Five changes in liberal racial rhetoric I'd like to see in 2018

 ...such a degree of unmingled good was expected as it was impossible to realize. If the Revolution had been in every respect prosperous, then misrule and superstition would lose half their claims to our abhorrence, as fetters which the captive can unlock with the slightest motion of his fingers, and which do not eat with poisonous rust into the soul. The revulsion occasioned by the atrocities of the demagogues and the reestablishment of successive tyrannies in France was terrible, and felt in the remotest corner of the civilized world. Could they listen to the plea of reason who had groaned under the calamities of a social state, according to the provisions of which one man riots in luxury whilst another famishes for want of bread? Can he who the day before was a trampled slave suddenly become liberal-minded, forbearing, and independent? This is the consequence of the habits of a state of society to be produced by resolute perseverance and indefatigable hope, and long-suffering and long-believing courage, and the systematic efforts of generations of men of intellect and virtue.

-Percy Bysshe Shelley, from the preface to "The Revolt of Islam"

...our condition is not a mistake.... (W)e don’t need to run around pretending, as though there’s some great mystery going on—it’s not. If an alien came to planet Earth and looked at the socioeconomic statistics for African Americans and then measured that against the history and the policies of this country, there would really be no surprises about who we are and where we are.

-Ta-Nehisi Coates

I've been doing a fair amount of writing about race on this blog in the last year. From a business perspective, this is probably a disastrous decision. I'm a struggling part-time writer trying to get myself noticed. Writing about race is more likely to alienate people than it is to grow an audience. It's especially perilous for me as a white male writer to talk about race, because the statements of white writers are--not without good reason--looked upon with a certain a priori suspicion.

The best strategies I could follow from a business model perspective if I wanted to discuss race would be one of two courses: First, I could ape the idioms of the dominant liberal discourse on race, nod my head at ideas like white privilege and whitesplaining, and then generally avoid going too deep into it after that. Race is a dangerous subject, so it's best to just prove you know the right things to say and then move on. Secondly, I could throw my lot in with the self-described mavericks, the Breitbart crowd who think they're telling you the truth about race that the liberal establishment doesn't want you to hear.

I don't think either course is honest.

What I believe about where we are

I agree with Coates that the conditions of black Americans today are not an accident. They are the result of systemic choices over hundreds of years. Those choices include slavery and Jim Crow, but they also include more recent choices like redlining, the War on Drugs and how criminal justice is handled.

To say these things happened long enough ago that their effect should no longer be as great as it is today is to ignore how profoundly pernicious those choices were, up until how recently they have played a role, and how long-term the generational effects of these things can be. Conservatives argue, rightly, for the primal importance in society of family. Slaves were intentionally kept from having normal patterns of family life. At the end of slavery, former slaves weren't able to simply go back to their wives and children and start to rebuild a life as free folk. Many slaves had no idea who their parents were. The fact that former slaves didn't bounce right back after slavery doesn't prove that there is something wrong with African-Americans. It proves how terrible slavery was.

Normal family life would have taken generations to regain after slavery even in a best-case scenario. As I hope everyone knows, post-bellum black families did not face a best-case scenario. In the South, there was Jim Crow and predatory economic conditions for black families. Even in the North, there was separate-but-unequal segregation.

Black families recovered, albeit unevenly, over time. Even in two-parent families, though, there were problems most white families didn't face. Most black women worked long hours, making them unable to supervise the children. (Feminism's history of the last 50 years was altered by the realization that the demand for the right of women to work was a strange request if feminism was going to include women of color, who might have liked the ability not to work so much.)

In the last fifty years, although the legal standing of black Americans has largely been set right, there have been other policies that have disproportionately hurt black families. The War on Drugs has been the main one. Mrs. Heretic, as I've mentioned before, taught in Baltimore City Schools for about five years. Almost none of her kids were from families with two parents or guardians. The main reason was incarceration, followed closely by death from drugs, then death from gun violence, then AIDS, then diabetes, then the rest of the other black killers.

