Race and US Politics posted by Richard Seymour

Let's get this over with: to be honest, I quite enjoyed Crash. It certainly didn't deserve the Oscar, but then neither did any of the other shitty films nominated. As a film about race, it's a superficial exercise in liberal self-aggrandisement. But then Hollywood can't deal with race, or racism, without affirming the essential goodness of America, its sorrow and disgust at its own past, its willingness to make amends and so on. Then there are teevee shows that are supposed to 'open up the debate', but look set to merely reveal the contours of existing opinion on the matter while generating much sound and fury. But what's happening with race in America, and why did it take Katrina to force anyone to take it seriously for just five seconds (rather than treat it as a token issue whose sole function is to mobilise one's sense of one's own virtue)?

In the 2004 election, a number of things happened to the black vote: it increased by approximately 22%; 88% of it went to Kerry; and the absolute number of black Republican votes doubled from what it had been in 2000. Meanwhile, Bush increased his share of the white vote by 4% to 58%, largely it has to be said from white women. There is far too much hysteria about the reactionary swing among the US electorate, or more precisely this hysteria is created among articulate liberals to justify a sharp turn to the right already being made by the Democrat leadership and the section of the US ruling class it represents. By way of comparison, Nixon took 67% of the vote and 96.6% of the electoral college votes in 1972, while Bush took 50.7% of the vote and 286 of 538 college votes in 2004. There was much talk about the evangelical vote and even dirty whispers that gays could have cost Democrats the election, but as I pointed out before substantially fewer voters identified the reasons behind their choices as moral ones than in previous elections. Meanwhile, the majority of Bush's new voters tended to be less religious not more. I'll leave aside the question of vote-rigging, except to note the obvious: the areas where faulty, paperless, misleading or absent voting machines were registered tended to cluster among poor and black populations.

Nevertheless, the US Presidential votes break down fairly clearly for the least half century or so: supermajorities of black voters back the Democrat candidate, while a majority of white voters has not backed the Democrat since 1948. This has happened in part because of the internal dynamics of the Democrat party, and in part because of the polarisation among white voters created by desegregation and civil rights legislation, beginning with Brown v The Board of Education in 1954 and culminating in a series of legislative and economic reforms resulting from the struggle of the civil rights movement. As a liberal capitalist party with historic connections to southern slave-owners, it had been able to unite lower to middle income white voters, minorities, farmers and working men with business interests. The alliance with the South was melded in the Compromise of 1877, following which Southern blacks were disenfranchised. Roosevelt's reforms had cemented this coalition somewhat, even if it alienated many capitalists who considered Roosevelt a radical, a communist or - worse! - a Jew. Conservative Democrats opposed Roosevelt and subsequent Democrat administrations on issues of welfare and regulation, but racism was the prism they needed to turn these into populist issues. This was supplied by the wave of legislative reform in the 1950s and 1960s. George Wallace consequently ran for the Democrat leadership as a Southern 'outsider' supporting 'state rights', and formed the American Independent Party: in the 1968 election, he took five states, the last candidate to win electoral votes without the backing of one of the two main parties. Had it not been for that split, Nixon would not have won the 1968 election.

Not to conflate psephology with politics, but this tells us a lot. The absence of a mass class-based party in the US, either labourist or Marxist can partly explain the facility with which racism is used to break up what might otherwise be lasting class alliances (although that demands further explanation in itself). And one might add that the resulting strategic alliance formed by black voters with white liberals and the national Democrat leadership that still persists to this day has had catastrophic consequences in itself, allowing the movement to be systematically defanged. Not to mention suffused with what Manning Marable describes as a savage, individualist, atomised capitalist ethos that has destroyed a sense of solidarity built up precisely by the experience of collective oppression. The politics of liberal integrationism demanded formal legal equality, the equality of the market place, in which people relate to one another out of fear and mistrust rather than solidarity. Hence, a new generation of black people raised outside of the bonds of legal subordination have nevertheless experienced the failure of liberal integrationism first hand: the continual police repression, media demonisation, the attacks of Reaganism that followed the gains made in the Sixties and early Seventies, the defunding of largely black universties, the welfare cuts and the soaring unemployment, and the encroachment of capitalist ideology in which black people are encouraged to relate to one another as competitors rather than as comrades.

