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STRAINING THE OBAMA NATION SOUP
So for years, I have been mentally returning to a seminar I took with Mike Apple while I was a graduate student in sociology and rural sociology at University of Wisconsin Madison. At the time, Mike was working out the details for what would become Educating the “Right” Way (Routledge, 2001, 2nd ed 2006), which for me is one of the best neo-Gramscian analyses of the New Right coalition to date. I was particularly interested in the social conservative wing of the coalition (he terms the disparate factions as neoliberals, neoconservatives, authoritarian populists, and the new middle class in relation to the Right’s assault on public education). The unresolvable contradictions between the neoliberal, free market, libertarian wing and the social conservative, evangelical Christian, moral entrepreneur wing of the Right coalition are finally beginning to show serious signs of unravelling. The social conservatives’ attempt at domineering common sense by framing authoritarian religiosity as natural, the basis for ‘True knowledge’ needing to be taught in our schools (read intelligent design and literalist interpretations of the Bible as science and history education), and a hard/fast demarcation between them as chosen ones and apparently us as sinners will together allow a great nation to become a perfect nation if we remove the element of unbelievers and heathens. Look back at Sarah Palin’s prepared speeches and gubernatorial debates for some of the clearest expressions of just how judgmental and exclusionary– dare I say non-Christian -- this brand of ‘real’ Christianity can be.
As a self-professed recovering Catholic, I am sure I am guilty of Luther’s axiom… ‘Be a sinner and sin boldly’ as my colleague Angela Gonzales reminds me but I think the culture wars are far from a relic of the 1980’s and constantly reappear to rear its ugly head when the Right feels somehow marginalized by not being at the full and total controls of power. I am, of late, befuddled by social conservatives’ articulation with the Republican intelligentsia (those that write books to espouse their particularist values as some universal moral compass). Whether it is the Bennett Book of Values franchise, Elizabeth Dole (see her Hearts Touched by Fire), Lynne Cheney’s flag waving children’s books (including America: A Patriotic Primer, A is for Abigail, and Our 50 States), or James Dobson and his Focus on the Family intertextual assault on us heathens on all fronts; I could never figure out how an anti-intellectual movement of authoritarian populists could share the same tent with such a well-funded attempt at literary hegemony on moral politics.
It finally all connected to me on the evening of November 4th watching CNN’s coverage of the U.S. presidential election. Book of Virtues and Moral Compass author, former U.S. Secretary of Education, and recently self-described political pundit William Bennett was representing the far Right side in a panel of experts responding to Anderson Cooper’s questioning about the larger significance of this Obama-Biden drubbing of the McCain-Palin ticket (that’s right, DRUBBING, ya betcha!).
BILL BENNETT: Sometimes, we pack a little too much into these analyses, sometimes we strain the soup a little too thin sometimes. [crosstalk]
BORGER: Am I straining something?
BENNETT: No. All the comments together are trying to make a conclusion that is so clear about this radical change. I don't know if it is. I don't know if it's that. I don't know if it is the second economic cataclysmic or the incredible ability of this candidate. We'll wait and see.
But let's resist the temptation to talk about the Republican party as just old, white, confederate men, it isn't. It's more than that. Indeed, the Republican Party has a lot of work to do. And let's resist talking about Blacks and Hispanics as if they're all progressive and liberal because they're not.
BORGER: Am I straining something?
BENNETT: No. All the comments together are trying to make a conclusion that is so clear about this radical change. I don't know if it is. I don't know if it's that. I don't know if it is the second economic cataclysmic or the incredible ability of this candidate. We'll wait and see.
But let's resist the temptation to talk about the Republican party as just old, white, confederate men, it isn't. It's more than that. Indeed, the Republican Party has a lot of work to do. And let's resist talking about Blacks and Hispanics as if they're all progressive and liberal because they're not.
Somewhere in the exchange, Bill Bennett, and I am paraphrasing here, stated that with an Obama victory, “nobody [read no minority] can now claim, that hard work, determination, and picking up a book isn’t enough to overcome race.” Please help me if you have the direct quote. When I heard this comment go basically unchallenged, I realized we on the left have a lot of work ahead to challenge the collective amnesia that Bennett and his ilk are so skillful at manipulating in their politics of forgetting. In their version of American History, race no longer matters, the United States is an exceptional, classless or middle class society, gender differences are either natural or nonexistent, and homosexuality is an abomination – sound familiar, again ya’ betcha.