The main criticism of capitalism is that it's a race in which once you fall behind, it becomes exponentially more difficult to catch up. Black Americans have been shoved back by policy over and over. Each time they try to catch up, but America is a hard place in which to catch up. The tendency is actually not catching up: poor people tend to raise poor kids, and rich people raise rich kids.

There is a strange argument made by the alt-right crowd that when liberals assert there is a reason why black Americans struggle to catch up, this amounts to a kind of racism. The claim is that we liberals think blacks are fundamentally flawed and need help to catch up. This is a bizarre argument. Slavery is bad. Legal discrimination is bad. They harm their victims irreparably, and those effects are felt generationally. Just because I don't think black people are magic and super-human and immune to the effects of bad policy doesn't mean I think they're inferior. I think they're like everyone else. I think they're like me, or I'm like them. If I'd been born under different circumstances, I'd be a different person.

What I believe about what to do about it

I didn't blog for almost all of 2016. What started me going again was the election of Donald Trump. Like so many liberals, I was suddenly thrust into a place where I went from the rhetoric of being alarmed to being actually terrified. There was something obviously different about Trump's election from anything I'd ever seen in American politics. Vox writer German Lopez summarized a year's worth of study of the election by telling us what we kind of knew: the main factor behind Trump's win was racial resentment. Not kitchen table table issues. Not middle-class, middle-America-being-ignored issues. Racial resentment. Lopez defined racial resentment as “a moral feeling that blacks violate such traditional American values as individualism and self-reliance.”

It might seem like the thing to do in the face of this moral resentment is to confront it, to decry it and those who espouse it, from the rooftops. Here, I'd like to introduce a principle of political discourse I term "The Jack Sparrow Principle of Political Pragmatism":

It's hard to believe now, four movies later, that this series was once so much fun and Jack Sparrow seemed full of so much wisdom.

The fact that so many white people voted for Trump out of a sense that things they believed in were under attack is a raw fact we have to deal with. We can draw our sword on it and demand justice out of our own sense of righteousness, but that won't do any good. Lopez notes that it is possible to reach out to Trump voters. While one doesn't have to condone racism to do it, it has to be done in an empathetic way. As Lopez developed more fully elsewhere, calling people racist is not an effective way to reduce racial bias.

This is one reason why I consider writing stories to be my main project. Stories done well increase empathy. I could have browbeaten those people I knew who were criticizing the kids in the streets with their low-hanging pants tearing up their own neighborhoods during the Baltimore riots. Or, I could write a story, based very loosely on one of Mrs. Heretic's students, about what one young man's life was like during the riots. (That's "A Cinnabon at Mondawmin, the second story in my collection of stories from this year.)

Spike Lee's Chiraq or Aziz Anzari's Master of None deal with the very painful experiences of marginalized people. I never felt while watching either that I was being attacked. Chiraq is dealing with the very worst consequences of systemic racism in America, but I never felt that its point was anything except to tell the story of the people living in it. Ansari occasionally takes swipes at white folks. Once, while on an Internet-appointed first date, he mentions that black women and Asian men get the least views on dating websites. After adding that white people tend to get the most views, Anzari jokes that, "Well, thank God white people are finally getting a break in something." I didn't feel in any way offended by that. It was an earned joke at that point, because we'd seen enough of Anzari's life to know that:1) It was a joke, and 2) Even though he partly meant it, he had some reason for the frustration in it. One of the best characters on that show is a big, dopey white guy named Arnold that Ansari's character is obviously very close to. The show celebrates more than it scolds, and it works for that reason.

We can scream ourselves hoarse at the other side and pat ourselves on the back for our moral righteousness. But if it's not effective, what have you accomplished? In any event, the country is something like a big boat, and we're stuck in it with all those people who voted for Trump. So we can't start a riot with them without sinking ourselves.

Our role in this

Lopez's article points out that Trump channeled white angst in a way that neither Romney nor McCain did. One obvious reason why is that neither Romney nor McCain really tried. But there were other candidates available to the Republican Party in those years who would have been happy to try what Trump did. They didn't get the nomination. I have to believe that Trump rose not just because of his outsider persona, not just because Clinton was a flawed candidate, but because white feelings about race in America changed between 2008 and 2016. That is, not only did Trump do more to capitalize on racial resentment more than earlier Republican candidates, but there was more racial resentment in America on which to capitalize.

