so as to avoid the dangers he sensed around him. He kept a journal of his travels and it formed the core of his book and then later a major motion picture starring James Whitmore.

Something analogous to this has been going on in the state of Washington where Rachel Dolezal recently resigned from her position as president of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP. Like Griffin she is white and was attempting to pass for black.

Aside from the fact that she has become an instant butt of jokes on late-night TV and comes from a crazy-mixed-up family (her parents were the ones ultimately to out her) her claim that she is black (which she still insists is true though acknowledging she does not have "one drop of black blood" in her genetic background) raises a whole set of complicated issues about race and identity and what it means to be black or white or Asian or Christian or Jewish or, for that matter, male or female.

In regard to the latter, Bruce Jenner recently revealed that he was undergoing treatment to become a biological woman because for his entire live he thought of himself more as a woman than a man.

Dolezal says a version of the same thing--growing up with four adopted black children as siblings she claims to have developed a deep commitment to black culture and the issues African Americans, because of their race, still face in America.

She said, and continues to affirm even after being forced to resign and dragged through the media gauntlet, that she "identifies as black"--

But it's a little more complex than me identifying as black, or answering the question of, 'Are you black or white?' . . . Well, I definitely am not white. Nothing about being white describes who I am.

She, though, is genetically white but thinks of herself as black. Jenner is genetically male but identifies as female. Situations of this kind are common enough and are now being more openly discussed.

Mainly, what constitutes gender (clearly more than genitals)? What defines race? Just how much African blood or DNA must one have to be considered black by others? And how much, if any, needs to be present for blacks or whites to deem themselves one or the other? Or determined by society and perhaps the courts if necessary? For example, in affirmative action cases?

Freud famously said, "Biology is destiny."

Perhaps not.

Indeed, many scholars claim that all forms of identity are socially constructed. If so--and I feel a strong case can be made that this is true--why is it all right for Bruce Jenner to think of himself as a woman but inappropriate for Rachel Dolezal to take on a black identity? If it is all right to assume one's own sense of gender, ethnicity, or belief system, why not blackness? Or whiteness? Is race still our hottest button?

May 7, 2014--NY, NY: A Mirror to Nature

He came at us from out of the shadows behind Cooper Union where we had just been at a public discussion between Colm Toibin, Francine Prose, and Salman Rushdie. About literature and freedom and art and truth and rebellion. And worry about the shrinking audience for serious literature. "Only old farts like me will remain," Salman said with an ironic smile.

So we weren't prepared for what felt like an imminent assault, or at least pressure to give him street money, while still with our minds on Toibin and Yates, Lady Gregory and Easter 1916 in Dublin.

From the shadows he seemed darker and more muscular than at first. And taller, towering above my six-foot-three. Even as racist as it may have been to stereotype him, I shivered with fear.

I moved the three of us along, hoping to merge with the crowd ahead bunched up waiting for the light to change. Safety in a crowd, I thought.

Before we could get to safety, he reached toward us. We recoiled, trying to avoid eye contact. But I stepped ahead, toward him, feeling I would try to take whatever brunt might come. We were getting, thankfully, closer to the corner where it was lighter and where there was a cluster of young people.

"Do you know how to kill . . ."

Trembling, I was unable to hear the rest.

"What did he say?" our friend whispered.

"Something about killing," Rona said.

"This is getting very scary," I said. Our friend cringed.

"Do you know how," he repeated, "to kill . . . a mockingbird."

By his pausing I felt relieved--he was playing with, not threatening us. Perhaps knowing where we had just been.

So I took a chance and, trying a smile, said, "I think I do."

He laughed and speed ahead.

"What was that about," our friend said, equally relieved.

"It's a New York story," Rona said. "Maybe he's a street artist."

"I hate those," our friend said, "I like my art in theaters and museums, not on the street."

When we reached the corner, with the light still red, he was waiting for us.

"As Shakespeare wondered," he asked, "when you hold a mirror to nature, what do you see?"

"What?" our friend said now full-voiced. More her old cantankerous self.

"What Shakespeare said about the Mirror of Nature."

"From Romeo and Juliet?"

"Think more," he said. "It's something you need to know the answer to." And with that he darted to the other side of Lafayette Street, avoiding the stream of cars and taxis.

"I think it's from Hamlet," I said, after a moment to think about what had just happened. "I can't remember the context, but we should look it up."

Which, later that night, I did.

In fact, it is from Hamlet. From Hamlet's instructions to the players. He advises--

. . . suit the action to the word, the
word to the action; with this special overstep not
the modesty of nature; for anything so overdone is
from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the
first and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the
mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature,
scorn her own image, and the very age and body of
the time his form and pressure. Now this overdone,
or come tardy off, though it make unskilful
laugh, cannot make the judicious grieve  . . .

Overstep not, indeed, I thought.

April 23, 2014--Obama's Drones

Five days after Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula released an audacious video of a daytime militant rally in southern Yemen, President Obama authorized a drone strike that killed at least 55 Al-Qaeda-linked terrorists.