When I think of the history of the U.S. nation and current relevance of Obama’s victory, I find this context helpful…
231 years ago, all 13 former British colonies officially recognized slavery as a legitimate institution. Vermont was the first to declare bar slavery in 1777 and the New England states followed (New York was the last in 1799) while it required the Civil War to end Southern slavery in this nation of freedom and equality.
221 years ago, when the Declaration of Independence proclaimed all men were created equal and threw off the tyranny of British imperialism, democracy and the right to vote was extended to free, white, propertied males which would remain the standard rights bearing citizenship standard for the next 88 years.
151 years ago, the Dred Scott decision ruled that African-Americans, free or slave, could never be considered rights-bearing citizens. The decision ended court challenges that free African-Americans mounted to claim the rights promised to them in the nation’s founding documents. The ruling followed a set of decisions and rules initially established during the 1787 Philadephia Convention that stated for the purposes of apportionment of Congressional representatives and electoral college representation, slaves would be counted as 3/5 a person even though their legal status was one of property.
144 years ago, the hopes of post-Civil War Reconstruction were dashed with the adoption of the Black Codes that circumvented the amendments to the Constitution and allowed Southern states to uphold the plantation economy by restricting the movement and rights of African American sharecroppers.
112 years ago, the Black Codes were replaced by Jim Crow laws that culminated in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 that established the separate but equal doctrine. Many segregationist and unequal laws throughout the United States were firmly in place well into the 1960’s.
84 years ago, women were extended the right to vote for the first time in the history of the United States.
54 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Topeka, KS Board of Education that the logic and practice of separate but equal was inherently unequal and unconstitutional.
44 years ago, in Mississippi, 80 ‘get out the vote’ volunteers were beaten, 1000 arrested, 67 churches/homes/businesses firebombed, and ultimately 4 people lost their lives trying to register African Americans to vote.
Also 44 years ago, Congress passed the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act to end discrimination and segregation in public institutions. Due to Southern resistance to integration, the act also focused on education as the South was still fighting the battle of de-segregation – particularly vehement opposition was mounted in Virginia, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. The promise of Reconstruction and the end of 100 years of Jim Crow represents at least an official end to de jure segregation though Acts in 1965 and 1968 were required to extend the reach of civil rights into voting and housing.
32 years ago, in Boston and Denver white opposition to integration via busing led to violent clashes that often put Black and Chicano students in the crosshairs.
Today, if you look at education segregation rates we are re-segregating public education at
alarming rates. Gary Orfield and his associates at UCLA’s Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles identify that the re-segregation of public education is both willful and a product of the Supreme Court’s scaling back of the civil rights era gains.
For blacks, more than a third of a century of progress in racial integration has been lost--though the seventeen states which had segregation laws are still far less segregated than in the l950s when state laws enforced apartheid in the schools and the massive resistance of Southern political leaders delayed the impact of Brown for a decade. For Latinos, whose segregation in many areas is now far more severe than when it was first measured nearly four decades ago, there never was progress outside of a few areas and things have been getting steadily worse since the l960’s on a national scale.
Housing segregation rates have slowly reduced over time but are still at incredibly high, Jim Crow-era rates. John Logan and his associates at Brown University’s Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences research center track residential segregation patterns and find that 100 metro areas experience severe levels of segregation (most located in the Northeast and Midwest), where well over 3/5 of the white or black population would have to move to from their basically all white or all black neighborhoods to achieve integration
Comparing that people were still being murdered in 1964 for trying to register African Americans to vote, to the United States electing its first African American president in 2008, this vote is symbolically so important for a nation rooted in a long history of racial segregation, violence, and disenfranchisement.