There are a lot of reasons why this resentment might have grown. Certainly, the organization of the alt-right has allowed it to get its message out more effectively. So race-baiters have grown through their own grass-roots movements, to some extent. I would like to submit, though, that we liberals who use a particular manner of speaking about race are also one of those reasons. Over the past decade, we have evolved a discourse that comes off as shrill. I do not mean to suggest that this was decisive or the main reason for the growth of racial resentment, but I believe it is a factor. I believe by changing it, we can help to shrink racial resentment.

Plea for an open mind

Before I start my list of changes I'd like to see in liberal rhetoric that I think might help to reverse the growth of white racial resentment, I'd like to say that I already know two objections. One is that I'm "blaming the victim," saying that the oppressed bear the blame for demanding their rights too directly from the oppressor. It's a fair objection, but I think it's important to keep in mind that many of the racial issues discussed in the public sphere now are more akin to the oppressor unknowingly stepping on the foot of the oppressed than knowingly stepping on the neck. There is oppression, but it takes a few steps of explanation to show how. Yes, the oppressor shouldn't be such a clod and should realize what he's doing. But he doesn't. So here's how to talk to him.

It's like if your neighbor's landscaping is causing flooding on your property. You don't storm over there demanding changes. You explain why you think your problem is caused by your neighbor. You provide expert testimony from the flood mitigation guy you brought to your house to fix the problem, because you're neighbor's immediate reaction is going to be to think you're wrong. If you're right, that means he has to do work and spend money, and that means you've got to get past the instinctive urge to deny the facts. So you ask, not demand, that your neighbor make changes. You offer to help if you can. The fact is, the law might not necessarily demand that your neighbor make the changes you want. It's the decent thing to do, but it might not be required. So it's better to appeal to his better side rather than go in guns blazing. So if I suggest that liberals can change their language and get better results, that's not to excuse bad behavior. It's simply to suggest a more effective means of asking your neighbor to do right by you.

Secondly, one might object that I'm advocating respectability politics, or going out of the way to avoid confronting American racism and upsetting whites. Again, this is a fair concern. The line between moral cowardice and pragmatism can be a thin one, and the latter can be used to justify the former.  And it does seem like every time I want to defend white middle America, some guy I know on Facebook who fits that demographic posts something that is unambiguously racist. Something like this:

About 500 dogs showed up at my window the moment I selected this photo for my blog.

It's not just my liberal imagination making this racist; it's racist.  (Part of me wonders if it's one of those things posted by liberals posing as Conservatives meant to make Conservatives look stupid by exaggerating the racism. The misspelling makes it suspicious to me. But I'm sure the guy who posted it meant it without irony.)

But what should my response be? I could unfriend the guy in a righteous huff, but that will make no difference to his life, and then there'd be one less social media contact likely to question his ideology. I've tried different approaches to these things with varying degrees of success, but one thing I don't do is tell him that either the post or he himself are racist without at least explaining what I mean by that and why. And I try to do it in a way that appeals to the better angels of his nature.

So how do we appeal to those angels?

I think there are five tropes of liberal discourse on racism that do more harm than good. There is truth to each of them, but they are presented in such a way that they instantly raise the defenses of people confronted with them. I'd like to hear less of each of these in 2018.

1. Advocating "color blindness" is racism by other means

A very simple Google search will give me a whole lot of examples of writers who claim that saying things like "I don't see color" are tropes of racists, not progressives. (Et tu, beloved Atlantic?)

I understand the argument. As Adia Wingfield put it in The Atlantic, "as the mechanisms that reproduce racial inequality have become more covert and obscure than they were during the era of open, legal segregation, the language of explicit racism has given way to a discourse of colorblindness. But (sociologists) fear that the refusal to take public note of race actually allows people to ignore manifestations of persistent discrimination."

