Social constructs

One often hears people declare something to be “just a social construct” as a way of dismissing its reality or relevance. In reality, the fact that something is a social construct makes it infinitely more powerful and difficult to escape than if it were, for instance, a biological brute fact. We get around biological brute facts all the time. Social forces regulate our eating, drinking, defecation, urination, sexual pairings, etc., etc. Social forces can drive us to suicide — meaning they have overcome the most fundamental biological drive of survival. Biology isn’t infinitely pliable, of course, but it is hardly destiny.

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann…

A colleague of mine once said that among white students, discussions of race tend toward silence, while discussions of gender tend toward anger. This sounds right to me, and certainly these reactions are not limited to white students. It seems to me that both phenomena share a common root: discomfort with any kind of generalization.

Anger’s Nonidentity / Occasion Against Universality

I recently looked back at Judith Butler’s response to her having been awarded a “prize” for writing in an especially non-commonsensical style. She observes that the recipients—or “targets,” as she aptly redescribes—of such a prize “have been restricted to scholars on the left whose work focuses on topics like sexuality, race, nationalism and the workings of capitalism.” This then raises “a serious question about the relation of language and politics: why are some of the most trenchant social criticisms often expressed through difficult and demanding language?”

Posted Without Comment *Updated*

“A few points. 1. RO has always accepted Augustine’s account of the 2 cities. The secular regnum can pursue a limited virtue though this must be oriented to the virtues of the city of God. 2. The UK is almost uniquely not composed by ethnicity. (The US is arguably still a white nation to its appalling detriment.) This is why eg British Asians feel totally British and hate the idea of a little England on her own. Britishness, even Englishness, is style and value, not birth or blood or even location. So the UK is not a nation state. 3. It may not even be a State, which means secular autonomy, centralisation of sovereignty and exercise of polizei plus civility. Though indeed much contaminated by all these things, formally it is not defined by them like France and Germany. In his Hamlet Carl Schmitt says the UK is not a State though he thinks this is bad. 4. the UK is still technically a Regnum legitimated by its deference to the Sacrum. Ie there is an established church which, like Rowan Williams, RO tends to defend. (There are exceptions here as we are properly a broad alliance). England and Scotland are only realms because they are also ecclesiastical terrains. Wales is an exception. Till fairly recently the ecclesiastical parish remained the fundamental governing unit and echoes of that remain. 5. To me this ‘west byzantinism’ CAN go along with a theology integrating nature and grace and stressing the communication of idioms in Christ. Ie his divinity and humanity and his priesthood and kingship are all tangled up. For now the sacerdotal rules and seems more divine, but eschatalogically there is an inversion when only his kingship remains and the physical is caught up in finality also. Hence the secular regnum is at once a necessary evil and yet also a sign of the ultimate perfect kingdom. This is the traditional meaning of Christian monarchy I think and why it is so linked to notions of the common good and has always helped to oppose oligarchy and anti-democratic faction. One needs monarchy or some good equivalent. 6. RO of course fully recognises the ecclesial sacrum as the true community of complete virtue beyond the need for coercive law and military violence. The test of the legitimacy of the regnum is the degree to which it enables that. AJM”

“The Queen tells the Duchess of Cambridge to curtsy to the ‘blood princesses’”

The UK’s population is predominantly White British (around 89%).

“But Sean just describes Britain under an American category: ‘exceptionalism’. That’s something post-revolutionary and consciously messianic. Whereas he things I described in the UK just happen to be the case: the British are scarcely aware of them. They are lingering archaisms that may still be of use. Other European countries have different kinds of archaism eg non-capitalist features of their market economies of which the same thing may be said. There are not so many British arabs; mostly our Muslims are from Pakistan. They don’t by and large complain of racism but of hostility to Islam. This though (from talking to imams etc) can often co-exist with an admitted view that Muslims need to show prime political loyalty to the country they live in and not to the Umma. Rowan Williams’ forthcoming book makes the same point. Loyalty first to the Church beyond the state does not have the same problem as the Church is para political in a way that the Umma is not. Though the evolution of Islam in Europe would seem to be towards this ‘Christian’ model. Nothing to do with race. Again it is specifically American to read race everywhere. Anything to do with ‘empire’ is seen as racist, forgetting that the British (and the French and to a degree the Portuguese empires) were the main vehicle for the abolition of the global slave-trade, including the intra-African one, considerably before the US abolition. This is not of course to deny all the evil aspects of empire. But racism often springs as in S.Africa from local colonists and not the local centre. Indeed the Virginian rebels against the Crown wanted to repress native and African Americans more than London would have allowed them to. I’m merely amused that my remarks on monarchy leave you so aghast. So why is Canada freer, less violent, more caring and democratic than the US? Why are similar things true of other existing constitutional monarchies? It’s important in politics to think paradox.”