The long road ahead and the steep climb that Obama identified in his victory speech for me is about first recognizing and second fixing a profoundly undemocratic and unequal United States. In the 2008 presidential election, 64.7 percent of the nation voted in this election (131 million votes cast is the current estimate with a 2006 ACS Estimate of 202,428,149 eligible voters -- see http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0781453.html). Given that during any presidential election the rate is closer to 50% of the eligible electorate voting, it is clear that grassroots organizing and voter mobilization must have a good future if we measure democracy by the percentage of the population who engages in electoral politics. The ugly history of racial, gender and class exclusion at the polls is captured by Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward’s Why Americans Don’t Vote. The point is the political elite have preferred to keep the electorate small as it allows both parties to play to their privileged bases and what may be the most relevant outcome of the Obama victory is who actually turned out to vote.
In terms of voting, compared to the rest of the world, we can see how far we have to go. The United States is 121 of 169 nations in terms of participation (voter participation measured in terms of those who register and then actually vote) in parliamentary elections since 1945 --66.5% (http://www.idea.int/publications/vt/upload/Voter%20turnout.pdf). Comparing the vote to voting age ratio (the actually percentage of people eligible to vote in terms of age as compared to those who vote), for the US the percent declines to 47.7 percent and ranks them 138th among the world’s nations. Until election night 2008, it was 26% of the eligible electorate who were deciding our political representatives. That doesn’t square with the ideal of a representative democracy. The fact that about 35% of the eligible electorate brought Obama into the White House should be cause for concern and a clarion call for an electorate that turns out at a rate of 95-98 percent.
We cannot stand still while Bennett and the withering Right grab onto this election as a vindication of a post-racial, colorblind society. Nor can we allow the quasi-liberal left to rest on their laurels and good intentions of striving for a colorblind society without recognizing that longstanding racial inequalities, if left unaddressed, not only linger but are threatening the fabric of a nation quickly heading to a majority-minority status by 2050. If we seek to be an inclusive, racially integrated society; it requires hard work to break down the barriers to equality (a term Obama has allowed the right to take away from him to avoid charges of “socialism”). Race is not simply prejudice and Bradley effects… race is a system of exclusion that proves much harder to fix than making white people feel uneasy about using the n-word. I sincerely hope the transformational figure of Obama and his rhetoric of hope and change forces us to look squarely in the mirror of U.S. history to see yes how far we’ve come but more importantly also how far we have to go. If the election of an African American man only serves to allow us to “put race in the past” and ease white guilt for a system of privileges and benefits they currently possess, we have failed miserably in learning history’s lessons and future significance of Obama’s victory.
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About Ron Mize
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Ron Mize is currently Assistant Professor of Development Sociology and Latino Studies at Cornell University. More information about his research can be found at: http://devsoc.cals.cornell.edu/cals/devsoc/people/faculty.cfm?netId=rlm6... . Ron's partner, Chris Batman-Mize, is a social worker whose recently defended MSW thesis draws out the implications of Freire's critical pedagogy approach for a more activist social work praxis. They have two wonderful children (Tori-12 and Theo-8) and reside in upstate New York.
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Thomas Jefferson claimed: "The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees, in every object, only the traits which favor that theory." Bill Bennett and the Right (and all ideologues, including on the Left) are personifications of this premise by Jefferson. During that same discussion on CNN, Bennett stated, again a paraphrase, "Let's not forget that Obama achieved this on Bush's watch"; in other words, Bush's America made Obama (as "African-American" or biracial) possible! Paul Thomas
Education for the poor, minorities, and differently abled: Or Why Bill Bennett Owes Me Money!
This is a long story, so I won't spell out all of the details. Let me just say that Bill Bennett's online program, as most people know has been hugely financed through public monies. It profits from free labor of parents with children who are often discarded from the public education system, or in other ways denied the education which by law is supposed to be provided....and Bill Bennett also had his hands in that setup (Leistyna, 2007; Stanley, 2007). Well, I was one of those parents who was basically backed into the corner with no other options for my daughter's education. It is a long twisted story, but suffice it to say that it managed to keep us locked into poverty while Bill Bennett made great profits.