Perhaps the first sign in broad daylight of the bankruptcy of the strategic alliance with the Democrats was the refusal of that party's candidates to even criticise Reagan's resumption of relations with apartheid South Africa, to whom he supplied the equipment of repression, aid and diplomatic cover as the regime attacked surrounding states, or even the support for UNITA murderers in Angola. Another sign was perhaps the repeated liberal worrying about 'affirmative action' and all it entailed: the usual line was that if only new measures could be designed to help all of the poor on the basis of income and opportunity not race, then a new progressive coalition could be formed: as if the initiatives of the 'Great Society', the Head Start programme, public housing and so on were not in fact based on economic rather than 'race' distinctions; as if substantial numbers of recipients of this kind of help were not poor white people, women and so on. And finally, one might note the Clinton administration's penal policy, which contributed to a further increase in the already vast numbers of black men in prison - with the 'three strikes' law seeing many imprisoned for decades over such piffling matters as drug possession and minor theft. That did as much as anything to lose Florida for the Democrats and cut the Democrat base, and one might add a point about the history of incarceration in the US: there is a reason that prison regulations and conditions mimic those of chattel slavery, and that is that the Thirteenth amendment abolished slavery and involuntary servitude "except as a punishment for crime". In 1999, though Blacks were only 13 percent of the U.S. population, they were half of all prison inmates. In 2000, one out of three young Black men was either locked up, on probation, or on parole. Recently it was found that there are more black men in prison than in college. There's no reason to be euphemistic about this: the drastic increase in prison numbers is the result of a deliberate assault on poor and black people, in which often harmless behaviour is criminalised, and minor offenses made imprisonable. It is a means of disciplining the black population and the working class with the threat of slavery.

Anyway, what underlies the disparity in voting practises? Different worlds, to be blunt. Different worlds of circumstance and perception. For instance, surveys show that a large number of white men are deeply resentful about what they perceive to be unfair government support for black people, which some see as an erosion of "standards" and "professionalism" (let those associations play in your mind for a moment or two). One assumes that if poverty and unemployment disproportionately affects black people, then those who harp about 'standards' think this is entirely a meritocratic affair. Similarly, racism and sexism operate in subtle ways in daily life: a study conducted by the American Bar Association found that car salesmen will typically sell a car to a white man cheaper than to a white women, or to a black man, or especially to a black woman, who had to stump up the most. This ugly reality is purged from one's daily vision, as it does not conform to standards of bourgeois propriety: no one would want to be called a racist these days - it's embarrassing. Nevertheless, surveys of public attitudes reveal not only disparities in perception of crucial issues between black and white people, but also a great deal of disavowed racism. For instance, a public commission investigating the conduct of the LAPD recorded 700 racist, homophobic and sexist remarks made over the car-communications system over a period of eighteen months: among these, "Sounds like monkey-slapping time" and "I would love to drive down Slauson [a black neighbourhood] with a flame-thrower. We would have a barbecue". (See Manning Marable, Beyond Black and White, 1995, for examples and sources).

Of course, the Republican Party and various right-wing foundations and institutions have appealed to this latent racism by perpetuating the myth that programmes like affirmative action place unqualified, shiftless slobs (who happen to be black) in jobs that could be occupied by qualified professionals (who happen to be white), while attacks on welfare usually have a specific racist undertone: the poor are to blame for their own misfortune and the black poor are especially to blame. Right-wing shock-jocks feed on this resentment, of course, as quite a number of them did during the Katrina crisis. Interestingly, Bush's appeal against anti-racial profiling laws in 2000 mimicked that of the old Dixiecrats - don't let the states and local departments be federalised by misguided attempts at big government. And contiguous with this is of course the drive to create a right-wing populist nationalism, something that really took off in the 1980s and saw a recrudescence following 9/11. That aggressive nationalism cuts across classes, which is the intention, but not across 'races', which is why non-whites who are less susceptible to idolising the American Dream must be demonised and marginalised.