A thought on anti-Semitism vs. criticism of Israel

Yesterday on Twitter, Alex was musing about the fact that while we tend to take their word for it when minorities believe something to be racist, we do not extend the same courtesy to accusations that criticism of Israel is necessarily anti-Semitic. To be sure, some criticism of Israel is motivated by anti-Semitism — but that tends to come from fringe elements that few would take seriously.

Leaving that out of account, I think the key reason that criticism of Israel shouldn’t be viewed as necessarily anti-Semitic is that in Israel, the Jews are the powerful ones. They’re not a poor oppressed group that’s being scapegoated — they are in charge of the biggest military power in the Middle East, which has the virtually unconditional backing of the biggest military power in the history of humanity.

Racism is not symmetrical — it’s not “just as racist” for an African American to distrust white people, for instance. Racism is a tool used against a disadvantaged group in order to justify their oppression by the dominant group. Obviously this doesn’t tell the whole story, but this is a necessary starting point if we want to keep the real political stakes of racism in view, rather than letting it devolve into the analytically useless question of “personal prejudices” that are “just as bad” no matter who’s harboring them against whom.

The Psychologization of Racism

I just got back from walking around the National Mall after visiting the new MLK National Memorial and the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. It was a nice, crisp day in DC, and I began to think about the legacy of Dr. King and the current state of race relations in America. As a graduate student in clinical psychology, I read many papers on diversity, race, and cultural issues. Although psychologists do not pretend that they have the key to ending racism today, I’m amazed at the simplicity of their analyses. They argue that what we need is for people to begin to accept the parts of themselves that they resent. This will bring an end to the projection of self-hatred onto other racial groups that ‘contain’ these unacceptable feelings. According to these psychologists, racism is grounded in psychological insecurity, and the cure is to simply to learn to accept ourselves. However, does this not forecast a rather dismal future for race relations, considering that self-hatred and insecurity are an unavoidable aspect of being human? Our current political discourse concerning race relations also seems prone to making the same mistake – namely – the relegation of racism to the psychological realm. This is why we are constantly bombarded with the propaganda that racism arises from psychological issues such as an intolerance and prejudice. Ultimately, the individual is commanded to learn to love herself and become educated because – and this is exquisitely American – it is up to the individual to accept herself and to change her individual racist attitudes. This is probably why the majority of school children are taught that Dr. King’s major contribution was his belief in colorblindness and his hope that people “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” What is most pathetic is that reactionary forces have used this idea to lobby against affirmative action. This is in obvious contradiction to Dr. King’s statement in his great speech “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution”:

“And these are so often the very people who tell Negroes that they must lift themselves by their own bootstraps. It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.”

I think the psychologization of racism is wrong on two accounts. First, it does not inspire people to struggle for racial justice and liberation. Let us take for example President Bush’s revelation that the worst moment of his presidency was when Kanye West called him a racist for his handling of Katrina. This is instructive on multiple levels. Bush assumes that racism is somehow synonymous with his private feelings about black folks. Again, the assumption being made is that personal feelings and attitudes constitute racism. Forget the needless suffering that occurred during that tragedy. Furthermore, this emphasis on Bush’s private feelings is simply a distraction from the real problem of suffering. Whenever racism is relegated to the realm of private feelings, people only respond with defensiveness or guilt when they’re accused of being racist. They overlook the actual material effects of racism. The person accused of being a racist is then rendered politically immobile as he neurotically self-reflects and feels hurt. He might even be motivated to do something temporarily, at least long enough to assuage his guilty conscience.

Second, I believe the more problematical result of the psychologization of racism is that it fails to recognize that racism is a systemic issue. This is what is so humorous and tragic about the entire scandal surrounding Ron Paul’s racist newsletters. Regardless of whether or not Paul knew about the content of these letters, what shocked me was Paul’s response: “Libertarians are incapable of being racist because racism is a collectivist idea, you see people in groups.” The exclusive focus of the individual in libertarian philosophy simply cannot account for the racial systems in place that actually leads to political and economic oppression. Instead, the libertarian paranoia about government infringement is ultimately a mask for the hatred of the poor and minorities and invariably results in the blaming of disadvantaged folks for their lot in life. This is why Paul rejects the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because, for him, the real danger is that the government will interfere in the affairs of private citizens not the existence of segregation. Racial discrimination in education, employment, drug laws, and the prison system are all blatant examples of continued racism in modern America. Dr. King certainly agreed that we need a systemic analysis when he gave his speech on his opposition to the Vietnam War: “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.” I believe that racist attitudes are simply an outgrowth of psychological reflection on societal injustices. It would be logical to hold racist attitudes if one assume that the institutions in this country were just. But of course, they are not. Moreover, the only way to end racism is not to police personal prejudices which leaves unjust systems untouched, but rather, we must destroy the very systems of injustice that disproportionately bring down hell on minorities. Indeed, the entire Civil Rights Movement was always about economic and political empowerment. The March on Washington was for freedom and jobs. Racism is not merely about conscious prejudice, but rather it is grounded in the racist social unconscious that enacts discriminatory policies. Of course, through this social unconscious we are able to disavow our own racism because our institutions express them for us, albeit in a displaced manner. Ultimately, Dr. King was right to point out that capitalism (economic exploitation) is the real source of the problem. I also couldn’t agree more with Fred Hampton who said, “Racism is an excuse used for capitalism”. In America, class exploitation is color-coded. The legacy of Dr. King must be his emphasis on social and economic structures that oppress the poor and racial minorities in society. Until we rearrange these racist systems we have no hope of eliminating racist attitudes or personal prejudice.