Too many liberals will use this observation to produce unbalanced rants in which they accuse anyone who uses the language of color blindness of overt racism (instead, as the proper argument goes, of indirect and possibly unintended racism). This is not playing fair, because it ignores history.

As Wingfield noted, the language of color blindness was developed to confront the racism of an earlier time. When I was growing up, progressives actually argued that people needed to be color blind. That never meant that people didn't see color, of course. That's impossible. It was a hyperbolic way of saying you should strive to treat people as though you didn't see color.

In 1992, this was how progressives talked about race: "Free your mind/and the rest will follow/Be color blind/Don't be so shallow."

In an age of overt racism and the decades immediately after it, this was the right way to teach people. You have no idea how hard it was to get people in Ohio where I grew up to accept "treat people all the same" as a reasonable rule for human interaction. But it worked. It really worked. It's a goddamned miraculous social accomplishment that we got this country to mostly agree on at least the basic principle that people deserve to be treated equally regardless of race. It happened in a generation, and the language of color blindness played a big part in that. "Color blind" was an inaccurate but easy-to-digest bit of memetics that worked.

If you don't see any value at all in color-blind rhetoric, you likely never heard a scrum of football players referred to as a "nigger pile" when you were fourteen. You likely never heard someone tell your best friend in seventh grade, who was the only black kid you knew back then, that he ought to "go back to the plantation." I'm telling you, getting those overt racists from back home to "I'm color blind" a decade later was amazing. I doubt that 90% of those kids use the "N" word now. It didn't solve racism, but it was step 3 in our nation's 157-step program to recover from racism.

It's true that there is a difference between equality and equity. Step #4 in the 157-step program involves understanding that fact, and "color blind" language gets in the way. But the nation is still sort of consolidating the victory of step #3. We need to allow people a transitional sort of language and not immediately chasten the stragglers who just caught up to 1993 yesterday.

Rather than "it's racist to say you're color blind" it would be better to simply focus on equality vs. equity logic. That is, don't focus on ripping out the language you used to accomplish step #3, just introduce the language from step #4. If someone is still using the old language, just keep using the new with them. That's how anyone learns--from modeling.

It's hard to believe, but there are a lot of people in the U.S. for whom "I'm color blind" really represents their best efforts, and a lot of personal growth had to take place to get them there. That doesn't mean that you have to give them a cookie, but it does mean it isn't helping to immediately tell them all the growth they went through to get there just means they're now completely wrong about everything.

2. Ignoring (or accusing of racism) social conservatives who use the language of personal responsibility

If I believe the argument--and I do--that black Americans aren't struggling by accident, then I also accept that it will take something other than an accident to right the wrong. Intentional harm can only be undone by intentional attempts to fix the harm. I accept this.

That doesn't mean I have to think that every social program meant to be part of the intentional solution is a great idea.

Mrs. Heretic, in her years of teaching in Baltimore, knew hundreds of female students under 18 who had babies. When they got pregnant, it was treated like a very normal thing, something to celebrate. The students had baby showers--sometimes, very elaborate affairs. It wasn't uncommon for more than half of the females in her classes to be either pregnant or already mothers.

Social and economic conservatives have been arguing for decades that social programs make the cost of bad life choices too cheap. I have often thought their arguments were racist: who were they to criticize teen mothers for their choices under hard circumstances, and what was the cost of WIC and Medicare compared to the price of a human life?

But seeing how normalized it has become to have babies in the teen years--and contrasting this with how much anxiety I faced when I became a parent in my thirties with my upper-middle-class income--makes me accept that these conservatives at least have a good prima facie case. Maybe band-aid programs only serve to institutionalize poverty.

I don't know what the answer is. Ripping a band-aid off means terrible pain for a community already suffering. I just know that the current answers haven't seemed to help like they should have in the last 50 years. So a critique of social services-based solutions doesn't deserve to be attacked on the grounds it's racist.

It's certainly an inconvenient critique, because coming up with another solution isn't easy, and nobody wants to try to figure one out. I myself have tried to figure out what I would do to help Mrs. Heretic's students in Baltimore if I were president, and I don't know that I have an answer. Or I do, but I know that the country does not have the will to carry it out, because it would call for a massive mobilization of resources.