As Leistyna (2007) states, "Look at how Bill Bennett, the former Secretary of Education under Reagan (1985-1988), and drug czar under Bush Sr. (1989-1990), has been cashing in lately. Bennett's online home/school company, K12 Inc., recently received $4 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Education. The funds are intended for an online charter shcool in Arkansas - Arkansas Virtual Academy ('X U.S. Secretary of Education Bill Bennett,' 2006)" (p. 105). He has set up these charter schools in many different states, Idaho being one of them, where I lived previously for awhile. The special education student population was out of proporation in these online programs when my daughter was attending (and you know what that means); reason being that the public education system is allowed to dispose of them, much like the "politics of disposability" which Giroux speaks of. But, Bill Bennett is right there offering a "perfect solution." I think things are changing there because, as my daughter's great attorney in Idaho who works for Obama on disability law has stated, "There is a new sheriff in town!"
And so, my daughter was one of those victims who was refused a free and equal education. I became a teacher to ensure she had an education - free labor for Bill Bennett to line his pockets. So from my perspective, Bill Bennett owes me money! just as he owes money to all of the parents and children who have been forced to use his program.
this sort of thing is what has turned me into a rebel (just one of my roles).
the rebel,
Vanessa
References
Leistyna, P. (2007). Neoliberal nonsense. In J. L. Kincheloe & P. McLaren (2007), Critical Pedagogy: Where Are We Now? New York: Peter Lang, pp. 97-123.
Stanley, W. B. (2007). Critical pedagogy: Democratic realism, neoliberalism, conservatism, and a tragic sense of education. In J. L. Kincheloe & P. McLaren (2007), Critical Pedagogy: Where Are We Now? New York: Peter Lang, pp. 371-389.
Ron,
The following article really bothers me for several reasons. One, we know what the plans are of the neoliberals: war and more wars. So, in light of the following article, might we interpret this to mean that Obama will have little power to divert what might be a set up in which people have no choice but to go fight in upcoming wars? I don't like to think like this, but when I read this article, it brings up these worries. So, I was wondering what your thoughts are - or other people's thougts. Are we going to head into more wars as was the plan (Syria, Iran, etc)...and could this whole economic issue be a setup to support those efforts? High unemployment = soldiers for war. After all, they did get their "war money" and will probably get more of that. No matter what the interpretation, if the economy continues to free fall, I guess Obama will be rendered less powerful for leading in the changes the country needs.
http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2008114719/free-fall
In solidarity,
Vanessa
Vanessa,
So I am definitely struggling to get the hang of this blog stuff as I've replied a couple of times, hit the wrong button, and lost everything. Thanks for so diligently responding to my posts and hopefully I can quickly encapsulate my last few responses in case I screw something up yet again. I read the article you mentioned above and I think they confuse the agenda of neocons (which I think is thoroughly discredited as crude, militaristic, empire building and definitely unpopular in US public opinion) with the agenda of neoliberals (which I worry is much more trenchant and difficult to turn around). Obama seems as though his team can keep the neocons at bay (withdrawl of troops from Iraq, rise of diplomatic corps in State Dept, no more pre-emptive strikes) but I am less convinced that the neoliberal, laissez-faire, economic globalization from above hegemony can be subverted. I think the article goes back to traditional Democratic line of restoring Keynesian fiscal policy without recognizing that we may have gone too far down the neoliberal road to restore a post-Keynesian Keynesian style compromise. I just saw a talk by a UN economist who views himself as a good guy and he was talking about how Obama's presidency can usher in a new era of Keynesian approaches to global North-South, capital-labor inequalities. I am not sure we are prepared for how deep this financial crisis may run and my hope is that Obama's team realizes how novel we must be to stave off the fiscal crisis of most our lifetimes. He doesn't seem to be veering far from the Clintonian Democratic line that is represented by Lawrence Summers but I do worry incessantly about how deep our economic recession runs and I still remain hopeful that Obama is the type of transformational figure to take on this challenge-- something about optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect seems appropros in these times.
Paz en la lucha/ Peace in the struggle, Ron
I really appreciate your fair judgment to the candidates of the past election. The people are really hoping for the change of our nation. All the problems existing now need immediate action of the newly elected officers. Lets just hope that Mr. Obama cab do what he said. Electing him as the new President gives a conclusion that people don't base their ideology in race where a person came from. We probably think for our nation progression not with our own personal wills. We can see the problem we are now facing regarding of the economy, one fact is that everybody observed that it getting worst. This article talks about which programs are getting axed in the government’s quest to save READ States Cut Juvenile Justice Programs to Save Extra Cash extra cash.