I want to make one final comment about color-blindness. I work a part-time job entering survey data. All of our surveys ask questions about race/ethnicity, which is an inevitably touchy subject for some people. It never ceases to amaze me how often white folks refuse to acknowledge their race and write-in “human being” or “shouldn’t matter” or some other cute bullshit. On one level, we all know that race is an artificial construct. On another level, race clearly matters. After all, the very societal structures that allow certain citizens to deny the importance of race is itself a symptom of white privilege. Of course, race does not matter to white folks because privilege is the opportunity to be unaware of how your race benefits you socially, politically, and economically.

On the commemoration of Martin Luther King

One should not let the public commemoration of Martin Luther King, Jr., pass unremarked. I assume that most readers here know what they are commemorating — a historic step forward for racial justice, along with a legacy of more radical hopes, including in the area of anti-imperialism and economic justice, that were tragically unfulfilled.

That is what we commemorate. Yet what do “they” commemorate, what is the social order or “big Other” commemorating when they enshrine Martin Luther King as a public hero? I would venture to say that they are commemorating above all his failures, defining them as the outer limit of possibility. To those who say, as Katie Grimes at Women in Theology reminds us, that racism continues to poison life in America — well, they say, you had Martin Luther King. To those who claim that war and capitalism are part of the same complex of injustice as racism, they say that over-extending his message is what discredited Martin Luther King and ultimately got him killed.

Above all, they say: we gave you formal equality and canonized the man who forced us to do so — now can we please not talk about this any more? Yet things are not quite so fargone as that. Despite their formidable power, despite all the efforts of domestication and neutralization they’ve devoted to it, they can’t fully control the meaning of such a powerful symbol. We should be glad that this date is on the calendar, not so that we can passively honor that symbol but so that we can continue to struggle over its meaning.

“I’m not a racist, but…”

Via Twitter (@bat20), I learned that the mayor of a town in Ireland is declining to meet with his black African constituents. He claims that said constituents have been uniformly rude to him and have even — get this! — accused him of racism. Henceforward, he will be referring them to his black colleagues on the city council. The story quotes him as saying, “Everything I do as a councillor is for the general good… It saddens me that people would call me a racist, because I’m not.”

As @qwghlm points out, this is “perhaps the archetypal ‘I’m not racist but….’” He may as well have said, “I’m not a racist, I just hate black people.” This is the logical endpoint of a certain white response to accusations of racism — what’s important is not the existence of any racial bias, etc., but rather the fact that “racist” is a mean name. In other words, the term “racist” in this conception exists solely and exclusively to defame the person accused of it.

I suppose this is a perverse kind of victory for anti-racism — everyone agrees that being a “racist” is a bad thing! Yet the only thing bad about it is the word itself.

Maimonides and the Whiteness of Jewish Philosophical Theology

In addition to the Introduction to Philosophy course I am also teaching another with the title “Nature, Cosmos, God” (basically a survey of theories of nature in the monotheisms and Darwin). We are going to read some selections from Maimonides Guide of the Perplexed and as I was prepping for that lecture I came across a passage where Maimonides displays some explicit racism. I thought this was interesting in the light of our book event on Carter’s Race because it calls into question some of his claims. I’ll quote the relevant section and then outline some of what I think might be going on here, but I’m no expert in Jewish thought and so am looking forward to what Bruce and Adam might have to say.

On the PETA porn site

When I was in seminary, there were several students who were interested in questions of animal rights. Such an interest is surely to be expected in the extremely liberal environs of Chicago Theological Seminary. More noteworthy to me, however, was the reaction from the black students whenever another (invariably white) student brought up animal rights. They rejected such concerns while so much work remained to be done to combat the mistreatment of other human beings and suspected that some students had embraced animal rights as a way of “skipping over” those concerns.

That is certainly unfair as a general statement about animal rights activism. At the same time, things like the PETA porn site make one wonder.