Putting aside for the moment the legal and ethical issues, in many ways this was a good thing. These men are among the world's most dangerous people and drone strikes are a good way to get at them with little risk to U.S. or Yemeni forces.

The openly-flaunting way in which Nasser-al-Wuhayshi, head of AQAP, organized the rally and brazenly made videos of it public, not only emphasized the level of the threat he and his fighters represent but also was a way to humiliate his enemies, especially the United States. He brashly seemed to say, "Catch me if you can."

So Obama was quick to rise to the taunt. At least three drone strikes were carried out over the weekend and as a result dozens were killed.

One thing even fierce critics of Obama's concede is that he not hesitant about authorizing drone strikes against bad guys, including an occasional American citizen.

Putting tactics aside--drones' ability to respond quickly to threats--it is striking to see Obama acting so decisively about . . . anything.

The very same Republican critics who poke him about "leading from behind" give him begrudging credit for being so aggressive about the use of drones. But I suspect Obama is uncharacteristically decisive and forceful when it comes to the deployment of drones for other than just military or political reasons.

Political-Psychology 101 would suggest the unfettered use of drones is the one arena in which Obama has undisputed power and can act out his frustrations.

For a president who knows that at least half the reason conservatives oppose everything and anything he initiates or even supports is because he is African American, for a president who is reluctant to play the race card much less even openly confront this political bigotry, fearing being characterized as an "angry black man," having a means to act out his frustrations and, I am sure, rage about this must be irresistible.

The giveaway that this is not a preposterous notion is that authorizing the use of drones without seemingly endless cogitation--a quality for which Obama is known and not-entirely-unfairly criticized--is the one area of leadership in which he clearly leads from the front and is expeditiously decisive.

In Freudian terms--this is an example of displacement theory.

As a close reader of the Constitution, he knows that much of this is extra-legal or, minimally, questionable; and yet, time after time, instead of being cautious or timid, he acts boldly. And, it would appear, successfully.

It may be unfeeling to suggest that ordering the killing of people--even terrorists--is in some ways therapeutic, but considering the circumstances in Washington and in Red-State America, on some level it is understandable.

January 24, 2014--"Who's this Calhoun?"

At the Delray News Shop the other morning an elderly man asked Richard, one of the owners, if he had a copy of this week's New Yorker. He had heard about David Remnick's long article about Barack Obama and wanted to read it.

"I heard about it too," I said, "the one where, among other things, Obama talks about being a black president."

"That's the one," the man said. "Outrageous."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"That he views himself that way. And blames all his failures and the criticism he deserves on people who he accuses of being anti-black."

"That's hard to believe," I said, "If anything, Obama plays down his blackness and gets criticized for that by some African-American leaders."

Richard didn't have the issue yet and, since I too wanted to read it, did so on-line.  I also had seen excerpts from the article in which there were a few quotes from the president about how some people don't like him because he's black. The Fox News folks jumped all over that, claiming this as evidence of Obama's own racism and hatred for white people.

So, if you haven't seen the article, here is the full quote from the Remnick piece so you can make up your own mind:

Obama’s drop in the polls in 2013 was especially grave among white voters. “There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a black President,” Obama said. “Now, the flip side of it is there are some black folks and maybe some white folks who really like me and give me the benefit of the doubt precisely because I’m a black President.” The latter group has been less in evidence of late.

“There is a historic connection between some of the arguments that we have politically and the history of race in our country, and sometimes it’s hard to disentangle those issues,” he went on. “You can be somebody who, for very legitimate reasons, worries about the power of the federal government—that it’s distant, that it’s bureaucratic, that it’s not accountable—and as a consequence you think that more power should reside in the hands of state governments. But what’s also true, obviously, is that philosophy is wrapped up in the history of states’ rights in the context of the civil-rights movement and the Civil War and Calhoun. There’s a pretty long history there. 

"And so I think it’s important for progressives not to dismiss out of hand arguments against my Presidency or the Democratic Party or Bill Clinton or anybody just because there’s some overlap between those criticisms and the criticisms that traditionally were directed against those who were trying to bring about greater equality for African-Americans. The flip side is I think it’s important for conservatives to recognize and answer some of the problems that are posed by that history, so that they understand if I am concerned about leaving it up to states to expand Medicaid that it may not simply be because I am this power-hungry guy in Washington who wants to crush states’ rights but, rather, because we are one country and I think it is going to be important for the entire country to make sure that poor folks in Mississippi and not just Massachusetts are healthy."

I doubt if people such as Sean Hannity read the full article preferring, for his ideological purposes, to quote it out of context. Of if he had, I wonder if he would know anything about the history Obama refers to.

"Who's this Calhoun?" I could hear him hollering at his staff. "Some Chicago pal of Obama's?"

I also wonder what the New Yorker was doing, also quoting Obama by releasing very selected out-of-context excerpts of only the most controversial material. I guess for them it's also all about selling copies and making money.