We can disagree over what the right answer is, but we shouldn't accuse someone of being racist because they say what ought to be plain, which is that whatever we're doing now isn't working like it should.

3. Calling critiques of culture racist without considering the critique

My Facebook friend who posted that meme up above with the sagging-pants guy was making a racist argument. If you asked him, though, he'd probably say he was criticizing an aspect of (black) culture, not black people, or not all black people. He'd probably be full of shit, and maybe this line about criticizing culture is, like patriotism, a last refuge of many scoundrels.

But that doesn't meant that it's never right to critique black, urban, American culture. One has to consider how well-informed and well-reasoned the argument is. I myself don't try much to talk about the culture. I've had a chance to learn a little about various segments of American black culture, but it's really been just enough to get past a little-learning-is-a-dangerous-thing territory. That is, I know just enough to know I don't know much.

But some people do, and they've actually done the work to deserve an audience. If someone argues that hip-hop isn't really a positive force, that argument isn't itself a racist one. Certainly, there are feminist critiques of hip-hop and rap that seem very reasonable to me. These deserve a hearing.

4. Ignoring prejudice against whites

I get that there is no such thing as "reverse racism," if I accept the standard definitions of these things. But there is prejudice, and sometimes it's excused as a truth-bomb.

It's not the most serious issue out there, so I don't need to belabor the point, or cite examples of it. We all know it happens. I just want to point out that my son, when he sees examples of it, has a much harder time excusing it than I do. He is growing up in a much different world from me. His school is 40% black, with the rest evenly split between white, Asian, and Latino. He is living in a world where students are expelled for hate speech if they use the N word. To him, when he sees those videos about dumb things white people say or do, and he knows his mother and I have threatened death to him if he ever speaks that way about another racial group, it's difficult for him not to develop cognitive dissonance. He either has to accept that he should put up with something we've taught him others shouldn't have to put up with, or he develops...well...racial resentment. You can argue with him if you want, but this is the kid of two fairly liberal parents who has a black sister. This is our ghost of Christmas future, liberals, if we don't mend our ways.

We don't need a massive campaign to eradicate it. We just need to stop doing it and not accept it when we see it.

5. Not having an agenda

It often seems like the only goal liberals have is to make everyone talk like they're woke. People are never going to see culture in the same way, so it's pointless to try to conquer society by working to get everyone to use the same vocabulary. Having a concrete agenda, on the other hand, is easier to get people to unite behind. Agendas can appeal to different people for different reasons, and we don't even have to agree on what those reasons are to work together.

What, in practical terms, do we liberals want? I bet we'd have a hard time giving an answer other than "to get rid of Trump."

Trump came to power with about a million promises, but a yuuuge infrastructure program was one of them. One of the benefits (?) of de facto segregation is that it's possible to advocate for a racial population by proxy. For example, liberals could stump for a massive infrastructure program "in America's inner cities." Why shouldn't we use our own dog whistles? We could try to shape it so that people in the cities themselves should get first pick for jobs. This makes it both a jobs program and an infrastructure program. One of the largest obstacles to work people in a city like Baltimore face is that it sometimes takes hours to get to work if you don't have a car. So a better system of public transportation would be a good thing to put at the top of the infrastructure wish list.

I don't know why we couldn't work with Trump to get it. If there's one thing that guy loves, it's to be loved. He doesn't particularly care who loves him, either. He'd take it from us as quickly as he'd take it from the other guys. Could we consider offering it to him? Or at least a truce until we inch forward the next step in the long battle?

우리답게 싸우자!

I had to write that sub-heading in Korean. Koreans are great at social campaign slogans. The one I just created there would be translated as "Let's fight like us!" Liberals have been growing coarse and shrill over the last twenty years, and 2017 was the peak of it. It's not a winning strategy for us. We're supposed to be charmers. Conservatives tell others how to live; we're supposed to make people want to live like us.

Sun Tzu counseled that the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. I hope that 2018 is full of less fighting and more winning.