Racism is not just an aggregate of nasty attitudes, and it is certainly not something our DNA does to us - rather it is a power relationship, it is something human beings do to one another. And for a limited but substantial number of white working class Americans, tapping into the latent longing for supremacy has been an effective recruiting sergeant for the right. It reaches into every other issue - welfare, gun control, crime, war and so on. It serves to bind working class Americans to policies which are not in their interests, while perpetuating the informal structures of racism in daily American life. It is sometimes said that therefore the left needs to refocus the terrain onto one of class, rather than cultural issues like 'race' (hence the Frank thesis). But perhaps it is more useful to see these issues as interconnected, rather than competing. And it might even be more effective - who knows? - if the US left makes that connection loudly, and tries to form a new strategic coalition outside of the Democrats on that basis. Racism is not simply a moral issue but also a class issue: poverty, unemployment, corporate greed, environmental destruction and so on are immediate issues that working class people of different ethnicities can form a substantial majority to oppose. Similarly, the demand to stop police harrassment and racial profiling is a demand, at least in the short term, for better policing - which is a demand not exclusive to black people. The racist lies told about Katrina justified the blocking of aid and the imposition of martial law in New Orleans, but as Aaron Broussard hotly testified to the news, this also affected white areas, particularly poor white areas. Similarly, one of the main sources of sustainable income for African Americans in the past has been unionised labour: the anti-union rollback, the job cuts and factory closures have cut into this while also proving disastrous for the white working class. State-led assaults on the black civil rights movement, such as Cointelpro, also targeted the left and the unions. Racism is against the direct interests of white working class Americans, while class politics is a direct ally of black Americans, one third of whom live in poverty.

This is especially important when the Democrats treat black people as an embarrassment, certainly to court votes from, but otherwise swept delicately under the Oval Office rug. Like Bernard Shaw's library, they are excellent to borrow from but otherwise to be avoided at all costs. Just look at the outrage and perplexity that Cynthia McKinney causes, simply by articulating what millions of ordinary Americans feel - not to mention the spit-flecked diatribes from the right. There was suspicion when even a white Cold War liberal like Howard Dean opposed racial profiling for Arabs and suggested Israel might give up some settlements in the West Bank: who is he working for, Joe Lieberman demanded to know? There is a new left-wing political coalition to be built, but it won't be done from beneath the carapace of the moribund Democrat party, nor will it be done by averting one's eyes from 'cultural' issues and simply refocusing on class. It seems to me that you can't talk about class without talking about racism, and you certainly can't be consistently antiwar without grasping that racism is essential to imperialism, that they could not raze Fallujah to the ground or attack Cite Soleil without it. And you can't have a left without any black people in it (although you may occasionally have a self-defining exclusive 'left' that does not care to entertain the demands of non-whites). One of the strongest criticisms of the Nader campaign in 2000 was from the ISO, which noted that the campaign had little to say about race and that what it did say was superficial and uncontroversial. Nevertheless, black voters in a number of key Democrat states voted for Nader and contributed substantially to his near 3 million votes nationwide. It might well have made a substantial difference if the campaign had taken the issue of racism more seriously: it wasn't exactly out of the news. And on what basis should such a new coalition be formed? In the strategic alliance with the Democrats, black people have been forced to await Federal goodwill and put up with suppression, witch hunts and organisational obstacles within the party (think of the obstruction faced by the Rainbow Coalition). Yet it is the most oppressed - non-whites, women, homosexuals - who are usually at the forefront of struggle. It seems to me, therefore, that the attempt begins here. African Americans, Arab Americans and Muslims are the spearhead of what could be a mass movement, and potentially a mass party, with the interests working class Americans at its heart. Unless, of course, you would rather await the tender mercy of Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman in 2008?